Apparently Sue would have to endure the cold morning air of her commute a little longer: the entrance to her office building did not work. How can an entrance not work? Try again, Sue. The usually-automatic, usually-sliding doors to Sue’s office building appeared to be functioning irregularly, refusing to acknowledge her approach. Sue laughed for no one’s benefit and advanced, ready to be greeted by the doors’ normal hiss and welcoming split, but once again she came up close against the glass of the door and watched her reflection stiffen.
Sue ran through various second-guessings as she regrouped. It was definitely a working day and she hadn’t accidentally misread her calendar. This was definitely the right building, the same one as always, and these were the same doors she had sluiced through for nigh on seven years. She was awake. She was almost certain she was awake.
Sue planted her feet a little further apart so that her body might become a slightly more assertive shape. During a training day at work some months ago, a bright-eyed external consultant had breezed into the building and made all of Sue’s colleagues line up and one by one strike different poses. This was meant to inform or improve office culture, or customer support, or business skills. Something along those lines. He promised that after an hour with him they would all not only be able to physically impress a room but ensure that ‘clients, onlookers and interlocutors from this moment on will experience value-added comportment denoting frank and open dynamism’. She watched each of her colleagues attempt frank and dynamic standing, sitting down, handshakes, and she patiently listened to the consultant outline how they might improve. When it was Sue’s turn, by which time everyone was bored and fidgety, the consultant instructed her to stand as if she were addressing a room full of hostile negotiators. She did so, earnestly. The consultant tutted, then came right up next to her and ducked down, and Sue felt a hand tugging at her ankle chivvying her leg and foot into a new configuration. She kept her smile fixed for the imagined hostile patrons, and allowed her leg to be redirected. ‘Far better,’ Sue heard the consultant say, his grip still around her ankle, his bowed head at the level of her hip. There was a warmth in his voice that made Sue dart a glance downward, to see if he was proud of her, but he did not meet her gaze. Sue craned frankly, dynamically, earnestly at the top of the consultant’s head. The parting in his hair was so neat that long after the exercise was over, after the training day was finished, and over the course of the following weeks, Sue found herself compulsively thinking about it: that neat, clean parting in his hair. It intruded on her thoughts as she rode home on the bus, smoothing a seam into a bus ticket with the edge of her thumb. It occupied her as she took a shortcut through the park, following the desire lines that communally hemmed and stitched the official design of its squares of grass. She thought of the parting in that bowed consultant’s hair every time she passed a framing shop, or saw vapour trails carving across the sky. She couldn’t recall what the consultant’s face looked like, or what clothes he was wearing, or whether he spoke with any particular accent or what his name might be, but for whatever reason she knew the quality and definition of that parting in his hair would be with her until her dying day.
She daydreamed about the consultant’s bedside table. She could envisage such a table quite clearly. It would be neatly arranged with a variety of obscure tools dedicated to precision which he would apply to his body every morning. Some kind of emery board or sandpaper to buff any creasing traces of sleep from his eyelids; a burin to finesse every pore; he might floss his teeth and between his toes with a fine wire gauge. The parting put her in mind of awls and chisels.
This morning, confronted with the closed doors, Sue thought of the parting in the consultant’s hair, his clean hands clasped around her ankle, and marshalled her body into action. She shifted her balance, lifted her chin, and advanced towards the doors once more. They did not respond. Her shoulders drooped as she looked, hurt, at the speckled grey matting of the prohibited floor beyond.
It must be the case of some unseen, unknowable sensor misfiring, Sue thought, or perhaps something as simple as dust or other occluded gubbins jamming the doors’ mechanism. Certainly this kind of thing just happened sometimes – it was a glitch, an unfortunate error, and could happen to anyone. Sue tried again and this time she performed a pantomime swing of her arms, as if the problem lay in a lack of momentum rather than perceived conviction, but there was no corresponding twitch of recognition from the office doors, no elegant glide of metal and glass permitting her through. This was dreadful and obscene – a complete joke. Sue looked around. She hoped to lock eyes with a passer-by and establish the whole business as daft and forgivable or gently unforgettable rather than monstrous, but no one along the busy city street seemed to be facing her direction. It felt like she was being watched, and the uneasy heat or pressure that surveillance brings to the surface of one’s skin lay taut and coiling at her nape and ears, but as far as she could see nobody seemed to be giving her any mind. If anything all the commuters around her seemed to be pointedly not looking at Sue, hurrying past and pulling their coats more closely about their bodies. Sue returned to the doors and gnawed her lip, looking them up and down. Not even a CCTV camera to wave towards, hopefully, apologetically.
