Patricia – Pat – was dumpy,
with a curling lip,
Pat was in fact the Office Bitch.
Every night she walked (stridently) home
along our beautiful meaningless beach.
I sometimes saw her from the car,
an umbral figure with an itch
for grey skies, pavements and — she told us this —
‘some decent human misery’,
which of course was never to be:
the sun was unstoppable, relentless
the rapture of the sea.
So Pat went ‘home’ to London
and lived alone, unhappily.
