There’s something to be said for a story that starts like a James Bond movie, throwing you straight in the deep end, a perfect way of getting to know the main character, David, or is that Alistair?
A retired spy, well not so much a spy as a retired errand boy, David’s rather wry description of his talents, and a woman that most men would give their left arm for, not exactly the ideal couple, but there is a spark in a meeting that may or may not have been a setup.
But as the story progressed, the question I kept asking myself was why he’d bother.
And, page after unrelenting page, you find out.
Susan is exactly the sort of woman that piqued his interest. Then, inexplicably, she disappears. That might have been the end to it, but Prendergast, that shadowy enigma, David’s ex-boss who loves playing games with real people, gives him an ultimatum, find her or come back to work.
Nothing like an offer that’s a double-edged sword!
A dragon for a mother, a sister he didn’t know about, Susan’s BFF who is not what she seems or a friend indeed, and Susan’s father who, up till David meets her, couldn’t be less interested, his nemesis proves to be the impossible dream, and he’s always just that one step behind.
When the rollercoaster finally came to a halt, and I could start breathing again, it was an ending that was completely unexpected.
Every time I close my eyes, I see something different.
I’d like to think the cinema of my dreams is playing a double feature but it’s a bit like a comedy cartoon night on Fox.
But these dreams are nothing to laugh about.
Once again there’s a new instalment of an old feature, and back on the treasure hunt.
…
“Do you remember Nadia?”
Boggs was out the back on the veranda, sitting in an old lounge chair that had seen better days, eating tacos, or at least I think they were tacos. He offered me one but I didn’t like the look of it. Aside from the fact I wasn’t a fan of Mexican food.
“One of the Cossatino’s, Vince’s sister, tall, shorts skirts and big, well you know what I mean.”
Statuesque, Amazonian, yes I did. We all coveted what we couldn’t have.
“The same. She’s back in town.”
“And this means what to us if anything. As I recall, the one time we tried talking to her, Vince had his friends rough us up.”
“I saw her with Alex today, in the warehouse.”
I had his attention. I knew what he was thinking.
“Doing what, as if I couldn’t guess?”
“Alex wouldn’t be that stupid.”
“And we also said that when he fucked Annie in front of the class in the sports hall, not that we knew then what he was doing.”
Good point. “No. He told her to get the map from Rico. Has Rico and her…”
“Dated? Like Rico would be in her league. He’d be little more than trash in her eyes. But, no, not that I’m aware of. But, if she was to throw herself at him, I’m sure he would react like any other dumb bastard who thinks with his dick and not his head. But he hasn’t got the map.”
“Yet.”
“I still think I should try to sell it to Alex.”
“And I think if you are looking for a reason for a long hospital stay, that would be it. You need to be careful where Rico is concerned. Maybe we should check him out tomorrow.”
“I thought you had a job, and couldn’t get away.”
“My shift has changed to the afternoon, so I’ll be available in the mornings. Do you know where Rico lives?”
“On his boat. He has a small cruiser at the docks. Uses if for, he says, fishing trips for businessmen, but I think he does the drug run from the shipping lanes to a quiet cove.”
“For the Benderby’s?”
“No idea, and don’t care. But you’re right. We should check him out. Tomorrow morning. I’ll meet you at Al’s fishing shop at about 9:00.”
He’d finished the tacos, and clearly had something else to do, something that didn’t involve me. I felt a little disappointed.
50 photographs, 50 stories, of which there is one of the 50 below.
They all start with –
…
A picture paints … well, as many words as you like. For instance:
And, the story:
Have you ever watched your hopes and dreams simply just fly away?
Everything I thought I wanted and needed had just left in an aeroplane, and although I said I was not going to, I came to the airport to see the plane leave. Not the person on it, that would have been far too difficult and emotional, but perhaps it was symbolic, the end of one life and the start of another.
But no matter what I thought or felt, we had both come to the right decision. She needed the opportunity to spread her wings. It was probably not the best idea for her to apply for the job without telling me, but I understood her reasons.
She was in a rut. Though her job was a very good one, it was not as demanding as she had expected, particularly after the last promotion, but with it came resentment from others on her level, that she, the youngest of the group would get the position.
