IN THE REALM OF WISHFUL THINKING #1.
She walked into the room thinking of nothing but getting the job. Her four year-old son, her mortgage repayments, her ex-husband – all were banished to the shadows. All that mattered was the job and the money that would lead to a comfortable future, where she wouldn’t have to dance topless around a greasy pole being yelled and panted and clawed at by drunken men in cheap clothes.
“Miss Ward, thank you for coming. Please, sit down, make yourself comfortable and we’ll begin shortly.” The man’s smile was shy, awkward, and she sensed that he hadn’t conducted many interviews. He was lean and attractive, with a slightly lazy left eye. His suit was an expensive one, and she knew immediately that beneath the desk his shoes would be polished like glass. He was the antithesis of the customers at the Golden Pole, who tended to be fat and plain and wore their desperation like a shabby uniform.
“Thank you, Mr Beale,” she said, sitting and smoothing down her only good skirt, the one with a tiny slit up the left hand side, to show just the right amount of thigh and stay on the right side of good taste.
“We’re waiting for my colleague, Miss Ward. Mr Bannister has just nipped out to the gents.” That smile again, and a little boy look in his eyes that said that she already had him, and if she kept her cool the job was hers. This man liked her: her face, her body, her mind. If she kept him sweet, she was in. She returned his smile, casting her eyes coquettishly downwards as she did so.
The door opened behind her, then quietly closed again.
“Ah,” said the interviewer, “here he is, our Mr Bannister.”
A shuffling of short footsteps on the grey-carpeted floor. And a small rotund man drifted into her peripheral vision from the right hand side, and she knew that her chance had gone before she’d even had a second to taste it. When Bannister- fleshy-faced, pot-bellied, shuffle-footed- moved to the front of the room and saw her face, his lascivious grin said more than she ever needed to hear.
“Excuse me,” she said, refusing to let the sound of the tears that would come later into her voice. “I have to leave.” Then she stood up, turned, walked to the door and out into the corridor. Leaving Bannister and Beale behind in the dry heat of her passing.
Beale she would never see again; Bannister she would thrust her hips at that very Saturday night. He would be sitting drinking and sweating and leering from his usual spot at the bar in the Golden Pole club, and beckoning her over to push crisp 20 pound notes into her silver G-string.
IN THE REALM OF WISHFUL THINKING #2
When she left the offices of TAB Legal Services, she went straight to the nearest bar. It was a place she’d never been into before, a small dive in the East end of town: the rough area. It was just after midday, so the clientele were the type of people who started drinking when the pubs opened at 11, and didn’t stop until they were either thrown out or last orders were called. Old men in shabby knee-length coats and dirty tweed hats, old-young women who drowned past relationships in glasses of cheap whisky, unemployed labourers with big scarred hands, sad eyes, and sun-weathered faces. She knew them all. These were the people who frequented the Golden Pole; perhaps not these exact faces, but ones just like them. The sad and the lost and the desperate. The ones that society had shrugged off like a winter coat in the sun.
A short underweight barman with a glass eye walked slowly up to her as she took a stool at the bar, lit up a cigarette, and tried not to cry. “What’ll you have, love?”
“Vodka,” she said, without looking him in the eye. It was something she practiced at the club, this minimum eye-contact. If you didn’t make a connection, people tended to leave you alone to do your thing.
A young man in oil-stained denims walked up to the jukebox in the corner. He leaned against the machine, bracing himself against it with one hand, and perused the play list. After a short while he pushed some coins into the slot, pressed some buttons, and walked away.
When the music started she felt lost all over again, and wished the barman would hurry up with her vodka. It was a song called Tonight, Tonight, Tonight, by The Smashing Pumpkins. Her theme tune at the club, the tune she danced to first every night: her opening number. Tears sparkled like fake discount store diamonds in her eyes, and she wiped them away, looking at her ghostly reflection in the mirrored tiles behind the bar.
The song played on; the man who had chosen it glanced at her and grinned over the rim of his pint glass. She knew his face from the club, and realised with a crawling horror that she had once slept with him after a tough weekend shift. He had offered warmth and companionship, but had supplied only a cold coupling on the back seat of his truck. Why couldn’t anyone see her as a human being? If a single man would only pause for a second and look beyond his own lust, they might both see a route through the darkness.
Shame and guilt and a sudden self-awareness flooded her senses, crushing her mind and disassociating her from her own body. She threw a five-pound note on the bar, ran from the pub and back into her life, knowing that she had been stupid to even consider escape.
*****
The young man in the oil-stained denims watched her go, the smile dying on his lips. Perhaps he had misjudged the situation, made one of his usual ham-fisted mistakes in choosing that song, her song. But when he had seen her there at the bar, her eyes shining like liquid silver and her face pale and wan in the subdued barroom lights, he had recalled their night together in detail: her soft, silken skin; the way that she had almost wept when she came. And he had realised that he should never have let her go.
But the time had passed now. Things had moved on. The moment lost, he finished his drink and went back to work, feeling like he would never find a route through this darkness.
THE END
By Zed