The Accountant

He leans back against the train door with his birdy chin tucked into his chest reading the Financial Times on his mobile.   An empty takeaway coffee cup held upright in his other hand so as not to spill the dregs out of the tiny sippy hole in the lid.   His sparse grey hair is cut short and carefully brushed forward to cover the thinnest areas.   He wears large glasses with plastic frames high on his sharp pointy nose and their long brown wings  loop over the top his ears.  His ears are quite ordinary at the top but from the bottom hang very large flat lobes which rest against the side of his wrinkly neck.

For the first time this winter he wears his big grey coat which has lived in the back of the wardrobe since August of last year.   The collar is pulled up at the back in an accidental kind of way, and the long blue and red striped scarf slung around his neck  has ratty tassels on each end which hang past his waist. Underneath his warm coat he wears a white and red pinstriped shirt unbuttoned at the neck which forms a V on either side of his Adam’s Apple, his shirt is pulled tight over his stomach and in a series of folds and pleats at the bottom is tucked into his pants, where it is secured by a wide brown belt worn above his hips at the back but slung low in the front to accommodate his middle aged belly.   He wears pale coloured cotton trousers, the kind with large pockets on the outside of the leg, they fold and crease at his angles atop a pair of Kmart runners with a florescent orange logo stitched into each side.

At his feet is a sagging satchel containing a handful of unimportant paperwork, tax tables and the like, and in which nestles his lunch; two egg sandwiches and a small tin of sardines in tomato sauce.

He slips his phone into the pocket of his coat, and raising the coffee cup to his mouth sucks the last cold drops from the tiny hole and grimaces just a little. 

“Now arriving at…………… Pah… ran” comes the candied voice of the pre-recorded train announcement. The train doors make a bingle noise then open.  Tucking his long scarf out of the way he bends to pick up his satchel and steps through the crowd of commuters and onto the platform.