It was something that had been weighing down on her for the last three months, and if noticed it, the late nights, the moodiness, and sometimes a flash of temper. I knew she had one, no one could have such red hair and not, but she had always kept it in check.
And, then there was us, together, and after seven years, it felt like we were going nowhere. Perhaps that was down to my lack of ambition, and though she never said it, lack of sophistication. It hadn’t been an issue, well, not until her last promotion, and the fact she had to entertain more, and frankly I felt like an embarrassment to her.
So, there it was, three days ago, the beginning of the weekend, and we had planned to go away for a few days and take stock. We both acknowledged we needed to talk, but it never seemed like the right time.
It was then she said she had quit her job and found a new one. Starting the following Monday.
Ok, that took me by surprise, not so much that it was something I sort of guessed might happen, but that she would just blurt it out.
I think that right then, at that moment, I could feel her frustration with everything around her.
What surprised her was my reaction. None.
I simply asked where who, and when.
A world-class newspaper, in New York, and she had to be there in a week.
A week.
It was all the time I had left with her.
I remember I just shrugged and asked if the planned weekend away was off.
She stood on the other side of the kitchen counter, hands around a cup of coffee she had just poured, and that one thing I remembered was the lone tear that ran down her cheek.
Is that all you want to know?
I did, yes, but we had lost that intimacy we used to have when she would have told me what was happening, and we would have brainstormed solutions. I might be a cabinet maker but I still had a brain, which was what I overheard her tell a friend once.
There’s not much to ask, I said. You’ve been desperately unhappy and haven’t been able to hide it all that well, you have been under a lot of pressure trying to deal with a group of troglodytes, and you’ve been leaning on Bentley’s shoulder instead of mine, and I get it, he’s got more experience in that place, and the politics that go with it, and is still an ally.
Her immediate superior and instrumental in her getting the position, but unlike some men in his position he had not taken advantage of a situation like some men would. And even if she had made a move, which I doubted, was not the sort of woman she was, he would have politely declined.
One of the very few happily married men in that organisation, so I heard.
So, she said, you’re not just a pretty face.
Par for the course for a cabinet maker whose university degree is in psychology. It doesn’t take rocket science to see what was happening to you. I just didn’t think it was my place to jump in unless you asked me, and when you didn’t, well, that told me everything I needed to know.
Yes, our relationship had a use-by date, and it was in the next few days.
I was thinking, she said, that you might come with me, you can make cabinets anywhere.
I could, but I think the real problem wasn’t just the job. It was everything around her and going with her, that would just be a constant reminder of what had been holding her back. I didn’t want that for her and said so.
Then the only question left was, what do we do now?
Go shopping for suitcases. Bags to pack, and places to go.
Getting on the roller coaster is easy. In the beginning, it’s a slow easy ride, followed by a slow climb to the top. It’s much like some relationships, they start out easy, but they require a little work to get to the next level, follows by the adrenaline rush when it all comes together.
What most people forget is that what comes down must go back up, and life is pretty much a roller coaster with highs and lows.
Our roller coaster had just come or of the final turn and we were braking so that it stops at the station.
There was no question of going with her to New York. Yes, I promised I’d come over and visit her, but that was a promise with crossed fingers behind my back. After a few months in the new job, the last thing she want was a reminder of what she left behind. New friends new life.
We packed her bags, threw out everything she didn’t want, a few trips to the op shop with stuff she knew others would like to have, and basically, by the time she was ready to go, there was nothing left of her in the apartment, or anywhere.
Her friends would be seeing her off at the airport, and that’s when I told her I was not coming, that moment the taxi arrived to take her away forever. I remember standing there, watching the taxi go. It was going to be, and was, as hard as it was to watch the plane leave.
So, there I was, finally staring at the blank sky, around me were a dozen other plane spotters, a rather motley crew of plane enthusiasts.
Already that morning there’s been 6 different types of planes departing, and I could hear another winding up its engines for take-off.
People coming, people going.
