It was near dark, and the last rays of light shone orange and red through the thin clouds. The tall buildings of the city were sillouhetted in splendid disarray against the jangled horizon, and Drake Harley waited for a bus. He was going to work for the seventh eight-hour nightshift in a row, blowing out a lungfull of smoke from his one hundred and fifth cigarette of the week, and staring up at the endless sky, hoping to ignite the drifting sense of wonder that always made him smile.

      The bus drew up, Drake dropped his smoke and pressed his foot down on it, brushing the gray-white specks of fallen ash from the legs of his black pocketless trousers. He took an empty seat on the upper-deck and turned to stare through the smudged window for the forty minute ride, ready for the world. The clocks had rolled forward the week before and the spring evening was cold and fresh, the streetlights glowing amber, making Drake think of a new cigarette.

      Work for Drake didn't begin until ten-thirty, although he would clock-in almost an hour early because that's what the transport system dictated, leaving him with many precious and boring minutes in the staff room consuming machine coffee and cigarettes, glancing habitually through the shroud of expelled smoke to the cheap wall-clock, waiting.

      The bus stormed up the wide road, where grand houses converted into average hotels lined the sides, trees and flowers blooming to brightness in every careful garden, sliver leaves trembling in the wind, peripheral to the focus of the red and green neon vacancy signs that hung central in the windows. Drake past the stop at which he would have left the bus had he been going drinking in Max's bar, and sighed through his smile at a memory of last week's rum session, even although he knew that it had taken three days of various sufferings to arrive back at a feeling that resembled health. He checked the time on his phone.

      Noticing a crease in his burgundy work shirt, Drake made resolutions to be calm and confident no matter how idiotic and low a situation might first present itself. The following two days he had off, and that promise of time always made antagonising aspects of the job on the last night easier to accept, because somehow they became less serious, almost comic. Besides, Drake Harley didn't consider his work as a croupier to be the most significant aspect of his life's dream. But then just a few years previously, dreaming of his life, he had barely known what a croupier was.

      Shops were shut and closing, but the bars bustled with the excited talk and release of the Friday night free. A young couple ran with clasped hands across a busy side road, their frantic lips and glimmering eyes revealing their unknown happiness that flowed silent next to the steady growl of the old bus's engine. 'I need a more sociably-houred job immediately,' thought Drake. 'Otherwise, when the weather becomes t-shirt friendly, when this small bit of world becomes joyous bright and warm I'm going to be up all night getting sworn at in a windowless casino, sleeping through the best of the sun, generally unavaible for the good times.'  He grinned unconsciously and raised his hand to his mouth, taking in the scent of stale tobacco as he did so, and concentrated on other people's conversations and the movement of the streets, determined to avert his thoughts. For when the roulette ball spun, and the bets came fast, Drake's mind formed sweet letters of resignation. Listening to other people's conversations didn't help. He decided that he would rise early the next day, around two, in order to search for better work, and thereby take a step closer to an imagined sense of contentment that forever seemed to be sprinting away. 'Either that or I'll just get wasted again,  nicely mangled.'  He considered. 'But if I'm clever I can do both.'

      At that moment a colleague of Drakes boarded, a neatly-bearded Italian who had started three weeks before and who smoked finely scented rolling tobacco during his breaks. Tony climbed to the upper-deck with heavy, sullen steps, and made his presence known to Drake by lightly tapping his shoulder, appearing hesitant and unsure of what to say in his fragmented English. He raised his hand in a wave, said 'hello,' rapidly nodding his head as he did so, trying to smile, and sunk into the adjacent seat, searching side to side with expectant eyes. It had been hard for Drake moving to a new casino, and harder still had it been for Tony moving to a new casino in a new country. Tony had also moved into a new apartment with another Italian croupier, and Drake asked him about this, unsure whether to laugh or show sympathetic concern in reaction to hearing about a lack of hot water and mice feces in the kitchen.

      'Oh right,' said Drake, looking at Tony questioningly.

      'Yes,' Tony replied, 'I don't know what is the word for what we need.'

      'A plumber.'

      'No, it's the person for... who can fix the water.'

      'Yeah, I think you need a plumber.'

