The Cutting Crew by Steve Mosby

much at least.'
    I checked my watch; the afternoon was passing quickly, and I wasn't going to have time to meet Rachel and then check out the university. It was one or the other. I closed my eyes.
    Half of me thought that she was being unfair - that I didn't owe her anything, because life doesn't work like that. Relationships die, and usually one of you hurts a lot more than the other. I'd felt enough guilt to sink my entire life, and so I'd tried to convince myself over time that you can hurt someone very badly without it necessarily being wrong. But it never quite worked. For a start, there was my affair with Lucy; in reality, I had such a lot to be guilty about. If Rachel thought that meeting up and talking to me might numb the pain a little, then I could do that. Whatever she asked, in fact, I could probably do. It didn't balance against the one huge thing I couldn't do for her, but at least it was something.
    I opened my eyes and said:
    'Okay. Where do you want to meet?'

    Chapter Four
    At the western edge of Horse, where it borders Elephant, there is a place called the Clock Cafe. It's on the cusp of both studentland and the bohemian market end of the business district, and therefore it's needlessly trendy: nestled in between a fake authentic pizzeria and a shop filled with old clothes that had come back into fashion by virtue of simply being so revolting. The cafe itself is a mixture of glass-fronted utility and old-world decor that doesn't really work.
    On the front, above the window, somebody had painted an enormous white clockface - Roman numerals, and all - onto the brick, and obviously that doesn't work. And yet it's always full, presumably because students don't work either.
    The drizzly rain had stopped now, and a fair few people were sitting outside at tables on the cramped pavement. There were too many couples and they seemed too happy. Whenever I saw people who were blatantly in love with each other, I was always torn between thinking that either they were very stupid or I was. Today, it was edging towards the latter.
    I crossed the street heading for the cafe, but I stopped a little way down from the entrance as something caught my eye. A friend of society had spray-painted graffiti onto the flagstones in the middle of the pavement. It said:
    LIFE SPEAKS
    LOUDER
    AT DEATH
    I stared at it for a few seconds, feeling confused and intrigued by it, and then I shook my head. It was just graffiti.
    I headed inside the cafe and ordered a cappuccino. The waiter slick, tanned and ponytailed - was drying the inside of a cup with a tassel-edged tea towel, using an action that suggested a previous customer must have been drinking some kind of glue. He took my order imperiously and then set about taking as long as physically possible to make it. I sat down at a table not far from the counter, and decided that if he didn't bring my drink over within five minutes then I was very probably going to shoot him. It seemed reasonable.
    He just made it and I almost scowled. Instead, I sipped the froth off the coffee, waited and remembered.
    There's this strange thing. Whenever I travelled by train, I couldn't help looking for bodies out of the window. Macabre perhaps, but the side of railway tracks always seemed such a likely disposal site for corpses: all those wastelands and embankments and litter strewn sidings. Looking out of the window, all you ever saw were fields and gravel, desiccated buildings and rubbish.
    There were no bodies that day, as far as I could tell.
    We were on a train, side by side, with me beside the aisle and Rachel by the window. She had been sleeping for most of the journey. I would have quite liked her to rest her head on my shoulder but instead she was facing forwards, her head tilted back slightly, with the four-four rattle of the tracks moving her gently.
    Sitting opposite, there were two indifferent strangers, arms folded, bored and lolling. We were all doing our best not to touch knees or look at