Two Extremely Handsome and Well-Dressed Men

An extremely handsome and well-dressed man is stood outside HMV in Gloucester.  It’s mid-December.  He looks and listens as the shoppers walk by.  The hum of Christmas. ‘I’m going into Superdrug to get some eyelashes, then I’ll meet you in Primark,’ one woman says to another as they pass.  He smiles.  He notices the accent more now.  It slides back onto the man’s tongue whenever he’s home.  He no longer lives in Gloucester, but is a stone’s throw from the Gloucestershire border.  He loves that border.  He’s proud that he didn’t need to go far to find his dream job.  The drive back into his home county is like sliding into a warm bath.  He refocuses, observes.  If you turned the scene upside down, ticked and unticked shopping lists would flutter down like snow.  Not just snow but Christmas snow.  Pillow-soft, whiter-than-white movie snow that never turns to slush.  Snow you can walk into a bookies in the summer and bet on.  Snow that children pray for, snow that postmen don’t.  The shoppers’ eyes have their own focus.   They are shaped like the presents they are propelling their legs towards.  Legs full of festive intent.  He recognises a face and smiles.  Another extremely handsome and well-dressed man walks up to him.  They greet each other with a kind word and a firm handshake.  Costa Coffee on the corner is busy.  Too busy.  They don't want to admit it to each other, but they can see that Costa has no room for their vast intellect.  Their brains need space to breathe.  They decide to go for a drink at a Turkish cafe nearby.  They enter.  Fewer people, therefore fewer admirers, therefore butterflies in fewer stomachs.  Fewer legs to turn to jelly.  Fewer people fainting.  Fewer banged heads and broken hearts. They prefer it that way.  One is happily married, the other happily unmarried.   They order drinks and a selection of Turkish delicacies from the woman behind the counter.  She leans against the counter to stop her legs from doing a funny dance.  Her legs are acknowledging that two extremely handsome and well-dressed men, who are almost certainly scholars in their field, have just walked into her cafe. She feels as if she’s met them both before.  But where?  In a dream maybe.  Or in a memory so long ago that it now feels like a dream.  She doesn’t want to ask.  They both thank her and she feels a flutter as their resonant voices wash over her.  They find a seat near the back of the coffee shop. Their eyes dance and sparkle with art and film and books and music as they speak, and when they’re finished they leave the biggest tip the woman has ever been left and her legs want to do a jelly dance again when they say goodbye.  The door closes softly behind them and she collects all the written-down snippets of the conversation she heard as she served them and will write to her mother about it.  ‘Perhaps they were writers,’ her mother will reply.  Yes, perhaps they were writers, the woman thought.  She would find out years later that they were indeed writers, but not just any old writers – they were titans of the blogging world.  But all she knew at the time was that they were two extremely handsome and well-dressed men.