X3 by Saunders C.M

Author:Saunders, C.M. [Saunders, C.M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

Switchblade Sunday

The city centre was bustling. Sunday afternoon shoppers, yummy mummies pushing prams escorting wide-eyed toddlers, groups of teenagers out looking for trouble, sad weekend workers on their lunch break. In this brave new world of ours, Sunday was just another day. No one went to church anymore, and most shops and businesses were open as usual. It was the only way to keep up with the times and avoid losing valuable revenue to your competitors who didn't give much of a shit about tradition.

Adam was hungry. He called in at McDonald’s, bought himself a double cheeseburger and large fries, and took his meal outside. There was no room to eat inside the restaurant, if you could call it that. But there was a space on one of the benches in the pedestrianized area, between a smartly dressed young girl smoking a cigarette and a fat man with his blue-veined belly showing feeding the pigeons.

Pigeons. Dirty sky rats he called them. Vermin with wings. Most of them hobbled around on cracked stumps on the end of their legs, their feet having been burned off from landing on electric pylons. Smart birds. He made his way over to the bench and sat down, laying his bag next to him.

‘Man bags’ people called them, half-mockingly. A fashion accessory popular not just with people who had too much shit in their pockets but also among the new breed of millennium men who actually cared about their appearance and didn’t care who knew that they cared. And what was wrong with that?

Adam was mystified that pride was considered one of the Seven Deadly Sins, alongside things like greed and sloth. What on earth was wrong with being proud of the way you looked?

Luckily, he’d long since stopped caring what the occasional philistine said or thought about him. They could put him in any box they wanted. All they were doing was limiting themselves, not him. He was comfortable enough in his own skin. He was successful, and more importantly in this increasingly superficial world where looks counted for much more than anything else, he was blessed with charisma and good looks. That can take you a long way.

He didn’t carry a man bag just to be trendy. To Adam it was an essential piece of kit, and he couldn’t imagine life without one. His was made from pleather. Plastic leather. Made in China. And contained his mobile phone, his wallet (which in turn contained some cash, credit cards, membership cards, business cards, and various sundry items such as vouchers and coupons he picked up in different locales), apartment keys, a notebook and pen, some aspirin and indigestion tablets, some roll-on deodorant, his MP3 player, a magazine (Esquire had just launched a handy smaller-sized ‘travel edition’ which fit in the bag nicely) and the new Foo Fighter’s live DVD he’d just bought.

So you see? Far too much stuff to ever fit comfortably into his pockets. He would have to carry some kind of bag, and his man bag was better than one of those horrid, environment-clogging plastic shopping bags.

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