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On the stairs, I count a fibonacci number for each step, stopping briefly on eight to right a picture frame that hangs wonkily above the banister rail, before rushing to the bottom and out of the front door. I hastily shut it, check it’s locked three times and walk-run to where I’ve parked my car.
Chapter Six
My head hurts, my throat is sore, I haven't showered, I haven’t slept anywhere near enough and the last thing I want to do is stand on my feet for eight hours up-selling shit comic books to naive teenagers. My working environment is not laid back, largely because my boss has control issues. He doesn’t trust me to do anything without breathing down my neck like an overweight vulture waiting to pick at the bleached bones of a long dead animal when everyone else has already had their fill. That’s what it feels like to be worn down by someone who feels inadequate and inferior to everyone else.
I’m at my car in less than ten minutes, which leaves me about fifteen to get across Brooklyn, find a suitable parking space, check the car is locked and get behind the till before the customers start piling in. Two miracles in less than twenty four hours might be pushing it slightly.
I check the mirrors, the seat, the dials and counters, set the clock, tune the radio, and check out the ghost like reflection staring back at me from the rear view mirror before taking a deep breath and starting the car. I feel like a casualty of war, rising up from the battlefield only to face death again in a different place. A normal, healthy human being that’s just been bitten by a zombie and is pretending for as long as she can that it hasn’t happened and she’s still okay, knowing that at some point she’s going to turn.
My stomach growls at the thought, reminding me I haven’t had any breakfast.
I’m never drinking again.
Alright, I guess there’s no need to be that extreme. I’m never drinking before work again.
Traffic is ridiculously heavy for this time of the morning on a Saturday, and I find myself unable to get out of second gear until I’m clear of Alice’s neighborhood and up into East New York.
When it isn’t other cars halting my progress, it’s traffic lights, construction work, an elderly woman at a zebra crossing, cyclists weaving all over the road, or any one of a number of other impossible to make up obstructions. I can’t help but feel like I’m playing Grand Theft Auto but without the immunity to run through them all.
Half way along Linden Boulevard my time officially runs out and I’m still a good twenty minutes from work, which, you know, would probably still be fine, if there wasn’t steam rising rapidly from the hood of my car.
For as long as I can I ignore it, I continue to drive, I look elsewhere, I pretend the gauge isn’t running red and I repeat equations back to myself in the hope it’ll go away. It doesn’t go away. The steam continues to spread, the gauge continues to rise, the panic seeps deeper into my body until eventually, as though my car is having some kind of nervous breakdown, it splutters, coughs and comes to a pathetic halt right in the middle of the road, the engine whining out like the death knell of a prize horse culled in its prime.
No, my car couldn’t possibly make the simple journey across Brooklyn in fifteen minutes, that would be absolutely ridiculous. Of course it makes sense that it would have to turn that simple journey into an obstacle course of the most advanced and challenging level, extend the duration and then collapse only half way through completing it with a seizure, in the middle of the road, with a hundred people staring at me like a rare museum exhibit nobody can believe exists.
I can’t think for the sound of horns blaring from cars trapped in an ever growing line behind me, and I have absolutely no idea what the hell to do. What do I know about cars? There are dials and counters and lights and levers but when they don’t work as they should, like right now, I obviously have no idea how to fix them. They could be stickers for as much good as they are doing me right now.
Steam continues to rise from the front of the car, a cacophony of horns refuses to temper its march, and then to add insult to injury as though I really need it right now, someone draws alongside the car and starts to bang angrily with a closed first on my firmly shut driver’s side window.
Can’t they see both car and driver are having a nervous breakdown? I mean seriously, are people that insensitive?
“Lady”, the voice says muffled by the glass of the window I refuse to open. “Lady, you’ve got to move your car.”
This is the last thing I need right now. Hungover, later by the minute for work, and half of the state of New York screaming at me to get out of the way.
“Lady”, the voice says again, “the car, come on.”
I feel like Michael Douglas in Falling Down, ready to shoot my way out of here and on to work, except I can’t even work out how to take my hands off the steering wheel and get out of the car.
When my cell phone rings, I can’t help but scream so loudly the man outside backs away from the car, both hands up in the air passively.
