A Thousand Days Like Sunday (No 1)

The beer in the bottom of the glass had barely settled from the swirling motion he had been making absently for the past five minutes when he raised the glass to his lips and swallowed the flat, foamy liquid. The woman to his left looked hopefully at him, her coke glass long since drained, the lemon slice looking ugly and dirty in the fingerprint and lipstick smeared glass. 'We for the off?' she said more in hope than expectation. She felt like a bored child pulling at it's parents coatsleeves. 'One more' he said flatly, almost with a belch. She would have gone long ago but he'd promised her 'a night'. He always did on a saturday. The cinema maybe? A nice restaurant? Even a walk in the park and a go on the swings................. The pub actually. She knew where this was leading though. Drag the late afternoon hours in the bar, dividing his time between her and the pool table. He'd then take her through to the lounge bar for some perfectly palatable but supremely dull fish and chips before returning from his ordeal to meet his mates. He usually never bothered to come back from the pool table by this point. That was her 'night' She didn't drink. Didn't like the taste of the stuff. On one occassion she had consumed several Baileys but found the sensation it induced in her deeply unpleasant. How she had landed up with a congenital pisshead she couldn't quite fathom. Sods law probably covered it....... It was about seven o'clock and she was now on the station platform. She had gone to look at the trains. She always seemed to end up looking at the trains. It was a terminus station and she always liked to watch the people boarding and disembarking, coming from the world and going back to it, the deisels rumbling and hissing, the guards whistle, the way the train seemed to take forever to disappear from sight on departure. It was only one train an hour but she was rarely pushed for time. Somewhere to the north and west was the rest of the world. Every time she sat on the platform, the same thoughts rushed through her head. Thoughts of escape. The city, another county..................hell, another country even. It wasn't like she was trapped as such, but she had been a definite case of arrested development in a variety of ways. All she had was her man and a small rented flat and a job in the post office. More than enough for some she supposed but little more than small town status symbols in reality. She was beginning to see why the station always seemed to 'suggest itself' in her wanderings.............. The 7.30 pulled in beside her and snapped her out of her thoughts. By the time she had gained full control of herself she was on the train and the doors were shut. She was perfectly calm. What could possibly happen? It was a train, it was going somewhere and it would take her back eventually. It would probably take her back that night but the spell had been broken.............