Was the punk rocker’s hair purple or florid green? She says, she loved the damned since she was twelve years old, these days she goes rarely out. Forum is under sheet and scaffold, hope it emerges art deco, the damned the punk band still with three original members, she says, on our unseasonal night, her favourite Rat, she has come to watch him play the drums, she heard he is just as manic, as when she met him forty years ago by chance; he says we are not a punk band anymore just a band.
I watch the elderly gents in white tie, and a loose drift of young educated men tentatively flow past, under the plane trees stiff hand sized leaves that hang down. A lacquered fin of punk white hair a foot high scathes above the crowd. She rarely goes out she says again, made an exception tonight. A lone magpie caught in its nesting delirium ready to pick a battle with anyone willing.
My customer is suddenly struck mute to see that the very Rat Scabies stands alone on the footpath in front of the stage door with the look of journeyman crew member not transcendent drummer, hair soft and short, peering soulfully toward the aubergine gap of evening sky squared off by steel and glass. When she sees that just by chance I will have to stop the cab just there next to him, and that she will of necessity stand on Rat’s toe when she gets out unless he manages to retreat, her small figure begins to push excitedly through the obvious pain, and I witness a strange elongated moment when you could see what was about to happen. Rat’s hoary croft of hair resembles exactly the underbelly of a cloud overhead, ominously caught in the last slant of native sunlight, just as they were poised to meet by chance again after forty long years. Would he remember?