Experiment With Destiny Read Online Free Page B

windows. It was too dark to make out any details but the silhouettes were few enough. He entered.
    “Usual?” asked the barman. Marcus nodded inside the collar of his coat, looking around to avoid the barman’s eyes. Reaching into his pocket he pulled out the battered open packet and took out his last cigarette. As the barman pulled his pint of bitter, he proceeded with the ritual of removing the cellophane and foil tab from his new packet, scrunching it into the old and crushing the useless packet in one fist, dropping it onto the side of the bar. Then he lit his cigarette, paid for and collected his pint and inhaled deeply, searching the shadowed corners for an empty table. He found one near a fruit machine that bleeped hopefully at him before launching into an annoying electronic jingle. Marcus sat down and sipped his beer. It tasted stale and watery, it always did. He remembered real ale and malt whisky. Such flavours were unattainable now. Not for us moles, he thought.
                  The jukebox jarred into life. Two skinheads were sat beside it, sneering at the untidy collection of ageing drunkards who sipped, cursed and argued over loudly in their shaded corners. The guitar riff sounded first, joined by the bass and then drums. Marcus recognised the style, late 1970s post punk, though this particular single was not amongst his prized collection of ancient vinyl. The vocalist was howling like a crude impression of a dog. London Calling by the Clash…Marcus had heard it before.
                  A pensioner, perhaps someone who worked in the local collieries at the time the record first came out, his grey, bristled face squashed beneath a stained flat cap, stood unsteadily and bawled drunkenly at the two skinheads.
                  “What do you know about music like this?” he slurred, his finger jabbing at the smoke-filled air. “You don’t know nothing, butty!” The skinheads stood and squared up to him as he swayed helplessly and prodded one of them in the chest. “You’re a disgrace!” he accused.
                  “And you’re dead meat, fucker!” The youth lashed out and sent the old man sprawling against the table from which he had risen. Glasses shattered and beer sloshed as the table toppled and the stench of ale became suddenly stronger. Marcus looked away, trying not to catch the skinheads’ attention as the barman moved in to hastily resolve the scuffle. His sympathies were with the pensioner, another relic of better days.
     
    * * *

II
     
    IT was dark when Marcus emerged from the Crown. He buttoned up his coat against the assault of the wind and turned along the road toward his bedsit. He walked briskly between the terraces that fronted onto the street, sometimes peering into their windows as he passed. He saw sullen faces, wide-eyed but lifeless, lit by the lulling hues of the evening transmissions. Opiate for the people, he mused. He saw lamps, tables, chairs and a variety of garish modern décor. Fathers snubbed their children, children snubbed their mothers, mothers turned their backs. House after house, terrace after terrace, Marcus saw people with nowhere to go, nothing to do and no one to believe in. Yet life went on. Normality undaunted.
                  He passed the graffiti-ridden community centre, dark and empty, then slipped from the lurid amber streetlights across a waste-ground that was once a cinema. Back under the surreal lighting he was again among the rows of houses. Across the street, above the rooftops, he caught the bright white gleam of the floodlights from Rhydycar Park, home of Merthyr’s perennially underachieving football club. He walked among the shadows toward the towering main stand and listened to the voices of the reserves echo around the empty terraces as they practised. Football was the closest thing to a religion these days, even if the Martyrs’ miracles were much less impressive than the