Wide-Eyed and Juggling

To begin with, I was in awe of them. Their daughter looked to be no more than four, and life still seemed to be an adventure for all three of them as they explored the markets in the sun, each with the same wide-eyed fascination as the others.

He had honeyed hair hanging thinly down to his unshaven chin that framed a contradiction of an intelligent gaze and a dumb smile, and he stood casually, leaning back on a crooked hip so that his back leg took most of the weight of his body, and his arms hung down behind his arse. The back of his open jacket would have been swinging gently in the breeze had it not been such a still day.

She, in her thirties, dressed ten years younger and looked all the better for it. The remainder of her gloss-brown hair not cut in a severe line across her brow was collected loosely behind her head and held there by an oversized toothed hairclip. For the entire duration of the time I watched them, I remained undecided as to whether her face was intriguingly cute or distortedly odd.  She had the air of someone who liked to tell people that she worked in advertising, despite being merely a half truth given that she was the firm’s accounts clerk. He was definitely an architect.

The daughter sat like a typical girl her age, straight backed and legs outstretched along the ground at forty-five degrees, bright red kicks punctuating the lines of the angle. Her hair was dark and cut like her mother’s, except for the two loose pigtails that hung unevenly on either side, and her cheeks had the strawberry complexion of someone whose last batch of tears had only recently dried. The scowl did not move from her face, nor did her gaze shift from her parents’ as she stood up. She stretched her top down to cover the bottom of her puppyfat belly and wobbled uneasily before regaining her upright balance. Then she began walking uphill away from the crowded market.

The architect and the accounts clerk simply continued with their wide-eyed fascinations and their dumb smiles as they called after the girl. From behind the glass of the window I heard nothing above the thick hiss of the coffee machine, clinking of crockery and the prickly hum of a dozen conversations, but their faces showed no authority, and their chests and necks showed no sign of volume or projection. The daughter, ignoring them, simply continued along her uphill trajectory until finally, the accounts clerk sprung forth, handing the architect her latte and handbag, and vanished out of sight to the right of my window.

He remained where he stood, juggling the girl’s red parka, two coffees and a handbag, but as his balance shifted forward to his front foot, his mouth changed shape to form an O, and his eyebrows rose sharply. He fumbled to regain his grip on the parka that had become unbalanced and was slipping out of his grasp, and in doing so, tipped one of the two coffees at such an angle that its contents were emptied all over the parka, handbag and footpath, while somehow keeping the now-reclining glass resting on the saucer. Fearing that he might overcompensate and lose the second coffee, he froze, the O still on his lips.

The accounts clerk returned to the frame carrying the girl under her arm at an awkward angle before returning her to the same forty-five-degree sprawl. The architect and the clerk argued briefly over who should drink the remaining coffee, gesturing theatrically – no, it’s my fault; it’s okay, I don’t need one anyway; no you go; no you go; no really – but their expressions did not alter from dumb fascination, which in the end, seemed to be less the look of unbridled love and unwavering joy, and more the look of two fumbling adolescents with a new puppy they had just brought home from the pound.