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He watches me like a hawk as I approach the desk, my eyes lowered meekly.
“Francis”, I begin.
“Enough”, he says, cutting me off. “No more excuses, no more stories, no more last chances.”
I lift my eyes to look at him, hoping that he’ll have some compassion if he sees the state I’m in.
“I had to call Greg”, he says, looking me up and down with his beady eyes. They are eyes that remind me of Mike’s, black like lumps of coal and as emotionless as rounded discs of marble.
Greg waves apologetically from behind a stack of comic books.
“I had an accident”, I try to explain.
Francis lifts his hand into the air. “You’re fired”, he says plainly.
A group of teenage boys listening to our exchange begin to snigger.
“Fired?” I repeat back to him.
“Sacked, dismissed, discharged, laid off, contract terminated”, Francis says. “I’ve already collected your things.”
He pulls a box out from under the desk and slides it across the counter to me. It contains an Iron Man mug, a selection of pens and pencils, a drawing pad and a novelty eraser shaped like an erect penis he’s always complained about me having.
“Please, let me explain”, I say. “My car broke down, and then I dropped my cell phone.”
I have to stand out of the way and wait while he serves a customer. I can’t help disapproving of the comic book choice, but It’s definitely not the right moment to bring it up.
“I couldn’t phone”, I continue. “I got here as fast as I could.”
“Greg lives in Harlem”, he says. “He got here twenty minutes after I called him.”
Fuck Greg and his advanced level timekeeping, I ran six blocks in twelve minutes.
“And he isn’t dressed like that”, Francis adds haughtily.
“I was going to clean up”, I say.
“When, exactly?”
“Now”, I say. “I can be ready in five minutes. You can send Greg home.”
Francis pushes the box towards me again, “It’s over, Penny”, he says. “I’ve already taken your name off the roster.”
“But I need this job.”
Francis stretches his hand out towards me, palm up.
“Badge”, he says, coldly.
“Don’t do this”, I say.
“Badge”, he says again. “That’s company property. A company for which you no longer work.”
I jabbed my thumb three times putting my work badge on this morning while rushing quickly through advancing pedestrians, there is no way I’m going to let that be in haste.
“I’ve been here for three years”, I say in a final attempt to salvage something from this disastrous morning. “I’m a good worker.”
“It’s over”, Francis says. “Don’t embarrass yourself further by making a scene.”
I can’t believe this is happening. I can take the car having a heart attack, but not this. How the hell am I going to afford my apartment if I haven’t even got a job? Francis still has his hand out and still I’m refusing to hand over the badge. I feel like a renegade police officer forced into giving up her status because she’s made one mistake too many over what could have been an otherwise illustrious career. Alright, I’m not the most punctual of staff members, but at least I’m interested in comic books and I do care about this job.
Francis narrows his eyes and wiggles the tips of his fingers. He’s always hated the fact I know more about this stuff than he does, and that I’ve spent much of my time here disagreeing with the way he wants to run this business. He’s been waiting ages for the right moment to get rid of me, and my bad luck this morning has given him the perfect opportunity.
“I’m not going to ask you again”, he says.
I take a commanding step forward, grasp the box of my belongings firmly, and look him directly in the eye.
“You’ll be hearing from my lawyer”, I say as confidently as I can, even though it doesn’t make any sense. I don’t have a lawyer, and if I did have one, I wouldn’t be doing this job in the first place.
With Francis suitably confused, I turn on my heels and return the way I’ve come, absolutely no intention of returning the shitty plastic work badge I’ll throw into the first trash can I pass.
It’s a symbolic, and ultimately hollow victory, but the inconvenience for Francis, no matter how slight, is the best I could have hoped for. Once outside, I have to fight against an inhuman urge to return, moving quickly in the direction I arrived in, in case Francis decides to follow me and fight me to the death for his company property.
It isn’t long before the realization dawns on me that my unremarkable life is quickly unravelling. I now have no job, no car, no idea where I’m actually going right now and an apartment I have no means to pay for.
If it weren’t for the slight glimmer of hope my mysterious suitor left me last night, I might think I’ve somehow been cursed. Thank God I’ve got his number, safely stored away in my sharpie bag, itself safely tucked away into my purse, both of which are—.
I stop dead in my tracks, my skin cold. In slow motion, my small box of inconsequential belongings hits the ground and spills out across the sidewalk. The Iron Mag mug shatters spectacularly, the pages of the drawing book spread like the wings of a fallen bird and my penis eraser rolls to a stop under the helpful foot of a passerby.
It’s not here, and no matter how many times I anxiously check my shoulder I know it’s not going to suddenly appear. Why the hell didn’t I check? The one time my OCD fails me is the one time I need it the most.
An elderly man is trying to pass back my rubber cock and I can’t stand in one place long enough to take it from him. I step one way and then the other, my hands on my head in panic, unsure which way to turn.
“Two, three, bag, five, seven, car, eleven, thirteen, number, seventeen, nineteen, help”, I say, sounding like a complete and utter maniac.
Chapter Eight
I feel absolutely horrible. Not only have I lost the cell phone number of my future husband, I’ve lost pretty much every other important piece of personal documentation I own, including my credit cards, my broken cell phone, the keys to my apartment and my favorite sharpie pen.
I also lose pretty much any shred of dignity I might still have, when I return to the shop with my tail tucked firmly between my legs to see if I’ve accidentally left my purse there. Francis seeths at me silently, hand twitching over the telephone ready to call the police, while I slide my badge across the counter and perform what I know already to be a pointless endeavour.
With absolutely no way of getting in contact with my bank, the breakdown service or the leasing agency, I have to go to back to Alice’s to make the necessary calls, thereby ending up in exactly the same place I started in several hours before, wondering why the hell I even bothered to get out of bed.
Thankfully Alice is at home. She looks me up and down and knows immediately it’s something bad.
I cancel my cards, inform my service provider that my phone is broken, arrange a time to meet the agency to pick up a set of replacement keys until I can organize an expensive lock change, and freak out horribly when the tow truck service tell me that my purse isn’t where I think it is.
Let me repeat that. My purse is not in the car. It’s not in the shop. It’s not in Alice’s house and it’s not on my arm. It’s either been snatched by a light fingered street hustler or it’s vanished into thin air, and whichever one of those things happens to be true, it doesn’t help me in the slightest.
I can replace the cards, change the phone, find new pens and even draw the sexy pictures again, but the one thing I can’t replace is that number. I close my eyes and try my best to picture it, but I’m OCD not rainwoman, and there is a limit to my useless skills. One good thing happens to me in a lifetime of bad experiences, only to get washed away by a monsoon of misfortune.
“You never know, it might turn up”, Alice says comfortingly. “Or he mi
ght. We could go back to that bar again tonight.”
“I’m beginning to think I imagined the whole thing”, I say glumly, sinking into the bed. “It would have been better if it hadn’t have happened at all. I can cope with never finding my prince, what I can’t cope with is finding my prince and then losing him before I get a chance to fully enjoy the experience.”
“There are plenty of men like that in New York”, Alice says.
