Chameleon On a Kaleidoscope (The Oxygen Thief Diaries) by Anonymous Page B

creep into
your face. We had no knowledge of each other’s facial
eccentricities. Two complete strangers willingly engaged in an
artificially arranged attempt at falling in love. If we allowed
dissatisfaction into our faces we immediately made ourselves uglier
thereby setting off a reaction in the other person’s face that
limited the chances of either of us looking our best which in turn
only increased the possibility of repulsion. Hence our crazy
smiles.
    Her
linen trousers were virtually transparent and her tits were pert
and she seemed to be at right angles to herself. All in all, very
Slavic. She drank two glasses of wine at dinner and a Jameson’s at
the bar afterwards. She asked me what whiskey I would recommend as
an alcoholic so I ordered the Jameson’s for her. More than once she
started to reach for it and stopped herself. It was the sort of
jesture that uninterrupted would have resulted in her gulping the
entire glass down thereby requiring another to be ordered. I
recognised this muffled yearning only too well. The injustice of
having a whiskey in front of you, when it should be inside you.
Anything Dutch bored her. We had that much in common. By then I was
looking at her the same way she was looking at her glass. She hated Holland but couldn’t leave. She said her friends
considered her a pain in the ass after she’d had a few
drinks.
    “ In that case
she can count me among your friends” I said.
    She smiled and tilted her
head as if I had just paid her a compliment.
    “ You should
take your hand away from you mouth when you talk, it makes you look
dishonest.” she said
    I could see how she could
be a real bitch. But I wouldn’t let her. She certainly liked her
booze. Three glasses of wine that first night.
    “ Do you have
many friends that drink?”
    I put my hand in front of
my mouth.
    “ Yes” I
said
    She laughed
reluctantly.
    The next night we met she
wasn’t drinking because she was afraid of making me uncomfortable
which had the effect of making her uncomfortable instead. In fact
she became frighteningly depressing. Had she necked a couple of
whiskeys I would have been the one exhaling in relief. The result
was that she didn’t look so good to me and in her cowboy boots she
appeared even taller. We cowered in some god-awful seaside
restaurant that looked like it might have been on the shores of the
Styx as angry white-knuckled waves tried repeatedly to grip the
mainland and drag it under.
    I tried manfully to keep
things light
    “ So how was
your day?”
    “ I’m not in a
cheerful mood”
    “ Oh I’m sorry
to hear that. Bad day at work?”
    “ I just heard
that my friend has cancer.”
    I was sorry to hear that
too because now I was going to have to listen to this shit all
night. Cancer; the alcoholic’s friend. Nobody could laugh when
cancer was in the room. It must have been killing her. She was
looking for an excuse to drink and she even had a good one but I
was sitting there in front of her the sober alcoholic.
    At the end of the evening
I tried to kiss her more from duty than desire but she almost
snapped her neck pulling away. It would have been more depressing
if I hadn’t even tried. Was there such a thing as a nice pretty
girl who wasn’t divorced, married or crazy? Was that possible?
Anica, on closer inspection was a communist-built structure
teetering on the brink of collapse. I still wanted to at least see
her naked.;
    “ Wow”
    “ Wow?
What does this mean? Wow ?”
    “ The
passion.” I said
    “ I’m deciding
if I should go or stay.“
    “ And you’re
short.” she added. It was with a smile but she said it.
    “ It doesn’t
matter when you’re lying down”
    ” You’re not lying down all the time”
    I wanted to tell her to go
fuck herself but I’d come all the way to the Hague and I felt I was
owed something. Something I could still get if I was
patient.
    “ You could be
a sweet guy but you hide behind the jokes.”she said at
last.
    Then she told me she