Telangiectasia

Ian Seed


At the packed trade fair, I bumped into my old boss. He suggested we swop business cards so that we could arrange to meet for dinner. In contrast to my plain white one, his was designed in elegant vintage style with gold lettering on a background of dark blue sea. However, I saw that his surname was missing some letters. ‘Bob Brooker’ had become ‘Bob Brook’. I was wondering whether to say something about this when he told me that on my card I was now ‘Ian See’. Why hadn’t I spotted this before?

‘Anyway, you look well,’ I told him. And he did. Beneath his now bald cranium, his eyes had retained their boyish eagerness, and his tailor-made suit showed off his athletic frame.
    
‘You too,’ he said, with some hesitation, looking me up and down. ‘That is,’ he went on, ‘apart from the broken veins on your nose.’  I had noticed these myself in the mirror only the other day. They were spreading out and downward in tiny intersecting streams. They seemed to have come from nowhere, and I had no idea what to do about them.



Ian Seed’s latest collections are New York Hotel (Shearsman, 2018), which was selected by Mark Ford as a TLS Book of the Year, and Distances (Red Ceilings, 2018).