Through Binoculars

Patrick has been promoted: it is a party all afternoon. Yes there are speeches, yes they could not have been over more soon. "Tom," Patty said to him, "Tom. Haven't seen you hardly all year! What's been happening to yer?" Well Tom said nothing of that Friday Feeling of fuckitall, or the weekend where pleasure was dotted about like Wars amongst Stars, or a Saturday spent daydreaming of Monday morning as if of Mars; Tom said nothing of the Fist Blog at all. "Ahh nothing much you know." "And a good day today?" said Paddy, "my lucky day?"

And once again it is the fists of truth he failed to say. He failed to say: "Today, I locked the office doors, unleashed my binoculars, and spied through the window the student party. There they danced and there they sat, wrapped up in the colours of a flag; orange, green, and white. And I spied today the first bikini of the year, here in this glorious Spring-like warmth and light, in the park there, where, she, stomach all wobbly, face all slushly, sipped at beer, fell off the bench and on to her rear, and spilled cigarette ash, right across her vast breast - like some violent, alien rash. But then laughed, as if she'd just passed some crazy test, as a friend called right over - O Milly, Oh Molly, in a voice that sounded like, You silly, You lovely, as if some echo of a Dublin sidestreet, where mourners by a coffin sighed, O my darling, Oh my beauty, and then cried."

Instead it's simply - O you know me old Tom, struggling on, battling through, bureaucratic fist-fights is my life, through and through. And how's Patrick's day - his change of position? "Just an excuse for a drink!" says Patrick, who looks at Tom for a brief second, as if from great distance, or as if spying a truly curious name - some name that has become anonymous, or meaningless, or strange, through some result of the passage of time, or through age, or via the distance of an internet page.