“If yer want my opinion,” says Bill. He looks up at Alana, with his runtish face twisted into an intense expression.
“Frankly Bill, I don’t,” Alana interjects before he can launch into one of his tirades about the subject at hand, one of his favourites—why elves would be better employed getting some time in—and monopolise the conversation with tired but well-practised jeu de mots and superficially plausible conclusions that pay scant regard to any logical rigour.
“Why’s that then? Yer got no answers, eh?” Bill winks and for a moment he looks handsome, his runtiness banished to some corner of her memory which ekes out a living as a trash cart, something Hermann Ebbinghaus calls the forgetting curve; a repository for unwanted ecoica. He is quite a smart man, she reflects, dressing in an old-fashioned, button-up to the wattle suit, something the fashionably communist would call a Mao Suit, but Bill likens to the more counter-revolutionary apparel of Hong Kong opium dealers; a red velvet waistcoat, the only evidence of which are the brocaded fishtails draped over his trouser-tops; a silver, silk-neckerchief, knotted in the askew fashion beloved of poets and others of ill-repute; patent leather dancing pumps, and a jauntily placed homburg bearing the marks of a remarkable and possibly violent history. At his side, on the table, is his ever-present Makala yellow soprano ukelele, an instrument the demands of which he only has a casual acquaintance, a half empty cigarette carton, and a pair of antique duelling pistols.
“Not really, Bill. As Plato said, opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding,” she says. If she spoke in PowerPoint slides, the last discrete clause would be underlined and bracketed with Spanish exclamation marks. She positions herself near to the bar, one foot on the brass guardrail, her chin jutting belligerently. Bill takes this as flirtation, and if circumstances were different, he wouldn’t be far from the mark. Alana likes rogues.
“Alrighty then. I’ll keep my mind to me-self. So, what do you want to talk about? The weather? The price of dried toads? Or where I keeps me etchings?” Bill chuckles at his less than subtle transition and Alana rolls her eyes.
But she nods and offers her best temptress smile. “Etchings would be good. Although, if you’ve got other things to do…”
She eyes the duelling pistols.
“Oh these?” Bill picks up one gun and swings it around his index finger. “They ain’t nuffink. I just gotta return a couple of empties to old Alex on Severn Road. Job done, proper like. I won’t be more-un five minutes, tops.”
“Run along then, and I’ll go splash my face with some water. You can pick me up at three,” she says, glancing at her watch.
Bill tips his titfer, swallows the dregs of his absinthe shandy, stubs out his cigarette and stands. “Right-oh then.”
“Right-oh, Bill,” she says, nodding to her accomplice waiting by the door.
