cigarettes and cinders

We were in a dim-lit club crammed full of twenty-year-olds and cocktails and the slightest scent of sweat. The dancers were too close for comfort, but the loud distorted noise of the bar made it a good place to spill secrets.
Nathalie crossed one leg over the other so that both legs reflected the spangling light of the bar. Her hair was astonishing; it fell across her shoulders and wrapped itself around her frame like amber silk, a robe in itself.
She tipped a tussle of tobacco onto a flattened out cigarette paper, rolled it and rerolled it with concentration, as though it were a piece of origami that she wanted to get exactly right. Soon the cigarette smoke fluttered from her mouth: smoke like a fleet of faded butterflies, emerging from their crumpled lung chrysalis. The smoke dispersed but the tobacco odour lingered and clung to our clothes, the fumes of a dark perfume.

the morning after the night before

Eight students on the table in front of me. They have been at a Cambridge may ball, made it to the survivors' photo at 6am and are now having breakfast with smudged makeup and ballgowns crumpled from the all night vigil.
One, a girl- or is she a woman? - is wearing something between a ballgown and a gold-sequined mermaid outfit from a fancy dress box. She is playing at fashion, aiming for a cross between nobility and Amy Winehouse.
Her eye makeup is exquisite; golden pearls of shimmer punctuate her eyelids. Shadows sweep across her lids alluringly. Her earrings dangle regally; they are grown up earrings that one might wear to the opera, and are a counterpoint to the crass conversation:
"Callum said I chose my earrings to match the way his bollocks dangle."
Hysterical laughter fills the air like champagne bubbles. She moves slightly, smugly, but her bosom does not move. It is tucked tightly into a sequined bustier, pressed into two breast-clusters, two glittering galaxies. Her tinted black nails betray her adolescence, scratched to imperfection.

The students leave and their table is an anti-feast of crumbs and water jugs and elegantly crumpled napkins. Their table is a work of art- left abandoned, a creation in itself, betraying little about its creators. Funny how the remains of a meal are fairly indiscriminate - this table could have been occupied by a large family, businessmen or ladies who lunch. The remains of the last supper, or Queen Cleopatra's feast: and all that's left is this wooden table, these crumbs.
Only writing can repeople the table, tell a little of its back-story.

gypsy girl, dancefloor

A gypsy girl, thin in a very beautiful way, came to the table. Her cheekbones glistened with sweat, her skin was luminous. She held a bottle in the hand, a roll-up in the other. Her nose was pierced, one sparkling diamond hovering there uncertainly to signal her rebellion, but without upsetting the exquisite balance of her nostrils. This girl was one of those unique beings who have something about them, a quality that makes you want to watch them and never look away, hold them and never let them go.
She wore plain jeans and a black top which revealed glowing skin, two shoulder blades pulling like wings. Her hair was pinned up at the back of her head with a pencil, as though she were an artist, the strands curling around like swirls of paint. Her eyes shone; she was wholly concentrated on her lover, the dance.

She danced nearer and nearer to him and he danced too, and they were in time to the music the drumbeats the rhythm the lyrics, they moved and they shook and they shimmied closer and closer together, they danced they were dancing closer together and their hip bones were touching closer together
and then
he takes her suddenly, catching her head like a falling star in his hands and pouring burning light into her lips with his an animal kiss, a surprise kiss, playing passion - his trump card - laying his desire on the table.

She tilts her head and kisses back, mouths moving and hands searching,
the music over,
the seduction complete.

His hair was flame coloured and devilish; his face was calm, composed. The goatee burned about his mouth uncertainly, like a smouldering ember that had jumped from the fiery ginger of his tight-kept hair onto the cold calm stone of his expression. All this gave him a look of peculiar intensity that drew her eyes to him again and again, irresistibly. She stared at him even when he noticed and smiled bravely at him – flirtatiously, passers-by might have said, in the way that young women do, sending subliminal signals of desire and attraction in the flicker of a smile, without really meaning to, without being aware that this smile was a flirty smile, this look a knowing look, these eyes come-to-bed eyes and so on. They only realise their earlier power, their earlier coquettish mannerisms when they are mature women, when flirting is much harder and the flicker of a smile will oft go unnoticed.

He did not smile back. Instead he looked at her with that intensity and she looked away. She got out a book from her bag – Orlando, suitably intellectual – and pretended to read it. On the bus she sat deliberately, provocatively in front of him. She was too nervous to say anything, so she continued reading and ignoring what she thought was the burning gaze of his eyes on the back of her neck.

“That looks complicated,” he said, and she turned eagerly.

portrait on the tube

Her eyes were silver and slow-moving, orbiting around their sockets, observing all corners of the room. Her cheekbones held rings of fatigue under her eyes, tiredness pooled there in circles like moonlight. These dark lunar rings betrayed her late nights; the moonlight that had kept her company through the wee hours had left traces around her eyes.

They were rimmed with turquoise eye-makeup, meant to disguise the shadows. Her lips were sugary with the fake mint of chewing gum. She was a creature of the rainforest, this luminous woman with her inner strength and tribal loyalty. In the inhuman jungle of the London underground she did not bat an eyelid.

the couple at Waterloo station

He took her hand and they strode onto the escalators, so confident and sure - so in love, so hopelessly in love. On the escalators they held hands and their burning fingers intertwined like interlacing stories, hands crumpled together like the discarded pages of lost books.

He swooped a printed kiss onto her open face, like a word of tenderness scribbled on the page of a notebook. Here. Now. They were writing their own histories, unfolding them in the damp grey morning at Waterloo station, London. There had been lovers before them, and there would be lovers after them, and in some ways they were no different. They were simply another couple on the platform stage, acting out their roles.

And yet: there would be no two people who kissed like this ever again, who looked like this ever again, who felt the same rush of love and pain. On the surface, they were the same as any young couple have ever been; yet they were also two lovers unlike any others, experiencing emotions so new, the world had no words to describe them. For all the critics and their cynicism, for all the linguists and their poems, the English language cannot adequately express love. It cannot reflect feelings in the way that lovers' faces do – in the way that his face did in that moment to hers, in the way that it shone.