Barney
By samhennig
- 227 reads
‘What happened to your phone mate? That is absolutely classic’, Barney nudges his glasses down onto the bridge of his nose and stares over them at the phone he holds in his hand in mock amazement, pressing the little button on the side repeatedly in order to reveal the water damaged screen in all its backlit glory, ‘have you ever owned a phone you haven’t broken’ he continues. Barney is a large man; he was a rugby player at school where the pair had first met but hadn’t continued that pursuit. Now he worked in app development for a bank, or something like that, either way it involved him wearing suits and talking, a lot. ‘well I mean…’ said Rob half-heartedly, knowing that he didn’t need to bother with forming a full sentence because Barney would come straight back in with some comment before he, Rob, had a chance to release the entire thing from the cage of his mouth. ‘Look at it!’ said Barney, still moronically prodding at the button before decisively slamming the phone down on the sofa next to him and saying ‘anyway, what else is new?’. No sooner had he said this than he was engrossed in his own phone, fervently swiping left and right with his chubby index finger; either ordering more terrible shirts or looking through his incredibly important work emails about the latest ‘chat bot’ that would help to extract money from its users overfull pockets and put it into his instead. If that was what he was doing it had clearly been working for him up until now. The pair, Rob and Barney currently found themselves sitting in Barney’s house in the centre of London, a three-floor affair with an extortionate number of bathrooms, a loft conversion and even some (if admittedly limited) outdoor space. Barney owned this house with his girlfriend, a tall woman with broad shoulders who Rob didn’t mind, which for one of Barney’s girlfriends was a real statement. Rob wasn’t sure now if all Barney’s previous girlfriends could possibly be as awful as he remembers them being but even recalling their faces to his memory causes a pain that isn’t worth revisiting. ‘Well, not much, same old really’ said Rob wondering whether Barney would look back up, but he didn’t so Rob turned his attention to the gigantic T.V screen in the corner of the gigantic living room.
Barney tended to either be talking or ignoring other people who were talking which always left little room for any real conversation, usually this wasn’t a particularly fond trait but today it suited Rob just fine and the pair of them sat in a state of calm silence for quite a while, half watching some terrible film from the late 90’s and stuffing their faces with crisps. ‘Fancy ordering a pizza’ said Barney, eventually breaking what felt like hours of peaceful silence, ‘oh, actually I got an offer from…’ the sentence trailed off as Rob remembered that he wouldn’t be able to access the offer he had received by text earlier that day, and as usual it seemed that Barney wasn’t listening and was already in the process of ordering two extremely large pizzas from Papa John’s, ‘I will have one XXL double pepperoni and one XXL Hawaiian’ he said clearly and rather loudly down the phone, offering a prideful nod in Rob’s direction at the mention of the Hawaiian in the same way that a Barista nods when they successfully remember your ‘usual order’. Barney put the phone down abruptly and suddenly turned to face Rob, ‘look there is something I want to tell you, it’s nothing bad, but I just thought you would want to know’, Rob looked at Barney face-on for the first time that day, it wasn’t an unattractive face if a little ruddy. His lips are thin and his nose slightly upturned, but unlike Rob’s own face, the collection of what were on their own unfavorable features seemed to come together in a cohesive manner beneath a lid a of bright blonde, lightly curling hair. ‘What is it mate?’ said Rob without a hint of worry in his voice, expecting that as was usual Barney was adding a little extra drama to what would probably be some incredibly boring statement like “I am getting a cat” or “I got a promotion”, and in some ways Rob wasn’t wrong; but given the strange, distant setting that he seemed to have been switched to today, the news Barney delivered knocked him from his blind pollen collecting and back into the real world in a way that he hadn’t quite expected, ‘we are moving to Australia’.
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Comments
Nicely written. I don't
Nicely written. I don't really understand why the news is so shocking to Rob though - unless this is part of something longer?
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ah, ok - well perhaps you
ah, ok - well perhaps you could number them? Unless they're just random extracts. Easier for people to go backwards and forwards if they want
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