The Spire

He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.

- Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera.

Now I like a drink as much as the next guy but the next guy is sobbing beside me in piss-specked boots with vomit running down his chin, lamenting a girl he never even loved. “We’re all just pissing in the wind,” he says as the hulking bouncer circles us like a hungry shark, “pissing in the fucking wind.”

“I think you’ve had enough, mate,” the shark bites but the fuck he has and a premium Belgian lager crashes to the floor like an offertory with the sobbing man led out into the darkness He called night, congregation of taxis waiting aglow in the fine drizzle beneath the pale streetlights on New Union Street.

That’s the Moonlight Sonata humming in the fillings of my teeth, that’s the cries of the dissolution that crow beneath the jaunty Ska beat, that’s history writhing beneath us like the biblical Beast; I watch the mystery play as we play it today and take another slug of the hard stuff and it burns as the Christchurch had in the shadow of the Heinkel He.

I stammer through the crowd, imploring the DJ to play Right Right Now Now, but I’m drowned out by two stags rutting beneath a setting sun and a baying crowd of sycophants and chauvinists who have swamped the ancient spire in search of another Duvel and chaser, and so I slip into the courtyard under the watchful eye of the spotlight and torches and the brooding shark as it skulks on the corner.

And the old boys now bow their heads and turn to the musician, the Guinness on tap and the dancers in full flow.

The choir warm their vocal chords beneath the pine canopy as the Socialists cheer their former Lord and the battles they had won.

Lou is waiting for his man.

Mick is 2000 light years from home.

Lucifer son of the morning, Max gonna chase you out of earth.

First date.

Blind date.

No date.

How did it get so late so soon?

God has spoken. Out on Bull Yard.

LEAVE THE BINS ALONE, He says. LEAVE THE BINS ALONE.

*

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