Oxygen (Catfish And The Bottlemen/1975)

Saffron

It never occurred to me that I already was. That I already had fallen in love with him, that it had been easy. Even easier perhaps than it had been for Fliss.
No that never occurred to me at all.

Instead I sat playing and replaying every time he'd caught my arm, every time his fingertips had grazed my lower back or my cheek or my forehead. Every time his eyes had pooled into mine and a silence so strangely comfortable had elapsed between us.

I chewed my cheek, tried to think about the last time I'd seen him, how he'd hovered just above me, barely centimetres from my lips and just smiled. Never leant in. Just smiled and turned away. But still that was enough. He'd been tender enough in even that action.

So I finished my pint and I felt good, I felt the warmth of the sun wash over my skin and I shrugged my jacket off. I took my little sketchbook out and started chewing my pencil, chewing ok the words i wanted to say to him or to somebody else about him. And as the heat caressed my bare arms and I drained the first and the second of my pints, I allowed myself to enjoy the glow Johnny had put back in me. Almost naive enough to believe, just for a moment, that it was love.

I finished a second and lit another cigarette, scribbling down something that might make a better lyric than anything I'd written for awhile.

Its funny honey to think its a passing phase
but if i feel alone in the morning dew,
i start to think in new shades of blue, one of these days
I'm gonna set our hearts a blaze,
if its the last thing I do...

I let my cigarette smoulder, the ash caught by the breeze and carried away. I smiled to myself and chewed the end of my pencil still just thinking of him because he was a hard thought to shift. Hard to ignore.
And the thought of him then filled me with warmth, left a glow in my cheeks. For five minutes I managed to trick myself into believing it could work, that he could look at me and see everything but a victim, that he could look at me and see all thats good in the world manifested in me, the way i saw it manifested in him.

For five minutes I really did believe that, and when I tapped my cig out and wandered inside to the bar I felt as though I was walking on air. And the air was warm too. Everything was warm and I was cosy and wrapped up in love. You could see it in my eyes and in the flush on my cheeks.
And for a moment that didn't worry me at all.

I sat back down in the back booth where I'd been writing earlier that afternoon. The bar was a little busier, a little more alive and yet still very far away from the lary haunt it had been all those months ago when me and Fliss had fallen to our knees singing some song by the killers, when she'd ended her night swaying to Van Morrison with Van and I'd ended mine uncertain how I was getting home. Id probably been resting on Bondy but I couldn't remember now.

I'd wasted a lot of time in that little bar, several hours had stretched out and blurred and as I sipped my fourth pint I found myself wondering just how long I'd actually been missing for. And whether any of my friends had returned from cloud nine and noticed my absense.

I'd meant to wander off looking for Jazz. That had been my plan originally but somewhere between berating myself for being so pathetically shy, and thinking about Johnny I'd sidetracked and wound up day drunk on my own, nursing lyrics I hadn't thought I could write.

Thats when he came in. Him at the bar I hadn't been paying enough attention to to notice when he abandoned his stool and strolled, as if we were always supposed to meet, over to me and my sketchbook with my sentimental lines scribbled through.

"Alright love? Canna get you a drink, you look like you need another?"

I bit my lip, looked between my half full pint and back up at him.