Sue pictured her desk upstairs beyond these unbudging doors, beyond the lobby, beyond the elevator’s familiar wrenching hiss and the carpet-cladded corridors. She imagined the boring, necessary details awaiting her there: her overwatered plant in its glum yellow pot, the faux rose-gold stapler that she bought in order to cheer up the place. She imagined the Post-it notes on her desk that had lost their gumminess and accrued a fluffy kind of silt along their edges. Another line delivered by the visiting consultant returned to her: The key to manifesting what you desire is to cultivate the feeling you want to experience. Sue shut her eyes and tried to conceive herself at her desk. The iambs and dactyls of the franking machine sounding down the hallway, the air-conditioned air brittling the surface of her tea – Sue felt her breath steady and, newly galvanised, she stepped again towards the sliding doors. They didn’t even flinch.
Sue brushed something invisible from her coat sleeve, extended a hand to the glass of the door as if to rap upon it and then, with a snarl, clamped her arm to her side and tried to take the doors by surprise, shivering forwards once more with an angled shoulder and a grim, set jaw. She made contact with the door and burred its surface with mustered force, but – and – that was all. It would not be bested.
Sue juddered back on an italicised heel, Sue-in-reflection shaking her head like a stunned, dispirited cartoon of a person.
She approached the doors again, no longer clear about anything, and allowed her forehead and the tip of her nose to press against the cool of their unyielding, unsliding glass. That feeling again of being watched. Sue’s reflection squinted at her, then she slid her eyes across the glass to the view of the street over her shoulder.
Opposite Sue’s office building, across a featurelessly busy rat race of a road, there stood a seafood restaurant. She was used to looking out at the restaurant from her office window. Used to it being there, that is, rather than properly taking an interest in it – just one of the unremarkable facts that upholster a working day. Sue had never considered the restaurant closely and she had never been inside – it was very overlookable, and after all she preferred to eat lunch at her desk. Recently the office had bought everyone little plastic sheaths bearing the company logo that you could slot beneath your monitor so that crumbs wouldn’t fall into the keyboard. Sue had never really thought about it, but now she felt quite strongly that a seafood restaurant in the middle of this non-coastal town was vaguely embarrassing. Looking at her reflection in her awful, clarifying, firmly closed office doors, Sue saw the salmon-coloured swags of the restaurant’s curtains hitched up about its windows. She imagined they were once white but had been stained by years of steam and kitchen-stink. If she stared in the reflection and really concentrated, Sue believed she could see movement from inside the restaurant. The white tablecloths, the dull shine of cutlery arranged on tables. Who went to a seafood restaurant for breakfast? Sue thought, disgusted at everything. Sue glared at her reflection. Sue glared at the reflection of the restaurant across the street. Sue saw there was a woman at a table in the restaurant’s window, or the shape and movement of a woman. The woman appeared to be waving, and Sue felt that she needed to be certain, so she pitched away from the unmoved doors and pivoted on her heel.
Although buses and cars and people streamed past it was clear that the woman in the restaurant across the street was waving at
Sue – staring, and waving very slowly and deliberately. By the looks of things, even at this distance and at this early hour, the woman was obviously enjoying a huge meal – she had a table to herself in the window, and it was laden with plates and dishes. Although Sue could not pretend to guess exactly what the woman was eating it had all the fresh pinks and whites and greens and chrome-sheened levels that implied some kind of seafood platter. Sue imagined oysters, langoustine; she felt the sensation of the sting and spritz of squeezed lemon wedges along the crest of her tongue.
Without thinking about it, Sue waved back.
The woman’s hand stopped, hesitated, then she was waving again but in a slightly different way. Rather than tracing an arc back and forth, Sue watched as the woman across the street in the restaurant window rippled her fingers one by one through the air. If the hand had been placed flat on a table, it would have caused a drumming sound. It was a summoning gesture, camp and delicate, unnerving and beguiling. Without thinking about it, Sue returned the wave in kind, modulating her own hand movement to match the stranger’s rippling gesture. She took a step towards the seafood restaurant, glad to have a reason not to further shame herself in front of the closed office doors, and as Sue lifted her foot off the kerb she noticed details about the seafood restaurant that she had never appreciated before: the grey fuzz of smudged chalk on its menu board, the dust clogging in its window boxes’ artificial plants. By the time Sue reached the traffic lights in the centre of the road, she was close enough to see that the woman was about her age, with a similar build and colouring. Her shoulders were slightly more rounded, perhaps, and that was surely fair enough as the woman was hunched over her far-too-early lunch. Sue could now clearly see that the woman did indeed have a luxurious and indulgent spread all across her table. The remnants of a meal, rather, as now she could see that there were piles and piles of discarded bones and scales and shells strewn across the plates and scattered cutlery.
Grunts and squeaks of traffic and the sound of distant horns tuned the air all around her as Sue kept walking across the road, waving and waving. She forgot all about the automatic doors just as they had forgotten about her, and with her head held unnaturally high so that she would be able to meet the eyes of the woman sitting in the approaching restaurant window Sue kept walking, waving at her advancing reflection. She was close enough now to see that the woman at the table had shelled all the prawns on her plate; in fact, as she drew closer Sue noticed that the woman had slotted each of their bright orange heads onto the fingertips of her waving, waving hand.
Photograph © Alice Zoo
