The Unlucky Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

would tell Danvers where I’d been all morning when I got back. It was unusual not to be able to get through to the parlour, still he could chew me out later, or not, depending on his mood. It was just entering the dying light of rush hour and the station was easing to a steady trickle of people; aimless day trippers mostly and tourists with just a smattering of hassled looking suits who were either late for work or important enough to carve their own hours.
    Overhead, the great glass dome of the roof was a uniform soulless grey, rippled with rain drops. According to the monstrous gold-plated clock over the escalator, I was about fifteen minutes too early, so I bought a copy of The Standard and another coffee and settled at a plastic table, sprayed to look like metal, in front of a pretzel stand done up as some kind of wooden shack with a straw roof. It was like something you might hope to see on the white sands of some beautiful tropical beach between the cobalt blue of the ocean and the mirrored sky.
    Flicking through the paper proved disheartening at best. There was a report of more buildings on fire across the bridge and somebody had dug up a pit full of bodies behind some old hotel. I sighed and laid it aside. Cigarette smoke wafted from somewhere, peppering up my nose. I coughed and brushed it away. I was dressed for work and they didn’t like it if you turned up smelling funky. Smoke was especially bad for a cremation. Made sense, I guess.
    I glanced at the clock again. Still ten minutes. I sipped my coffee - it was good this time, grit black and bitter, swamp thick. Smelled just like burnt rubber. On the far side of the concourse an overweight commuter in a floral shirt shouted at a ticket clerk, waving his arms in over-wrought dramatic flourishes at the bemused attendant.
    A woman in a severe cut charcoal skirt suit was sipping a coffee at the table across from me, dark hair pulled back in a no nonsense ponytail. One perfectly manicured fingernail tapped a machine gun rhythm on the screen of her mart phone. I spent a few minutes half trying to catch her eye but she was having none of it. Killed some time anyway.
    Muffled music floated on the lifeless air, all hi-hat and deep bass escaping from a set of gleaming heavy gold ear-cans tangled in some kid’s curly black hair as he swaggered on by with practiced nonchalance.
    People watching killed another five minutes as I waited for Whimsy to show his face. A face, I thought, that I didn’t know. Still, I was where he’d told me to be and that was as much as I could do for now. The pill in my pocket was a dead weight, heavy with questions.
    Time ticked by slowly in acid green digits. Idly I brushed lint off a black sleeve, straightened a pant leg, adjusted my tie. Seconds passed like pouring syrup, not so much ticking as oozing immeasurably.
    Something on the rolling news screen caught my eye…
    I heard the noise as I reached again, unconsciously, for the styrophome coffee cup. A pop and a rush like thunder that shattered the ambient bustle, like a train approaching the platform. I heard it, felt it, didn’t understand. And then my chest exploded outwards.
    Swamped, mugged by the pain I jerked backwards in the aluminium chair, toppling it backwards, my legs sending the light table arcing through the air, coffee and ashtray spiralling off over the ground.
    I toppled backwards in slow motion, screaming the pain I could barely register and flopped onto the floor. What started as a tumble was, by the time it finished up, too wet and messy to live up to the name.
    I hit the floor, blood spray painting my landing. I am street art, I thought in one ludicrously detached moment before everything closed back in. Then I lay still, panting and pumping out blood, fingers sliding around in it as I struggled for purchase, tried to cling to a life I knew was in its terminal moments.
     
    Carver Whimsy stepped onto the platform, just another morning traveller in a like-minded sea.