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stranger’s mug and shake it about a bit. It also boasted a jukebox of the Rockola persuasion, now sadly scarified with the rust but still with its original selections: “Wild Gas On Saturn” by The Rock Gods; “Standing in the Slipstream of the Jets” by The Flying Starfish From Uranus; the “Two-By-One Song” by Little Tich and The Big Foot Band; “God’s Only Daughter” by The Sally Girls; and selections from
Armageddon: The Musical
sung by the original cast. There were “contemporary” chairs and Formica-topped tables and even those plastic tomatoes that dispense ketchup when squeezed. And those chrome-topped glass sugar dispensers, which rarely dispense anything, even when shaken with surpassing fierceness. The Plume remained as those who had always known it knew it, and those who knew it, knew it well. And loved it also.
    And so also loved they Lil.
    The sign above the door proclaimed in faded italics that The Plume was the property of one Mrs Veronica Smith, but whether this was Lil, none asked, nor even thought to.
    Lil was Lil, or Lily Marlene to a stranger, a Junoesque beauty now in the middle fullness of her years. A suicide blonde [4] , all pouting lips of rubeous hue and mammaries to set a young lad’s loins a leaping, with skirt that little bit too short, heels a tad too high and those parts that were clothed pressed into garments of a size that didn’t “fit all”.
    It was popularly believed by the good men of Brentford that they did not make women like Lil any more, and so she was adored by them. Yet they feared her in equal measure, for Lil was fierce.
    Omally, who had known many women of the borough and indeed the surrounding territories, did not number Lil amongst his conquests. Although he flirted with her mirthfully, and she with him, such a liaison – interesting though it might have been for the both of them – would have been, in Omally’s opinion, and no doubt Lil’s, inappropriate. A friendship existed between them, a deep friendship that would not have been strengthened by sexual congress; rather it would have been severed.
    Omally entered The Plume Café and breathed in of its ambience: the fragrance of frying, the bouquet of bacon, the heady scent of the sausage. Of customers there were but several: a tall youth named Cornelius Murphy munched upon bacon sandwiches in a window seat and discoursed with his dwarflike comrade Tuppe; a salesman, travelling in tobaccos and ready-rolled cigarettes, downed cornflakes alone in a corner; and a native of the Andaman Islands took tea with an elderly sea captain.
    Omally nodded good mornings to each and to all and for the most part these were returned to him. The Irishman approached the counter; the eyes of Lil, framed by their painted lashes, fell upon him.
    “Well,” said Lil, a-pushing out her bosoms, “if it isn’t my own dear John.”
    “Indeed if it isn’t,” said himself. “Hail, Lily, full of grace. Blessed art thou amongst women.”
    “The usual?” said Lily.
    “The usual would be sublime.”
    Lil set to the frying of John’s usual. And John watched her at it and smiled as he did so.
    “That idiot grin becomes you,” said Lil, cracking three eggs simultaneously into the cacky pan. “It is surely the grin of one who has recently enjoyed the illicit favours of another’s wife.”
    “Perish the thought,” said Omally. “My heart belongs to you.”
    “Your heart, then, should perhaps inform your penis of this truth.”
    “Perhaps so.”
    Lil heaped several pre-cooked-and-ready-for-a-warm-up bangers into the cacky pan and shook the pan around upon the gas hob.
    “Do you never think about settling down, John?” she asked through the smoke.
    “All the time,” said himself, “which is why I always keep on the move.”
    “You could do little better than to find yourself a good woman.”
    “There are many to be found.” John turned towards himself a copy of the
Brentford Mercury
(numbered by Norman for a house in