"I can’t look or she’ll think I’m a pervy loser”
They’re easy to spot; getting up at the crack of dawn and cycling inordinate lengths has left both men with red, constipated-looking faces, and a sheen of righteous sweat.
They sit collapsed in their chairs like puppets whose strings have just been snipped. I sit down opposite them — upright, fragrant and after a nice long lie-in, full of beans.
“I was just saying,” Cycling Companion says to me as I sit down, “there’s this woman at work and she’s literally bursting out everywhere. Everything is sort of… super-sized,” he says, illustrating the bursting phenomenon by drawing large, round shapes in the air with his hands, “and sometimes, it’s just a bit… ”
He breaks off to ask the waitress for milk. While he does this, I ask my husband to plump out the context. This — he tells me — is a wider discussion about the rules of etiquette a man should observe when unexpectedly confronted by a great expanse of quivering bosom.
Not bikes and associated gadgets, then. “Like I said,” Cycling Companion resumes, “it’s just a bit… you know… uncomfortable.” While he tries to catch the waitress’s attention again, I turn to my husband.
“Is this discomfort cerebral or physical,” I ask him discreetly, “or a bit of both?”
“What do you mean?” “Do I have to spell it out?” “Yes.” “OK,” I say, “typically, is this sort of discomfort in a man’s head or his pants?”
“It’s more a distraction than anything else isn’t it?” he says to Cycling Companion. “I don’t know about you, but when you’re concentrating hard on not looking at someone’s breasts, you can’t think of anything but not looking at their breasts.”
“It’s like this,” says Cycling Companion, “I’m talking to this woman about work and saying to myself, eyes UP, eyes UP, I’m cricking my neck looking at the light-bulbs because there’s an enormous pair of breasts in front of me, which look like they’re about to escape…” he takes a mouthful of coffee, “and I can’t look at them or else she’ll think I’m a pervy loser.” He puts his coffee cup down.
“Quite a dilemma,” I say, “I mean, I find it impossible not to look when a pair of double D’s are bouncing around in front of me.”
“I know,” they say, looking vindicated. “I don’t feel you shouldn’t look,” I say. “I mean there is absolutely nothing wrong with a three-second glance. You can’t go wrong with three seconds. That’s what I do anyway, impossible not to sometimes, you know, when they’re really on display.”
“Right,” they say together, in the manner — it strikes me — of slightly gormless pupils, sitting in the back of a Cleavage Conundrum class.
“Otherwise,” I continue, “it’s not fair, it’s like standing in front of one of the Seven Wonders of the World, and then being told to put a blind-fold on. ”
“Yes,” they say, looking supremely vindicated, “it is a bit like that, but still, you don’t want to be disresp… ”
“But you mustn’t gawp,” I say. “Three seconds then look away, then maybe another three seconds but only after a respectable interval — in fact it’s all about the interval — there’s nothing worse than a man conversing with your breasts, especially if he’s old and gruesome.”
“Sometimes,” my husband says, “it’s so in-your-face that you can see them even when you’re looking at the ceiling.”
Cycling Companion has to go. He gets up. My husband gets up to say goodbye, throws an arm across the back of Cycling Companion’s shoulders. I remain in my seat, which means their cycling shorts now draw level with my eyes.
“The gall, lads,” I splutter, pointing a finger clearly in the direction of their shorts, “the gall of it… I mean talk about… ”
But they are making arrangements for another cycle. And so I sit, eyes UP, eyes UP, while they stand chatting — shameless in spandex.
Shameless in a fabric which lifts, separates and vacuum-packs their buttocks, clinging to each man in such a way that his penis could not draw more attention to itself if it was adorned with a little string of flashing LED’s.
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