Parables of Clippety (1) - The Pretty Feret

'It’s not about the dots Clare,’

Clare tutted and said, ‘Well I feel like I’m letting him down.’ She was seated very close to the table, leaning forward, with the weight of her breasts bolstered by the edge of it. Her eyes were screwed up small like slits, concentrating hard while shaking her head in dismay so that her blonde hair, stiff with hairspray, jiggered unnaturally from side to side. ‘I can’t find them on my keyboard anyway. Maybe they’re only on foreign devices.’ 

‘Foreign devices?’ Marni said with a laugh.

‘Yes, you know what I mean, ones with different keyboard settings.’ Clare was muttering now, in a low voice, as if speaking to herself. She peered down at her phone. ‘An umlaut, I think it’s called.’

‘An omelette?’ 

‘Yeah that’s it, two dots hovering. Northern European keyboards must have them, for those letters, you know, the ones which have all those dots and accents. We don’t really have them here, in fact we only have the j and the i here, don’t we.’

‘The eye?’ Marni said, winking.

‘The i, as in dotting the i!’ Clare exclaimed. She followed this with an annoyed intake of breath. 

The sunlight streamed in through the train window, highlighting deep vertical lines in the center of Clare’s forehead and illuminating a bloom of low-pile carpet, consisting of tiny specks of face powder which had accumulated on the fine hairs of her cheeks. In her mid-fifties, she occupied a sort of no man's land in the ageing process; neither young nor old, she could appear bright and  youthful one minute but instantly spent and faded the next, usually when stressful thoughts encroached upon her physiology. 

Marni smirked. ‘I suppose,’ she said, shrugging, knowing full well that the conversation was ridiculous.

‘I’m sure there’s a way to change the settings on this keyboard, it’s just that I can’t find it and I don’t want to mess up my phone, not when we’ve got everything lined up for this weekend. I just hope he’s not insulted that’s all,’ she said flatly, without looking up from her phone.

‘Those messages you send him,’ Marni paused and let out a long ywan, displaying dagger-like canines, ‘they never get past his PA,’ she said while stretching out her arms, speaking into the end of the yawn so that her words were prolonged, distorted although there was always a hint of her sweet Scottish accent.

‘Mmmmm,’ Clare uttered while giving her a long suspicious look, feeling so aggravated by her obtuseness that she found herself unable to respond with dialogue. Bloody feral little woman, she thought to herself. She tried hard to brush the thought away but the truth was that she was experiencing a small but familiar sense of contempt towards her bosom friend and it pricked her like a thorn. 

Prior to meeting for their trip, Clare had given herself a little pep talk and resolved not to get angry with Marni because this had been happening with increasing regularity. Despite prior urges, she really didn’t want to terminate the friendship. She valued having a best friend, one whom she’d known for three decades, ever since they were temps at Royal Insurance; the ‘faxing fillies’, that’s what they were known as. All day long, faxing quotes to clients, chattering away while looking youthful, fashionable, occasionally silly.

They’d never had a major bust up despite their differences, however their relationship was occasionally a trial, especially when they were together for long periods.

Marni could come across as rather thick and disinterested, usually when things got a bit complicated, at least that’s how Clare viewed it. In reality Marni was deeply astute and clever, so deeply buried was her intelligence that it was often indetectable to outsiders. Marni had worked out that it was simply more convenient to let Clare take over situations and play more of a parental role since she was more outwardly confident and had a good grip on the inane details of the modern world. 

Increasingly with age, Marni found herself feeling anxious and jittery when circumstances were unfamiliar and this had a crushing effect on her social skills. Physically, she was an attractive woman, petite and pretty, she had retained her prettiness in the middle years but this was somehow combined with the characteristics of a small, wild animal and thus it could be said that Marni resembled a pretty ferret. The way she yawned for example was unrefined, rather savage, she failed to cover her mouth, showing ancestral teeth and she let a bit too much carbon dioxide out in the public space, indeed she created a small monsoon within the carriage. 

She had her eyes shut now in feigned sleep or perhaps meditation. In any case, Clare was able to continue her scrutiny unobserved. She concluded that, besides the apparent simple mindedness and obtuse yawning, Marni’s outfit too left a lot to be desired. Skinny brown cords on her little legs and a purple body warmer which she’d attempted to jazz up with a fringed scarf, scattered with golden threads. What was she thinking?

There was no point trying to speak to her about it, Marni had a sort of unwavering defiance about her aesthetic choices. She’d recently been on a make-up course and had been somewhat experimental with her use of eyeshadow. Shades of purple and orange coloured her eyelids like a Saharan sunset. She was expressing herself but there was something about the result that was overwhelmingly suburban, at least that’s how Clare saw it.