Walking down Cambridge Heath Road the other night, past a strip joint marked by a neon outline of a woman and her dancing pole, our friend A, an eccentric Lebanese woman whom I hadn't seen for a while and had just bumped into, speaks to a gaunt woman outside the strip joint. The gaunt woman - obviously a junky - is holding a large glass recepticle of some sort, like the thing you put spaghetti in, but much bigger. "Will you sell me the bottle?" A asks. A is of a very small build, with a high-pitched voice and a lilting Cockney accent, and looks about 15. So, "Will you sell me the bottle?" she says. The woman hops from the rock-hard bouncers that she'd been talking to and towards us. "I'll sell it to you for a fiver" she says, lilting her head on the stalk of a neck. "Oh no, I won't buy it for a fiver!" shrieks A, "but I'll give you a kiss!"
"Eugh!" says the woman. "I'm not a lesbian!" And her face is scrunched up with disgust.
We carry on walking when the woman starts running after us. "Wait!" We stop. She thrusts the recepticle/bottle/whatever it was to Rafa, who receives it compliantly. She grabs A and starts kissing her cheeks and hugging her. It's a bizarre scene. A then gives her some coins, amounting to about £1.50, and says: "I don't have a fiver, but this is all I've got. Enjoy it, but don't go doing silly things with it, like smoking fags or stuff like that!" The woman calls A a sweetheart and kisses her more, and all the while A is giggling, enjoying the situation. R and I stand around watching and laughing, a bit confused. We're not sure who the show is for, and whether this is a normal part of A's life.
We carry on walking towards the Underground, and the woman is walking with us. "My name is Tracey" she says. We introduce ourselves. She can't pronounce or comprehend my name. She asks A her age. A says: "I'm as old as the oak trees" and Tracey goes: "Eh?" A never wants to reveal her age, and we try to convince Tracey that even we don't know how old she is. "I'm fir'y free.' Tracey reveals. She smells of booze. Her legs shiver as she walks, but she seems lucid enough. "I've got two daughters, one's 15 and the other 8. They's in Australia at the moment." She was 17 when she had her first child, I think. She doesn't look like she's even given birth, her body is so tiny.
"Where you going now?" She asks A.
"I'm going drinking!"
R and I nod to each other that we're going home.
"Come with me," Tracey says, and grabs A by the arm. "My dad owns a pub down the road, let's go and get pissed."
The two women scuttle across the street. The pub is called The Dundee Arms and is open past 11pm. Tracey and A enter, while R and I go home with Tracey's vast glass thing, chucking it in the park by the Tube. It's an ugly thing.
Tracey's dad doesn't own the pub, but a man sits in a corner on a velcro settee. The pub's a nasty yellow colour, coated with fag smoke. Tracey drags A to sit down: "This is Bob. He's my mate."
A shakes his hand. Bob and Tracey hug each other, and she sits close to him, her skinny leg looking like a toothpick next to his slabby thigh. "I've known Bob for years" she says. "Go on, buy us a drink then!"
Bob goes to the bar and brings back pints of lager and shots of whiskey. Tracey downs the whiskeys first and then gulps the beer. She's getting wasted, but A's enjoying the atmosphere. It seems that this is it for them, for Tracey at least, this is what she lives for, and it's good to be in the company of people - at least every once in a while - who are right here in the moment, who aren't chasing anything, but have what they need right in front of them. Of course, A knows that this isn't a life at all, but it's the moment she's cherishing. Bob seems to enjoy getting Tracey drunk and Tracey gives him affectionate, glazed glances, eye lids half-mast. A is getting a bit drunk too.
We emerge at Holborn, and in front of us is a young black guy, with tiny thin legs and enormous feet. He's walking as if he's a mime artist pretending to be sneaking up on someone. He wears a beany hat, which he takes off and scratches his head, and looks inside the hat before putting it back on. We cross the street leaving him behind. I turn around to see what he's doing and see him getting a large metal thing out of his pocket and clumsily undoing a front wheel of a bicycle tied to a railing. He takes the wheel off after some fumbling and walks his spidery walk with the wheel under his arm.
A lady is rummaging through bags of flowers outside the florists on Great Queen Street. She takes out a bunch of bluebells and goes into a house. R and I rummage through the bags too, unearthing eucalyptus, geranium and nettles. We take them all, plus some bluebells and go home. Tracey's glass thing would have been useful as a vase.