Maybe I would go to New York in a couple of months, not to see her, but just to see what the attraction was. Or maybe I would drop in, just to see how she was.
As one of my friends told me when I gave him the news, the future is never written in stone, and it’s about time you broadened your horizons.
I’m back home and this story has been sitting on a back burner for a few months, waiting for some more to be written.
The trouble is, there are also other stories to write, and I’m not very good at prioritising.
But, here we are, a few minutes opened up and it didn’t take long to get back into the groove.
Was I working for a ghost?
Training sometimes was one of those things that went in one ear and came out the other. That accounted for the boring bits, but our instructors called it tradecraft.
I guess I should have taken more notice at the time.
Home was a bedsit in Bloomsbury, Not far from the Russell Square underground station, on the ground floor overlooking the small park. Sometimes, in summer I would sit there and watch the world go by, thinking there had to be more to life than waiting for an opportunity.
To do what, at the time, I didn’t know. But, when this opportunity presented itself, oddly as a rather strange ad in the help wanted pages of the newspaper, I guess the people who put it there were looking for the curious sort, with a sense of adventure.
My first impression of the job was that of a courier who would be required to travel a lot. It said, in part, “must be prepared to travel to different locations worldwide, understand the requirement of confidentiality, and must be able to respond to emergencies that might occur in the carrying out of your duties.”
To me, it spelled courier, though I rather hoped it wasn’t the briefcase handcuffed to a wrist sort and no guns.
After the first interview, I think I had guessed correctly, though, in subsequent training, the word tradecraft put a slightly different slant to the job. That, and the surveillance module, sold to us as “you need to know if you are being followed, recognise hostiles, and be able to deal with them.”
But, it was the notion that we should get out of any habits we had, those that made us predictable to an enemy, yes, they actually used the word, enemy. Like for instance, if we caught the same train, or bus, into the city. If we went to the same cafe for coffee, restaurant for lunch or dinner, met people in a pub on the same day, same time, each week.
Before all this, I found comfort in a regular schedule. I hated being late, except when the transport system let me down. I had a regular stop off on the way to the office for coffee, and usually went to the same cafe for lunch at the same time.
Inevitably I would leave home at the same time and quite often return home at the same time. OK, I was boring and predictable. Now it was a little different, with some variation in departure and arrival times, as well as the places I stopped for coffee, and lunch or dinner.
This day I was very late, after dark in fact, getting back to the flat.
I went in after checking for mail, not that anyone ever sent letters these days, unlocked my door, went in and switched on the light.
The whole of the living space had been trashed. Well, more to the point, someone had checked everywhere it was possible to hide anything, which I didn’t, and hadn’t bothered cleaning up after them.
Had they been interrupted?
If that had happened the landlady would be down in a flash the moment I walked in the door, not to commiserate on my bad luck, but to issue me with an eviction notice. Very little was tolerated in her establishment.
That she hadn’t told me that whoever did this had done it very quietly, and without anyone knowing. We had been taught the same procedures which is why I recognised the signs. This had to be done by my previous employers. The only question I had was why?
I had nothing they could possibly want.
I took a few minutes to clean up the mess so that instead of a thorough trashing, it just looked like the aftermath of a wild party, then went out to get a coffee and think about why this had happened.
Not far up the road was a cafe I went to for dinner if I wasn’t doing something else, and, lo and behold, the minute I walked in the door, there was Severin, sitting at the back half disguised by the evening newspaper.
Obviously, he’d been waiting for me.
Yes, now I understood the implications of being someone who did the same thing over and over.
There was no mistaking the invitation, and, after briefly considering ignoring him, realised that was not going to work. After seeing what happened to O’Connor at their hand, I didn’t want to join him.
I sat down. “I have to say this is an unexpected surprise.”
He put the paper down. “For both of us, I can assure you. I’ll get straight to the point. I want the USB.”
“What USB?”
“That your target was carrying, it wasn’t on him, so by elimination, not being anywhere at the crime scene, you must have it. He either gave it to you, or you took it from him. Where is it?”
I took a minute to process what he was saying. I had not seen a USB, not had he given me one, not was there one nearby. I would have seen it. No need to pretend to be surprised. I was.
