At The Crossing

The tall guy in a green T-shirt, vanishing past me as I cross in the opposite direction, has fairy wings on his shoulders: toy ones, children's fancy-dress wings, cartoonish butterfly cut-outs. Do they say gay? No time for that. He flickers past the traffic lights - whoosh! gone! - outside categories. Do they say foreign? They say young. They say London. Grab it, they say. Kiss the winged joy as it flies. Traffic swings around the corner; gusts of drizzle sweep us along the Strand in the glittering dark, threading to and fro among skeins of never-quite-colliding blurs. All this whirling's why we came out. Those fragile flaps could lift no one. Perhaps they were ironic wings, tongue-in-cheek look-at-me tokens to make it clear he had no need of hydraulics, being himself Hermes. Wings, though; definite wings.