Monday 28 July 2014

View from a night out in Cardiff



The train was full of anticipation, the promise of a night out. Everyone had different ideas of what the fun would entail. - For the boys drinking bottles of Bud it was the hope that the condoms in their pockets would not be coming back with them. For the wild group of women sharing a bottle of wine it was the hope a of dance, a flirt and maybe a quick snog before heading back to their husbands for safety and security. For others it was the thought of a skinful, or the chance to get away from family for a few hours that was appealing. Whatever it was you could almost touch the expectancy in the air.

You don't expect to see a young man on his knees when you go into a pub's toilets. Well I suppose there are some pubs where that is acceptable but not a town centre bar on a Friday evening. He was kneeling on the floor with one arm up over his head and the hand dryer blowing. I have to admit I did a double take and the look on my face told the fella he had some explaining to do.
‘Bit warm, innit’, he said in a strong Welsh accent. ‘Just drying my pits like.’ I smiled at the explanation and left him to it, thinking only in Cardiff. 

Maybe he was trying to dry his pits to impress the girl in the red high heels. They were the highest heels of the evening. Not that the girl particularly needed them being the owner of the longest pair of legs of the evening leading up to the shortest pair of shorts possible. Any longer and the legs would have been unnatural and any shorter and the shorts would have seen her arrested for indecent exposure. But she was having the desired effect, decent exposure - attracting admiring looks from the men and jealous looks from the women. 

The man in the blue shirt thought he was god's gift to women. He didn’t really have the looks to justify his claim but to be fair he had the patter. He’d clocked the long legs in the red shoes but was busy chatting to two sisters and had his eyes on the one in the lime green, summer, knitted  jump suit thing. But she seemed less than impressed with him letting her Goth sister do the laughing, joking and flirting back. Lime green girl was all about the withering put down and the rolling of the eyes. She was making like she wasn't interested at all but that didn't perturb him; he was persistently ignoring the Goth's advances creating a strange three-way conversation. I might have been wrong but I suspected that Lime Green was just playing hard to get, giving her sister a chance, but it would be her that ended up in his bed later that night. 

The woman in the blue dress also hoped to end up in someone else's bed that night, how did I know? Because I’d watched her ease of her wedding ring off and slip it into her handbag.
‘Fuck him,’ she whispered to her mate, ‘I'm gonna have myself some fun tonight.’ Her friend smiled a little uneasily; maybe disapproving of her friend's plans, maybe worried that she'd have to keep a secret or maybe just well aware of the mess that would need cleaning up come the morning.


As the door closed he looked resigned to his fate, like a man about to start a 20-year stretch behind bars. He leant against the door longing to get out, longing to regain his freedom, wondering how he’d got here. But he couldn’t dwell on that now he had a job to do. He pushed the button signalling to the driver that the last train to Ebbw Vale was ready to depart and then looked up and down the train, noting that the air of expectation from earlier in the evening had been replaced by one of mild disappointment as the evening had not quite panned out as planned.

1 comment:

  1. I can see from the two Cardiff stories that one can never get bored there :) there is something for everyone, young or old, married or single, daytime or night:)

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