“I haven’t got it.”
“He didn’t give you anything?”
“How could he, you were there just about the same time as I was. And after you shot him, he had nothing on him. Whatever you’re looking for, it must still be in the alley, or he hid it somewhere else. And since you shot him, I doubt whether you’ll ever find out.”
He shook his head and folded his paper. “If you’ve got it we’ll find out. and it will not bode well for you. And if you accidentally find it, here’s my card. Call me.”
He dropped a card on the table as he got up.
I picked it up just as he stopped and turned to give me a last look before walking out the door. There was no mistaking the intent, if they thought I had it, I’d be dead now.”
And it meant that the evidence O’Conner was referring to was on a USB. All I had to do was find it. Or Nobbin did.
We’ve all heard of the expression, he’s playing it fast and loose, or more interestingly, he’s fast and loose with the truth.
I’ve never really got a proper definition of that expression, but it sounds good, and people have to use their imaginations and put their own interpretation to it.
And if this was the 1930s, and Clarke Gable was playing opposite Jean Harlow, it’s exactly how the posters would describe the blonde bombshell.
Loose, however, in a more literal sense means not tight, so a loose nut on a bolt might be the cause of a catastrophe.
And speaking of catastrophes, there’s a fox loose in the hen house. Sadly it would be very difficult to catch and tie up.
Of course, in hot weather, you’d rather be wearing something loose, to keep cool.
Women, in particular, can wear their hair loose, as distinct from ‘up’, or in a ponytail or braids.
Some people make a loose interpretation, which inevitably creates grey areas, and loose lips, well, they’ve been known to sink ships.
This word can sometimes be confused with lose, which means something else entirely.
Like, lose a watch, lose your head, in more ways than one, lose your life, as if it was one of nine when it isn’t, and lose everything, perhaps, in the 1930’s stock market crash.
Quite literally, it means to be deprived of, or cease to gain or have.
You can lose weight, have a clock that loses time, or you can lose your temper.
Is love the metaphorical equivalent to ‘walking the plank’; a dive into uncharted waters?
For Henry the only romance he was interested in was a life at sea, and when away from it, he strived to find sanctuary from his family and perhaps life itself. It takes him to a small village by the sea, a place he never expected to find another just like him, Michelle, whom he soon discovers is as mysterious as she is beautiful.
Henry had long since given up the notion of finding romance, and Michelle couldn’t get involved for reasons she could never explain, but in the end both acknowledge that something happened the moment they first met.
Plans were made, plans were revised, and hopes were shattered.
A chance encounter causes Michelle’s past to catch up with her, and whatever hope she had of having a normal life with Henry, or anyone else, is gone. To keep him alive she has to destroy her blossoming relationship, an act that breaks her heart and shatters his.
But can love conquer all?
It takes a few words of encouragement from an unlikely source to send Henry and his friend Radly on an odyssey into the darkest corners of the red-light district in a race against time to find and rescue the woman he finally realizes is the love of his life.
I have an electronic notebook on my smartphone and writing pads at the ready at home in my office/writing room/library.
As soon as one hits, I get it down, either on paper or on the phone app. I use SomNote as it’s easy to export the text to an email, or have a version of the app running on my computer and just copy and paste. SomNote is great because I can use it anywhere.
Of course, it doesn’t work so well in the shower, so I’m still waiting for a waterproof phone. Or perhaps it can wait for a few minutes until I’m finished.
But, the trouble with that is, these ideas come so quickly and are sometimes so vivid that they need to be put down as quickly as possible. I have come up with the perfect dialogue for a tricky scene and played it all out in my head, and by the time I got to the paper, it was almost gone.
Perhaps a whiteboard and a permanent marker on the wall.
Or is that going too far?
A long time ago, I received a portable tape recorder for a present, you know, the one you can hold in your hand, and the tapes are so small you wonder how much will fit on them. The gifter said that when ideas came to me, all I had to do was speak. It was also voice-activated.
Needless to say that conjured up a few ideas right there.
