He’s sitting in a car park behind the pub. It’s getting late now and even though it isn’t quite dark yet (at this time of year it barely ever gets really dark at all) there are heavy black clouds overhead and the lights from the pub doorway are shining brightly, casting shadows into the evening. It was raining all day so the ground is wet, the empty car park an archipelago of black tarmac islands scattered amongst the puddles. He’s sitting on a wall with his back to the building, one foot on the ground one tucked up underneath him talking on the phone to someone he hasn’t heard from in a long time. He’s an expressive talker. As he speaks he waves his arms around, smiles broadly, nods and gestures vigorously. All this riot of non-verbal language exerted even though the person he’s talking to can’t see any of it. He knows he does this. It’s a kind of a joke between him and his friends. “If we cut off your hands you’d never be able to finish a sentence,” they tell him. “You’d hardly be able to say a word.”
He’s glad to be outside, even though it feels as though it might start raining again any minute. He was glad when his friend called, it gave him a reasonable break from the people he’s out with and the slow, whining, impossible to follow conversation they’re torturing him with. Now that he’s out he doesn’t really want to have to go back inside again. He’s being deliberately more talkative than usual with his friend, pushing the conversation so that it lasts longer than it normally might, trying to put off the moment when he has to hang up and go back inside again. Why he came out tonight in the first place, how he got caught up on his own with this crowd, still isn’t quite clear to him, other than that he was asked in a way he couldn’t quite say no to. He’s not sure where the evening is going, only that, however it ends up it’s bound to be uncomfortable. So for the moment he’s happy just to talk, waving his big hands about in the cool night air as the clouds dip lower and thick, wet drops of rain begin to fall.
