Sweet Fanny Adams

SWEET FANNY ADAMS Fanny Adams. Brit. informal. Noun (also sweet
Fanny Adams) nothing at all (Origin : early 20th cent. : sometimes
understood as a euphemism for fuck all.)

Granted, it could have been an airport, say, or any other point of
departure for that matter, not necessarily a railway station. Then
again, I would not want you to go thinking that his choice had been
totally arbitrary, although he was, admittedly, no stranger to acts of
random behaviour. It did not have to be an overcrowded railway station,
but it sort of made sense somehow.

It's like this: your train is due to leave any minute now. You look up
from your book or paper--if you are reading, that is-- but I think we
can safely assume that you, mon semblable, mon fr?re, are reading at
least one or the other, possibly even both, one after the other, or,
better still, simultaneously. You check the time on your wristwatch,
the kind that they advertise in The Economist and suchlike
publications, something Swiss or German with knobs on (the more, the
merrier) which exudes manly sophistication.
Just as the Red Sea parted for Moses, the door slides open, blissfully
pneumatic, to reveal a stunning Mary Poppins--stacked, stockinged,
sorted--in a comely knicker-skimming skirt: entrancing entrance. Being
the proud possessor of a Y chromosome, your eyes make a beeline for her
A-line, zooming in on silken thighs, NordicTrack-toned. While she fafs
about with her umbrella (which will be left behind, of course,
accidentally-on purpose like), you are at leisure to divide her
putative weight in kilograms by her hypothetical height in metres
squared, thus reaching the satisfactory conclusion that the young
woman's Body Mass Index slots into the ideal 18 to 20 range. Stocky
stoccado, scatty scattato, she click-clicks her way towards the only
vacant space (which just so happens to be facing you) aloft a pair of
chichi cha-cha heels, whereupon her petulant posterior takes a pew. As
she crosses her endless legs with a hushed swish whoosh, the bright
young thong hitches up her skirt a notch, pinching the flimsy fabric on
either side of broad hips between manicured thumb and forefinger.
At this juncture--when you are about to abandon wife and children, sail
the seven seas or commit genocide because men cannot help acting on
impulse--you notice that those are tear- and not rain-drops irrigating
her tanned, yet still unblemished, features. Ever the gentleman, or
simply embarrassed, you interrupt your ornithological study and peer
out of the window which, being in dire need of a good clean, forces you
to squint in the most unsightly fashion.

Now is when it happens. For a few split nanoseconds, another train
pulling into the station tricks you into believing that your train is
pulling out.

Adam Horton--33, caucasian, 5'6'', underendowed, thinning on
top--viewed this sensation as a perfect metaphor of his stumbling
through life like a sleepwalker on a treadmill, a pet hamster on a
wheel, or a commuter on the Circle Line. Hence the choice of a railway
station over any other leaving place. But which one? Paris offered un
embarras de choix.

Gare de l'Est was a definite no-no for some obscure reason. Gare
d'Austerlitz was likewise ruled out: Adam, you see, had a passion for
Waterloo Station. Watching the workers munching their lunch-break baps
at the bottom of the up escalator, eyes cast skirtwards all the while,
never failed to microwave the cockles of his little heart. Since
childhood, he had conceived of Austerlitz as a sort of counter- or even
anti-Waterloo; it was enemy territory.
This still left Gare de Lyon, built in the grandiose style-probably the
most pleasing, aesthetically. Gare St Lazare, caught between the
red-light district and the posh department stores, scored a few brownie
points. Proust's lyc?e was close by, as well as the Op?ra Garnier (a
fine example of architectural eclecticism) and, more importantly, Marks
&; Sparks with its large lingerie section where Adam often did a
stint of lingering among the petticoats and suspender belts. There was
also Gare Montparnasse, where the muses hung out, free and easy. They
rode around like BMX bandits astride expensive Dutch bicycles, wearing
a saucy look on their freckly faces and precious little else,
serpentine locks flailing the air. The area never failed to remind him
of the time when he micturated on the tomb of Jean-Paul Sartre after
burying his late goldfish (Botty, short for Botticelli) in the shadow
of Baudelaire's corpse. Such fond memories.
In the end, however, he had plumped for Gare du Nord which houses the
Eurostar terminal. Adam's grasp of French had greatly improved over the
past twelve months, but he was looking for a lady who spoke the mother
tongue. Besides, the word 'terminal' had a certain ring to it, the
finality of a full stop.

The air hung heavy with Chaucerian expletives; dropped aitches were
strewn about his feet. Here and there, young men sporting crew cuts
were reading redtops from back to front. In the distance, a posse of
senior citizens was doing the hokey-cokey. If I should die, Adam
muttered, think only this of me: that there's some corner of a foreign
railway station that is forever In-ger-land. And there she was.

Sweet Fanny Adams.

Sweet Fanny Adams and no mistake.

Although he had never actually seen her before, he recognised her at
once, and once he had recognised her, he realised he would never see
her again. After all, not being there was what she was all about; it
was the essence of her being, her being Fanny Adams and all that.
As he walked towards the bench where she was sitting pretty, Adam
missed her already. Missed her bad.

'How do you do?'

'How do I do what?' The imperfect stranger looked up from her slim,
calf-bound volume and flashed him a baking-soda smile, all cocky
like.

Their eyes met, pairing off at first sight. The earth moved, orbiting
at half a kilometre per second around her celestial globes--a couple of
scalloped cupfuls with peek-a-boo trimmings--in what can only be
described as a new Copernican revolution. For the first time since Mrs
Horton's belaboured parturition, when he was forcibly sprung off into
the world, Adam did not feel at the wrong place at the wrong time: he
was back in the bountiful bosom of Mummy Nature. As if to celebrate
this return to the much-maligned Ptolemaic system, a gaggle of gurgling
putti glided overhead to the strains of syrupy muzak and departing
trains. All in all, it was an auspicious overture, fraught with the
promise of premise.

