The week continues - a short story and some thoughts

my new job continues fine

this week i have been supervised in performing two operations both laparascopic, one is a sterilisation and the other the removal of an ectopic (born outside the womb and life-threatening) pregnancy. Both went well and im hooked on surgery now. Ive already booked a surgical skills course next month and will be sitting my first exams in march (it takes 3 goes on average to pass them but ill try and make it 2 as they cost 320 quid a go.) What does this all mean - im continuing with my career and its heading in an exciting direction with no distractions (well no serious ones anyway)

In the mean time heres a short story i wrote a few years ago which one night find amusing/interesting/dull as dishwater.

You’re sitting in the end carriage of the Inter-City train, stomach already burning from the second cup of black coffee, the first bought at Bristol Temple Meads and the second from the buffet car, just getting juiced up for the night.

The book is interesting but not enough to stop you noting the girl a few seats down tapping things into one of those electronic diaries, looking occasionally puzzled and writing something into a ledger. You can only see her between the head reats of the seats in front, but the view is enough.

“I’m not getting on a bus”’ you suddenly hear from the Welsh-Lass in the corner. The train’s going to Paddington you see, and you know as you hear the odd word, ‘Camberwell’, that she’s meeting someone that night in London.

You guess judging by the look: late teens, centre-parted-straight-down-to-the-shoulder-blades, blonde hair that she’s either meeting her mum or a bloke. Of course, being male yourself you bet it’s the boyfriend, and you play over in your mind what her night in London will be like. No, not the sex, but the arguments, the recriminations… she’ll be angry at him for dragging her up there. But you know when she first sees him that she’ll be all smiles and laughter. No, the first bitching will start in the taxi from the station. He’ll have forgotten to do something or will mention that he went out the other night, something he forgot to mention in his most recent ten-minutes-nightly, half-interested phone-call from the pub. She’s touching up her makeup now…maybe she’s getting off at Reading.

But even as you’re thinking this, your eye’s flitting over to the other girl – she’s older, perhaps, 29,32. She’s lot easier to watch as she doesn’t notice you looking at her, so engrossed is she in her clumsy-whole-handed grip writing, scribbling in her ledger. (Welsh-Lass is now brushing her hair, a trial run perhaps for if and when she gets off in London.)

The other woman is more tomboyish, cargo-pants instead of spray-on black polyester, surrounded by what look like fragments of a manuscript – well there’s writing on them …you aren’t sure if it’s hers or someone elses.

She’s wearing a green/white t-shirt. Again not the usual cheap cotton worn by Rhianne (let’s call our Welsh lass that shall we?) but looser than a crop top, with the slightly fuller breast of an older woman. She’s got shortish blonde/brown hair you see more than her face, she, still poring over the fragments, and when you do see her face, it’s there frozen, locken in concentration.

Scenario 1: – she’s tanned, and her style is that of a smartish, older student world traveller – so she’s kept a diary of her experiences on the electronic-thingy (which she still keep s referring to and seems now to be transcribing the contents onto patterned paper, to friends and unknowns like…all the sights and sounds and sensations she recorded whilst in the Outback, or taking those can’t-fail-but-be-natural haunting photographs of the orphaned Penomh Penh/ Calcutta/ Mbabane children, clutching the biro given to them to make them smile.) But she seems a little more pensive than that – something more creative perhaps?

Scenario 2: she’s been travelling, but is writing a book on her experiences (Welsh-Lass is now listening to dance music on her personal stereo, but keeps rewinding and fast-forwarding, the tiny sounds on the edge of hearing like a mosquito on the inside of the bed-net.) The intensity with which she looks at those pieces of paper suggest this, even though some of them are folded over, as if taken out of a small envelope – perhaps a secret correspondent…but why has she pulled out the electro-gizmo again?

Scenario 3: - she’s in fact a modern-day female Indiana Jones, small-time archaeologist decrypting the scribbles on the papers, hastily copied down from outside a tomb in Ulan Bator.

As the train pulls into Reading she prepares to get off, and all the time all you want to to do is to ask, to know what she was writing…but this is England…random approaches to solitary women on a night train will turn some heads, get unnecessary questions asked. You almost get the courage up to slip you email address into the top of her rucksack as you bump into them, but before the chance arises she is off the train, down the platform and off into the night…you never bothered whether Welsh-Lass got off the train.