My old mate, Kenny Sovereign, is a fantastic jazz guitarist. I’m not bad player myself though not in Kenny’s league by several hundred miles. Kenny is a natural and has all the Django Reinhardt tunes and style off to a T. I was a fan of the genre too, if you’ll forgive the South Bank Show description, though to me there are too many gypsy jazz mimickers around and the whole thing has become a bit commonplace and corny with all these guys trying to play all the Django riffs at 90 miles and hour.
Anyway, Kenny was actually out there doing it and I admired anyone who had the guts and the talent. As far as I was concerned you could be a lover or a player but you could only be a real lover if you were a player as well, but if when reading this you aren’t even a lover, I must sound like I’m talking out of my arse. C’est le vit.
Tuesday.
Kenny was a full time professional musician scraping a living on the meagre British jazz gig scene. He always looked half starved and, like a lot of musicians, probably was, choosing to forgo the odd meal to finance the purchase of a couple of sets of guitars strings. But on this particular night at the Le QueCumbar Gypsy Jazz style bar and restaurant in Battersea High Street, where regular homage was played 7 nights a week to Django, the great Belgian gypsy guitarist of the Forties and Fifties, Kenny looked even more drawn and pale than usual.
The line up was two acoustic guitars, bass and violin. This was a Tuesday, the regular free jam session night, though few of the would-be Djangos sitting at the tables around the small stage had the bottle to get up there and give it a go, me included. This, being an open night to anyone with nerve, was a free gig for Kenny who played to an audience at any opportunity and this time, he was really on it, choosing several slow soulful numbers written by the great Reinhardt himself, including his most famous composition, ‘Nuages’, which means clouds and another, ‘Manoir De Mes Reves’, or ‘House Of My Dreams’. Both these numbers are steeped in raw emotion and when played well, can choke the average Django devotee to the point of tears, which, incidentally, is the title of another Reinhardt composition.
At the end of the set the ripple of applause from the patrons was quite a bit denser than usual and I’d already poured Kenny a large congratulatory glass of his favourite Frascati when he came and sat opposite me at the table I’d reserved.
“That was brilliant, Kenny,” I said handing him his glass, “Christ, I wish I could improvise with that kind of feel.”
“Yeah.” he said flatly, almost draining the wine in one long gulp.
“You OK?” I said, as he looked anything but.
He downed the rest of the wine and examined the glass as if it was the first one he’d ever seen to avoid eye contact. “Ingre’s left me, Hack.” he said, tipping the glass to examine the inside.
“I’m sorry, mate. That’s a real shame.” I said clumsily.
“Not as sorry as I am.”
“That goes without saying. What happened?”
“Things haven’t been right for quite a while,” he said with a sigh
“About a year, actually. There was no particular reason though the gigs had largely dried up, hers and mine, so I guess we’d both got a bit tense. Then a few weeks ago she upped and left. I came home from Ronnie’s at about 4 one morning and she’d gone. Just packed her stuff and legged it. Didn’t even leave a note.
“At first I just thought bollocks. If that was what she wanted then it was fine by me. But after a couple of days, I really started to miss her, you know? Like it really hurt in a way I never imagined it could’ve. I ‘spose when you’ve been with someone that long familiarity creeps up on you and you don’t know it’s really there until it’s too late.”
“Have you heard from her since she went?”
“Not a dickie bird. I’ve no idea where she is. I tried calling her sister but I got pretty short shrift there though I’m pretty sure the cow didn’t know where she was or cared that much. Those two never were that close. They’re hardly the Labeque Sisters, if you know what I mean.”
This was such a familiar, boring story. I’d heard it a thousand times before from a countless number of clients and could almost anticipate each word as it came. It was me who’d introduced Kenny and Ingre in the first place. She’d studied painting at Camberwell Art School while I was there though she spent most of the time singing with a student jazz quartet. She was really good with and had a great voice - soft, breathy and sexy, somewhere between Blossom Dearie and Astrud Gilberto with essence of Billy Holliday soul.
Ingre sang a few duets with my old friend, Tony Broadbent, who occasionally also sang and played a bit of rhythm guitar with the quartet. Ingre quit the quartet and the school when TB tried it on with her in his usual over the top, relentless, suffocating manner. She’d also decided she didn’t want to be a painter and wanted to sing full time. That wasn’t really an option and she got a job in the lingerie department of Marks and Spencer till ‘something turned up’, as she put it.
