After a long wait, and back and forth on the sidewalk, our friend leaned against the wall of the café with a man, and a man crouched on the ground like a pair of horses, as he looked at the passers-by and looked at his watch, and we could almost hear his cursing from the movement of his lips, which was certainly neither praiseworthy nor thankful, and the burning of the wick of his cigarette. In a hurry, two people entered the bar, one wearing red pants, the other light green. Our friend’s movement became disturbed, and he almost went back to combing the sidewalk. The coquettish guffaws that the door of the cafe used to leak every time it opened, and laughter like the neighing of happy widowed women, rose up.
In the beginning, and when we talked later, it was believed that this bar was for students or belonged to one of the English clubs that catered to young people, and the reserve team, but the exaggerated cosmetics and perfumes were unusual for the English, and those tables that each gathered a mixture of feminine clothing, And colors closer to the color of “sharbat,” and those beards that are not on men whom our friend considers “the Shamma brothers,” changed his outlook. He froze after the soft necks turned to him. He “felt proud” and slipped out the door after he noticed an unusual movement, especially since there was a group of people with Motorcycles, people with tattoos, like the loiterers in the Soho neighborhood, and Asians from the Philippine Sea, regretting the time of the American Navy, and the absence of that Englishness, that sobriety, and the conservative aristocratic tradition. The long, bushy, well-groomed mustaches, yellowed from hot tobacco, filled The faces of sailors and adventurers in distant settlements, in the days when the English “naked man” was seven and without a rifle, now all he saw were black leaded leather trousers, vegetable brown, and hair wet from “gel.” Each one of them suggested to you that he had just come out of his aunt’s bathroom, and was going Straight to his workplace in the women's clothing department at Harrods, with faces resembling the faces of exhausted clowns.
Time passed for our friend, as if it were an eternity, and he felt as if he were thrown on the sword of the sea, lying in a featureless place. He stopped a passing person, when he was sure from his appearance that he was exhausted from the boredom of London. They talked, and he took out the paper to him, and they looked at the sign of the bar, and they exchanged head shakes, and he left. Our friend remained confused, then he decided to enter the bar, introducing one man and leaving the other behind. The sour smile of the African, who was wearing black, gave his corpse the look of the jungle, and his shaved and oiled hair classified him as being from the service of the temple, and its night guards. The place was crowded, and there were noises like the trembling of birds. Wet water, and smoke filling the place, two troubled people, standing and communicating. If each of them had an inch of ulna, it would have grown his torso. He kept wondering, throughout his stay in London, the secret of these muscle masses, and the secret of the throat in the ear, and he would repeat with regret: “What a waste of that meat.” “Except for the meat in bulls, and the poison in ghouls.” He tried to find a table for himself just to catch his breath, and when he walked around the place and looked at the people sitting, he felt that the place was not his, as there was a lot of banging and tattooing, and a lot of earrings, so he ran away, to find us laughing. Holding us by the waist, his first reaction was to say: “You are already a camp… no real estate, and this place is your place!”
We remained satisfied with him throughout our stay in London, and whenever we wanted to go anywhere, he swore that the place we were going to did not resemble the “Sea Horse” café and bar.
#Sea #Horse #Cafe
