Trains grind past, sometimes depositing passengers, but often not. Brian hasn’t turned up yet and I squirm uncomfortably in my seat, remembering what happened last time Brian was late. He’s always doing this, leaving me somewhere to wait for him. While I sit, agitated, I don’t notice an old man come and sit next to me, nor realise he’s talking to me; he continues regardless. The man sits there, hunched forward, his flinty eyes remarkably bright for this part of town…not that it was always like this, he laments. He’s soon gone, unmemorable like most people I meet. A siren wails, soon drowned out by an approaching train. On the opposite platform a crow pecks at an empty crisp packet. It begins to niggle at me as it squawks the way crows do. I glare at it, all thoughts of Brian put to one side, but it has no effect, so I get up and clap, and when that doesn’t work I shake my arms, hoping it will fly away, but still it stays, and the only outcome is that the group of teenage girls at the otherwise empty platform (bar me and the large lady who has usurped one half of my seat) giggle, and I sit back down, embarrassed, while the crow walks proudly along the ground, rather as Nelson would have at Trafalgar, I imagine. But then we both know what happened to Nelson at Trafalgar, don’t we? Anyway, I digress from the main point, which is that Brian isn’t here and the train is approaching. It pulls up and the fat lady and the girls, the memory of my native dance still fresh, get on, giving me one last smirk - not that I care, of course; it’s not me who has to return to this place. It’s just me on the platform now with only the crow, still beaming from its victory, to keep me company. Brian is nowhere and for once in this rotting metropolis I am alone. I get up to go and look for Brian, which I shouldn’t do; last time I did that Brian was furious. Outside the station, on the road, there is a white van with a broken windscreen, a twisted bike lying in front of it. A phone, its screen shattered, lies a few feet away. A solitary figure stands at one side trying to help the cyclist, his hands
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