The doors hiss as his boot-tip touches down. Chaz Sticks looks up and down the silent, grimy platform and waits. Fluorescent lighting makes the station look like a morgue, where out past the train line the smoky pre-dawn shadows hang like shrouds and phantoms in the cold. Chaz tucks his chin and counts to ten with his shoulders hunched. Then he steps back into his cabin, raises the whistle to his lips, and exhales. Its thin shriek sounds forlorn, final throes drowned by the doors’ hiss, and Chaz lets it dangle as the train first edges forward, then accelerates.
“B—y cold out there,” says Vince, ancient and draggled and just respectable enough to skip the concept. Chaz draws shivering breath in agreement. He waits for Fenton Station, gloved hands tucked into his pockets, and toys with the wooden disc that rests there. The disc is not much larger than the face of a man’s watch, and of about that thickness, too. If the wood were not so plain, it might have been a game counter; grey-green and grained as it is, Chaz could well have sliced it from the handle of a broom.
They slide into Fenton and the doors spit sibillant greeting to four passengers in long coats. Chaz steps down to watch them board. When he climbs back again, there’s a smile around the whistle in his teeth. He straightens his cuffs and settles his cap and leaves Vince muttering into a thermos.
Olivetti sits on the right and faces left and is the only person in the first carriage. His briefcase, good Italian leather, is already open. His hat sits on the seat to his left, atop a folded newspaper. “Ah, Charles,” he says, as though Chaz is a long-lost nephew, and Chaz tips his cap in return.
“Good morning, Mr Olivetti.” He waits until the man has tucked away his spectacles and taken out his wallet before he inquires after Mrs Olivetti and the Olivetti children, who are visiting Mrs Olivetti’s sister. Olivetti hands over his ticket with a flourish and declares that the house has never been more quiet, nor his desk more productive, and as Chaz checks the date and station confides that he is likely to be malnourished by the time they all return, but at least the business is doing well.
The second carriage is a crowd of two. Lacey Stevens, off work early and headed for her boyfriend’s flat, has her long legs crossed and her elbows on the back rest, emphasising her cleavage as she makes obnoxious chatter at the man opposite her seat. Philip Grey’s lips are thin, and he snaps his ticket toward Chaz even as Lacey winks and extracts her rail pass from beneath the strap of her bra.
“Thankyou, Mr Grey. Morning, Miss Stevens.” The moment he has his ticket back, Grey makes a break for it into the third carriage, scraping through the concertina door and nearly losing his briefcase on the way. Lacey chuckles after him and corrects her posture as soon as the door springs shut. She digs in her handbag, withdraws a pencil and a thick book peppered with weeks’ worth of rail passes. She is already underlining and scribbling in the margins when Chaz hands her ticket back and wishes her good luck with her studies.
He pauses ever so slightly when he enters the third carriage. His left hand twitches toward his hip pocket. But then he is calling, “Late!” down the length of the carriage and plump Mrs Harris, four seats behind the newly-settled (and still grumbling) Mr Grey, slaps her knee and laments aloud that he has caught her out.
“But it wasn’t my fault, dear,” she burbles, quietly so as not to further incense the carriage’s other occupant. “Poor little Jackie went right down the stairs this morning on his trike – not hurt a bit, bless his soul, but shocked! He fair howled the house down.” “Poor tot,” says Chaz, taking her ticket. He peers at it closely for a moment, then makes a sound of disgust through his nose. “Printing errors,” he says, and pats himself down slowly for a pen he doesn’t have. He slips his hand into the left-hand pocket and withdraws not the wooden disc but a small silver piece. “I’ll give you a token. Mind you hang onto it, they’re easy things to lose.”
She rolls it on her fleshy palm. “Heavy,” she observes before she drops it into her purse. “I’ll notice if I lose that.” And then she is off again, cheerful tongue tripping all the way to the next station, when Chaz excuses himself to check other tickets. If his left hand lingers uncomfortably at his pocket, few notice, and those that do attribute it to the cold.
“That Mrs H has rotten luck today,” Vince mentions during the five o’ clock rush, when she fails to appear on her usual train once again.
“Yes,” Chaz agrees distantly. “She’s late.”
There's more to come, but I'm getting all adjshfahs about this section alone, so thoughts would be nice, guys, plz. I like the first paragraph but the rest feels very blah-blah-blah... so it's a good thing that Ash is just about ready to take over. I do wish I could break out of present tense, but we'll see how it goes.