The train drags and rumbles its way through the grey-stone towers of South East London into the shabby suburbia, hauling a mixed load of humanity, grime and graffiti tags.
The girl is slumped, smaller than herself, in the corner of the carriage, back to the direction of travel. Dark blue seats patterned with cigarette burns and burger stains. It is a wet dog dirty November evening, greasy drizzle on a greasy window with the words: in case of emergency – break here. She is completely alone; too late for the evening rush of businessmen flocking exhausted back to their executive boxes, too early for the late night clubbers desperately seeking that early Christmas party high, still more than a month away.
She is pretty in a brittle, late-teen way. She wore cheap clothes; denim skirt too short, a simple tank-top and her hair a tangle of colours, raked into place by a shocking pink clip and yellow stained fingers. She wears the very latest in fake fashion shoes, but the heels are scuffed and the tight lacing cuts into her calf like the net around a Christmas turkey. Beside her, nestled in a burn crater, duty free cigarettes and a pink lighter that nearly matches her hair clip. Her mobile is silent, battery exhausted on the lunchtime train from Bath to London. The carriage smells of perspiration, mixed with stale burger wrap and damp upholstery.
The girl drifts in and out of day sleep, hugs her thin arms around her body, half smiles and remembers.
A soft, west-country sky and endless summer, skipping school with Beth and Sal for a quiet smoke, and later, the fearful smell of the school auditorium, cleaning fluid, deodorant, anticipation and underneath a nagging feeling that it was all too late. GCSE exams, boring but was what she worked for most of her interrupted teenage study, but who cared anyhow?
Graduation day and she was early for the first time in three years. Later, a mix of euphoria, friends’ kisses and tears, all spiced with cheap cider. Underneath the smiling faces a sense of something lost and gone forever, she walked home alone that day through silent streets perfumed with hot tar and dog dirt.
Her mother was out, micro pizza, chips, and a letter from Bob offering her a room and a job in his brother’s pub in Kent. Miles away, where he had drifted when Mother had grown bored with him.
The girl had always liked Bob - lazy, kind, rat thin with wild hair thinning on top. Never without his evening can of beer, newspaper and snubbed cigarette. He was her favourite by far when she remembered the catalogue of ‘uncles’ who had populated her childhood. With all the wisdom of near 17 years, she knew that a happy, sleepy drunk was far preferable to the other variations on that particular theme.
The evening bartender’s job in the Rugby Club had been the envy of her friends, the recently widowed owner had approached the girl as she helped her mother clean the bar room carpet on a weekend job. Long past forty, rich and loud, Mrs Davies wore a heavy spray on her tanned skin and a tight, low-buttoned blouse that kept her assets transfixed. She had a villa in Spain and lived in the large house her recently dead husband had built next to the park. The girl had liked Mrs Davies, at least at first she had.
The job was easy and the confident, affluent, the public school boys who frequented the bar after training were so very different from the pale, quiet boys she and her friends had kissed in the park, as the light grew dim. It was in the bar that she had met the boy. He was tall and blonde with faded jeans, tattered cap and casually upturned collars on his rugby shirt; Self-confident, but kind and friendly, staying in the flat above the bar for the summer whilst his father worked in South Africa. He helped to collect glasses, outrageously flirting with a smiling Mrs Davies and happy to talk to the girl, listening to her chatter as she washed up at the end of her shift.
‘King’s Cross, this is King’s Cross.’
The train, which had stopped, jolts back to life. The girl starts, for a moment a frightened child first day at school, and then the armour-plated scowl returns. A short, stubby man in a dark, banker blue suit moved slowly down the carriage, swaying like a drunkard with the combined effect of the train’s motion and an expense account lunch. Ruddy faced, he looks the girl from head to toe and then back again, dwelling on legs and teenage cleavage.
He grimaces and his face broadcasts an odd mix of lust and contempt, he thinks he knows her type, another plastic girl willing to take his folded notes and dance in city bars whilst he and his colleagues smirk, leer and disapprove. She scowls in return, her face hard with dark eyes unwavering. And suddenly, a revelation dawns on her; the boy’s father would be much like this man, and the boy too had been destined to tread the same path, that was, before he sold his soul.
Not for the first time she caught her breath, surprised and self-angry as she felt sorrow for the boy. Remembering the last time she had seen him, head down so as to avoid her stare as he crossed the street, smaller, older and with the look of a cornered animal.
The hateful banker lurched on, sweaty forehead, heart attack already booked and paid for in the currency of rich food and too much wine. In his wallet, tight against his chest, pretty auburn wife and studious, prep school daughters smile for the camera.