'Adam,' said Adam, extending his right arm.

'Margherita,' said Margherita, giving it a hearty shake.

Still reeling from that initial, blinding smile, let alone the
handshake, he struggled to regain his composure. 'Have you read The
Leaning Tower of Pizzas by N.E. Tchans ?'

'Is that the one which ends with an epic battle between gangs of
pre-pubescent herberts bouncing around on orange space-hoppers?'

'Yes.'

'No, but I read a review at the time.'

'Well, it's all about this Mr Soft Scoop geezer, right, who comes from
Italy and settles down in South London where he falls in love with a
girl called Margherita.' She was fiddling with her umbrella, a faraway
look on her face. 'Like you, like.'

'Oh, I see, yes. Sorry, I was miles away.'

'I know: that's the attraction,' he sighed sotto voce, before getting a
grip on himself. 'Anyway, you should check it out some time--if you're
into lolloping lollipop ladies, lesbians from Lisbon, the romance of
ice-cream vans, that kind of thing.'

'Sounds right up my street.'

'I see it as a contemporary footnote to Dante.'

'Talking of contemporary feet, mine are killing me.'

'Dying on our footnotes are we? One footnote in the grave, eh? How long
have you got left?'

'Long enough to grab a bite to eat--or so says my chiropodist.'

'There's an Italian just round the corner that might tickle your
fancy.'

'Sounds great. I feel like a pizza.'

'I'm not surprised, love, with a name like that.'

Adam caught a fleeting glimpse of the dark, gaping twilight zone
between Margherita's parting thighs as she uncrossed her legs to get
up. That topsy-turvy Bermuda Triangle twixt skirt and stocking exerted
a gravitational pull of such magnitude that he was sucked in, there and
then, never to re-emerge. He picked up her bulky suitcase, l'air de
rien, but in his mind's X-ray eye he could see her neatly-packed
unmentionables. He was big on smalls was old Adam Horton.

'Heavy, innit?'

'It's a burden I feel I've been carrying all my life.' He turned to
face her, fair and square. 'This may sound potty, but you are the
hollowness inside. At last, I have found my sense of loss.'

'I'm flattered,' she said in Estuarine undertones, blushing a little.
Her dimpled cheeks resembled two squashed cherry tomatoes, only bigger.
'I always like to be of assistance to strangers.'

'After you,' said Adam, bowing theatrically and showing the way with
her suitcase like a truncheon-toting gendarme stopping the traffic for
pedestrians. He could not help noticing the shaft of light that fell on
Margherita's top bottom--proof positive that the sun shone out of her
behind--before leaving the station, hot on her high heels. They
repaired to a small, dingy restaurant nearby (which Margherita praised
on account of its 'atmosphere') where Adam poured out his heart and a
couple of cheap, albeit potent, bottles of plonk. Whining and dining,
in medias res.

'We are all post-Denis de Rougemont.'

'Couldn't agwee maw,' said Marwgawita, making a mental note never again
to shpeak wiv her mouf full. Frankly, she did not have a clue what he
was going on about.

'We are the first generation to know full well that love doesn't last,
and yet we cling to the ideal like shit to a blanket.'

She turned up her already-retrouss? nose. How more retrouss? can it
get? he wondered. 'Maybe it's just me. The whole thing's very Oedipal,
I know.' Adam cringed at his attempt to laugh it off.

'I could spank you, free of charge, if you think that might
help.'

'I'd rather not if it's all the same with you,' he replied rather
primly, his flushed face a slapped-arse crimson, 'but thanks for the
offer. Might even take you up on it some other time. Except . . .,'
Adam paused for effect, '. . . there won't be another time.' He sighed,
staring into his bowlful of miniature bow-ties, topped up their glasses
and cleared his throat. 'Love stories are like fairy tales . . .'

'Aren't they just,' she interrupted, a trifle too eager.

'. . . in that we know the end from the start. Only it's not and they
lived happily ever after, is it?'

Tears welled up in her belladonna eyes.

'You know, someone should really write a different kind of love story
for the new millenium. It would start with the foregone conclusion and
work its way back towards the unknown: how it all started in the first
place.'

'Will you write this new-fangled love story?'

'I'm writing the first pages even as we speak--with your assistance, of
course.'

'I like to be of assistance.' She smiled a wet smile. 'So that's it,
then?'

'Yes, in our beginning is our end.'

Margherita seemed in a hell of a hurry all of a sudden, even her nose
was running. Where is it running to? he wondered. To by-corners
Byzantine, I'll be bound, and wondrous Wherevers, to the end of the
earth, at the end of its tether. Then he shrugged--to himself and at it
all--because it did not really matter anymore, it really did not.
Whatever: yeah, right.
She had relieved him of a burden, that much was clear. In the
circumstances, it did not really seem appropriate to give her a hand
with the luggage, it really did not. The suitcase constituted a clear
case of unsuitability, plus he could not be arsed anymore. There was
that too.

It was raining when Margherita stepped out of the restaurant. Adam
watched her amber umbrella disappear from view, a Belisha beacon of
hope on a dimmer switch. He scribbled a few words on the paper
tablecloth. D'elle, il ne reste que ses tagliatelles.

The door slides open--which is where you came in. You assess her
golden-delicious breasts as if you were picking apples on a market
stall. You think that a man should never trust a woman who offers him
an apple, let alone two. You think that this woman's tits are perfectly
identical, for Christ's sake. Like bookends. God knows what happens
next. God--and you.