CH 1 (Part 1):The Department Store

Five to eleven. Inside, the place was charged with the empty hum of potential purchasing power. A tiled floor gleamed like melting snow. Rows of uniform colour co-ordinated shelves gave a blocky communist air, whilst outside a drooling, gluttonous crowd huddled together at the entrance waiting for the department store to open.

As soon as the two automatic doors parted company I threaded my way through the empty aisles with gay abandon. I am not a glutton. I do not capitulate to nuanced consumerism. Skip, skip, plié, skip, cabriole.   My heart is bursting with gleeful incandescence. I hear Smetana's Vltava playing from within, waterfalls and escalating energy. I approach the fine bone china section. 'Heaven, I'm in heaven'. Melodically please! I pick up a £75 cup from the Wedgewood brand. The Florentine range speaks to me. The halogen lights illuminate the paper thin china as I hold it up, indicating only the finest quality. Classic turquoise and earth brown gilding envelops the brilliant white cup on the outside, a thin ornate brown strip adorns the inner. And the shape. Modern cups are all monstrously oversized, urging us all to drink a little more, urinate more, flush more, wash more, spend more. The diminutive Florentine educates us; bypass speed and decision encouraging instead to take an appreciative sip from a dainty façade. Pressing my eyelids firmly shut I catalogue the image of the cup in my mind replete with a bold Courier font emblazoned across stating 'must have.'

By this time customers start to walk by me. My time alone has ceased. Not to worry. Onward. With a balletic slide I chasse towards the male fragrances, bee-lining for the Aqua di Parma. A man has not lived nor a woman yearned until the swimming pool blue tonic has been imparted through the nasal passage. Arancia di Capri induces feelings of Springtime in the synapses, buds bursting and flowering, pupils dilating, co-currently the physical system in the legs enter lockdown; knees weaken. I spray liberally over my neck. I do not use the tester. I am flourishing on this retail dance floor.

Reaching the escalators I observe two women a step up from myself. The younger is no more than 21 years old, wearing her brown hair tied up like a pretzel and a skirt that barely reaches the back of her knees. Perverse edification. Is there no English object secure from rash assault by the common man. Bank. It's in the bank, from whence it's return is hitherto unknown.

I reach the second floor where I head to the restaurant for my lunch date.

A Diversion with a Crossword

The cafe is a refuge. Bustling with people chatting their white noise away. The sound percolates evenly through the room. The choppy murmur has a sedative effect. Odours of ground coffee and toast. Mother I am home. Comfy seats and a wide, wide window to watch the passersby. But every morning, in he comes, with his wife. Both wearing virtually the same clothes as yesterday. All navy blue and dust. He sits down and picks up two of the broadsheets, clicks his pen and begins the crossword. They are here for two hours. One Americano each, both with warm milk on the side, that is their lot, nothing else. He has the gall to fill in the crossword, fills it in with his vile blue Parker pen that he purchased from WhSmith. This is a public newspaper! I get a smile from her once in a while. She seems pleasant enough, but he, he goes over to the rack and picks up another newspaper and then another, one by one every damn newspaper in the cafe and completes each crossword, with his pen, silently for two hours. Completes them! Not a word to his wife. His offensively grey and red facade never indicates this pleasures him. He remains blank throughout the entire farce, the type of blank that can only derive from a healthy pension and a childless marriage. Satisfaction through life apathy. Nothing can touch him. Apathy for his wife, apathy for the barista and apathy for the crossword. Oh he's a clever old git alright but the gall, the magnificently flagrant gall of the man.

Cezanne and the Unisphere

The meeting of the two of them could have been completely innocent of course. The possibility of chance dealing a favourable hand guided by nothing other than the wind had not escaped the attention of Cicely who had planned to use the opportunity to finally draw a bold line under their former relationship which had ended without resolve. But chance does not exist in this story. It had been fated only minutes before, by the ineffable and nameless dictator of the unisphere, that the mind and palette of artist Paul Cezanne should construct the remaining chapters of the un-exhilirating life of Ernest Moss turning it into something bright and joyous. A challenge for both Cezanne, who, of late, painted with a broad gloomy brush and Moss who is unashamedly bland. A bombshell has been dropped.

Now the story innevitably bifurcates, not only to discuss the ridiculous notion that a famous, long since dead artist can single handedly transform the lives of innocent human beings with a brush stroke but also to confront the equally unfamiliar idea of the unisphere. Surely, the universe? Hark up reader! Your eye is fixed and your spine straight. What an interesting and cruel twist this is.