The girl drifted back to the summer and, as she knew it would, her daydream locked on its tracks like the train she sat in, moving slowly towards the tunnel, into the darkness.
The bar had been quiet that night, first team away on tour and Mrs Davies, preoccupied with the day’s returns, had turned a blind eye as the girl had bent the rules. She sat on the stool, on the public side of the bar, knee to knee with the boy.
Later, the two pints of cider he had bought reignited that last day at school feeling, brittle, alive but with an underlying and unexplained sadness and something lost. The boy had seemed like a good friend to have, and her raised heartbeat told maybe something more. A drive in his father’s new car was just a taste of the pop idol life she dreamed about as she wasted rainy afternoons in front of the television.
The smell was intoxicating, not the minicab odour she associated with cars but leather, money and something more, perhaps excitement. The night was warm, insects buzzing in the darkness and the old park seemed to close in around them in a way that was neutral, neither friendly nor hostile, just there. Afterwards, it worried the girl that she was never able to exactly pinpoint the moment where harmless fun turned to uncertainty, then fear, pain, force and shame. As he left her as a violated and shattered wanderer, it may have been the first clap of late summer thunder that made her shiver, but it was the sound of sirens that she felt she was saved by.
The policewoman was kind by training, but the way she looked at the girl, her muddled hair, multi-pierced lobes and tear smudged make-up; the way she raised an eyebrow when the girl gave her suburban estate address, told another story.
‘Are you absolutely sure?’
’Can we go through this one more time?’
’Had he taken anything?’
Hours passed. It was all whitewashed walls, stewed tea and hard plastic seats. A background of pain and noise, crying and angry shouting pooled with plastic words of consolation and always a smell of disinfectant, vomit and resentment. After some time, her mother arrived, flustered, part angry, part sad. Alternately, shouting, weeping, with shaking hands lighting cigarettes, stubbing them out un-smoked, then lighting another. In the end her mother had taken the girls chin in her hand. Not hard, but firm, her eyes now clear and voice steady and quiet in a sad way.
‘Shut it away girl’ she had commanded. ‘They don’t lock up the likes of him, for the likes of you and me.’
She remembered the Sergeant clearly, tall and thin. He looked like Bob but without the puppy kind eyes. He would not sit, pacing the small room as he spoke at her, never meeting her eye. He was clear and precise in his speech but she remembered only the threat as he half whispered ‘the offence of false accusation’.
The room had seemed even smaller then, scurfy walls moving in whenever she took her gaze away from them. The sergeant had explained, slowly, like her cousin’s remedial teacher. The man she had accused had a perfect alibi. It was corroborated - that meant backed-up he explained, without waiting for her to ask, ‘by a respectable bar owner who had testified that the boy had spent the entire evening and night with her.’ There was no case and the girl was free to leave.
Confused, crushing up the card from Victim Support, the girl had left the police station alone, her mother having caught an earlier bus into town with another office to clean. She walked slowly to the bus stop, staring intently at the patch of pavement ahead of her. Last night’s storm had left not freshness, but grey yellow cloud and a feeling that the warmth of her summer was long past. Spots of rain flattened her hair and the big grey Mercedes burbled past splashing dirty water onto her bare legs.
‘Canterbury, this is Canterbury. This train terminates here.’
The announcer’s voice breaks through to the girl, shakes here back to here and now. The door hisses, opens, as a sole passenger walks off the train, trying to minimise his time with the musky mood on the train.
The girl collects her belongings, fake Gucci handbag with taped up handles, cigarettes and silent mobile phone. She stands up, shakes herself taller and left hand pulling a tatty piece of paper from her inside pocket, she smiles to herself as she re-reads the letter. Bob’s untidy words conjure up his face, and the map of the route to his pub is clear. The bar job will be her new start, away from the boy, Mrs Davies and from the past.
The girl jumps from the train, clicking heels in time with her clicking lighter. Head held high she shakes her hair, pulls her jacket tighter and walks into the mist.
-----------
brr. emo. -.-
heh. cant' believe u actually read through the whole thing. =S was searching through my comp and happened to come across it.
uber nostalgic. lol.
kindda miss those days.
TOMU
August 2006
September 2006
October 2006
November 2006
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January 2007
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I want the world to be filled with pink candy floss and little mini pink and christmas green hearts floating around the sky blue (duh) sky.
LOL. OK NO. -.-
ok but yah. but i really actually love candy floss.
