Twiggy Star Dust

[14/08/20]

First things first, take my pants off. I didn’t wear any yesterday so why should I today? Only two weeks ago I was in Amsterdam, my lover by my side, questioning me for doing the same thing. ‘It’s a little act of freedom’ I told him, ‘and anyway it’s summer, get some air up there.’ Maybe he doesn’t get me, sometimes.

I felt alive this morning. It was just one of those days when you’re there. No past, no future, just walking down the streets as the world and open to it. A man stopped me. Immediately, obviously Italian, wearing glasses, over his small and wrinkled eyes. Black heads on his skin, the same black heads I saw on Nigel’s skin when he went through chemotherapy. Should I have stood back? Social distanced, and all that? Only now I wonder if this man had been diagnosed with cancer too. It would explain his abruptness.

‘Do you play?’ He made a violin gesture with his arms.

‘It’s a guitar!’ I replied, wondering whether to really stop or instead continue on my journey to a big paper cup of coffee.

‘I was here in the swinging sixties, I’m Italian…’

‘Oh I bet it was diff…’

‘Yes, very different, swinging! The hip.. the hippies, everywhere! I lived on King’s street…’

‘King’s street’ I remarked, ‘where’s that, King’s Cross?’

‘No, Chelsea.’ The small man then looked at me in a why which made me feel utterly smaller than him, a regular, even a tourist.

‘I lived there since my twenties and now I’m sixty! The swinging sixties, you know, the girl with the short skirt, ah… What her name?

‘The girl with the short…’

‘Twiggy!’ He shouted, almost jumping on me like an excited child, ‘look…’

The Italian adjusted the mask he wore around his chin and looked down towards his phone. He scrolled through photos. Was he going to ask me for money soon, I wondered? If so, so what?

No, he showed me a photo, black and white, him standing with a woman in a short skirt.

‘Wow, the swinging sixties’, I replied as though he now really was a child, showing me a new invention, ‘who’s the woman?’

He skipped past some photos, moving onto the next back and white one. ‘It’s me’, the man whipped off his glasses and stared at me as he held up the phone screen to my face ‘see?’

I looked and him and then back down at the photo, ‘ha!’. The man in the photo, heavily bearded staring straight into the camera lens with a serious gaze, ‘you look like my ex-boyfriend.’

He laughed as I did, ‘was he Italian too?’, he asked?

‘No, his name was Adami, French for my man, but not French, he was stonkingly English.’

Then, at the very moment we both looked up and smiled, I wanted to know more about this man, the life he’d seen, his philosophy, savoir the ultimately unknown circumstances that put both him and I in the mood for not even a minute of such personal exchange.

My bus!’ He ran, whipped on his glasses as he did. His rucksack, thin strapped and black leather, unzipped and half-open, bounced up and down on his back. He waved, flagging the bus down as though it was a black cab, pre-booked and about to speed off without him, ‘hey!’ he shouted, ‘hey!’.

But the bus was slowly pulling over, opening the doors to the five other passengers awaiting it. The little Italian man stepped on first, before all other passengers who had patiently, quietly waited, as Londoners are supposed to.

I stared at him, amazed at his speed, then noticing his half-open bag.

Hey mister Italian, your bag! That’s what I wish I said but didn’t. Instead I stood, thinking it would be an act of over caution, that would only ruin his grand entrance on to the number 25 to Ilford.

I walked ahead, past the bus stop. I glanced in the open door, watching him banter with the bus driver, another person who was lifted up by the little man’s exerted presence.

‘Thanks stranger’, I muttered. The bus pulled away and passed by. I turned and stopped to wave, but nothing, no wave, gone. Just as another star in the sky.