Ingre was Danish by descent. She wasn’t classically beautiful but was very attractive and extremely sexy, with dark hair, and pale skin. Her features were slightly reminiscent of the Mona Lisa and she had a body Lisa Gherardini, Da Vinci’s model, would have killed for. I was instantly spellbound, as were all the other blokes in the group when she first turned up in the life class, the impact of her entrance possibly enhanced by the fact that she didn’t have any clothes on.
We were used to middle aged women as models with bodies that sagged a bit here and there and that had seen better days, and which I guessed had been deliberately placed in front of us to put the hormonally charged young bucks in the class off sex for the duration of the life class if not for life altogether. So when Ingre stepped out from behind the screen in all her glory the air in the studio was immediately sucked dry by the huge collective intake of breath by all the males in the room. It was a bit of a shock, especially after the model we’d had in the previous class was described by the one-handed tutor who was leaning over my drawing board at the time as something that would have been more at home hanging up in a butcher’s shop.
During the break, Ingre lit a cigarette and, and wondered round in her dressing gown, looking disdainfully at our efforts. She stopped by me and took a long look at my own drawing and I felt myself blush like a bank of red traffic lights.
“You’ve done a nice job on my tits,” she said, “They look about right. Most of these other drongos made them too big. They’re obviously too influenced by what’s going on in their trousers.”
Ingre obviously thought she was as good an artist if not better than any of us and enrolled as a full time student in the painting school.
Kenny had been teaching jazz guitar and having called him when I saw his classified ad in Melody Maker, I’d been going for lessons at his flat in Maida Vale for a couple of years before Ingre turned up at Camberwell. I was very into Django Reinhardt at the time and the first Gypsy Jazz tune Kenny taught me was the famous ‘Minor Swing’, which over the years has become a sort of Django anthem, and which if you can’t play, you can’t consider yourself to be a true gypsy jazz player.
Kenny and I became good friends and he actually encouraged me to step up to the plate in the Plough pub in Stockwell where he was playing one evening and accompany him on rhythm guitar while he belted out his interpretation of the tune. He even offered me a solo spot with the traditional nod of his head but I bottled out, preferring to stay out of the limelight on not make a complete prick of myself, something I’ve always regretted – not making a prick out of myself – I’ve done that often enough - but actually stretching out with the spellbinding solo I always knew was somewhere inside me if only I could get it out.
Kenny formed a new band which was a sort of cross over affair between gypsy jazz and more mainstream stuff. He’d included a trumpet and alto sax in the line up and wanted to add a singer. I suggested Ingre but Kenny said he really wanted a bloke, preferably a black dude with a bluesy kind of voice but agreed to meet her. I went with her to the little church hall in Shacklewell Lane off Kingsland Road, North London, where the band was beginning rehearsals. Kenny was very off hand with Ingre to the point of rudeness, typical of a lot of jazz musicians born from years of playing to café audiences who were more interested in their food than the music.
Ingre suggested ‘Body And Soul’, as a try out song. She must have known the classic jazz standard that had taken four men, Edward Heyman, Robert Sour, Frank Eyton and Johnny Green, to write it back in 1930, was guaranteed to show whether any woman could really sing or not. Kenny just shrugged and said, “Yeah. Why not,” which sounded far from encouraging.
All that changed when Ingre took the mike and opened her mouth. In true, corny Hollywood style, she blew everyone away with her interpretation of the song and when it was Kenny’s turn to solo, he played like I’d never heard him play and the other musicians in the band played their socks off when it was their turn. The great jazz guitarist, Charlie Byd, once said that jazz is like a conversation between musicians and when one of them ‘says’ something beautiful the rest are inspired to do the same and that’s the way the best performances happen. What I’d just heard proved him right.
I don’t know whether you could call what occurred between Kenny and Ingre lust at first sight, or chemistry or whatever other silly analogy people seem to stick on these things but Kenny transformed before my eyes from the grumpy old bastard I’d become used to into a gooey-eyed puppy. During the break, he siphoned Ingre away from the rest of the band and sat her and himself down in a corner with his back to rest of the gathering. He was talking ten to the dozen at her rather than to her and she just sat there smiling at him.
“So what do you want me to do, Kenny,” I said as if I didn’t know.