People call me tom (which happens to be my name) and everytime i speak chinese a little cute sheep on the other side of the world burns and dies in agony. I love soggy cabage cereal and suck at writing profiles. so just click your way away from this page and make sure you leave a tag after each visit to my21grams. Enjoy. =)
mw_dust@hotmail.com is my msn.
TOMU
The train drags and rumbles its way through the grey-stone towers of South East London into the shabby suburbia, hauling a mixed load of humanity, grime and graffiti tags.
The girl is slumped, smaller than herself, in the corner of the carriage, back to the direction of travel. Dark blue seats patterned with cigarette burns and burger stains. It is a wet dog dirty November evening, greasy drizzle on a greasy window with the words: in case of emergency – break here. She is completely alone; too late for the evening rush of businessmen flocking exhausted back to their executive boxes, too early for the late night clubbers desperately seeking that early Christmas party high, still more than a month away.
She is pretty in a brittle, late-teen way. She wore cheap clothes; denim skirt too short, a simple tank-top and her hair a tangle of colours, raked into place by a shocking pink clip and yellow stained fingers. She wears the very latest in fake fashion shoes, but the heels are scuffed and the tight lacing cuts into her calf like the net around a Christmas turkey. Beside her, nestled in a burn crater, duty free cigarettes and a pink lighter that nearly matches her hair clip. Her mobile is silent, battery exhausted on the lunchtime train from Bath to London. The carriage smells of perspiration, mixed with stale burger wrap and damp upholstery.
The girl drifts in and out of day sleep, hugs her thin arms around her body, half smiles and remembers.
A soft, west-country sky and endless summer, skipping school with Beth and Sal for a quiet smoke, and later, the fearful smell of the school auditorium, cleaning fluid, deodorant, anticipation and underneath a nagging feeling that it was all too late. GCSE exams, boring but was what she worked for most of her interrupted teenage study, but who cared anyhow?
Graduation day and she was early for the first time in three years. Later, a mix of euphoria, friends’ kisses and tears, all spiced with cheap cider. Underneath the smiling faces a sense of something lost and gone forever, she walked home alone that day through silent streets perfumed with hot tar and dog dirt.
Her mother was out, micro pizza, chips, and a letter from Bob offering her a room and a job in his brother’s pub in Kent. Miles away, where he had drifted when Mother had grown bored with him.
The girl had always liked Bob - lazy, kind, rat thin with wild hair thinning on top. Never without his evening can of beer, newspaper and snubbed cigarette. He was her favourite by far when she remembered the catalogue of ‘uncles’ who had populated her childhood. With all the wisdom of near 17 years, she knew that a happy, sleepy drunk was far preferable to the other variations on that particular theme.
The evening bartender’s job in the Rugby Club had been the envy of her friends, the recently widowed owner had approached the girl as she helped her mother clean the bar room carpet on a weekend job. Long past forty, rich and loud, Mrs Davies wore a heavy spray on her tanned skin and a tight, low-buttoned blouse that kept her assets transfixed. She had a villa in Spain and lived in the large house her recently dead husband had built next to the park. The girl had liked Mrs Davies, at least at first she had.
The job was easy and the confident, affluent, the public school boys who frequented the bar after training were so very different from the pale, quiet boys she and her friends had kissed in the park, as the light grew dim. It was in the bar that she had met the boy. He was tall and blonde with faded jeans, tattered cap and casually upturned collars on his rugby shirt; Self-confident, but kind and friendly, staying in the flat above the bar for the summer whilst his father worked in South Africa. He helped to collect glasses, outrageously flirting with a smiling Mrs Davies and happy to talk to the girl, listening to her chatter as she washed up at the end of her shift.
‘King’s Cross, this is King’s Cross.’
The train, which had stopped, jolts back to life. The girl starts, for a moment a frightened child first day at school, and then the armour-plated scowl returns. A short, stubby man in a dark, banker blue suit moved slowly down the carriage, swaying like a drunkard with the combined effect of the train’s motion and an expense account lunch. Ruddy faced, he looks the girl from head to toe and then back again, dwelling on legs and teenage cleavage.
He grimaces and his face broadcasts an odd mix of lust and contempt, he thinks he knows her type, another plastic girl willing to take his folded notes and dance in city bars whilst he and his colleagues smirk, leer and disapprove. She scowls in return, her face hard with dark eyes unwavering. And suddenly, a revelation dawns on her; the boy’s father would be much like this man, and the boy too had been destined to tread the same path, that was, before he sold his soul.