But, I used it, but I found it quite weird to be talking, ostensibly to myself, in the car whilst driving home, or going to, work, and the curious looks I’d get from others. One thing it did teach me was that when a conversation was replayed, it would sound ok or most of the time, hardly what one expected a conversation would really be like.
So, because of that device, I learned to read out all conversations, and if they sounded stupid, they were.
So, ideas come in the shower, ideas come while driving, ideas come when reading the newspaper, and ideas even come when reading books.
This leads me to another point that I learned early on. Writers must read. Not only novels of their chosen genre, but any reference books that go with it. The research was, a friend and more successful author than I told me, was mandatory.
So too was the reading the classics, old English, and sometimes American, literature, to gain an appreciation for the written word. We might not follow those styles, but we can learn the majesty of the English language.
That author taught me a lot, though at the time I didn’t realise it. Perhaps I thought I was already smart enough to write, but I’m guessing that it took a long time before I felt my writing was worth reading before publishing it.
I don’t profess to have a full understanding of the language. I might have loved that school subject called English, and later in University, creative writing and literature, but not all of it soaked in. But writing is one of those odd things, that can take many forms and styles, but at the end of the day, if the reader understands where the story is going, and when at the end, is satisfied that it was ‘a good read’, then the author’s work is done.
The only trouble is, getting the next idea, and then they were withal to write a second book, or third. It is said everyone has one book in them. For those who can write more, well, that might be what might be called, a gift.
My trouble is, I have too many ideas, too many starts and brief outlines to work with, and I don’t know which story to start on next. I guess being spoiled for choice is a good thing, yes?
It is hard sometimes to keep the lid on what might be called justification of your position in a company where there are many naysayers, and little support from those who are supposed to be working together towards a single conclusion.
Not work against you, or to have their own agenda, not only in furthering their career on the back of your mistakes but take the credit for all your hard work.
Every company has them.
I’ve worked in a few where this has happened, but the deciding factor of whether they’re successful or not is when they have to stand on their own two feet when the source of their reputed good work suddenly is unavailable, and the shit hits the proverbial fan.
What is it called? Art imitates life.
Benton is the proverbial leader who takes credit, but when it comes to the crunch, can’t pull the rabbit out of the hat.
I guess in writing this little piece, I was subconsciously getting back at someone from a real, but now distant, past.
Perhaps there might be a little more about one of the places I worked cropping up from time to time.
It’s not so much writing about what you know, but writing about what happened, and what you might have wanted to happen. Invariably it never did, because these credit takers are a cunning lot, and sometimes lay the foundations for getting out from under when there is a disaster.
Unfortunately, I’ve been there too.
It’s called cutting your nose off to spite your face.
Be that as it may, I let this little vent run and see where it goes.
…
It was my responsibility since I’d recommended it and then won the support of management over his objections, and following that it had become a point of continual contention, a petty war neither of us was going to win.
I tried to keep the joy out of my voice. He’d also vetoed my recommendation for a full-time network engineer as my alternative, making my job become single-point sensitive. There was no one to replace me if anything went wrong.
“Sounds like you’re having fun.” I had to work hard to keep the amusement out of my tone.
“Fun nothing.” His tone was reaching that exasperation point. “There is no one else.”
“Why did you approve my holiday if I can’t have one?” I’d stretch his patience just a little more.
“You promised me the network was stable.”
“It is, and has been for the last six months. I’ve said so in my last six-monthly reports. You have been reading them, haven’t you?”
Silence. It said all I needed to know.
I had a choice sentence to deliver, but an ignominious thought popped into my head. He could probably use this against me, and would if I gave him the opportunity. Perhaps I should shelve my differences with him for this morning.
Aside from that, there was a shooting, and we didn’t get one of those every day. Not that it would probably amount to very much. During the previous week, the office grapevine had been working overtime on the rumour Richardson was having a relationship with one of the ladies in the Accounts department. It was just the sort of scandal the data entry staff thrived on.
A shooting and a network failure. I didn’t know which was worse. Perhaps if it was Benton they’d shot, there might be some justice…
I decided not to argue with him. “Give me an hour.”
“Half. Aitchison wants to see you.”