“Like I said, things haven’t been quite the ticket for a while in just about every department, including, well, you know…” I’ve always found this kind of conversation cringe-makingly embarrassing. I didn’t want to know about ‘well, you know…’ I certainly didn’t want to hear what came next either, so I tried to blank it all out by thinking of something else while he was talking but snippits got through - the odd word or phrase here and there… “…sack….” “…do anything…” “…uninhibited…” “…a kind of hunger…” “…you only ever read about…”
“She tried, bless her, but even she couldn’t shake me out of the morass I seemed to have gotten into. But it wasn’t just the physical stuff. We really had something going together - something well below the surface. She understood me like no one I’d ever met - the moods, the frustrations and intensity of it all. It was like she’d been on the road all her life. Like it was all second nature to her. I know she loved me. But really loved me. Me. Cruddy, gnarled old me. Can you imagine anyone doing that, let alone someone like her. And I let it all go. I let her go. What kind of crazy fool am I for allowing that to happen? Eh? Now nothing means much any more. Not without her. She filled in all the missing pieces of my miserable fucking life. I still play, sure. I always will. But I don’t have the feel I had - the feel that came with us being together.”
“You sounded pretty much like you still had the feel just now. Especially when you were playing Nuages.”
“But that’s a new feeling, Hack. D’you know what that was? That was sorrow. Loss. It was the blues, but for real. It was self-pity and all the other shit those poor bastards in the Mississippi Delta used to wail about for all those years. It was real pain. Pain like I’d never felt. I sure as hell feel it now. Do you know what the real irony is Hack? If she doesn’t come back, I’ll be a better player for it. When you think about it, all those old blues songs were basically about the same thing,” he leaned back in his chair and sang in a really bad Negro voice:
‘I WOKE UP THIS MORNIN’,
BLUES ALL AROUND MY HEAD,
YEAH I WOKE UP THIS MORNIN’,
THE BLUES ALL AROUND MY HEAD,
MY WOMAN DONE LEFT ME’
MY WOMAN DONE LEFT MY BED’
“How about another drink, Hack.” he said.
vI could see where this was going so I declined. “No can do, Kenny. I’ve got a client to meet.”
“What at this time of night? C’mon. I’ll be finished in an hour and we can paint the town blue.”
“It’s the nature of what I do, Kenny. You know, dark corners, clandestine meetings, shadowy figures, all that kind of stuff. Harry Palmer’s got nothing on me. Anyway, what did you want me for? Why did you call? I know it wasn’t just to invite me to come and hear you play.”
He sat back and motioned to the bar man to bring him another bottle of wine. “Like I was saying. Ingre has needs. She’s very emotional. She needs someone to hold her close – all that kind of stuff. And she needs the rest of it. Like no one I’ve ever known. That’s why I know there’s someone else. That’s she’s with another bloke. We were together 25 years, Hack. I know her like I know the chord changes in Autumn Leaves. Not just the basic changes, you understand. I know Ingre like I know all the possible inversions and substitutions of that damned song not to mention all the modal possibilities.”
For a moment, Kenny’s command of music talk impressed me like it always had it also spelled out the real reason why she’d left him. She was a musician too but there was more to life and unless there’d been some physical reason, it was obvious now why they’d never had children. Kenny was just too bloody selfish. “So you want me to find this ‘someone else’ and then what? Beat shit out of him? Have his legs broken? Have him castrated? What?”
“That won’t bring her back, Kenny and anyway, that’s not my style, being the peace-loving wimp I am. That’s not the way I do things.”
He smiled a wizened, old man’s cracked face of a smile. “No, Hack, I don’t want you to do anything like that. “I’d like you to find her, yes. And I like you to give her this,” he slid a white envelope across the table, “They’re just the sentimental ramblings of an old fool, a real stupid, sentimental old fool who wants his baby back. If she reads it, it might mean something to her. It might not. Who knows? She’ll either leave this lucky fucker, whoever he is and come home. She might not. And if not…what was it old Bobby Dylan used to sing? ‘Don’t think twice, it’s all right.’ D’you know what that crazy Australian tart, that Germaine Greer, said with all her feminist bullshit? She said that Bob Dylan wasn’t a poet in her estimation. What the fuck does she know, Hack? What the fuck does she know?”
“Quite a lot, I think, Kenny.”
“Hey. You didn’t bring your sketchbook, my man.”
“No, I just wasn’t in the mood.”
I stuffed the envelope in my pocket. We shook hands and I left him there, knee deep in the stupor of his new-found blues.
I stuffed the envelope in my pocket. We shook hands and I left him there, knee deep in the stupor of his new-found blues.
Late Tuesday.