      'Ah, thank you my friend.'

      And with that Tony turned up the volume on his MP3 player and looked ahead, staring past the other passengers and into the reflection of light and stranger's faces that played on the front window. At least Drake assumed that Tony had an MP3 player. 'Could it be that a set of earphones and a hand movement in an empty jacket pocket had been a cunning ruse to avoid being worn down by an assumed obligation to converse in a language still very much foreign to him?'  He considered it unlikely, but worth considering nonetheless, and turned to gaze once again through the window, now beginning to mist in the corners.

      On the other side of the road and obese man waited for a bus, a cigarette pressed between his thin lips, his face flushed red as he stared with bowed head, counting the change that lay in his soft palm. 'He looks like a big heart attack, but I bet I die first,' pondered Drake, as the bus roared on, and veered round a sharp left corner onto Chamber Street.

      The bus had taken a different route than usual, and although it would rejoin the scheduled path half-way along Princess Street, Tony and Drake didn't know this, and looked at each other before quickly leaving the bus, close enough to the city centre to catch another. They stood in the doorway of a closed bookshop to light cigarettes, Drake burning well into his by the time Tony had one rolled, and it was soon decided that they would take their next bus from outside the train station. Tony fired up with a silver zippo inscribed 'Gratsi, Marie,' on one side, and they walked slowly on, past a man sitting on the hard pavement wrapped in a scruffy blue sleeping bag, past the entrance of a bar where the doormen were scrutinizing the I.D. cards of three youths with strange looks on their faces, expressing something between confidence and fear. On the road coming towards them a white limousine cruised smoothly, and a young woman was shouting 'woo, yeah,' from the open side window, her bare arms outstretched in the cool air, her fingers spread wide, her whole being craving recognition.

      As they walked along the way the bus should have traveled, they saw a policeman standing in the centre of a busy crossroad directing traffic, and Drake and Tony could see as they approached that the Bridges were sealed off. Fire engines, ambulances and police cars were parked up and down, but there was no visible sign of emergency. Drake and Tony turned left followed by a quick right and were considering the possibility of a terrorist seige being the cause of commotion, when Drake came within half-a-foot of being hit with a big German car. Tony had seen it coming and ran across the road to safety, which opened up the view to Drake - a block of speeding silver bearing down on him. The driver thrust his foot down on the brakes and blasted  the horn, and Drake leapt onto the pavement. The car drove on without having fully stopped, and surging from a natural hit of adrenalin, Drake drew in the last of his cigarette.

      'Close one,' he said.

      'Eh, what does this mean?'

      'I almost died but not quite.'

      'Ah yes,' Tony agreed. 'Close one.'

      The old street wound gradually downhill, and the few bars on either side, atmospheres of revelrey reverberating through their open doors, made Drake and Tony envious, that they too should be master of the moment, and drinking. At the foot of the road they passed the store where Drake had bought his first pack of cigarettes, ten Camel Filters, aged twelve, and he considered how far he had come since then, supposing that the change to smoking lights had been at least one positive in his personal advancement over the years.

      Approaching the bus-stop opposite the train station they looked to the bridge high above on their right, and saw emergency service personnel but could not see their purpose. They looked ahead towards Princess Street and saw that there were a lot of others waiting for busses, and they joined the disordered que near the front to no objection.

      'That boy'll be cold up there the day,' said a half-drunk old man to an older couple who both stood with white hair and small red suitcases on wheels. All three had the same general, disinterested focus, a sideline to the preoccupation of their private concerns.

      'At least it's been sunny, and it's a calm evening,' replied the old woman.

      Drake followed the direction of their eyes with his own, and peering through the darkened orange haze of dusk, he saw that there was someone sitting on a platform of the central pillar of the bridge, contemplating suicide, or pretending to in an extreme manner. Somehow it was obvious to all who saw that it was a man, even although the face could not be seen in any detail, just a sad figure in light-blue jeans and a red jacket sitting against the dark stone of the bridge's supporting pillar. Many others waiting for the bus either didn't notice the situation, or considered it too bland or intense to follow, staring instead at the direction the bus would come from and discussing the fact that it was two minutes late. One man looked at his watch, up at the bridge, and then cursed under his breath, rage in his eyes, as if to say, 'if this guy's suicide messes up my schedule I'll kill him.'

