(From 2013)
I spend every weekday morning in the South Lambeth Road cafe sitting at the next table along from the chin fissures. The Fissures are a fantastically or nauseatingly amorous cleft chinned couple – depending on your point of view - who like me, have been going to the cafe for over a decade. During that time, we have not exchanged a single word. This works for me. As I'm sure it does for them. Small talk is something I simply can’t do.
The Fissures, whose grooves are almost as deep as the hole I was in just over a year ago, tend to be the first customers in there just ahead of me. While I 'morning' the owner these days, it's only so she knows I've arrived as I sit at the toilet table, a notorious blind spot in the cafe which can often leave one left waiting to be served for up to half an hour in my experience. Sometimes, some of the waiters see me and still don't come, deliberately, I think. I have that effect on people on occasion.
With regards to the Fissures, if a disaster ever beset the café, and we all had to come together to find our way out of there, I do wonder whether we'd need to acknowledge that we’d never in all our years of seeing each other spoken prior to that moment.
I've noticed over the last few weeks just what a loud kisser chin fissure man is. Probably the loudest in SW8. He’s tender too, to be fair, handling his wife's face as he kisses her, gently caressing her strong jawline with a thumb. He’s one of those romantics. A face handler. But it’s the loudness of the kissing that really comes across. The café is tiled. The acoustics in there are as unforgiving as the winter cold can be on an erection in a poorly heated flat, yet he won’t compromise on his kissing audio. I wonder whether Chin Fissure woman ever tells him to tone down the audio but maybe he tells her he can’t. Maybe he doesn’t feel he’d be the same kisser if he’s asked to tweak the puckering.
“Don’t try and change me,” he might say.
It’s impressive in that regardless of whoever’s there, he still kisses his wife. Even if it’s someone they know is on their own, and it might make them think, “I don’t want to rub my loved up situation in their unhappy faces’, he doesn’t care. He has to kiss his wife. He won’t moderate the kissing. And every morning he seems to find a new way of kissing her, as if it’s their first ever kiss.
Maybe one day I’ll kiss a woman as tenderly, if not as loudly, as he does.
Maybe.
Chin Fissure Man has got a very classical face. Very Mediterranean. It’s a face I suspect has been around for at least a millennium and a lot longer than my own. None of the five different noses I've had have altered my face in such a way as to make me think, "Yeah, this face has existed a lot longer in man's history than Chin Fissure Man's. “
Sometimes I look at faces and I wonder how far back into mankind’s history do those faces go. Early on there probably would’ve been a lot of sibling inter breeding, a lot of grotesques, before eventually Early Man figured that unless you mix the blood lines, you’re going to end up with a lot of slow kids.
If you think about it, there must be faces in mankind's history that have died out. Faces we haven't seen again. And what's more, there must be faces that we've just started to see, at least in Europe, as the post-Soviet Union collapse brings lots of different nationalities and races together to add new looks to the wonderful spectrum of faces already on this planet.
There are probably combinations that haven’t come together yet. How many generations would it take before that face with its relatively new features became established? How long does the average look with its pluses and flaws crop up in a family before it dies out? Might someone take a look in the mirror at a time of their life when they’re looking for a partner and think, “Right, I’m not happy with my ears, I need to find someone who’s got better ears than me so we can bleed out this range of ears that have been in the family for generations.”
These are matters the Chin Fissure Man doesn’t concern himself with. He’s in love. He’s happy. With his woman. With his chin. So much so, he married a woman with a cleft chin. It’s a look they’re obviously intent on keeping and their child too also has a fantastic fissure. Will they look to persuade the kid to settle down with a similarly chinned partner and secure the fissure for yet another generation?
I'm guessing I think about him and his wife far more than they think about me. But they must think about me. There must be times. I mean, they see me five mornings a week at 8am. I’m probably one of the first people they see every day. I must be seared into their consciousness even if they know little about me.
