Rhetorical Answers-Responses to Questions never before asked

This is an essay I was made do over the christmas holidays. The assignment was to go sit in a cafe for a while and stare out the window until you found a notable character and then you ask yourself questions about their personality by looking at them (Which sounds shallow I know but it was for school) and then basically make up a situation that they induvidually would be uncomfortable in (Not like a mugging cos there are prescious few people who would be comfortable in a mugging)

As I sat with a laptop in a cafe in the side streets of a busy city centre, trying not to look too much like an attention seeking novelist who insists that you need to be seen writing to be seen as a good writer, I was checking my email only to find a succession of unwanted spam offering Valium and a collection of other unwanted body enhancement drugs, I looked up and noticed that on the other side of the steam cloud produced by the waitress who had just gone by with a cup of a “Vente Double-mochalattefrappochino” ,or some over descriptive name for coffee to make it seem hip and modern and very, very pretentious, through the window on the other side I noticed a rather peculiar man.

I asked myself was it even an exaggeration to call him a man for he seemed to have the physicality and the downright clumsiness of a child who hadn’t gotten used to the stature he had much like after a growth spurt. He was dressed in a pair of bright lime green, tight fitting corduroy jeans and he had a great big florescent orange coat on. The thought crossed my mind that he may have been some kind of director of traffic or lollypop…man but I then thought that if there were any kind of exam or training session for that kind of job he would have failed it by somehow managing to slip and fall in such a way that he’d end up with his tie in his back pocket and his shoe in his mouth. Either way it seemed like that’s just what he liked to wear. His hair was jet black and so unbelievably greasy that the strands on his forehead clumped together and stood up in an arch shape parted in the middle. He was continuously rubbing and poking his eyes so I had assumed he had recently gone to have his new contact lenses fitted and hadn’t gotten used to the unbelievable irritation of them in the early stages which I thought was quite ironic because of the fact that the way to crystal clear eyesight is to poke yourself in the eyes twice a day for the rest of your life. The final and perhaps most interesting thing about this chap was he was absolutely covered head to toe in various kinds of bags. He had one general back pack that seemed just simply too big for any practical purpose, three satchel bags hanging down on either side of his waste and one around his backside, two of those pouch things that clip in trough your belt around his waist and one slightly higher around his stomach and finally he had several plastic Tesco bags filled with what looked like useless novelty junk tied into the belt loops on his again nauseatingly green trousers.

So when I saw him he was approaching from stage right inside the parameters of my own personal cinema screen within this coffee shop and he seemed to be struggling to build up the nerve to approach this bus stop on the left side of the window. He kept walking up to it and as he got close he would fake some kind of sudden realization that he would use to turn around and go back the other way for some reason as if he was just doing in the off chance that somebody was watching him. I couldn’t see if he was avoiding someone or something further down the road but eventually I realized he was simply petrified at the thought of going near or indeed sitting in amongst the other six of seven other people at the bus stop. He tentatively shuffled up towards the bus enclosure and as he did he would pivot from left to right on an axis while walking which reminded me of that van with the camera on top that swivelled around to look in my direction which I was getting the slightest paranoid feeling like it was looking at me. He eventually made his way into a corner of the bench where nobody was sitting and gave off a loud clatter as his bags simultaneously touched down and settled on the seat beside him. Needless to say the seemingly unfamiliar crowd all shared a look as if it were possible for him to be a kind of intruder in a public place just because he’s not exactly the same as the people around him, which seemed incredibly unfair to me. As he sat I could see that through the transparent glass pane of the enclosure he was eyeing the person to his right in a worried fashion as if he was afraid that she was going to take some useless object from one of his bags such as the Richard Nixon bobble head peaking out of the top of the wrinkled plastic. She kept shifting closer and closer to him, seemingly to her own distaste because more and more people wanted to sit down on the bench beside her as it began to rain.

It went from a light wind influenced drizzle to a deep penetrating wet and by this stage there were a good twelve people trying to hide under the canopy over the bench. I then noticed why. The bag man in the corner was clinging to the wall as if afraid of the surrounding people and as a result everyone else was keeping minimum of two feet distance from him, which did not help the space issue in the enclosure. Two more people skipped and splashed up, running from a nearby newsagent from the other side of the street when they realized there was simply no room anymore so they were reduced to waiting in the rain. The Bag man still stricken with fear began to make shuffling noises that everybody around his couldn’t help but turn around to notice when he then struggled to take out an umbrella and he passed it to the nearest person then continued cowering in the corner.

The bus finally came to the stop and the crowd of people piled out of the packed bus enclosure and into the bus and the two who had borrowed the umbrella stayed behind for a moment and placed it on the seat beside him and offered a nod of thanks to him. He hesitated for a minute as they left then quickly snatched the umbrella from the bench as if he had missed it greatly in the five odd minuets he was parted from it.

Time went by, busses came and went and the bag man remained sitting in the corner getting frightened when people got close, suffering unjustified judgment from all those who looked at him. It began to get dark round about seven o clock and the manager came up to me to say that they were closing up soon and it was my last chance to order something and they were closing up but I could stay while they were tiding up. I sat there sipping at my unbelievably overpriced bottled water that the cafe was nice enough to let my buy instead of any of the cheaper brands I could easily have got for that newsagent across the road it suddenly hit me that the bag man was still there out in the narrow lighted street lamp in the bus enclosure and I realized… He wasn’t actually waiting for a bus and it was the buss goers who were actually the intruders. Realizing this I then asked one of the waiters if he could do me a favour.

Out in to the now freezing cold side street walked a waiter with at tray of a selection of the warmest most pretentiously named drinks imaginable along with a hot chocolate and a blueberry muffin (Because nobody doesn’t like blueberry muggings). As I finished off the essay I was writing at the table which I then only noticed was disgustingly rickety, He looked back at me, breaking the fourth wall of my little personal performance. He raised glass to me and I to him then I left some cash on the table and went on my way.