The Sugar Cube Club
He watched her thick lips pout slightly, kiss shaped, as they rounded on a consonant at the start of a question. He watched, expecting the W to exit her mouth and enter the world as though she was spitting the spiders of the harsh local accents of the East London girls: their accents seemed to be struck by some evolutionary defense mechanism, a foul, aggressive intonation making them unapproachable and hardened, so unlike the preceding generation they'd frighten off the smiling predators and wouldn't end up as single mums living on benefits on some grey sink-estate.
But as she spoke, he was led not onto the dark rocks of high-rise tenements, poverty, nor teenage pregnancy, but out into crystal waters over coral reefs that harbour colourful tentacles, which, instead of stings, touched his legs with the most delicious morphia narcotic.
Her eyes had picked him out already and cut into him like a silver bullet shot through coagulated, evening air molecules, soaring clean and clear and crisp.
When finally they spoke, he had just asked her question after question, but only because he didn't know what to say; and they were asked in a sterile tone as though he was a cold caller doing product research on oven cleaner with multiple choice answers, or in a questionnaire about the private health insurance sold to suburban housewives getting ready for that grotesque, inevitable tumour.
He had nervously picked out the perfect oblong white sugar cubes from the bowl and made shapes with them. As they spoke she too picked up some cubes, and built a wall between them that spanned across the table, getting higher and higher until it tumbled. It had perturbed him a little. He wondered if it was a symbolic wall. But she then built a square car out of the cubes; then he made an aeroplane. Now, every time they met, they played games with the sugar cubes.
Everyday since that first meeting he had come to see her at the Wildgoose Cafe. He had to be sure. After the last girlfriend he thought about becoming religious, but after looking into the religions of the world he decided he couldn't find a God he wanted to punish enough.
In the last week , he had, in the charity of the melody and motion of her company, evolved an as of before undiscovered passion within himself which had emerged from the sea and had now grown limbs that beat drums in large dense forests.
They talked about school and college days. He told her that he thought back in those days drinks and words were cheap, as were the good times and relationships and ego's which were all a steal and came all neat and tucked in. And cigarettes too. She said that we all still swear and lie and fuck like before. And they both laughed.
She told him funny little family stories from Kilkenny, and how the camp-bed – only brought down from the loft when an elder family member was seriously ill and put into the front-room so they didn’t have to climb the stairs – was like an omen of impending death: as frightening as the priest coming round to give The Last Rites, and as damning as the macabre spirits waiting patiently at the end of the bed for their moment.
This time she made a picture out of the sugar cubes: it was a house with the sun shining behind it, and two figures with their arms up in the air and she broke some of the cubes in half to make a little picket fence surrounding the house. She asked him what he thought it was, what it represented. It reminded him of a tarot card from a pack he owned. She smiled and nodded. But he got the impression that it was something else and asked her what it was. She thought for a moment, and told him that it was two old people in their cottage who were celebrating fifty years of a lifetime of war and truces, laughter and boredom, animosity and tenderness and processed ham. And that at the end of their lives they were basking in the triumph of undefeated love with the leaves on the lawn.
He thought it was the most beautiful thing he had ever heard, and he told her so. And she smiled. With some of the split sugar cubes he made a dog, to add to the idyll.
She asked him if it was a cat. He said yes it was. She told him that she had come to Albion because she was on the run from the CIA. She looked at him, to see if she could trust him. He looked back, puzzled. She told him that her cat could speak every language in the world, even the one of the tribe in Africa that communicate by clicks in their throats, then she attempted it. He looked into her eyes as he hoped to god that she was joking. The words going through his mind at that moment were: please don't be mental, please don't be crazy, please....you are perfect, please don't be like the others. But when he looked into her eyes, he knew she wasn't joking. She continued: Her cat used to work for the CIA, but had become a double agent. They, the Irish Government, had locked her up in secure accommodation and put her on mind-freezing drugs, and taken her cat for further research. He looked at her. He felt so sorry for her. It was the most deluded thing he had ever heard.
He said he was going outside for a cigarette, but they both knew he wouldn't be coming back. Outside, as he walked off he glanced through the window. She was building a wall with the sugar cubes.
Bio: Justin Cooke lives in Bristol, UK. He has been writing for nearly three years. His literary inspirations are Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, and Irvine Welsh.
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