The Cross Worder Cont.

Osborne was generally, a deflector more than a reflector but on this night he was the latter.

Past dinner, a simple fare of fried, thick, pork sausages with Melisa’s home made bean stew,  topped with a poached egg and parmesan cheese, paying due compliments, Osborne excused himself from the table and took his favourite seat out on the balcony. The forest could be felt, smelt and heard but not seen. There was no moon. The sound made no sound but gave itself away anyway with a cold humidlessness. Melissa’s careless, clattering in the kitchen fuelled Osborne’s determination. He had half expected Monty to turn up and was still not sure he wouldn’t. He smouldered on a few cigarettes he retrieved from a secret stash in a garage draw. He was suddenly not sure of what his wife, Melissa knew about him.

It was by chance that Osborne met up with Maud in the city all that time ago. As Monty had said he was there getting his kidneys tested. The problem started out as a back ache thing about which he complained so often that Melissa suggested a visit to the local locum (should really be visiting locum, Ed.) who then referred him on to a specialist in the city. Nobody actually mentioned a kidney problem to Osborne and it was only when he received a written report from the city doctor a few weeks later that he realised, in fact, it was not a back problem, but instead pending kidney failure. Undeterred Osborne cracked open a new bottle of bourbon and passed out a few hours later on the couch where Melissa was used to covering him before retiring herself.

Getting back to the situation at hand; The imponderables of travel time to and from the city due to countless things that may or may not go wrong (road works, accidents, laden lorries etc.) a journey of ninety odd kilometres had Osborne leave his house in good time. But then, having an unusually clear run found himself at the hospital an hour before his scheduled appointment. He decided to buy cigarettes (a guilty pleasure we have already encountered) and a cappuccino at the take away across the street. Dragging lustily on a Camel (not sure that’s a reference anyone gets anymore. Ed.), his lust found his loins when a woman of obvious charms seemingly, hastily stopped cars before the pedestrian crossing slightly left of the café where Osborne was yet to sip his first sip of coffee.

A man, any man would watch with intent a woman who could command so much traffic even if it meant or he risked being offensive in his stare. That’s what didn’t go through Osborne’s empty head at that point. She seemed so at home in the dress she wore. It was not hounds tooth but it was white with uniform black bits on who knows what fabric. Gathered at the shoulders it cupped her, good grief, tits, as tits of that calibre should be cupped (and I thought he was going to use the well-worn, but more acceptable ‘ample breasts’ thing here. Ed.). A black, wet looking sash, tied, unevenly on the left, separated them from her lower and equally voluptuous torso before swishing off her hips and walk like a gay tomorrow. Her shoes were black stilettos with a metal sheath at the tips of the toe and the base of the heel like tap strands. She wore dark sun glasses and a bandanna the same material as her dress. Her hair, though Osborne, for some reason, thought it was long and blonde, did not, in reality, protrude beyond the bandanna. (Coma use. Ed.)

Osborne tried to pretend he had not been ogling the woman as she neared his table. He took his first sip from the dark, texturally, variegated, cardboard coffee cup he had been sold and lit another cigarette. Just as his nose caught sight of the confusing aroma of musk as the woman swayed past he heard, exclaimed;

“Osborne!”

He looked beyond his coffee cup and raised his head. It was Maud.

‘Maud!”

“What are you doing here?” they both asked in unison.

A settling or unsettling silence ensued.

Eventually both confessed to having a doctor’s appointment in an exchange too to and fro and convoluted for this humble scribe to replicate. though neither gave anything away about what their appointments might concern. Osborne invited her to sit. She was about to but then remembered she wanted coffee.

“I need coffee,” she said, “I’ll be right back.”

Osborne shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Should he have offered to get her coffee and not left her standing he wondered? No, he concluded. He had come across her, Maud, but a few times in their small village, they had barely spoken and while he did know of her and that she was married to what’s-his-name, and that she obviously knew of him, there seemed no rite to familiarity in this circumstance. He felt his behaviour was within the realms of expectation. His rationalisation, however, did not comfort him. His back ached and he felt glum as he awaited her return.

Maud did not choose to seat herself in the chair opposite Osborne as he expected she would when she returned but rather chose the one next to him and to his left which is the most intimate chair to be sitting in for a right handed male.

The vagaries of Maud’s choice occupied Osborne for a few moments and so when he answered reflexively “Yes,” to something she had just asked he did not really know to what he had just committed himself. But he was not one to trouble himself with details in his outward life so pushing on asked why Maud had reason to come to the city and specifically the hospital.

“I expect that’s a bit forward Osborne. It may be only coincidence that we are meeting at this location.”

“Perhaps,” a careless Osborne pursued sucking in and puffing out his smoke like a carbon tax exempt and slurping on his coffee. “But is it?”

It was only a small city in a regional part of the country. The hospital stood high on a hill and overlooked its entire surrounds. A good position for a fort had there been a need for one. The café was on the north side of the hospital and so had better sun in winter than it did in summer, especially in the morning, which was a good thing because winters were cold and summers were hot. On the morning that Maud sat east and Osborne sat north a tempered sun hampered Osborne’s view and nurtured Maud’s back.

Osborne was not to know that her troubles were great, that the telling of them was greater and that her desire to speak them out loud was greater still.  Ignorant of what he was working with he continued on with his flippancy and innuendo while she welled her tears and considered what or whether she should contrive. Ultimately she decided against contrivance. Silly Osborne had flattered her instep of all things throughout her turmoil, Even she had trouble figuring out what he meant by his architectural appreciation of what he called ‘her steely, red slippery slide.’ (The soles of her shoes were red, not that that makes the leap any easier. Ed.)

“I have a tumour in my brain that is likely to kill me within a year and I am here for more tests.” Maud said, or blurted.

“Really?” said cold Osborne almost stunned. “I am sorry to hear that,”

”Are you?” She asked presenting a steady turquoise gaze and a quivering lip.

He wasn’t, stunned that is, if the truth be told. He did not really know or care about Maud and the only reason he was giving her time was because secondly, she noticed him and approached or made her self known to him. Thence moving to firstly, it is not often that some apparent stranger who impresses you in the street turns out to be someone you know. Impressions by people you don’t know can, later on, inspire invented fantasies you can’t know for real but which you may still embrace, tweak and hold close to your heart, possibly forever. But if, by chance, known and unknown meet, as in the case above, everything is voided because you cannot decry the person from that which you know to be true about them.  Osborne tried to steer away from the quivering lip.

“I am here because my back aches,” he said returning a not so classy brown gaze. “I don’t do anything; the doctors are trying to find out why.”

“You drink,” she said with a full stop and as if she was God. “It’s your kidneys.”

“I drink a bit.”

“You drink a lot according to Snake (Alexander Adams. Ed), the bottle shop guy at the local pub. He boasts that he has to get Absinthe in for you. At least half a dozen bottles a week and he says that’s on top of the beer, bourbon and the other stuff you buy.”

“Snake, as you call him, has a big mouth.”

“It’s a small village and most of us do the usual thing….”

“Unlikely,” Osborne uttered at that juncture ignoring the rest of her comment.

“And yet, despite you waning interest, you agreed to meet my wife at Restaurant 14 overlooking the river at 7:00 pm that night since neither of you planned to return home that day and, curiously, were staying in the same Motel but a few minutes away.”

“Too true, so you know my every thought too.”

“But you didn’t turn up.”

“No. I changed my mind and drove home.”

“Why?”

“Old man here Monty. Leaving out the mechanics of the likeliness of the thing you seem to wish happened happening, the emotionality in situations like that are rarely what a man of my age is after.

‘I am gone.”

“Be nice if it stayed that way.”