Broke-Ish [Completed]

Chapter 10

For less than the price of a Big Tasty, yes I'll go large, meal I am on a coach from Wolverhampton to London. My head is leant against the window with the bag I borrowed off Yaz occupying the aisle seat to deter anyone from sitting there. The zip is struggling to contain the clothes inside and the thread is fraying, threatening to rip each time we go over a pot hole. There's an almost definite possibility that it won't survive the journey unharmed but I remain hopeful.

I am four hours into the journey so you might be fooled into thinking that I'm nearly there but I'm not, I still have another hour and a half to go. This is because coaches were created in Satan's basement then sent to Hades for training on just how exactly to bring its passengers to the point of despair, I reached there about two hours ago and I hate it here. I made a chicken and coleslaw sandwich at home and brought it with me for the journey. The bread had a tiny spot of mould on it but I just picked it off assuming the bread itself would taste the same but that's not even the problem. The problem is, is that I ate it before I even got on the coach – partly because I was hungry but mostly because it was there, so now I'm wasting away. Not only am I hungry but I have spent the majority of the journey actively avoiding eye contact with the person sitting in the seats adjacent to mine.

He approached me at the coach station while I was sitting on the chipped painted seats minding my own business and asked me something. I took my earphones out in reluctance so that he could repeat himself. He wanted to know if I, Olive Ellis, wanted to sit by and get to know him, strange man I'd just met at the coach station. I looked down at his buttoned up tracksuit bottoms, inches short of his ashy ankles and brown church shoes. I knew enough. No, I did not want to spend the next five and a half hours getting to know each other, I didn't want to spend another second interacting with him. I smiled and told him I would be watching some films I'd downloaded then put my ear phones back in. He didn't move straight away, just sort of stood there processing the rejection while I changed the playlist on my Spotify. The coach arrived shortly after. Destination: London Victoria.

You see, I have been going about this all wrong. I have been seeing local men, at local places with their local money when really I should have started with London. London, is paying £4.50 for glass of orange juice at a bar poured from a 69p carton. It's having to rent a room in some random couples house because you can't afford your own, it's having to rent out your spare room to a random person to make ends meet. London is flash cars and unpaid parking tickets. It's multi million pound apartments and homelessness. London is reckless and grand, overpopulated, and desolate. London is where it's at.

This evening I will be meeting with JonTe310 or Jay he said to call him. We messaged back and forth for a few days and the conversation flowed surprisingly well. When he asked if he could call me my obvious answer was yes, I was well prepared and don't you just love scheduled phone calls. My phone updated over the weekend and with it came all too frequent news notifications that for some reason they thought I would be interested in, I wasn't. But having a brief read over them at least puts me in the know about what exactly is going on in this world outside of my little impoverished bubble. Our conversation was brief, without any awkward silences, I kept my accent as mile as I could and there was enough flirty banter for me to agree to meet with him. Does he know I am traveling for 5 and a half hours on a hell carriage? No, that would make me look desperate and I'm not sure if desperate is the right word to describe what I'm doing because I don't actually know what I'm doing. I told him I was from Northampton or was it Milton Keynes, could have been Watford. I'll need to check that before I arrive and I don't know what I'm going to do about my accent, I mean a shore phone call was fine but any longer than that it will betray me within seconds. I'm definitely not up to the task of faking an accent all evening. I tried it for a school play once, had to pretend I was from Australia and I just ended up sounded like I did when I first got my tongue pierced and that's not the look I'm going for tonight.