I poured myself a large whiskey when I got back to the flat and tossed the envelope Kenny had given me onto the old dining room table. I took my little old 1962 Gibson jazz guitar off its stand and sat down on the sofa. The chords of ‘Nuages’ slipped easily under my fingers. That old devil, Reinhardt, must have recorded the tune a dozen different times during his short life but the 1953 version he did on electric guitar sticks out in my mind as the most poignant and moving. He died in Samoise, south of Paris, of a stroke a month later.
Every year in June, the little town of Samoise is thrown open to a festival commemorating Django’s life, his music and his death. Gypsy players from all over the word make the pilgrimage as do many would be gypsy style jazz guitarist many of whom have never seen the inside of a caravan let alone sat around a log fire playing to the sparks carried on the wind as most real gypsies or Manouche, as they’re known, do regularly.
Manouche music is joyful and loud with as many as 20 guitarists and 3 or 4 violinists and maybe the odd accordionist playing at once amongst the amateur musicians around the festival site and during the 3 day concert many of the greatest exponents of the Gypsy Jazz style perform to the huge audience.
Rewind to Samoise.
Kenny and I made the trip together a few years back. He’d been several times before and knew the score – where to stay, the best cafes, where to buy the cheapest wine or the best shag. The place was teeming with people of all nationalities and hundreds of gypsies, not all of whom were interested in the music, but more who was worth robbing. Loads of people appeared to be stoned or drunk and the place was a giant campsite complete with chemical toilets and mud slime just like the average pop fest. The image I’d always had of Samoise being a magical, rural holy shrine to the great Belgian Romany and his music started to dissolve as soon as we coughed up the extortionate taxi fare from the station to the town.
The music made everything worthwhile. Bireli Lagrene, whose reputation as Django’s true musical descendent is uncontested and is also to my mind, one of the best, if not THE best of all jazz guitarists in the world was performing and played with his usual incredibly wide ranging technique and dazzling flare inviting a dozen or more of other Gypsy Jazz luminaries to join him onstage at the end of his set for a mega version of Minor Swing which lasted over an hour.
The usual groups of casual players were sprinkled about the festival site all trying to out-Django each other. Kenny sat in with a couple of them and acquitted himself more than adequately, visibly impressing the local players with his natural dexterity and melodic invention, if their expressions were anything to go by, which is really to say he pissed them all off no end.
Most of the guitars played at Samoise looked the same being based on the original Selmer Maccaferri style first designed in the 1930s with the distinctive cutaway and D shaped or oval sound holes and made famous by Django himself. Nearly all of the Samoise guitars are imitations of the original. Some are very good instruments, some terrible, the best better by far than the original both in terms of sound and playability.
I’ve only ever seen one real Selmer Maccaferri. It was hanging on the wall of a fairly seedy guitar shop in Charing Cross Road back in the 70s. I asked the bloke behind the counter if the guitar was original and he said it was. I asked him what it was worth and he said he could name his price, which would start at around 100,000 quid. As is traditional in music shops in the area, I asked the bloke if I could have a play. His reply was anything but affirmative:
“You’ve got to be fucking joking,” he said with a sneer, looking me up and down like I was something smelly that had become dislodged from the sole of his shoe. Continuing my Journey North along Charing Cross Road I vowed to visit the shop again in the dead of night and take the proprietor a present as a mark of my appreciation of his hospitality. I thought a jeep sized can of petrol would express my sentiments pretty well and I'd burn the stinking place down, Maccaferri and all.
Very few of the top Gypsy players actually own a genuine Selmer Maccaferri. Bireli Lagrene has said he’s never been able to find one and that even if he had, he wouldn’t have been able to afford to buy it, and that the present market now values the instruments at around a quarter of a million dollars whatever condition they’re in. The Dutch Gypsy virtuoso, Stochelo Rosenberg must have won the lottery at some point as he owns and sometimes plays a Maccaferri when on tour which I would have thought was a bit risky as anyone into Gypsy Jazz with half an eye would spot it a mile off and know more than just roughly what it was worth.
I was surprised then, when Kenny came up to me while I was busy drawing a particularly flamboyant group of Samoise Gypsy musicians in full swing and introduced me to an elderly and panicky looking Frenchman, with typically sallow skin and whose eyes darted from each to the other of us when Kenny started speaking. I was engrossed in what I was doing more so than usual having already sold five sketches of musician groups to some of the participants in less than an hour and wasn’t best pleased at being interrupted.
