The boat was delayed. The wind blowing from the wrong direction, apparently. Jimmy Nair was trapped in a time warp of a waiting room. It was a soulless stark affair populated by uncomfortably brown hard seating on which morose travellers squirmed.
It was difficult to tell which was more depressing, the scene inside the waiting room or the one Jimmy stared at through the picture windows. Outside, the sky was grey. The sea was grey. The buildings lining the seafront were grey, as were the faces of the people walking along it. It resembled a scene from behind the Iron Curtain circa the Cold War, where, as numerous movies and TV series have shown, the sun never ever shines.
To ease time forward, Jimmy decided to conduct a little experiment to amuse himself. He scanned the room, looking for suitable lab rats. After some consideration, he settled first on a woman whose slender, somewhat haughty, face was framed on one side by a carefully arranged straggle of brown hair curving around a high cheekbone and, on the other, a roughly tied single pony tail resting on the pale pink pashmina draped across her shoulders. His second victim was a shaven-headed workman wearing an orange Hi Vis coverall whose bleary eyes stared blankly into infinity while lipless lips sipped absently from a ribbed paper beaker. His third choice was an older man of indeterminate years, somewhere between sixty and eighty. Only the upper half of his face was visible above the newspaper he held, spread open, in his hands. Despite the limitations of his view, Jimmy could tell the man had a cheery disposition from the gleam in alert eyes which darted left and right. Occasionally, one tufted eyebrow arched upwards, indicating surprise, shock, amusement. It was impossible to tell which.
Jamie occupied the seat beside the man in the coverall. ‘Hi,’ he introduced himself. ‘I wonder if you would help me out. I need some help in describing a scene in the book I’m writing. It’s sort of similar to the one out there.’ Jimmy nodded at the large window. ‘I’m struggling to get the description right. What colour would you say the water was?’
The man raised himself slightly from his seat and peered out of the window. ‘Grey,’ he declared.
‘And the sky?’
‘Grey.’
‘The same shade?’
‘No, lighter grey.’
‘What about the buildings?
‘Greyish.’
‘How about those people walking along the seafront?’
‘Miserable.’
‘Right, thanks for your help.’ Jamie left the man and sat down beside pashmina woman.
She shifted in her seat, moving a smidgen away from Jimmy, and recrossed her legs so the tip of a shoe with a nervous twitch faced away from him. He gave her the same spiel. The woman regarded him for a few moments, her aloof, vaguely suspicious expression confirming his first impressions.
‘Why not,’ she humphed after a pause. ‘It shall help pass the time, I suppose.’ Her clipped tones lacked any noticeable regional accent. She leaned forward, placing one elbow on her knee and her chin on a clenched fist. ‘What do I see? What do I see?’ she murmured. ‘I see a charcoal, desolate, post-truth landscape ravaged by the sweeping scythe of austerity. I see melancholy buildings that were once noble beings sagging under the weight of years of neglect and deprivation. I see hollow shells of human beings who are devoid of hope and light, pallid shadows wandering aimlessly through purgatory under a diseased sky. I see—
‘Thanks, that’s great,’ Jimmy interrupted. ‘Very descriptive.’ He stood up and crossed the room, escaped really, to slide into the unwelcoming seat beside the man reading the paper. Once again, he posed his question.
The man’s eyes flicked up from his paper, regarding Jimmy rather than the scene beyond the glass. ‘Ach, I don’t have to look to know what it is. It’s dreich,’ he beamed.
Dreich. One word. Picture accurately painted. No messing.
Footnote: Andy accuses me of sometimes being too obscure. There is usually a reason, a prompt, behind these short stories. The one behind this is, to be fair, probably not easy to spot. It was The Guardian’s Saturday Magazine, specifically the book review section. There tends to be an imbalance, with there being too many reviews of books featuring middle to upper middle-class lives, usually in or connected to London. In these worlds, characters often spout poetic descriptions of the things they see, their thoughts deeply profound. Reading more of the same last weekend got me thinking, Who actually speaks like this? If you were to ask a roomful of people to describe a view, how would they do it?
