When I called up Karin to arrange a time to meet I sensed a reluctance on the other end of the line. I was only in the UK another two days and I too, was not sure about meeting up myself but I called her anyway.
Read moreWe arranged to meet on the Saturday, the day before I was flying back to the States. I went to her place that evening, and part of me wondered whether we would have a roll around in the hay so to speak, for old times sake.
Karin’s flat in Elephant and Castle was on the second floor of a tenement building. It was a student flat. A few flatmates were hanging there when I arrived. Karin and I stood in a grubby galley kitchen with unwashed plates, pots and pans in the sink and more dirty plates piled up on a small table by the wall.
‘What do you think?’ asked Karin.
She held up a photo of herself wearing a red beret. The beret was turned around so that the peak jutted out over her forehead instead of to the side. In the photo she was wearing a thin pencil mustache.
‘Looks good,’ I lied.
Women with pretend mustaches always disturbed me. ‘But I’m not sure about the beret,’ I added.
A tall man with long brown unkempt hair came into the kitchen and pressed up against her.
‘I told you I was going out, with someone tonight. An old friend,’ Karin said to him.
She sucked on a cigarette and nodded towards me. I felt that our meeting was not going the way I expected. Maybe it was not always a good idea to catch up with old friends.
We walked over to the common room.
A group of greasy students were lounging about in the room. They had spread themselves across the furniture. Karin found a spot to one side while I sat next to one of the students. A weak light came in through the net curtains which covered the windows. Another student sat on the chair back of the armchair in front of the window.
Karin pulled out a cigarette from a soft pack of Marlboro Reds and rested it on her knee. I was about to ask her if I could bum one of them when she held up a small brass bowl from the table in front of her and lit the bottom of it with a flame from her lighter. The flame licked the base of the bowl.
She handed the brass bowl to the student next to me and stuck her cigarette into a long thin cigarette holder. The cigarette holder looked antique. It was also brass.
The student next to me was talking about how great Elephant and Castle was. To switch the focus of the room back to Karin I thought to interrupt him to ask her for a drag from the cigarette holder. But then I thought better of it.
In a thick London accent I blurted out, ‘Nah, me, I’m a north London boy. South London, Elephant is no good. You can’t even get a tube around much of South London, mate.’
At that, the student next to me laughed, before sinking back into the cushions of the couch.
Photo AI generated by Stockcake, and cropped.