Lily has been reading Anaïs Nin. It's in her desk beneath the scrap paper. She has been reading way too much Anaïs Nin, and now tries to place together currents between people she has been reading about. She realises everything has the potential of sex behind it. She catches a smell and runs it through her mind for half an hour. At the traffic lights the man in the next car raises his eyebrows. Is it threat or invitation?
***
The drive to work and home again punctuated his days. That flat backwards stretch gave him a pocket in time where he could lay his mind flat like the road and let his thoughts expand. A few other cars jutted along the highway, all of them the wrong way, against the traffic. He crossed the imaginary line every morning, from a small town almost far enough away from the city to be called country and not close enough to be a suburb, out to the districts, the opposite way of the rest of the traffic.
Across the pastures that stayed green even in the middle of drought, he recalls a time when he thought of being a dairy farmer. He smirks a bit, keeping his eyes on the road. Good money but hard hours and now all the farms have been bought up by the big companies. Instead he ended up on a couple of acres with some fruit trees down the back and a nine to fiver job like everyone else. Oh well.
***
From his office he can look out of his window to the lunchroom, catching the reflection off the commercial grade fridge he can see who is in there on their break. He waits for Dorothea to come out at 12 noon on the dot. (Mondays at 11.45) Today she waddles down on cue in her red cardigan, pilling on the arms and such a forceful colour that it makes the rest of her fade. He counts the days since he last saw Lily. Not long enough, only last week he went and asked about leave accumulating. Was she here today? Normally he would catch a flash of her car breeze past the front of the office at ten minutes before nine, sometimes even find an excuse to walk across to the other side of the building to watch her walk across the rear carpark and come in the back door as she did every morning. She had a routine, her stride was always even and her head tilted slightly up. Effortlessly she would pull her security pass from her big red bag with her left hand, swipe it across the panel and walk through the doorway. It was a routine she had repeated so regularly that she did not even look to her bag or break her step.
He looks at her neatly pinned hair and skinny legs that stick out from beneath her coat. Once he had tried to describe it out loud in words. He had been looking at a digger that had been in an accident when he caught a glimpse of her eating lunch alone in the smidge of green left beside the quarry. Instead of words he just chocked and gave a cough.
***
Well, every day is Halloween around here. She gets out of the car and walks across the yard. The dust from the quarry gets up her nose straight away, she sucks it up, its just dust, and what is so terrible about dust? Everything turns to dust anyway, she works in the dust and it will turn into money. Then the money is dust, right? What then? Imagine, just a few more zeroes and she will be out of here. All that nothing will be turned into something... zero zero zero. Bang. Last night Jarod was drunk and Sally stayed over. They played loud music and she couldn't sleep, so she stayed up and wrote a eight hundred word email to Jo. She got a three line reply. Awake, she had stayed up reading old emails, following the snake chain that weaved between them, back and forth. His words were kind and grateful. She blinked, kept her feet crunching the gravel, walked through the door and through the corridors into the office she shared with Dorothea.
'Happy Halloween.' Said Dorothea from behind her computer monitor.
You are Halloween, she thought.
Someone had hung some paper Jack o Lanters in the hallway but beyond that she would not have noticed the date.
'Some of the boys are running around in costumes over in operations. Johno looks like Harry Potter' she said giving a snort of a laugh.
'Really?' said Lily 'Did any of the girls dress up?'
'Jamima's wearing an ugly orange dress but I don't think she did it on purpose. I need you to get all the end of month reports done by lunch time.'
'No problems.' Said Lily.
She had done it all Friday afternoon when the rest of the staff were getting drunk but had left the paperwork in her desk. She only had enough work to keep busy about half the time but had learnt early on it was better to shut up about it. She logged on messenger to see who was there, then pulled out a pile of scrap paper and put it in her intray in case any managers should walk past.
***
You've read this story before, right? Boy meets girls, boy gets girl. You know the drill. Of course you might be expecting more this time. Little clues have been left for you, tasty clues. For a while you'll get to know Lily and James, even like them. You'll want them to have each other. But will they? Well, probably. They might even love each other. She might just be a princess waiting for a prince!
***
'Hi Lily.' She glanced up from her computer, wide eyed a little surprised suddenly drawn away from what she was concentrating on.
'James. Hi.' She replied, watching him stand in the doorway 'No costume?'
'Don't really buy into it.'
'Too bad. You've missed a golden opportunity to run around like an idiot and go to the pub after work.' She replied with a light hearted laugh.
