The Call of the Siren

The Call of the Siren - chapter 2

Chapter 2 - Night Café

 They watched her. She could tell without seeing. Her ears told her as much through the relative clarity of their voices; clear when their faces turned towards her and muffled when they looked away to pick at their food or play with their drinks. Eleanor hid her face behind her fall of hair and lifted the thin paperback.

Just go away, she thought. Leave me alone. I don’t need this. Not today.

She knew they stared. They always stared. These days they stared with no disguise and no hint of shame. Whereas in the past they gazed at her with decorum, today they stare with undisguised want, their eyes seeing through the clothing she wore and assembling an image they wanted further proof of. Time had given her the ability to know their minds, giving her the virtual ability to know their thoughts, their dreams, their fantasies and any threat they bore her. She glanced up. Two of the three men watched her with cold eyes, one lowering his vision to the front of her jacket and fleece. She saw him swallow. Eleanor looked down, tilting her face away and thinking whether it might be wise to leave now, before the rain returned, or whether to leave with the rain, the drifting mist of droplets affording her cover. She glanced through the café windows. The wooded valley sides scooped down like darkened hands and merged seamless into the black sky. The few streetlights in the distance shone bright; out beyond the café car park and set into the gloom of the valley, their amber glow reaching her without the telltale halo of the rain. What life existed, beyond the café windows, drove cars and whistled past as streaks of cherry red or crystalline white. The mistake in her being there, deepened.

One quick glance was all it took for her to know their plan. She would make it no farther than the end of the car park before they approached. Their first words would be flattering and tempting, encouraging even, inviting her to accompanying them. She would reject their advance and they would change. The fingers of her right hand gripped the small book, her left clamping around her cup. The fingers trembled with the chemicals of her body, her mind crumbling into a confused mass of solutions and questions.

She glanced towards the counter and the manager looked away. He too unable to resist the urge to watch her sitting alone at a plastic topped table set for four. Just her, her book and her brown shoulder bag. Eleanor groaned and tried to disguise it. She covertly checked her mobile telephone. It told her, in plain text, of there being no signal in the deep valley that helped link the north of England to the far north of England. A lorry hurtled past on the trunk road the café served. She watched its multitude of red tail lights catch the misty plume of spray, the tyres sucking a path through the remnants of the last of many passing showers. The red lights grew bright, the lorry braking for the small traffic island a few hundred yards farther along the road. Beside the island sat a service station, and beyond the service station the road trundled on, passing the edge of the Lake District in its determined and winding progress south.

The lorry offered sanctuary and escape. The Cutter Café offered neither. By day the old café found popularity with motorcyclists; by night it intercepted the bored, the lonely and the sleepy, as they tried to justify their reasons for not using the nearby motorway. On the wall between the toilet doors hung pictures of the café from its glory days in the fifties and sixties, before the tarmac of M6 had cooled to steal away its traffic. Drag races with motorcycles and old-fashioned cars with proper wings and huge chrome bumpers. Men with moustaches and solid set hair. Girls in flared skirts and with hair no man would dare touch, for fear of it collapsing into ruin to spoil the night. A time of style. Eleanor glanced around at the sea of plastic which had encroached where once there lay wood. Plastic chairs and tables. Plastic stands for the menu. Squeezy plastic bottles of brown sauce and tomato sauce, and the chipped and stained white plastic tops of vinegar bottles. The lights above were cheap and they hummed a constant throbbing note that burrowed into her head. The café time forgot. The little roadside café that had, this night, intercepted three young men and trapped a single out of place girl. Once more she let the fall of her hair hide her face from the men, while letting her spy them from within its curtain screen.