She tries to chase away the butterflies that are flitting around her restless stomach. Nervous anticipation for no reason. Listening to the traffic surf its way along the rainwashed road outside her office, she tries to work out what it is she is nervous about.
Adrenalin is pumping through her veins for some reason; her body’s response to some need or other. Today is a day where it is difficult to concentrate. Her mind wanders easily from her work. She’s hardly done any work for her mind to wander from, though. A more accurate description of the status of her mental faculties would be Not On The Job.
Even her daydreams are about nothing today. They’re just a vague lack of focus, her eyes blurring the foreground, her mind aware of the butterflies still fluttering in her stomach, but not really thinking about anything.
Everything is floating, loose, ambiguous. The excel spreadsheet in front of her is making her frown, forcing her to concentrate and tie up the suppliers they have used over the past twelve months so that the finance department can credit check them in future. Some of the names are only vaguely familiar and it takes her a while to remember whether she has placed an order or not. She frowns. Finance has all the paperwork; they know who the signatories are. She doesn’t think it entirely unreasonable of her to wonder why they can’t link these suppliers to the right department themselves.
Work is increasingly an intrusion on her daydream life. Reality too. She searches for a highlighter pen in her desk drawers. She emerges from the time wasting rummage empty handed.
It reminds her of another time wasting rummage not that long ago. More pleasurable, but still a waste of time. His, and hers, and that of all the people in between.
She looks at the calendar hanging on the office wall. The day hasn’t moved on any. She looks at her watch. It seems that only the seconds are moving, but they don’t seem to be driving the minutes or the hours very quickly.
It is June. The pale gold of her summer skin is already fading. Only a month old, but there has been no more sun since that first week in May, when she drove as fast and as hard as she could through sunshine and narrow winding lanes to the sea. Nothing to fix that pale gold to her skin. Soon she will be as white as the dial on her watch again. Soon, if this never ending day will ever release her to discover what it is she’s so nervous about.
Across town, at the other end of an email, is someone she doesn’t want to think about. If she goes out tonight, she is likely to see him. Perhaps that’s what all this adrenalin is about. She can’t work out if she wants to see him or not. Channels of communication have been reopened. She thinks of him, dark haired and louche, wasting time in an airless office with a window too high to see out of. She visited him there, once. He was full of ideas about escape, but none of them were achievable. Effort was required to make them real, and he was too busy strolling down
But, no. She knows it isn’t him the butterflies are fluttering for. It’s something else, and she doesn’t want to admit it.
At last the hands on her watch say that it’s time to go. She walks out into the rain and down the street towards the car park. Her hair flies around her head in the wind. The hole in her boot makes her foot as soggy as November. She fights with the umbrella, performing a kind of modern dance as she moves down the street away from work, towards whatever it is that makes her feel so nervous.
She unlocks the car, trying to hang onto the umbrella, trying to believe that it is still June and not that same November as inhabits the sock inside her left boot, around her right foot. Her phone beeps somewhere in the depths of her bag. She flings everything into the car; bag, umbrella, herself.
Paused with hands on lap and head slightly bowed, she sits for a moment and tries to recover some semblance of equilibrium. The butterflies have stilled themselves now. So perhaps it was just escape she was preparing for. That long day, longer than a year in many ways. Long for no reason other than boredom and lack of dedication.
She sits and wonders how infinite are the ways of saying absolutely nothing. Could she fill an A4 page in a notebook, for example? Or is the description of nothing a life’s work, filling pages and books and hours and years? And where are all those books, with all those pages of nothing? In whose library do they sit, waiting to be read?
And people ask what it is she’s thinking. They ask if there’s nothing she has to say. How can you tell people what you’re thinking, when your thoughts are thinking about nothing and the infinity of its expression? How can you have anything to say, when you know there are books of that nothing walking the earth in human form.
The butterflies have flown, now that she’s outside those walls, that place. She peels back her head from its pose of reverie and forces her eyes to focus. Her hands unfold from her lap, like a marionette being brought back to life, and one hand grips the key in the ignition, while the other grips the steering wheel.
She will not go out tonight. She has an eternity of nothing to observe and filter and describe.
© J R Hargreaves May 2006
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