Not for the first time she caught her breath, surprised and self-angry as she felt sorrow for the boy. Remembering the last time she had seen him, head down so as to avoid her stare as he crossed the street, smaller, older and with the look of a cornered animal.
The hateful banker lurched on, sweaty forehead, heart attack already booked and paid for in the currency of rich food and too much wine. In his wallet, tight against his chest, pretty auburn wife and studious, prep school daughters smile for the camera.
The girl drifted back to the summer and, as she knew it would, her daydream locked on its tracks like the train she sat in, moving slowly towards the tunnel, into the darkness.
The bar had been quiet that night, first team away on tour and Mrs Davies, preoccupied with the day’s returns, had turned a blind eye as the girl had bent the rules. She sat on the stool, on the public side of the bar, knee to knee with the boy.
Later, the two pints of cider he had bought reignited that last day at school feeling, brittle, alive but with an underlying and unexplained sadness and something lost. The boy had seemed like a good friend to have, and her raised heartbeat told maybe something more. A drive in his father’s new car was just a taste of the pop idol life she dreamed about as she wasted rainy afternoons in front of the television.
The smell was intoxicating, not the minicab odour she associated with cars but leather, money and something more, perhaps excitement. The night was warm, insects buzzing in the darkness and the old park seemed to close in around them in a way that was neutral, neither friendly nor hostile, just there. Afterwards, it worried the girl that she was never able to exactly pinpoint the moment where harmless fun turned to uncertainty, then fear, pain, force and shame. As he left her as a violated and shattered wanderer, it may have been the first clap of late summer thunder that made her shiver, but it was the sound of sirens that she felt she was saved by.
The policewoman was kind by training, but the way she looked at the girl, her muddled hair, multi-pierced lobes and tear smudged make-up; the way she raised an eyebrow when the girl gave her suburban estate address, told another story.
‘Are you absolutely sure?’
’Can we go through this one more time?’
’Had he taken anything?’
Hours passed. It was all whitewashed walls, stewed tea and hard plastic seats. A background of pain and noise, crying and angry shouting pooled with plastic words of consolation and always a smell of disinfectant, vomit and resentment. After some time, her mother arrived, flustered, part angry, part sad. Alternately, shouting, weeping, with shaking hands lighting cigarettes, stubbing them out un-smoked, then lighting another. In the end her mother had taken the girls chin in her hand. Not hard, but firm, her eyes now clear and voice steady and quiet in a sad way.
‘Shut it away girl’ she had commanded. ‘They don’t lock up the likes of him, for the likes of you and me.’
She remembered the Sergeant clearly, tall and thin. He looked like Bob but without the puppy kind eyes. He would not sit, pacing the small room as he spoke at her, never meeting her eye. He was clear and precise in his speech but she remembered only the threat as he half whispered ‘the offence of false accusation’.
The room had seemed even smaller then, scurfy walls moving in whenever she took her gaze away from them. The sergeant had explained, slowly, like her cousin’s remedial teacher. The man she had accused had a perfect alibi. It was corroborated - that meant backed-up he explained, without waiting for her to ask, ‘by a respectable bar owner who had testified that the boy had spent the entire evening and night with her.’ There was no case and the girl was free to leave.
Confused, crushing up the card from Victim Support, the girl had left the police station alone, her mother having caught an earlier bus into town with another office to clean. She walked slowly to the bus stop, staring intently at the patch of pavement ahead of her. Last night’s storm had left not freshness, but grey yellow cloud and a feeling that the warmth of her summer was long past. Spots of rain flattened her hair and the big grey Mercedes burbled past splashing dirty water onto her bare legs.
‘Canterbury, this is Canterbury. This train terminates here.’
The announcer’s voice breaks through to the girl, shakes here back to here and now. The door hisses, opens, as a sole passenger walks off the train, trying to minimise his time with the musky mood on the train.
The girl collects her belongings, fake Gucci handbag with taped up handles, cigarettes and silent mobile phone. She stands up, shakes herself taller and left hand pulling a tatty piece of paper from her inside pocket, she smiles to herself as she re-reads the letter. Bob’s untidy words conjure up his face, and the map of the route to his pub is clear. The bar job will be her new start, away from the boy, Mrs Davies and from the past.
The girl jumps from the train, clicking heels in time with her clicking lighter. Head held high she shakes her hair, pulls her jacket tighter and walks into the mist.
-----------
brr. emo. -.-
heh. cant' believe u actually read through the whole thing. =S was searching through my comp and happened to come across it.
uber nostalgic. lol.
kindda miss those days.
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TOMU