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The battered old camper van turned into the car park noisily stirring the gravel. The attendant pulled his green bobble hat down more firmly over his ears and approached it, absently jingling the change in his leather shoulder-bag.
The driver wound down the window. He was swarthy, dark-haired with two or three day’s stubble on his chin, eyes shadowed and hooded with weeks of bad sleep.
"All night." He said gruffly, with a trace of accent. Irish? The attendant couldn’t place it.
“Erm…” Mused the attendant and then shrugged. “A tenner, but put it over there, yeah?” He gestured to the far corner where the crushed stones of the car park were littered with broken tile and brick from a near-by demolition. The driver nodded and passed a crumpled note through the window. He rolled the camper to its appointed position and turned off the engine before jumping down into the puddles of the rain-soaked car park.
As the stranger stretched out his arms and relieved the knots and kinks of hours on the road he was watched by the attendants helper, a boy of about thirteen. The man retrieved a shopping bag from the passenger seat and the boy could just make out it’s contents, a stack of magazines, through the thin plastic.
The man locked up the van and started out across the car park towards the pavement. The boy saw the cover of one of the magazines pressed against the inside of the bag, “Big Issue” the masthead read. He was probably going into town to make a few quid out of touting them to the afternoon’s shoppers.
The stranger stopped at the pavement and raised his head, almost as if he was sniffing the air like a dog. He turned his head to stare at the boy across the car park. Even at this distance he felt the strangers gaze and he turned away quickly and scurried back to the safety of his guardian.
*
Vincent, the driver of the camper van, walked up the Dock Road towards the centre of the town. It had been a long time since he’d been this way and a lot had changed in the intervening years. Not that the place was unfamiliar. How could it be when every commercial district of every town in the country was beginning to mutate into facile carbon-copies of each other?
Vincent despised the convergence driven by the religious inquisition of corporate identity. The old brickwork and ornate stone decorations, full of the stories of the years, were smothered behind the primary colours of franchise branding or ripped out and replaced with soulless glass. Windows that once stared out into the street were blinded with old and stained chipboard and then further humiliated with tattered fly-posters.
He’d been down in Cardiff a few months back and had been waiting for a liason in a dark alley when he’d witnessed something that had lifted his heart. A man had appeared on the main street, stripped to the waist and barefoot. In his hand he was carrying a garden shovel.
Maybe he had been drunk. The man had walked the length of the street shouting wildly at no-one in particular and proceeded to smash in every glass shopfront he could before a policecar had come squealing to a halt and disgorged two coppers to put an end to his orgy of destruction. Maybe he had been drunk and then again maybe he had just let his spirit take over and done the right thing. Vincent liked to believe the latter.
He turned onto Market Street and registered his contempt with a gob of phlegm he spat onto a poster depicting a moody-faced girl. She was advertising the album of some band he’d never heard of. Whore, he accused with contempt.
Market Street was busy and full of shops and scurrying people. He was invisible here, he knew.