Memoirs of a Vending Machine by James Pollard

Author:James Pollard
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-01-03T05:00:00+00:00

Kinki Karaoke

It was now about 9.00 pm. Although Mike's situation was hopeless, he didn’t feel at all the pressure that he had felt earlier. At this stage, there really was no imperative to get home. As much as he hadn’t planned any of this, it was an education and he felt that he was experiencing a lot very quickly. He didn’t need to contact the English conversation company for two days, as the training began on Monday and it was now Friday night. He walked on from the car park of the snack bar to a corner where a small stairway led to the glass-doored entrance of a building that was closed for the night.

Next to it were a group of vending machines that sold cigarettes. He had inadvertently left his cigarettes at the snack bar so he decided to buy a new pack. They were so cheap it didn’t really matter. He purchased the smokes and using a packet of matches that he had kept from the snack bar, lit one up. Smoking slowly, he stared for a number of hours, sitting on the steps, looking very much out of place and yet attracting nothing more that the most fleeting of stares.

He watched people come and go. At one stage, a group of forty-something men, many of them balding and a little chubby, accompanied by several young and attractive twenty-something women, all slim, pretty and wearing office attire, left the restaurant on the opposite corner and gathered in a group outside its entrance. They stood in a circle and led by the oldest-looking of the group, loudly chanted "Banzai, banzai, banzai," (Hoorah, hoorah, hoorah) raising their arms and then letting them drop to their sides between ‘banzais’.

A pair of young girls wearing fluffy, clip-on bunny ears was giving out what appeared to be small individual tissue packets to passers-by. Girls in skirts that left nothing to the imagination and shoes that doubled their height paraded about inelegantly yet exuding a certain exotic form of cuteness. They were holding mobile phones with little blue lights and fluffy little bunny shaped things dangling down from the phones. Young men looking and walking 'just so' in fashionable suits moved in and out of the multitude of restaurants and bars lining the streets. Mike sat there mesmerized, as if he were watching a movie. He snapped out of it, though, when he saw three happy western-looking faces in the distance, coming towards him.

He squinted a little as he looked again to confirm that walking his way were three people of western appearance. Sure enough, a man in his late twenties and two women, possibly in their early twenties, were walking amongst the crowds in Mike's direction. He jumped up and startled a young woman walking along the footpath, who promptly frowned at him. Weaving in an out of the constant stream of people, he gradually made his way closer and closer until he was a little less than three metres in front of them.

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