From across the street a woman reflects on men.

Bosco!" from across the street a man with a tennis racket under his arm called out. She recognised who it was immediately. It was just a word 'Bosco' but it had all the assurance of authority, as if calling a bearer.
"Just pop across to have a word with John. Come on."
"I will stay here." she knew who it was and she wasn't 'up' for male scrutiny, not now, not just now. So she watched the two men from the other side of the road. An intimate of fame all her life, she was an alliance of contradictions when confronted by it. Not now, not another white chief, not now. When she watched men in their confabulations betrayal was never far from her anger. There was hopelessness so often assailed her and which came upon her like an obsession, like something extraneous, independent of volition. And after all that good parenting, don’t you know, education at the Lycee South Kensington all those trips to France to hone a language.  Yes, all that from loving parents, yet there was a hopelessness, which so often assailed her and came on like an obsession. Why was she with him? Her recent marriage in ruins. He seduced me, but she knew that was just a passive get out and the truth

was that she had been beckoned by something, a clarion call, the irresistible call of the unknown. In Conradian speak, there she would find it, in him this mysterious enigma; there she would find a spark from the sacred fire. She was imprisoned with the immense folds of hope and desire, as she rebounded off a failed marriage. Her desire for escape had darkened the light or reason, and the sound of her famous parent’s strictures to 'stay away from actors.'  So, she had set sail with him but the ship was quickly foundering. Ok he wasn't a star but he was passably eminent, with his Heathcliffean background of violence and now post pugilism refinement a combination not often found. As to her own so called fame sometime she thought of it as a ritual of public humiliation of old ladies in supermarkets constantly sidling up to her. Men, there they were conversing under their supposed mantle of civilization. And look at them, seeming so bloody secure in their invincibility. What were they discoursing on, power, he was always dancing around power anyway, stupid fucker, look at him. Come on, what are they talking about, how to rule the world, when to set sail for further conquests with their women as appendages. She didn't say these words or even think them, but it is what she felt viscerally. They looked across at her, obviously they were talking about her, she recognised the refined features that graced the higher order of television. Her father had talked of meeting him in the BBC corridors and what an impressive figure he was.
Bosco, glowing with association bounded back lithely across the road in his athletic way, as if he was an emissary of pity to her failure to take part. What's he going to unfold a vast grave of unspeakable secrets, for he had been talking to him.
"Do you know who that was?"
"Yes, I course I know, my father knows him."
"Well...why didn't you come across to meet him?"
"Oh, you know..."

Read Peter Cheevers journalism and short stories 

published by Ether Books  http://catalog.etherbooks.com/Authors/1118