“It’s a bit cold outside John you might want to wear your jacket” Joanne says with the motherly affection he has grown to find intensely irritating in recent years. As well as this he dislikes the way she now seems to have her hair cut – in a sweeping fringe – and he is slowly starting to imagine she is maintaining the look just to spite him.
“I’ll be fine honestly” he says as he glances at his tired reflection in the mirror and steps outside the door. Their arms are loosely linked as they meander down the street, past waiting bus-stops and agitated taxi-cabs, the scent of the impending weekend coursing through the air.
“How was your week? Did anything exciting happen at the seminar?” Joanne interrogates as she catches the eye of a sharp-suited young male strutting past them, before guiltily snapping her gaze back to the safer paving slabs.
“Fairly average week. Nothing special really” grumbles John with that crushingly familiar reticence which Joanne increasingly finds at once suffocating and achingly distant.
As she finds herself pining ever-so-fleetingly for a dash of romance or spontaneity to launch itself into her life, John meanwhile has been ambling along hypnotised by his shoelaces and now finds himself slipping slowly through the cracks in the pavement, widening as though they were zips being unfastened on a leather jacket. Before he realises it, he’s waist-deep in the paving slabs, like quicksand it swallows him up and means he has to continue the rest of the walk beneath the transparent street, with Joanne leading him from above in a matriarchal arm-lock.
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to step on the cracks of the pavement John?” she tuts with disapproval as they continue on their way. John mooches along all non-committal, passing beneath occupied phone booths and open drains, with no one paying him the slightest notice, on the way to collect their Friday night Chinese takeaway.
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