Guy

How could a girl so attractive look so miserable? Guy had been sneaking looks across the café for minutes and her expression hadn’t softened. Was she miserable? Did she need cheering up? Was Guy the man to do it?

He pushed his spectacles back on his head to focus on the lead story in the Bristol Evening Post, lying on the table. No, he was bored with this flu scare. He closed the newspaper, under which lay Birds of Britain & Ireland. He hadn’t opened that, not knowing if he would buy it. He wasn't the sort of person that reads piles of books in a bookshop’s café. He studied a couple of gulls flying across the cover and absently stroked the stubble that he called a beard.

She was still there, Garbo-like, even down to that high, clear forehead. Why did that look so good on a girl and so bad on him? Mekon, he’d had at school. And now it was worse with only an island of hair on his scalp, and incipient frown-lines, which at least broke the length of his face. Guy was one up on the Mekon there. It was just a pity he didn't have the green man’s super-mind so that he could impel the girl to him.

Apart from a barn owl he didn't recognise the other birds on the cover. He did need the book. At last, he flicked through the pages. How was the fucker organised? How would he find the grey bird he’d seen on Brandon Hill?

Gone. Of course, the girl had gone. Guy scanned the surrounding bookshop with no success. He closed the book and gulped down the remains of his coffee. Guy had been long enough at his lunch-break already and he hadn’t even started on the original purpose of the visit. ⇒