“Hack, this is Pierre Trudous. He has a bit of a problem. Pierre, this is my friend, Hackney Marsh, the famous London detective. He may be able to help you.” The man clearly didn’t understand a word so Kenny repeated his introduction in what would never have passed as even the worst stab at O level French but which miraculously must have got across some kind of meaning as the man suddenly grabbed my hand and shook it violently pouring out a torrent of real French that went right over my head and into the forest of trees next to the lake where I was standing. Kenny explained. “Someone’s stolen this poor bugger’s Maccaferri - as in the genuine article. I told him you might be able to help him get it back. He only turned his back a minute and it was gone.”
“Are you completely out of your mind?” I yelled, “For a start, I’m on holiday and I don’t give a shit about his bloody Maccaferri, or anyone’s come to that. Secondly, where am I supposed to start looking in a place full of thousands of guitars that all look the same? Anyway, if it was the real thing, it’ll be hundreds of miles away from here by now on the first plane to Russia to be sold into some creep of a Mafia Boss’s collection before you can say Kremlin. Forget it.” The little Frenchman looked quizzically at Kenny then back at me. I looked back at the subjects of my latest commercial venture, a group of real gypsy family musicians. I was hell bent on prostituting my art strictly on a first cough up, first served basis. But Kenny wasn't about to be put off.
“Come on, Hack. How would you like it if it was your Maccaferri that’d been nicked? You’d bloody care then wouldn’t you?”
“It wasn’t and I don’t. Now leave me alone, I’m busy.”
Kenny took the Frenchman’s arm and hustled him away, no doubt telling him what an absolute bastard I really was.
Gyspy guitar players start young. They don’t go to school and, being surrounded by many relatives who play instruments, there’s not a lot for kids to do other than get stuck in themselves. Bireli Lagrene, whose Father and brothers were guitarists, began playing the violin at the age of 3 graduating to the guitar at 4. By the time he was 10 years old he’d learned every note of every single solo Django had recorded - no mean feat for anyone. I’d only managed a few of the slower tunes myself, many of them being too fast to contemplate, before giving up and moving on to the more modern styles of American players like the ones I’ve mentioned. Well, that's my excuse. Who wants to play like a two-fingered Gypo anyhow?
The young Bireli was an obvious genius and at 13 released his first album, ‘Routes De Django’, following up with a second at the age of 15. A year later he was touring the world with his own Gypsy band. The picture on the cover of the first album shows the young tousle-haired Lagrene barely able to see over the top of the big Maccaferri style guitar. The picture was brought to mind by the small boy who remained seated beneath the awning at the back of the row of old chairs and wooden boxes vacated by the musicians I’d been drawing when they drifted away for a fag break or whatever. The kid must have been about 8 or 9 years old and, oblivious that the session had come to end, was struggling away trying to make his tiny fingers do his bidding. He was attempting to play what sounded like Minor Swing, albeit rather falteringly and a smidgen out of tune.
His guitar wasn't helping his cause any and looked like it had seen better days. The wood was dull in colour and even from where I was standing, one or two large cracks were visible on the top near the bridge, which, to the uninitiated, is the bit the strings cross towards the wide part of what’s known as the sound board – the bit of the guitar with the hole in. The thing looked old and well past it’s sell by date - clumsy and decidedly un-wealdy and I could see the action (the space between the strings and the fingerboard, where in this case you could drive the average Citroen) was high enough to make the strings feel like cheese wire, especially to fingers so young and delicate.
I closed the sketchbook and walked over to the kid. “That sounds really good. It’s Minor Swing, isn’t it?” Why I thought the kid would understand English is anyone's guess.
The kid stopped playing and, taking the guitar off his knee, offered it to me with an expression that would've passed a blindfold test as sheepish. I took the guitar by the neck - the long narrow part, which leads to the winding mechanism on what’s called the machine head, as a tall man appeared from behind the awning and strode over to where the kid was sitting. The bloke grabbed him by his shirt collar hoisting him off the ground and shouted at him in French, confirming my suspicions it was the kid's native tongue. The kid wriggled and shouted back at the man who turned to me with an apologetic smile.
“I’m sorry Monsieur. He meant no harm. He says he saw your guitar leaning against a chair on the other side of the awning. He said he just borrowed it as he doesn’t have a guitar of his own and he wanted to join in with his family. Please accept my apologies.”
“It’s no problem, Monsieur. He’s very good, your son. Quite the little Django.”
