Candy Baby

Candy was in The Poacher this evening when I stopped off for a drink on the way home from the call centre. I don’t think Candy is her real name, but since she never tells me the truth ever, it doesn’t really matter. She was with Pete. I don’t think Pete is his real name, either. I suspect recreational drugs or illegal downloading comes into it somewhere, but there’s no point me asking because whatever answer they gave I wouldn’t believe it. Pete is very tall, and notices the rain sooner than most other people. It wasn’t raining today, because it’s been officially the first day of that thing, what is it? Sounds like bankruptcy, means the same as bankruptcy. Perhaps it’s bankruptcy, but that wouldn’t make any sense. Candy seemed smaller and thinner than last time I saw her. She said she’d just started a new job but it had only lasted a couple of days. It wasn’t the work she disliked, but she preferred to let someone else do it. I didn’t believe her when she said it had been as a front desk receptionist at a BMW showroom. I didn’t believe her when she said she’d seen me at The Rescue Rooms last week but had decided not to say Hello because I was with a girl. I never let Candy know I know she's a liar. I prefer to let the entertainment continue unabated. Briefly I wondered what the girl I hadn’t been with was like. Pete said he’d had some poems accepted by a magazine called “Black Bouquet” and had I come across it. Of course I hadn’t. But I said I’d heard it was pretty good, although I hadn’t seen a copy. Pete’s a liar like Candy is a liar. He has a couple of books out of print. Beyond inconsequential nods and yeses, this was the first time I’d ever become creatively and verbally complicit in one of Candy and Pete’s tales from the crypt. I said how Marcus Holdall was the editor and he was an okay sort of poet. It kind of threw them both. It threw me, too, because I was all of a sudden afraid of finding myself inhabiting a neck of their make believe world. There were buildings and people in it, and a dark place out back where mystery happened. It’s not that make believe scares me, it’s just I feel safer with my own than with someone else’s.