The Cookie Crumbles

Non-Fiction
Location – Melbourne, Australia
Written – April 2009
[This story was published in ‘Wet Ink’ magazine Issue 17, in December 2009.]

It began with a pair of legs. The heat brought the short skirts, and singlet tops. I was polite, I’d wait until she’d walked past before dropping my gaze to her ass, and her legs. Just a quick glance, there’s no need to be unprofessional about it. My mind filled in the rest.

I don’t remember when I first saw her. It wasn’t that kind of moment. She didn’t arrive at the workplace, she seeped into it - into long hours, the mindless toil, and the emptiness of the bustling office. So many people come and go in this place that you don’t pay much attention. As a supervisor said to me, “it’s like Vietnam in here - you don’t get too attached to anybody.”

It doesn’t really matter what I do. It’s a keyboard, and a computer screen. In the spare moments I write in my journal, or read the newspaper. I read the articles about the war in Gaza. My brother is in Sderot, with his Israeli girlfriend. The last time I spoke to him he had to drop the phone as a Qassam rocket came crashing into town. I imagine him safe, I and wonder what we’ll talk about when he returns. I skip the articles about the economic crisis. I hear enough about that on my cigarette breaks, from workmates whose stories don’t make the headlines. Sometimes while I work I’ll look around at the faces of my co-workers. And that’s when I began to notice her.

She smiles. Her teeth break free like a gap in the clouds. Clothed in one of her colourful dresses, with swirls of blue, and white. She doesn’t look like the others. She might be Spanish, or South American, and that lure of the exotic runs straight from your genes to your jeans. She might have lived on the edge of the Amazon jungle, bathing naked in the cool water. Or she may be the only daughter of a Colombian drug lord, who’d kill me if he found us languishing in tangled sheets. She could be from anywhere. But that doesn’t matter too much, either.

We’ve never spoken. I’m not shy. I’ve built up a repertoire of sarcastic one-liners that I use to break the ice with new co-workers. But I avoid her, and the guilt that comes with the idea of her.

I’ve been with my girlfriend for four years. And we have an adult understanding that, sometimes, we will be attracted to other people. This is to be human. Crossing the line is to act, to move from an attraction to something else. So I don’t. If I talk to the Spanish girl I might discover we have a mutual love for Herman Hesse, or Thai curries. She might play with her hair and laugh at my jokes, even when they’re not funny. I’m wary of her.

We reach a pleasant stalemate. Our only language is spoken through the silence of the eyes. She’ll leave her terminal to take a break in the alley, and pass me on the way. She returns my gaze with effortless calm. With eyes that speak of neither fear, nor glittering friendliness - just a cool awareness of things. A readiness, for whatever could happen next. These wordless conversations linger, like old friends. I don’t nod, or smile. I’m the first to look away.

When she walks past my eyes slip down again to her ass, and her legs. I try not to, but it happens anyway. It’s a natural thing, like influenza. She has that endless tan, a tan that has nothing to do with two weeks on a Bali beach. The tan is only punctuated by the reality of her hemline.

This isn’t the time for dreaming. My computer demands input.

I can’t afford to be fired. My girlfriend lost her job a couple of weeks ago. Her company got the job agency to deliver the news. Cowards. She got off the phone in tears. I held her, on the train platform, and told her not to worry.

“I’ll try to pick up some extra shifts,” I said. “We’ll be okay.”

But it isn’t so easy. People have been flooding towards dead-end jobs like mine, as they’re laid off from their regular jobs. Most are older than myself. You can tell they’re of a different breed, by the way they come in wearing suits, and black dresses. The veterans of this job are lucky to come in wearing shoes. This influx has meant there’s more competition for shifts. I’ve started coming to work early, to squeeze a few extra dollars from every shift I can get. But I’m getting so few that I earn less than the dole.