“I’m calling the police”, I hear him say before disappearing into a crowd of rubberneckers, gathered on the sidewalk to see what’s going on.
I must look like a monster rising from the deep as I finally prize my hands from the wheel and gather myself together enough to open the car door and begin to face what’s going on.
Unwashed hair, streams of tears cascading down my face, mouth curled up into a barely concealed snarl, and shaking like an alcoholic struggling through cold turkey, never have I needed rescuing more. But where’s my Prince Valiant to save me now, and, more importantly, would he still love me if he saw me like this?
There are some people that make getting out of cars look like an olympic sport, others who do it as naturally as walking, and then there’s me, who doesn’t so much step out of the car as ooze out and then manage to get her work skirt caught in some otherwise innocuous piece of metal, tearing a huge streak up the side. Honestly, I have never seen that piece of metal before today and couldn’t even guess what use it might have.
The upshot is this: In my haste to get out of the car, cell phone in one hand with every intention to answer it, I trip, spill, slip or fall, with as much grace as shit falling out of a sheep’s bum, rip my skirt on something that shouldn’t exist in the first place and land with my hands out to the ground and my ass in the air, thus smashing the screen on my cell phone into smithereens and flashing everyone who happens to be watching a cracking view of my panties, all in one incredibly pathetic motion.
When I finally gather myself together, crawling a large part of the way to the edge of the sidewalk and gulping heavily, like I might have just escaped the remains of a burning building, a dark shadow begins to loom over me.
“Miss”, an authoritative voice calls down to me. “Do you need me to call someone for you?”
Chapter Seven
With torn skirt held together by safety pins and grease stains all over my hands and face, I make my way through the Saturday morning crowds as quickly as I can, trying my best to appear normal, despite feeling utterly and overwhelmingly pathetic. If I wasn’t already over an hour late, and desperate to get to work to explain the reason for it, I could just as easily collapse to the ground here in a wailing mess of tears and desperation.
I rationalize this behavior by telling myself that as long as I get to work, Francis will understand.
Diagnosed with acute engine seizure, my car is currently being loaded onto the back of a tow truck, and will be taken to what I expect is the most expensive garage in the country for emergency repairs. I’ll tell him I had an accident, that I was unavoidably detained, and that despite everything else that’s happened to me this morning, I’ve never lost sight of the most important thing: Getting to work as soon as I can.
If Francis were a man with more imagination and a lot less cynicism, I might be able to invent a story about being caught in some kind of police chase and then being run off the road by the baddies in the lead car, and even if he knew it weren’t true he might be entertai
ned enough by the telling of it to be a bit more lenient for me being late, but Francis is not that man, and despite being surrounded by comic books in which extraordinary things happen, I think the only extraordinary thing that’s even happened to him is that somehow he managed to convince someone to marry him.
I turn onto Falcon Drive already out of breath. There is a sweat building up on the back of my neck that’s turning cold against my skin, and I can’t work out whether it’s just the excess alcohol making it’s way out of my body or because I’m literally terrified at what Francis is going to say when I finally arrive, in the state I’m about to arrive in.
The time for changing my mind has passed. The time for going the way my car has, on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance, a pair of sexy medics attending to my every need, not even a passing thought now, if it ever even was. To be honest, if anyone was going to be called to attend to me, or the part of me that was left after crawling pitifully like a scuttling cockroach from what the mechanic took great pleasure in reminding me was an avoidable mess, it would have been men in the wrong kind of white coats.
The shop has a full glass windowed front, stencilled with the kind of cut out sticker decorations that large comic book companies provide in exchange for the constant advertising, and it’s through the flowing red cape of Superman that I see him, even more red faced that I expect, eyes narrowed and directed at me like Cyclops’s laser sight, clearly about to explode.
I gulp, something I never thought anyone actually ever did in real life, flatten down the front of my skirt, which does nothing to alter my appearance apart from transfer some of the grease stains that I still have on my palms into the dark fabric, and then prepare myself as best as I can for the slaughter.
The tinkle of the bell above the shop door signals my arrival with a low, dribbling sound that perfectly represents my confidence. Behind the desk, his Ramones T-shirt one size too small to fit him well, Francis looks like the boss from a forgotten 80s video game. As is usual at this time on a Saturday, there are several teenagers flicking through comics they will never buy.