      Thoughts flowed through Drake faster and more profoundly than he could comprehend, and he wondered if this would be true for others who saw, if their expressions could ever adequately convey their true reactions.

      'Damn,' Drake said to Tony in a low voice. 'That's pretty mental.'

      Tony agreed, and glanced continually from the cigarette he was rolling to the man who was thinking of killing himself on the bridge, an affected and thoughtful expression on his face. As with Drake, however, this ponderous demeanour gave way every few thoughts to a soft and inexplicable smile.

      Drake's hand emerged from his jacket pocket with a new cigarette, and he looked round at the others in the que, doubting his initial surmise that he alone felt lifted from the mundane by the distant poignancy of what he saw. Tony gave fire to his rolled cigarette and kept the zippo blazing for Drake, who noticed and was intrigued by the inscription, 'Gratsi, Marie,' but didn't ask who or what it was about.

      'Is this illegal?' asked Tony, pointing to the man on the bridge.

      'Eh, yeah I think so,' replied Drake, who's forehead tensed for an instant as he sucked in smoke, 'not that the rights and wrongs of this life necessarily correspond to the laws of any given society.'

      'Yeah.'

      'If he kills himself he cuts his life story short,' said Drake, 'but he chooses the ending.'

      'He won't do this ,' Tony exclaimed, with an aura of confidence and secret knowledge that inclined Drake to agree with him, along with the fact that the man would have jumped straight away if he was serious, or would have sat high up in life or death contemplation somewhere less public if it wasn't simply for attention.

      Before their cigarettes had burned through, two buses arrived, and they took seats on the upper-deck of the first. Tony put in his earphones and gave no particular attention to the potential suicide, while Drake sat a seat behind and looked continually at the man on the bridge, who stirred, trying to find a more comfortable sitting position, and at those who stood trying to entice him to safety. Drake stared into the majesty of the moment, at the scene on the bridge, and almost smiled when a sense of the unknowable vastness of things entered his mind like massive streaks of lightning across a desert sky.

      Half-full, the bus pulled away from the kerb, climbing the gentle slope to the traffic lights where it would turn left onto Princess street. Drake turned his body into the window, uncertain whether he was merely a keen observer of human circumstance, or if he was morbidly waiting to see a person leap dramatically to their death. The bus shuddered into movement, edged forward in the line of traffic, and slowly took the corner. The man remained on the ledge and the journey went on, Drake asking himself if what he'd seen had been any more wisening an experience than listening to the mumblings of angry gamblers.

      The road continued in a straight line beyond what the eye could see. Big-name stores were on the right, modern shop-fronts on old buildings, and to the left, layers of architecht's dreams fought for attention, leading gradually to the castle, which appeared seperate and magnificent. Drake looked up at the illuminated castle and then down at a train that was creeping slowly along on the dark tracks below. In front, Tony looked out at these things with a burgeoning sense of familiarity. And although a vision of beauty in the scene permeated his every thought, sights that had a few weeks before ignited emotions of discovery in the promise of a foreign culture now simply meant that he was on his way to work.

      Drake unzipped his inside jacket pocket, checking that he had his name badge, because they charged you three quid for a replacement, then counted his cigarettes to ensure they would be numerous enough to last the shift, slowly realising as he did so that he was not going to need them.

      As they sped away from the city centre, Drake's feeling of joy transformed into a calm and confident resolution. Minutes later, the purple neon strip that lined the perimeter of the casino came into view above the low houses, the last clouds of day sketched faintly in the darkness of the surrounding sky. Drake and Tony left the bus, hands in jacket pockets, and walked through the casino carpark to the revolving door entrance.

      'Which game you prefer?' Tony asked, turning to look Drake in the eye. 'Blackjack or roulette?'

      'I suppose roulette,' replied Drake, nodding his head. 'Seems pretty random.'

      'Ah yes, roulette.'

      The receptionists greeted them with their customary second class welcome, and reminded them to sign-in as they approached the controlled gate.

      'It's alright,' Drake said, looking back at them. 'I'm only going in to quit.'

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