Waiting

Well here goes, I said that i was going to commence this little fiction yesterday but as I was nursing the first hangover of 2004 (happy new year by the way) I decided to postpone it until today, there's dedication for you! Ok, read on.....

WAITING

It's cold. That's all i can think of. It's cold, my hands are cold, my feet are cold, my ears are cold and even my eyes are cold! My eyes! Standing here I can see the streets around me beginning to fill with people, lurching, staggering about like marionettes with slack strings, being juggled by idle hands as they fall into each other, careless and uncontrolled.
See these three here, for example, look. All young men, him in the middle in his thin shirt in this weather, vomit down the front as well as all over the flower bed. He's hanging down between the other two, a yoke around their necks as they weave through the rest of the wandering souls who've been spat out of the bars, the pubs, the kebab shops, the clubs, anywhere, anywhere there is drink to fill their throats with and food to sit on their stomachs until it all comes spewing out like the finale fireworks of their 'big night out'. And here am I waiting. Waiting for a bus in the cold. A great British tradition no less!
My fingers are freezing. I can imagine being that one who died traipsing to the South Pole...Scott was that him? I think so, anyway if he was as bloody cold as me waiting here for this bus then I don't blame him for curling up in his little tent and dying, at least he had a tent!All I have is a grotty old bus shelter seemingly designed to channel the bitter wind and the icy rain straight onto the poor soul waiting in it. Bus shelter! There's an innapropriate name if ever I saw it. This gives about as much shelter as a crisp bag, and I'm still cold!
I'm actually trying to avoid making eye contact with the strange looking man I'm sharing this wintery oasis with. He's one of those dangerous looking people, you know, the ones who stare at you with malice and you don't know why. Anyway, he's staring at me. He's still staring at me. Right I'm going to look at him out of the corner of my eye and see what his face says. Mistake. I flicker a look out of a slightly squinted eye, he bores back into me even more so and with an even more sinister air about him. Oh God, I might have known. He has a plastic bag, one of those blue and white striped ones and in it are cans of some extra extra strong cheapo brew lager. He's swigging.
Why is it? Why is it that if there is an alchy, especially a nasty violent alchy with mental problems, they will always find me? Be it in the park, a bus stop, roaming the streets, even the library!
I'm even colder now with his frosty glare boring a hole into my back.
I'm going to look again, try and get the measure of the bloke. Right, he's looking at that man being sick into a drain. I see. Right he's looking back. Ok, he's one of those middle-aged men who look like they live alone in a mangy old bedsit. He's got a nasty pair of ill-fitting grey jogging bottoms on that have seen too many days without a wash and a khaki bomber jacket, as well as a cheap pair of black (I say black!)shoes with a split in the sole. Why do they do it? Why do they team 'smart' shoes with grubby old joggers? And no socks! This is classic self-neglect chic here! The old hair isn't much better, it's a kind of peppery grey, with a weeks worth of stubble to match, and has a tuft at the back where it's been slept on. He's got those horrible gimlet eyes that drill into you, glazed and staring....and one of those skull-faces, the ones where the tired, old, leathered skin, hangs off the bone as though you'd thrown a wet flannel at his face, all eye sockets and hollow cheeks.
Ah hah! There through the misty rain approaches the sickly green illumination of the bus number as it hisses and growls to a halt, the doors open and at last it is time to board the night bus.