Note: On whim and in ten minutes...the idea's been tweaking my thoughts. Make any sense?
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‘But sin’s old world ----.’ The man sat in his chair like a bruised Buddha, shoulders hunched and roundness crumpled in a dusky grey suit and creased tie. ‘You know?’ he asked, as if to clarify, ‘----.’
Damien had disliked him the moment his flaccid features had lifted: a petty, uneducated face with its half-open mouth and wan eyes; and a voice to match. Rasped, caught-up under double-chin to mutter with a self-effacing front - he spoke in bursts, and fell silent.
But one didn’t get to pick associates in this line; mostly when it came to humanity, there wasn’t much to pick. The higher-ups got the truly interesting - and Damien, dear Damien in shirt-cuffs and bland-faced diffidence, got Buddha in his stained tie and creased suit.
Carefully, he arranged his napkin beneath bent silver. A restaurant to match its patrons, Devil take it all.
‘Sin’s Dark Ages - so what’s it to you?’ stuttered Buddha, ‘Got this game going, even in the parish. You know?’
‘I didn’t,’ remarked Damien lightly.
‘Right, well - even in the parish. Fr. O’Connor’s a damn good modern man. Real friendly. We get on great when I’m not drunk. ‘Nother sin, isn’t it?’ he snorted into his collar, reaching for his iced-water and knocked it across the table in his fumbling.
It seeped into Damien’s neatly arranged linen and trickled over the table lip where Damien had been seated - he shifted slightly to avoid the spill. It pooled on cheap plastic-booth seat covers until he was forced to the far corner.
Buddha didn’t seem to realise the pity it would be to stain, wet or otherwise disheval his companion’s deft appearance.
A waitress was called. Damien thanked her with vaguely more interest than he showed in his companion.
‘It’s not the game I’m so very intrigued by,’ he said as his long fingers idly rearranged his new napkin and damp cutlery - Buddha fell oblivious beneath the mildly sardonic tone. ‘I was wondering if you’d like to do something…more interesting?’
‘Interesting,’ echoed Buddha dully, ‘How like?’
‘Yes. Much more interesting than a plethora of other things I can currently account for on my itinerary. Interesting, my friend - which is, I hope you’ll admit, is more than you can say of your current situation.’
‘Like Hell.’
Damien smiled. ‘No.’
‘And how is sin got to do?… You said sin, Mister.’
‘No such thing, naturally,’ Damien brushed it away in a breath, ‘All accounted for by mental ills and madness. We know half the murders on the Continent come of a mental imbalance and obfuscation of the question of human life, value, definition and applicability.’
Buddha took this monologue with amazing savoir-faire, spoiled by a hicough and sudden belch.
‘God’s sakes, that’s a mouthful. Say what?’
‘Personal responsibility - can’t be blamed,’ Damien said sourly, and to the floor - ‘as if intellectual is too much to ask!’
The food arrived, all greasy American and working-class - cheese, beef, French-fried potatoes in cheap baskets of red-painted wicker. It would have looked chintzy in a fortune teller’s bead-hung parlour.
What was there to do in an atmosphere like this?
Apparently, eat - as Buddha set to in a manner distinctly divorced from any Buddhist temperance. Gluttony was no object then. He could only wonder at the latent tendency to homocide that he had been told to uncover. Perhaps stealing the man’s food and denying him the comfort of shabby clothes and badly-knotted neckties would break through slothful indifference?
‘Good food,’ mumbled Buddha, ‘yeah? Not eating?’
‘I think I give up,’ said Damien, ‘Entirely and completely. White flag. Surrender. Devil take me, even admit I may have been an idiot.’
‘Hngh?’
Damien stood, dropping the pleated napkin from his lap, knocking the table as he knocked his chair back. The refilled, unspilled glass of water tipped sideways, flooded Buddha’s grease and pawed French-fries.
‘Hey - you said you got something’ for me. something good, you know?’
‘Oh?’
Buddha blinked.
Without another pause, Damien laughed - an awful, careless, dry laugh, catching on his lips. It fell as quickly as gravity - somberness always heavier than levity.
‘Tell me, man, what’s worthwhile in this weary world of yours?’
It took a long time; a heavy, brow-crushed moment of masticating thought. Buddha small, wan eyes looked dark.
‘Fun,’ he said, ‘you know? and then Hell! what matters? all die.’
‘I would rather serve in heaven,’ remarked Damien, ‘Than reign here in this madhouse hell of idiots; it’s terribly dull. And you can quote me.’
I loved the description, keep up the good work.