Birthday Balloons
The first time I saw this girl I once knew she was blowing up birthday balloons for her sister’s surprise party in a fashionable bar all chrome and glass in a former bank building sat on a stool with a tall skinny tattooed Scotsman who was coming down off black microdots and twisted his face in disgust when I ordered a bottle of McEwan’s Export hell yeah that brown liquid swirling into the schooner like a swollen river full of spawning salmon & as I kept glancing over at her big blue eyes long lashes face freckled by the African sun and blonde bobbed hair & our gaze finally locked I was struck by the thunderbolt of Sicilian legend so when she asked if we wanted to help I said sure & didn’t realise in those first awkward moments that our paths would become intrinsically linked for a while by her sister & months later she’d say that we were soul mates but then her star sign was Cancer & she felt a certain empathy with a bum like me who saw beauty in the light bouncing off those red balloons the empty bottle with foam crawling slowly back down the slender neck the torn beer mats & the lingering lonely fragrance of perfume on an empty pillow.
* Jon Tait is a former sportswriter and was the press officer at now defunct Gretna FC in the Scottish League.
