Rock n Roll Babes from Outer Space (35 page)

Kya, the yin-yang girl from the Sando, shrugged. ‘Who cares?’ She leaned over the table, rested her chin on her hands, and peered intently at Jake. She was rapt. She hadn’t been able to get him to come to her flat for dinner for
yonks.
Now if he’d only snap out of this strange mood he was in. He was still looking at the leaf. ‘You’re very spacy tonight,’ she ventured.

‘Sorry,’ Jake apologised to the salad. ‘I’m not very good company lately. I’d better go.’

‘No, no, no. I didn’t mean for you…Want me to open another bottle?’

‘If you want to.’

‘Why do you think they call it spacing out?’ Kya wondered, scraping her chair back and going to fetch more wine from the fridge. ‘Think about it. People who don’t quite have their “feet on the ground” are “space cadets”. We say they’re “off the planet”. But that can be a good thing too. If we want to praise something we say it’s
“out of this world”. What do you reckon, Jake, is space as a concept good or bad?’

‘Dunno,’ he mumbled noncommittally, tearing a crust of bread into little crumbs on his plate. ‘Space is just a place. The place.’ He held out his glass and forced a smile. ‘Sun Ra said that, you know. “Space is the place”.’

The two of them sat drinking in silence for a few minutes. Kya reached out and put a hand on Jake’s arm. She noticed the flying saucer tattoo and traced its outline with a fingertip. More minutes passed without either saying a word. ‘You really liked that girl, didn’t you?’ she asked.

‘Yeah,’ Jake shrugged.

‘Young Bodies Heal Quickly,’ she said. ‘That’s how the song goes, anyway.’

Jake didn’t reply.

‘So, you gonna stay the night, Jake?’

Jake sighed. He looked up at Kya with sad eyes. He still thought about Baby all the time. Did she ever think of him, he wondered. Suddenly, his arse itched and emitted a low flat honk. A smile crept over his features. It suddenly occurred to him that Kya was a very cute girl.

‘Dunno,’ he drawled. ‘What do you reckon?’