Werner Aitchison was head of Internal Security and a man who took his job seriously. Enough, that is, to annoy my staff, and me. He was ex-military intelligence, so ‘they’ said, but he appeared to me like a man out of his depth in this new age of communications. Computers had proliferated in our company over the last few years, and the technology to go with them spiralling out of control.
We dealt in billions via financial transactions processed on computers, computers which, we were told often enough, were insecure, and easily taken control of outside their environment. Aitchison was paranoid, and rightly so, but he had a strange way of going about his business. He and I had butted heads on many occasions, and we may have had our disagreements, but we were good friends and colleagues outside work.
Just in case Benton was accusing me, I said, as sincerely as I could, “I didn’t do it.”
“Of that, I have no doubt. He has requested a meeting with you at 10 am. You will be there.”
“I said I would come in to look at the problem. I didn’t say I was staying.”
“Let me know when you get in.” That was it. No ifs. No buts. Just a simple, ‘Let me know…’
I seriously considered ignoring him, but somewhere within me, there was that odd sense of loyalty. Not to Benton, not to the Company, but to someone else, the man who had given me the job in the first place, who had given me every opportunity.
Television is a great recorder of the past, and most channels, and especially cable tv have great libraries of films that go back more than a hundred years.
And, whilst it’s possible that modern-day films and television series can try to recapture the past, the English as an exception being very good at it, often it is impossible to capture it correctly.
But, if you have a film shot in the moment, then you have a visual record of what life, and what was once part of our world before you in all its dated glory. The pity of it is that, then, we never appreciated it.
After all, in those particular times, who had the time to figuratively stop and smell the roses. Back then as life was going on, we were all tied up with just trying to get through each day.
Years later, often on reflection, we try to remember the old days, and, maybe, remember some of what it was like, but the chances are that change came far too rapidly, and often too radical, that it erases what we thought we knew existed before.
My grandmother’s house is a case in point. In its place is a multi-lane superhighway, and there’s nothing left to remind us, or anyone of it, just some old sepia photographs.
I was reminded of how volatile history really is when watching an old documentary, in black and white, and how the city I grew up in used to look.
Then, even though it seemed large to me then, it was a smaller city, with suburbs that stretched about ten or so miles in every direction, and the outer suburbs were where people moved to get a larger block, and countrified atmosphere.
Now, those outer suburbs are no longer spacious properties, the acreage subdivided and the old owners now much richer for a decision made with profit not being the motivator, and the current suburban sprawl is now out to forty or fifty miles.
The reason for the distance is no longer the thought of open spaces and cleaner air, the reason for moving now is that land further out is cheaper, and can make buying that first house more affordable.
This is where I tip my hat to the writers of historical fiction. I myself am writing a story based in the 1970s, and it’s difficult to find what is and isn’t time-specific.
If only I had a dollar for every time I went to write the character pulling out his or her mobile phone.
What I’ve found is the necessity to research, and this has amounted to finding old films, documentaries of the day, and a more fascinating source of information, the newspapers of the day.
The latter especially has provoked a lot of memories and a lot of stuff I thought I’d forgotten, some of it by choice, but others that were poignant.
Yes, and don’t get me started on the distractions.
It was true to say that very few people knew our department existed. In fact, I was not sure quite who it was I worked for, but when I’d been first tasked with the assignment, a transfer precipitated by a transgression that might have ended my career, I was certain I had been sent to purgatory.
At least, that’s what the sign on the door said.
The office, if it could be called that, was in the basement, around so many twists and turns in the passages that it was easy to believe you had entered another dimension. It wasn’t located in the building you walked through the front door of, but somewhere else nearby. Through the walls, you could hear the sounds of cars, but whether it was a nearby road above the ceiling, or they were parking, it was not easy to say.
On another side, the sounds of trains passing through tunnels were barely discernible, and sometimes only noticeable by a slight vibration of the coffee mug on the desktop, of which there were four, the maximum number of occupants in the small area, but I have never seen who two of the other four were.
Such was the nature of our job. We operated in secret, hidden from the world, and the others. I was never quite sure why.
