I look around, the hordes of the homeless. Cardboard pavements. Then I see him, cramped like the buildings in a steamy alcove. The down-and-out, drifter, washed up here on unfortunate tides. Our worlds coincide. Sleeping bags piled up. Anne, as unromantic to the world as to me, turns her face away, stomps on, don’t make eye contact just ignore. I look to him. He is busking. Saxophone: brass seahorse. He lips the whistleesque beak, tinkers the tubes, releasing melancholic bawls. Hephaestusian craft! Producing the metallic sonory of volcano’s guts, the weep of Siberian storms. But look at him. He is old. Older than I care to imagine. His face is scrotal with wrinkles. Supercentenarian, hairy onion-faced, Methuselahean centuries stacked upon his cerebellum, homeostasis entropic collapsing. His hands are blackened by liverspots, strutted with scored tendons that are crosswired with swollen purple veins. Fingers like mandrake roots. Even on my approach, I see the humped bones of his fingers, acropped with week-old-banana coloured talons. Yet the nimbility with which he doubletimes tripletimes the keys: unparalleled. He plays it like the harp. His odd shoes planted, he moves the golden bow and bell in and out in and out of his thighgap, bucking altissimo on his single pavingflag stage. Visibly, he musters a mouthful of air, his flap-carven cheeks swelling to translucent thinness, expels it shakily into his instrument, and makes sweet music. Baker Street. Embouchure like a deflecting buzzbomb, woodpeckering play. The velvety dome of his head drips murky sweat, even with such frostbitten wind scratching him defenceless. He wipes a frail wrist across the dome, plastering down the lighter-than-air fuzz that grey-grew there. His music is fresh, succulent, but he is a relic of years with alien combinations of numbers. What befell? Why is this elder, worshippable oak tree evergreen, hovelling for pitiful pennies into his polystyrene cup? I see the cup tilt with the wind. Weighed down by nothing, no coppery contents. Is he the clutched sad remains of a dragonslayed curse? Did his grandsire unheed Tiresias prophesy forewarning, dooming lineage to blindness? Maybe he is Father Time, manifesting here on the corner of the street, testing the welfare of strangers of this race compliant with detachment. Maybe he walks the globe, careless of boarders and territories, performing. To pass the eons. And here he finds himself, on this featureless day. Jurojin blessed, maybe he was here before this town and its times. Lived in the marshland, before the punks levelled it. Deathless, he is the arcane gold of the philosopher’s stone’s unending ailmentless remedy. Yet he looks frail as his cheap cup, stained with expired coffee. Gasping for air his jaw quivers. On his lastlegs. Deathbedly. Will they build a statue here in memorial? No, this recycled God of dispossessed things shall, as his brassy notes upon the wind, just vanish. Darkly descends the Kali Yuga. The nearer I get to him, indeed, I can smell the thickness of decay. Blegh! Have I ever smelt that bad? My nose is so aware of his body, the organic fleshiness and somatic processes reeking. Blabbered breaths heat up the cold air smokily. My own breaths, I now see, coalesce with his. Anne, holding her breath, spoutless. What is she thinking? His aboriginal, primeval eyes, dognose wet and crust-rusted squinted, see me. It makes my heart beatskip. Picaresque eyes watch me. He bides, seeing what I’ll react. Charitable me? Or closepursed parsimonious tight, I will keep my dirtied walletbase change to myself, to hear it tuppencey chingle with every step of my right leg. In my right pocket, tucked square away, is my wallet. I handcover it, he won’t nab this. Anne is reaching an arachnid hand, clutching the clip and unzipping her purse. Wedging her fingers down, she pincers every coin she can, depositing them into her available palm. My face is nerve-blasted. The busker releases another, fainter honk of his saxophone. Tirthankaran wisdom, routing the transoceanic passage to the immortal shores unwaved by life after life, rank after rank. He knows Anne’s high charity. He sees the milk of human kindness curdling on her freckled face. He gumlessly smiles, pleased at my fear. He has not outdone centuries to be walked over by clueless singlecelled brats. Juvie sentenceable! Gumless grin, fanged silverback. Stood right in front of him now. He inverts his humpback to gurn his brown jowls at me. Like cuphanded-tipping excessively poured unneeded tablets back into the pot, Anne lets the coins slip one after a clattering other down into his cup’s bullseye. They hit the cup’s floor, jump and then land on tails, each and every. At the silence of the final currency, a tuber hand bends its calloused knuckles over her shoulder. I see his hand shaking uncontrollably through her deltoids, the buildup to an explosive pulse. I step back, looking around. I go to call for help. The thank that leaves the old busker’s toothless mouth is inaudible as no words. Sounds the same as water hissing from a tap. This could be his last breath! But the illumination of his eyes tells me all I need know. Right honourable gentleman! He pats Anne’s shoulder. Her father never did. He hisses again, raspier than a cobra, moves her along. Anne slides her hand into hold with mine, leads us on. We continue down the road. I take a last look. Pillar of salt. He purses the mouthpiece. Baker Street. We continue down the road. The music vanishes on the wind. Vanishes under the sounds of the city, my own heart’s rubato.