The definition of the universe understood by many and printed in the commonplace and authoritative text Adams' Dictionary of Matter and Concept describes the universe as being simply 'The idea that the system of life is predictable, one directional and immutable, governed by no force and written like a single piece of verse with a definite beginning and a definite end.' The unisphere on the other hand is defined as 'The irreducible fact of the system of life being unpredictable and cyclic with life being metaphysically recycled endlessly and governed by an anonymous dictator with a passion for 18/19th Century Impressionist/Post-Impressionist art and its proponents.' Every person it turns out is assigned a guardian artist that at some juncture, like a football manager deciding to bring on a substitute, intervenes at the behest of the dictator, because someone somewhere, usually on Earth, needs help. It just so happens that the universe is thankfully bunk, has always been bunk and the unisphere is alive with the future of its inhabitants at the mercy of the artists brush.

This leads us smoothly onto the initial point that Cezanne will transform the life of Ernest Moss.

Grim Mortality

The last meeting between the two of them had been pathetic. They stood several years ago, like they did presently, face to face, by the banks of Lake Konstanz, the quivering pastel blue shimmer of its surface radiating outwards under an opulent golden sun. It was expected that he would propose. Her family expected that he would propose and talking of nothing else other than all the permutations under which a proposition could occur. Moss had not been privvy to the garrulity.  For Cicely, the image had been framed under numerous guises but always on this holiday and by this lake. The moment would be seized on by a man normally not apt to seizing anything. He would enrapture and enthrall with poetry and prose on bended knee with sweeping arms and operatic delivery. A box would miraculously appear, sometimes falling from the leaves of a nearby aspen and landing squarely into the hands of Moss and sometimes whisked from the depths of a very deep pocket, offered and opened  in front of an exasperated but expectant Cicely.

However, fate decided to cruelly cast a different net that day. Moss had recently been offered a post as principal violinist at the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and contrary to plans hitherto made by the two of them to up sticks and de-camp somewhere on the west coast of France Moss had taken the decision to remain for the foreeable future in Liverpool. The story was unwound in a short time in Moss's curious manner of speaking so quickly that the words toppled over each other, pausing only to emphasize the larger words, and generally emitting an incongrous high pitched hum at the end of a sentence to smoothen out any gaps in sound that he predicted may occur. Cicely assimilated his news politely, furtively grief stricken by its magnitude but outwardly emitting an agreeable almost cheery tone. Why anyone would choose Liverpool, plain grey Liverpool, with as many taxi cabs as gulls, was beyond her.

The Broomstick

It could never really be defined as a walk, which commits one foot in front of the other in roughly equal measure, slower than a jog yet quicker than a shuffle. Nor could it either be described as a march because a march presupposes purpose and Ernest Moss moved without any purpose. What Cicely captured moving towards her at breathless speed was an aimless arrow fired from the fingers of an inebriated archer. Two frail legs bounding and lunging vigourously, the whole entity ebulliently vacillating from side to side and all this movement barely calibrated by his second rate eyesight.
 

Upon recognising Cicely, Moss's method of greeting revealed and antiquated charm, extending first his delicate pink hands which enveloped her wrist followed shortly thereafter by bending a knee to unveil, what was to him an endearing overture, a score of kisses to her unblemished arm. With remarkable animation he rose to vertical and further adorned both sides of her cheek. Within a few seconds the ritual was over thankfully for the receiver.

Cicely, like her botanical namesake was sweet but unlike it didn't have an umbrella. Shaped like a broomstick she had rather long flat feet on top of which sat slim edible legs, curveless midriff, a face countoured with precision to flush out her universally enrapturing features, and the counterpoint, a sad mop of drenched, near black hair.

The Number 82

It was shaped like a cello, the puddle. Less a point of fact than a squinting interpretation which two sharp-nosed women, standing stoically by the curb, admired through a blanket of besieging rain. The taller of the two internally mused that the glassy curves rippled and seethed to the beat of the downpour giving the impression of an ethereal string concerto that Nature herself was conducting. Her thoughts turned to other sounds that could accompany the track. The background hum of traffic perhaps acting as a trombone choir or the rhythmic shuffling of shoes over concrete as percussion. 

The completion of the orchestra was lamentably cut short however when a zestful forefinger and forearm were prodded road-wards by the smaller of the two women, shortly followed by the arrival of the Number 82 bus which courteously pulled in with a sibilant sneeze to serve the aforementioned limbs of the smaller figure and in doing so completely ruined the formation of the puddle, expelling much of its contents over the back of a nearby gentleman much to the amusement of the passengers on the bus. I say amusement because until that juncture the man had been intriguingly scrutinising a branch from a holly tree at unnervingly close quarters rendering several onlookers to believe that they were witnessing the habits of someone extremely peculiar; a feeling that was only compounded when the saturation of the man's coat by the bus drew no reaction from him whatsoever.

What captivated him was this.

A sunburst lichen (Xanthoria parietina). Ernest Moss had walked the same route almost every weekday morning for six years and most mornings he could be found at some point inches away from this particular lichen for reasons that will become explicitly clear later on. But for now a salient truth must be imparted. Ernest was hopelessly unaware that the Number 82 bus he ordinarily caught was pulling away without him on it.