For part one see here.
As he made the slow and dejected walk home Tristan was drawn towards the bright lights of the bar. Entering he surveyed the examples of lost characters and hopeless drunks that lay slumped over tables and propped against the bar. The room was a dark brown; a fitting colour for a location so soaked in dullness and inaction. Balding men with bright red noses watched their surroundings through distorted glass and aged women cowered in corners with half finished bottles of wine; their glasses untouched. These were Tristan's peers. The people that gave up. One of the men that had succumb to hair loss and clown like protrusion caught his eye. A retired astronomy professor named Joseph Meakin stood and waved to Tristan to grab his attention and beckoned to one of the many empty seats surrounding his centre table. Tristan sidled over to the table and dumped his books.
"I'm just going to get a drink."
"Okey dokey" Joseph leant over the table and greedily shook his hand, "I'll have a pint."
After a speedy serving from the unoccupied yet still disgruntled barman Tristan returned to the table to plonk the two beers down. Froth spilled from the top of each glass and settled into liquid on the wooden surface. Tristan began to play with the spill with his finger making arches and eights on the table as Joseph began to divulge his regular misgivings.
"The wife called today."
"I don't think you can really call her that anymore, Joe." Joseph's wife had left him months earlier and after a quick divorce had married a friend of their sons. This had left him alone on the space station as his entire living family now resided on the new colony on Ganymede. It was around this transition that Tristan had first met him in the bar and on a lonely night they had bonded over a disinterest in each others' stories and a desire to air their own greivances.
"Well it would be rude of me to call her, simply, 'bitch'... Anyway, she called me today. She wants to know when I will be sending the rest of her things. I mean should I really be expected to organise that. She left me. This is her responsibility."
"It has been months now, maybe getting rid of her things will be therapeutic." Tristan's finger kept going round and round the spreading puddle as if it was the needle on the record of the conversation they seemed to have every time they met.
"Yeah maybe. It would be more therapeutic if I just burnt it all."
"What are you talking about? Where will you find a place on the space station where you can burn things?"
"Oh you know what I mean. Maybe I will wait till the moon gets terraformed then go down and burn it all in front of her."
"Well good luck." Tristan drew a packet of cigarettes from his bag and, after throwing one to Joseph, pressed the button on the side to 'light' it. "You know they are starting to say that these are bad for you, like the nicotene does something to your brain."
"Makes it happier?"
"Yes... I'm sure thats what they meant.... I am not happy, you know."
"What?-"
The bar suddenly went from brown to red. Hidden lights emerged from the walls as an alarm sounded over the startled voices and rushing feet. Their eyes turned from each other to the televisions on the wall that were displaying the words "EMERGENCY ANNOUNCEMENT ABOUT TO BEGIN". Joseph was gripped by fear, the last time that this happened the spacestation was battered by asteroids that had been flung around the planet unexpectedly. Over a hundred people had been killed that day. He fled leaving Tristan to marvel at the screen. Something struck him as the image of the familiar newsreader came into focus. This was not going to be a bad day.
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