…
The interview, when I thought was going to be fired, was given by an old man in a pinstripe suit, long past the age of retirement. In fact, had I not known better, I would have said he was dead, and all that was missing was the cobwebs. He had no sense of humor and got straight to the point.
“You are being transferred to PIB effective immediately.”
He didn’t say what PIB stood for, and the no-nonsense tone told me this was not the time to ask.
“Many have come, but few have stayed. It’s not a job to be taken lightly, and a word of advice, the work you are about to undertake is not to be discussed with anyone but the person you have been assigned to work with.”
He then handed me an envelope, sealed, and that was the end of the interview.
I did not get to speak a word. I had this speech memorized, ready to explain why I had failed so badly, and what I was prepared to do to make up for it, but I was not given the opportunity. Perhaps I should just be grateful I was given another chance.
I waited until I was out of the building, and a block away in a small cafe, and the cheerful waitress had brought my coffee and cake. It was, in a small way, a celebration I still had a job, working for the organization I had set my sights on way back when I was in school.
Making sure no one was sitting too close; I opened the envelope and took out the neatly folded sheet of paper.
It was blank.
Was this some sort of joke?
There was a loud noise outside in the street, a car backfiring, and it caused a few anxious moments, particularly for me in case it was trouble, but it wasn’t. When normality returned I went back to the sheet of paper, picking it up off the top of the coffee cup where it had fallen, and something caught my eye.
Writing. Specifically, numbers, but what I thought I’d seen had disappeared, or hadn’t been there at all.
A shake of the head, perplexed, to say the least, I took a sip of the coffee. As the cup passed under the sheet, a pattern was discernible, displaying then disappearing. Bringing the cup back under the sheet, numbers suddenly appeared. It was a telephone number. It was also very cloak and daggers.
Was it a test? Because at that moment when I saw the blank sheet of paper, the meaning was very clear. It was a puzzle, and if I didn’t work it out, then I didn’t get the job. I’d simply been told to turn up at an anonymous building to see a man whom I doubted would answer to the name I’d been given to ask for again after I left.
I entered the number then pressed ‘call’.
Seven rings before a woman’s voice answered, “Yes?”
No names, no identification.
“Mr McCall gave me an envelope with this number in it.”
“You worked it out?” She sounded surprised.
“By accident, yes.”
“Well, four out of five candidates don’t. Consider this to be your lucky morning, the day is not over yet. Where are you?”
I told her.
“Then you’re not far from Central Park. Go to the souvenir store and wait.”
“How will I know you?”
“You won’t, I’ll recognize you.”
Then the phone went dead, and I was left looking at it as if I had the ability to see, via the phone, who that person was. I shrugged. How many others had failed even the most basic test, to figure out what was on the sheet of paper, and, was it an indication of the work I would be doing?
I spent the better part of an hour watching the squirrels at play. They scuttled around on the ground chasing each other or their imaginary friends or leaping from branch to branch in the shrubs and trees. They didn’t seem to have a care in the world, and I wondered what that would be like.
Unfortunately, I had to pay the rent, bills, and eat, all of which required having a paying job. I had been looking at having to return home a dismal failure and fulfil the destiny my father had predicted for me.
“David Jackson, I presume?”
I looked sideways to see a woman about my own age, dressed so that she would look anonymous in a crowd. It was anyone’s guess how long she had been there, but that, I guess was the point. She had been observing me, and no doubt assessing my suitability.
Could I blend in? Perhaps not if I was that easily identifiable.
“I am.”
“What if anything has been explained to you about the job?”
“Nothing. I was asked to meet a nameless man in an anonymous office and was handed an envelope which led to my call to you.”
After I said it out loud it sounded crazy.
“If you don’t mind me asking but how did you work out how to read the letter?”
Moment of truth, was there a right or wrong answer? Most if not all the people who received it would not work it out.
“Quite by accident.”
She smiled. “The truth is a rare commodity in our business. But then, you’re one of a very select group of people who made it to this level.”
“Just out of curiosity, what happens to those who done work out how to read the number?”
“They don’t get to stand where you are. Welcome aboard.”
Thrills, Spills, and just a dash of Romance 