The rumour floating around the alley is that management is flooding in the new workers to cut costs. The recruits are paid at the training rate. My guess is that once they’ve completed their training period, they’ll start getting the ‘sorry, we can’t offer you any shifts this week’ line, too. There’s plenty of people out there to replace them.

A while back I tried to find new work. I’d go to the library to use their free internet, and send off dozens of applications through the job-search websites. It’s quick, easy, and pointless. There’s less jobs advertised than there used to be. I didn’t get a single phone call. The rejection emails told me they’re sorry, they’ve had a large volume of enquiries about the position, and good luck out there in the cold. I could have tried harder. I devote a larger section of my mind to masturbation fantasies than I do to job hunting.

There’s a syndicate at my work, for Tattslotto tickets. Kat, the older lady who sits at the terminal behind me, buys one every week. There’s always a ticket on her computer, sitting next to the crime novels she borrows from the library.

“It isn’t about the prize money,” she says. “I’d just love to be able to quit this job, and never have to work a six-day week again.”

My Dad says you don’t pay for Lotto tickets expecting to win. You pay for a week of fantasy.

My friend Dean has been working this job for years. His passion is birds. Before this job, he co-authored a field guide on Australian birds, and travelled widely in search of exotic species. He’s reluctant to talk about it. Happy memories can bring pain, too. Then he surprises me. He says he wants to go to Thailand at the end of the year. Go ‘birding’ there. He shows me pictures of Thai birds on his mobile. His eyes light up as he tells me about them. I don’t share his enthusiasm, but I ask him dozens of questions anyway, just to keep that glimmer in his eyes. After working in dead-end jobs long enough, you realize that fuelling these fragile sparks of passion is the truest sort of friendship there is.

I encourage him to book a flight. He’s starting to falter.

“But I’m not getting anywhere near enough work to save the money,” he says. “The bills are coming in.”

“You could always take out a loan.”

Dean just laughs. Unlike myself, he does read articles on the economy.

I don’t know what the Spanish girl dreams of. Is she an aspiring artist? Does she yearn to return home, and visit her family? Does she dream of love? Of learning to dive beneath the sea? I know she doesn’t dream of being here. So what is her fantasy? I’d like to ask. But I can’t, for she’s become one of mine. And dreams, too, can destroy you.

I go out to smoke a cigarette. I rolled one before logging out, so they won’t dock my pay. I pull it from my pocket. I spark it up in the alley, surrounded by garbage. The garbage festers in the heat, but the smoke kills the smell. Summer rain begins plopping down, and I take shelter beneath a scrap of overhanging sheet-metal. As I smoke, alone in the alley, she opens the door and steps outside.

Our eyes meet. It’s just the two of us there. She stops. There’s no way we can get away without saying something to each other.

“Oh! It’s raining!” She says.

“Yeah,” I reply. “That’s the way the cookie crumbles.”

She smiles, and holds her jacket up over her head as she turns to go, protecting herself from the rain. She rushes off, as if trying to out-run the weather. She’s finished her shift and headed home.

The next day something has changed. She usually sits up the other end of the office, and our faces only sometimes cross paths. She sat up there for months. Today she moves closer, close enough that I can hear the clack of her keyboard. You can tell a lot from that sound - whether someone is calm and composed, or whether someone is having a bad day. Her clack is in light, joyous little clicks, that bounce like music. She’s happy.

The young bloke sitting next to her reaches out his hand and starts rubbing her back, in slow, soft circles. She’s at ease with the touch. His chair is rolled over next to hers. He whispers something in her ear. I look down and clack something into my keyboard. There’s a squeal of giggles as he tickles her. I look up, reluctantly, to see their beaming smiles.

The cookie crumbles.

I don’t mind. There’s work to be done, and my girlfriend is at home waiting for me. Despite the games I play with myself, I’m not going anywhere. I’ll return tomorrow. In pure fantasy nothing can be gained, or lost. I pause, as the dreams dissipate into the fluorescent office air. Then, when I’m satisfied they’ve been banished away, I return to my computer screen.