Odd Prose: Never Have I Worked in a Place
Odd Prose
Never have I worked in a place where a nipple so casually slips out and the countenance of all remains as unperturbed as a rock. The nipple was maroon brown like one of those milk chocolate Thornton’s sprinkled in chocolate powder. The woman, a dark Asian, from Thailand or the rectum of mars or the Bazaar of Opium twitching. She bent over the bar asking good old Imran to buy her a “Fine Chicken Chorizo sandwich”. “Did you hear me? “Fine”, it must be “Fine”, if they don’t have it, don’t buy it” she says, but more so dictates Imran. “Okay, I got it” Imran says, acceptingly. “Here take this” Nipple slipper hands him an unopened pack of peach Halls “thank you darling” and she finishes with a controlled sophisticated baritone, a blend of maternal and femme fatale timbers.
It was a trail shift of only four hours but time had done that ruthless thing where it stretches into an infinitum-ado-fata-morgana. But with bare flesh of legs, thighs, wrists, necks, shoulders, elbows, arms, breasts, nipples, brown nipple, arses, crack of the arses, secrets whispering from the cracks, pubes, bare flesh – how could I be mad towards time? In front of me sitting arse were three English girls – or birds, as they say here. What were they doing but killing time waiting to kill rich mans’ sinewy black card. They were playing a guessing game, the one where the victim puts the phone on the forehead and has to guess what thing, hero, place, is on the screen. They sat in a triangle howling all tumult “Italy!” “Bonjournor” “Ca’mon, Ya know it, It’s from da T.V” – et cetera. The leading lady, after guffawing with her snout to Olympus – sorry, the ceiling, struts towards the bar. She strutted carrying the entire voluptuousness of ass and character in her diaphanous dress, slithering around her two – because she would have two – sculpted Athenian legs. If ever her and the Algerian woman were cued in subway then, definitely, there would be a dispute of the ass, polemikos!
“Ya’ight darlin?” she blasts from her gob, money gob, temporary-cock-holder gob. Her breath, odious smell of dry sperm, smell, powerful, much too, for I.
“Just fine, what’s your name?” says I, congenially of course.
“Laura sweetheart”
“Well, nice to meet you Laura, I’m Keanu”
“D’ya like ma breasts?” she asks bullishly, yanking down her bra.
“You caught me” – she did catch me.
“Let me’ave a white wine and two rose’s for the girls please, and a dash of lemonade in one of em.”
I accidently splashed a dash of soda water in one of the rose’s. Give a shit, I did not. The girls accompanying her at the table looked like those plastic flowers trapped in the windows of steel coffins that men in blue, black, grey polyester uniforms drag themselves into, to sow numbers into screens, watch arrows, green and red shoot up-down superfluous charts, to eye orange coloured numbers race up-down in the millions, to save time going to the barbers because all hair is lost to the edge of the steel walls, to have the skin of face sag and droop beyond the base of Tartarus, to have flesh warp into pink mass-mush around the bones, to allow mind to rot into obsession for the vogue shoelace, the trendy button, the chic screen-watch, to suckle companions for steely motifs, but in the end it is all okay, because the Tom, Dick and Harry of the modern efficient sepulchres can buy themselves a plastic flower, one with a profound chipboard inside, a plastic flower that can talk and give advice, water itself and even clean up the guillotine disguised as an office. And even if Tom, Dick and Harry didn’t fancy the idea of having a flower by the window because the veneer of masculinity was at stake, then, there was always the plastic flowers sitting arse by the leading lady.
