Kentish Town Segue. by Jay-James May

He kissed her hard on the lips and fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck she said times six, Winona going yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
And then he woke up.
The girl attached to his shoulder with chewing gum in her hair wasn’t ugly but she was snoring, and to him this was an ugly moment. She was young, this girl, not jailbait, but young enough for him to feel like he should know better. He wanted out but he didn’t want to wake her. He knew she would wake soon enough, that her body would jolt out of that drunken sleep and demand a drink. For him, the beer on the bed-side cabinet would suffice but hardly quench. The room, grand, with tall ceilings, his and her bookcases, a hat rack, half empty - Kentish Town middle-class. The room, half-lit in the morning gloom was warm, although only artificially - it was mid-December. He began to slide his arm out from under her cheek but she snorted, like a pig he thought, and he lay still, frozen, agitated.
He thought about his dream.
Winona Ryder had a new movie out and he was a film journalist attending the premiere. They caught eyes during an interview. He could remember questions like ’have you ever dated a killer?’ and ’would you like to know the easiest way to dispose of a body?’ She gave answers like ’if I could swim in a lake of fire and not burn would you ride tandem with my soul?’ It meant nothing in the dream and nothing now, just words, language absolutely pointless. As with most dreams in which Winona popped up, they found each other in the end cubicle of the ladies toilets. This had been pre-arranged in previous dreams. Winona pinned him against the wall, ripping his shirt off asking, ‘if glitter was black would it still be called glitter? Or would girls go to nightclubs with gloom all over their faces?’ to which he replied ‘did you know that Freud was a cocaine addict? Celine was a Nazi? Have you ever…’
Light now replaced the darkness in the room, softly, a torsion of sun-rays and dust cut through the empty space. He slid his arm, softly, from underneath her neck and, softly, moved out of the room.
The hallway was a white wash of unforgiving light. He moved quickly down the stairs, along the entrance hall and out on to the street, where the light intensified. He thought to himself there must be a limit to the amount of strong light a man can take in a short space of time as he now felt dizzy and sat for a moment on the garden wall of the house with the bedroom with the stuck pig asleep in the master bedroom. Then he thought about the stuck pig waking and moved to a garden wall three doors down.

END.