“He’s my Grandson. It's as well his father didn’t catch him. You’re very lucky owning such a fine instrument. You know if you sold it, you could live your life in luxury, but I’m sure you won’t do that. If it was my guitar, I'd never part with it. I'd sooner starve.” He ushered the child away leaving me clutching a quarter of a million dollars worth of beaten up, tarnished old wood in a very shaky hand.
* * * * * * * * *
“You’re a bloody genius, Hack,” Kenny was saying, as we made our way back to our boarding house on the outskirts of Samoise. “How did you track it down, you old bloodhound, you? It was a bit embarrassing when the old geezer started blubbing like that when you handed his precious bloody guitar back. Jesus, we could’ve had it away on out toes with it if we’d have been a bit quicker on the uptake.”
"To answer your question, it’s what I do for a living, Kenny. Just put it down to experience, instinct, intuition and a good nose for what’s really what. Speaking of which, I could really handle a bottle of something with a bit of a smart bouquet. How about you?”
Fast forward to late Tuesday again.
Before I knew it, I’d begun playing the rhythm part of ‘Minor Swing’. The tune has quite a pace and, unlike Nuages, is difficult to play quietly and what with the whiskey warming the cockles of my fingers, I was soon bashing away merrily. The bedroom door opened and Ingre stood there leaning against the door pillar with the duvet wrapped round her.
“Minor Swing. I must have heard that a million times?” she said sleepily, then, “What’s the time? Aarrrrr How did it go? Aaarrr What did he want? Aaarrr.” punctuated with a string of yawns.
I nodded towards the table, “He just wanted me to give you that. The envelope.”
She shuffled over to the table and picked the envelope up, “You didn’t tell him about us, did you?”
“It crossed my mind, but no I didn't. I suppose I’ll have to tell him sometime. He knows you’re with someone, though. He said so.”
“God. How did he know that?” she said quietly.
“I haven’t a clue.” There was no way I was going to elaborate. She came and sat beside me and tore the envelope open, “Don’t you want to read that in private?”
“Why should I? Whatever Kenny and I had is over. It’s gone for good. I’ve moved on and he should do the same.” She leaned over and kissed me on the forehead taking a piece of folded paper out of the envelope. She unfolded it and read the contents. Then she screwed it up and leaned her head on my shoulder. "I’m going back to bed. Are you coming?”
“In a sec. I’ll just finish my drink.”
“I’ll look forward to that,” she said brushing her face against my arm, standing up and tossing the ball of paper on the table.
“It’s none of my business, but what did he say?”
She yawned again, “Nothing important. You can read it if you like. Don’t be long or I’ll fall asleep.” She blew a kiss then went into the bedroom and closed the door behind her. I went over to the table, picked up the ball of paper and unravelled it. On it, hand written, were the words of a song.
You’re making me blue
All that you do
Seems unfair
You try not to hear
Turn a deaf ear
To my prayer
It seems you don’t want to see
What you are doing to me
My arms are waiting to caress you
And to my heart they long to press you, sweet heart
My heart is sad and lonely
For you I cry
For you, dear, only
I tell you I mean it
I’m all for you
Body and soul
I spend my days in longing
And wondering it’s me you’re wronging
Why haven’t you seen it
I’m all for you
Body and soul
I can’t believe it
It hard to conceive it
That you’d turn away romance
Are you pretending?
Don’t say it’s the ending
I wish I could have one more change to prove, dear
My life a hell you’re making
You know I’m yours for just the taking
Id gladly surrender
Myself to you
Body and soul
Life’s dreary for me
Days seem to be long as years
I’ve looked for the sun
But can see none
Through my tears
Your heart must be like a stone
To leave me like this alone
When you could make my life worth living
By taking what I’m set on giving, sweet heart
My heart is sad and lonely
For you I cry
For you, dear, only
I tell you I mean it
I’m all for you
Body and soul
Kenny.x
I screwed the paper into a ball again and tossed it into the fireplace. Shuffling through the pile of pencil drawings on the table, I marveled at how her body hadn’t changed much over the years and she seemed to have suffered none of the gravity pulls the old art school models had back in the Sixties. She looked a little older in the face like we all did but all in all she was still the same Ingre.
Ingre's beauty still shone through even after all that time with Kenny. And that was nothing short of a miracle. I crossed the room, switched out the light and gently rattled the bedroom door handle as I opened the door just in case she really had fallen asleep.
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