At times of financial meltdown you have to hold onto what is imperishable, and endures: gold. I have to make use of my gold. Locked away in my vaults all these years. I have to try to make use of it. That schoolgirl fascinates me more than I can say. She is such a floweringly beautiful 15 (16?) year old girl yet always looks so unhappy, like she is carrying some deep wound, dignified, and proud. Her lips are always set in a pout, she always walks so slowly, like she has nothing to look forward to in her life—yet she is staggeringly attractive and can have any boy or man she wants. Perhaps she has suffered a loss, the loss of a mother perhaps, or perhaps it is a romantic wound—that I will not approach her perhaps. I always feel a spark of electricity between us since those first times we saw each other back in September, October, eight months ago now. In an attempt to catch my attention, or rather to provoke me into acting on my attention, I fancy was the reason for her change from a demure brunette to a stunning bottle blonde with long hair all over the place. I really don’t like blondes, despite the only three real girlfriends of my life, Olga, R—, and —– all being blonde, but her appeal to me has not changed. I had not seen her for a long long time, what with the Easter holidays and then me always being late, but yesterday as the bus turned off of Tower Bridge Road there she was trudging slowly with eyes to the ground, back TOWARDS her bus stop, away from her school. As if she had been that way and was now coming back for some reason. I think she cannot live that way as there was a closer bus stop than the one I always see her at. Her being there at that corner was quite mysterious. And today she got on my bus for the first time in weeks, and then strangely got off one stop earlier. I wonder if this was to give me the chance to get off with her in peace away from the crowd of her schoolmates who all pile off with her at the usual stop and have the confidence to approach her. The other strange thing is she never acknowledges the other pupils on the bus in her same uniform. She seems so apart from them, indeed looks so different, like she belongs in a better place than this. It is strange to see a girl so staggeringly beautiful around these parts. Quite out of place. There is something special about her, and I think she knows that, and I think she recognises there is something special about me too, that is why she was attracted to me from the beginning and cannot now shake it off, and it weighs down her every step. She has a broken bleeding heart, yet still hopes by some miracle I will do something to make something happen. Yet—I can never approach her, she is just 15, perhaps 16. It has to come from her or not at all. So I will do nothing and soon will see her no more. But she is one of the special people of my life, already.
The Stripper 