Foreword
Away from home I feel braver, so I indulge him when he asks did my brother and I fight a lot as children. He has a handsome Italian accent and a smooth beard. His satchel is heavy with copies of a free magazine, it looks as if it would split him in two like a block of wood. I won’t take a copy though, I have enough to carry.
“As much as everyone else, I guess.”
“Me too,” he says, “he broke my nose also. See without that,” he touches the bridge of my nose even though I recoil, “you would be an eight out of ten. Your friend there,” he points, “she is a six”.
Amy smiles, she knows it’s a game but I am defensive.
“My nose has always been this way; I was born with it this way.”
Later, in a different bar, a woman with wonderfully tight curls tells me what an ‘interesting’ nose I have. I laugh incredulously and tell her everyone knows that interesting is another word for difficult. Perhaps it was an advance. Nothing easy is ever worth it, after all.
In bed I thought how in just one short evening I have been forced to reconsider my nose, how it has never been a part of me that I have been particularly conscious of. But perhaps instead of worrying about my pale skin and my Elizabethan forehead, I should have been considering my nose, because people have been considering it for me. Aren’t you considering it now?
Drawn to drizzle, Laura Tansley has consistently picked damp places to live, including Glasgow where she is currently living and studying for a PhD in Creative Writing.
