Free Cronix by James Hider Page A

and divine witch, was still sitting, chatting now with her friend Becky.
    Glenn held up his hand as though instructing her to stop. She smiled, evidently pleased with her skills.
    “Oh yeah, baby, I’m gonna be somebody,” he slurred. “Amazing that you can tell all that just by looking at my right hand, isn’t it?”
    “Oh.” Cathy looked down, then smirked. “Shit, was that your right hand I was looking at? Oops, sorry, bit drunk.”
    He stared at her, uncomprehending.
    “It’s supposed to be your left,” she said. Glenn felt the cloak of the elect briskly whipped from his shoulders, the cold wind of the unfated masses envelope him. Cathy grabbed his left hand and gave what appeared to be a placatory once-over.
    “Okay,” she said, nodding. “No, no that’s cool. It’s not as pronounced on this hand…”
    “Does that mean I’m gonna be an IT manager instead of the first man on Mars?”
    “No, no,” she said, giving his fingers a consolatory squeeze that set his pulse leaping. “It just means that whatever is supposed to happen will just happen a bit later. But it’s still there.”
    Sitting now in the almost empty City bar, years later, Glenn winced at the memory. He leaned on the wooden counter, polished by generations of city gents' suited elbows, those monotonous, smart-dressed men who had nipped in after work for a quick one for the road. Cozy as it seemed, this was a non-place, steeped in the impersonality of the City, of lives lived elsewhere. A place to lose yourself, and oblivion was precisely what Glenn sought that late afternoon. He didn't pay attention to the man on the telephone by the bar, jabbering in Italian to a distant girlfriend, or to the brash young city workers celebrating a deal with over-worked bottles of champagne. And they paid no heed to Glenn.
    “Destiny,” he swore under his breath as the barman brought him his pint. He knew it was stupid, but somewhere, deep below his rational thinking, Cathy’s words had kept him going through the hard times: when he had run dry of ambition and hope, they were the fuel to tide him through the barren stretches. He took a swig of his beer.
    He hadn't eaten and the alcohol soaked quickly into his dark mood. He ordered another and drank it off before he could bring himself to open the pages of the magazine in his bag. He forced himself to re-read the painful words.
    "The self-financed junk of another bottom-of-the-pile, Turner Prize wannabe ..."
    The phrase seared his brain, the unwholesome realization that he had failed. He read on. “They say that if an infinite number of chimps were given an infinite number of typewriters and an infinite amount of time, they would eventually write the entire works of Shakespeare,” he read. “The idea for this self-styled open-air installation appears to have been dashed off by a lone bonobo during its lunch break, after one too many G&Ts.”
    The long years crushed in on him like faceless commuters: all the shitty jobs, the gritty determination that had kept him going for so long, but which now revealed itself to be have been nothing more than a sustained bout of self-delusion.
    Destiny. It had ruined Macbeth. But then he'd never understood Macbeth when he studied it at school: why, when the three witches predicted he would be king one day, didn’t he just put his feet up and wait for the crown to plop onto his head, instead of running around murdering everyone? After all, if it was all predestined, why make the effort? Or was that way of thinking precisely why his own promised encounter with Fate was running so far behind schedule? Was Kevin right: could a bloke with man boobs really have a destiny?
    He groaned, a guttural lowing sound. He glanced to see if the barman had heard, but the man was staring into space behind the faux ivory pumps. In the bar beyond, laughter erupted from one of the tables.
    Glenn's thoughts settled on the pile of scrap metal in the hallway of his tiny flat, the