Hat [9] Stockholm…

She is lounging outside the shop window in a Stockholm street, looking at the hats whilst waiting for him to emerge from his phone call standing against the lamp post. The children sitting on a bench eating ice creams. She is looking at a straw hat, welcoming and happy in the early summer, there is a dark green countrymans wide brimmed hat waiting and enticing rain. A few Swiss and German hats hoping for the alps. A few globe trotting embroided fez hats. They constitute a worldview that she has no entrance into, a history that has not been born yet. Could I manage that boyish charm she thinks looking at the rust colored hat in the corner of the window. Do any of the roles being offered to her by the window she lounges outside offer a meaningful alternative ? She thinks that she is really the the mysterious killer beneath a Kasa (japanese straw hat), hiding beneath the wave of hats that resists her passage along a wet and rainy street. Her weapons hidden from view. Each of the hats we have (work as) is a gesture of love, a lover (so few of those, she thinks) a stranger and a victim. When she raises her hat in greeting or false deference on greeting someone, a wild finiteness smiles in the separation of her head and the hat… I’m grimacing because I left my hat in the taxi, I can always get another one, I can’t get another one. You weren’t in a taxi. He wasn’t in the taxi. No child of mine was in the taxi. Did I leave a book in the taxi ? Did i leave a pen in the taxi ? Was there music playing in the taxi or was it just the sounds of car over tarmac ? A notebook with notes on a flight of steps, laughter, the weeks meetings, the last board meeting deciding to call the new subsidary ‘Hat’. I left my hat in the taxi…hat. She goes into the shop and buys the japanese (Kasa) straw hat for herself and caps for the girls. This is how it ends, with three or five days on holiday in Stockholm.