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This isn't finished yet but I wanted to post it anyway....
The car park at the roadside café was only partially tarmaced. The rest of it was a mixture of dirt, mud and loose gravel. The tyres of the trucks and cars that pulled in made a wonderful crunching sound as they rolled over the gravel, moving onto a softer, almost gentle sound as they slowed on the dirt, then down to an almost silent stop at the back of the car park where the tarmac was.
The owner had planned to cover all of the area, and then have separate parking spaces painted on in bright white paint like he saw at all the fancy restaurants in the city, but as was so often the case, the money had run out. This was the same reason his loft was only half boarded out at home, the elaborate Japanese garden design was currently in development stage and the extra bedroom was still on the drawing board.
This was also the reason why his wife had left him and run off with an investment specialist from London. The last he had heard of her was when she called him from a hotel room in The Maldives to ask for a divorce. He had agreed and then drunk a bottle of Jack Daniels Tennessee, half celebration, half dejection.
Still, in spite of it all, the café was opened the next day, and every day after just as it had been for the past 15 years. He had found some comfort in the eyes of a waitress 10 years his junior but the novelty of that had worn off pretty quickly and he decided that he was better off on his own, with his tropical fish and his new found hobby of making his own wine. Of course this had an inevitable side effect when combined with abject loneliness, a habit of drinking quantities of his produce every night.
But today was going to be the first day of the rest of his life.
His Decree Absolute had landed on his doormat yesterday, he had spent the night looking through old photographs, feeling sorry for himself and getting monumentally wasted. But for one reason or another he had woken with a clear head. Not even a hint of a hangover when normally walking past a pub left him feeling a little nauseous the next morning. He had walked downstairs and cleaned the empty bottles away, then gone to the shed where his home produce was kept and poured the demi-johns full of fermenting wine down the drain.
A sense of a new beginning washed over him continually all morning. He felt a new vigour burning in him, a new desire to live life, a liberated sense of himself and what he could achieve if he set his mind to it.
First day of the rest of his life.
On this particular morning, a cold November morning, the usual suspects were in the café. A couple of truckers on their way up to Glasgow and Sunderland respectively, two suits on their way down to London. Young lads, couldn’t have been much more than twenty, northerners, liked their fried breakfasts. It was obviously the first time they had been let out of the office on their own because they were giggling like a pair of schoolgirls. Old Ted sat in the corner reading the Guardian, still thinking that people cared what he thought about world affairs. Flo was sat at the counter reading some trashy romance novel she had bought from the church fete for 25p, occasionally she would wipe away a tear, or hold the book to the chest and sigh deeply, secretly longing for a fraction of the romance in the novel to enter her unhappy life. Instead she took the money from the punters, wiped tables clean and brought a cheery smile to the place, whatever was going on in her own life. Even when her husband had died, she had been in work the next day like nothing had happened, big smile across her face albeit not quite as bouncy as she usually was, but that was understandable at least.
It was 8.30, or thereabouts. A couple more truckers had just walked in and ordered “Eddie’s Special Breakfast”, named after the owner of the establishment and inventor of the breakfast, Eddie Williams, when suddenly the doors burst open. In rushed a young man, ragged and out of breath. Eddie didn't know it but the first day of the rest of his life was also going to be his last.
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