Let's Play Pretend

By Geraint Ellis

World renowned jazz trombonist Jack Threlfall helps his younger colleague (who narrates) kick the drug habit in 60’s Paris, and in so doing is responsible for producing the happiness high-peak of the younger man’s life; his marriage to Stella.
We fast-forward about 30 years. The two musicians meet up again. It’s pay-back time. But Jack is now a changed man, so paying back will be difficult ... Even so, our narrator can cope quite readily with such issues. He’ll have something up his sleeve no doubt; a made-up solution.

For him, life is a game of musical-chairs. It’s a game he excels at, for while others are petrified by the thought of not being able to find a chair to sit on when the music stops, he knows he has his method to fall back on. He’s well prepared to play this game in all those moments of all those years that lie ahead, until one day that is ...

‘Thus we spin around us infinitely fine filaments and construct for ourselves a system’
Virginia Wolf

Copyright © 2012 Geraint Ellis.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental

• Language: English
• Publisher: Geraint Ellis
• Release date: Jan 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301109678

Geraint Ellis

Born on the Isle of Anglesey - a stone’s throw from the ancestral home of the Tudors, the author hails from a long line of creative artists who lived in Beaumaris. His great, great, great grandfather born a decade before Beethoven, was an organ builder and musician. (Google, Lewis Ellis Anglesey) Educated in Germany, Oxford and York, the author’s professional career was in Education in England. He retired at the age of fifty two, and returned to live in his native Wales. He is married to Margaret, and they have two sons, Matthew and Robert.

Book preview

Let’s Play Pretend

Geraint Ellis

Copyright 2013 Geraint Ellis

Smashwords Edition

When I was a child the days seemed longer somehow – longer than they are now I mean. We’d play creatively in all kinds of ways. And we weren’t expected to be adults too soon – except in polite company of course. The adults told us stories that we knew were not true. And despite being without the knowledge and experience of the adults we too played pretend games we believed in … But we knew they were not true.

Whenever I’m in Paris I always make some excuse to call there, to eat or, as on this occasion, for an early morning coffee. I could barely afford it: not at that place, but what the hell … there are times in life when you just have to pretend.

In telling you this I’m going back a few years now, though how many I can’t quite recall, but it must have been 1960 or thereabouts. And in those days you could, with luck, park your Green 1932 Bugatti T55 Super Sport Roadster directly outside ‘Le Deux Magots’: It was the eye-catching thing to do – to parade your inviting two-seater Bugatti there, there for the whole world to see, or, more to the point, for women to get hooked on. Not that I needed extra female attention. But as the guys in the band always said, there are women and there are broads: And the women at ‘Le Deux Magots’ were of the ‘cut-above’ variety. But the guys in the band couldn’t have known that. They wouldn’t go to places like that. They didn’t pretend like me.

Oh, there were plenty of wild young things – femmes fatales, budding Rita Hayworths mostly, who threw themselves at me in the clubs I played. Residencies, usually: a month here, two weeks there: Zurich, Munich, wherever: you name it; in Europe, Jazz was King. And in Germany the frauleins called me their wunderkind, and they weren’t always talking music. Yes, in those days, in terms of women, you were playboy of the western world. But here in Paris things were somehow different. In Paris you had to improve your game; hire a Bugatti for the day. Cut-above woman wouldn’t look at you otherwise. You couldn’t afford the car hire any more than you could the coffee at ‘Le Deux Magots’. But you just had to do it if you wanted to play the game, their way. So you’d devised a system: a double-hook pretend: the car, hanging from the end of a maggot. (And yes, you already know that Magots are figurines: the waiter told you when you called first time last time) But you knew your plan would work: you’d done it all last time. But last time you discovered the fish wasn’t of the edible variety, so you threw it back in and left it to another day, in another year … that year … 1960.

Yes, as you sat outside ‘Le Deux Magots’, pretending to be minding your own business, you somehow felt like a fisherman who knows that if he sits back awhile at his earlier-chosen river-bank spot he will sooner or later hook a fish and have it sizzling in the pan by nightfall. All you had to do was to be patient: it was hardly a tough assignment. All you had to do was watch that float doing what a float does best. And it’s only when there’s some action around it that you …

The stage was set. The routine was so familiar I could have done it with my eyes closed and relied instead on touch and the feel of the taut line from float to fingertips. But my eyes were not closed. And in one way I wished they had been, for when the float did jolt and I felt the tug of the line right through to my shoulder, there was just too much to take in … I couldn’t cope with the vision overload.

Like the car I didn’t own, this model had been built in some place better than Heaven. It’s the way we all are when that special moment happens perhaps. This is a once-in-a-lifetime-moment you think. You just know it. But I also knew I couldn’t waste valuable time hauling her in. I wanted to throw away the rule book, throw away the fishing rod and dive in headlong and … But there was far too much information coming at me. It was happening too soon, too quickly. I couldn’t cope. I couldn’t open the floodgates of comprehension fast enough to take it all in.

And as I think about it now, I’m there, in that moment: just as it was. The billowing of her ‘New-look’ skirt makes gusts of fresh air around her. I close my eyes, inhale deeply and breathe it all in. But an impatient voice inside me keeps asking me questions. What else? What else? it asks. Open your eyes, dumb-kopf. Quickly, quickly! What else are you seeing, what else appeals? The almond eyes? The long black hair? The dark complexion? Her dress sense? Her colour sense? The way she stands? The way she holds herself? … Her figure? What? Her face perhaps? You nod in agreement to that. Her face, yes. Yes, her face makes you forget the God-forsaken monotony of all other women you’ve ever met. There’s desperation now in the screaming of your inside voice. But what else? What else can you see? Give me time, give me time, you respond. Well, she’s moving now. And she moves briskly, spiritedly, though never too hurriedly, as, nymph-like, with a firm but athletic tread she inspects every detail of the car that isn’t yours. She’s almost as spellbound by the car as you