Tobias Futers
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It had been almost 72 hours since the fallout as Angela breathed in quick rhythms of three waiting for the reflective elevator doors to open. The past often gets brushed away into the wind like silk or some other lightweight fabric, it is only through repetitions that we can solidify it. With each sudden inhale and exhale that passed through her purple stained firm lips, Angela was not calming herself but solidifying the presence of the past within the present. The conversation with Joe had now cemented its weighty head onto her mind and as the doors slid apart, she felt invigorated by the delusion that her thoughts would be left within the confinement of
that little silver box.
The gallery in which Angela worked had once been guarded by a single government issued heavy-man who, upon your entry, would ask which artefact you wanted to see. He would then guide you to the given artefact and wait patiently by your side as you did whatever was necessary for you to do, whether that be study it or to simply be in its presence. If you wanted to see another artefact, then the heavy-man would ask you to leave and come back the next day to undergo the same process. He would issue you a ticket listing the desired object and tomorrow’s date before escorting you out of the building. The fundamental idea of free knowledge is still upheld by the gallery; however, it is now disorganised and relentlessly open to the public. The building was filled with the ambient sludge of overlapping conversations. It was a constant noise that did not come in waves but was aggressively consistent.
The old ticketing system was something Angela had grown to admire in retrospect, a slightly more conservative sense of control that she felt she may
prefer. The vague wish for such ‘mature’ things had seeped slowly into what she had started calling her ‘youthful ignorance’. She felt herself to be in a moment of change.
“You have no...clue!”
His voice, due to its relevance to Angela, shuffled its way through the mass. A stubby, balding elderly man with a beige puffer jacket was having it out with one of her colleagues. She walked across the pale green marble of the main hall towards the front desk where she spent most of her last decade.
“I promise you; we cannot issue appointments with any of the leading curators; you have to call ahead way in advance”
As she got closer, she could see that the old man in beige appeared hollow beneath his thin layer of greyish, withering skin.
By contrast, Angela’s colleague was still a young man. He had recently joined the museum on a temporary basis and had a tendency towards laziness that was somewhat excusable under consideration of his age. Angela swept her hand across the lukewarm, metallic desk, leading it to the corner of a waist height, thick door, she pulled it open. At the noise of the small door closing shut, the young colleague turned, faced her, and, with a smirk, tipped his head towards the man taking up his time.
She looked behind her colleague and made eye contact with the old man.
His whole body appeared to be shaking slightly. His lips were speckled with little dots of deep purple- black. His eyes were so sunken into his skull that one might imagine them falling backwards, down inside. His small pupils seemed to widen ever so slightly towards Angela. She saw this and felt
butterflies in her stomach.
“There’s a uh- actually”
The colleague cut his words short, got up from his chair, turned, and walked towards Angela quite suddenly. Her body seemed to want to step backwards but she kept place, smelling the rising air of lemon and salt permeating from the young man’s perfume. He leaned in towards her shoulder.
“This useless cunt is doing my fucking head in”
The young man had consistently mistaken his relationship with Angela as something close to genuine friendship and because of this he consistently spoke his mind with a violent lack of awareness. They had now known each other for almost three months and were only able to hold conversations in short thirty-minute intervals due to the system of rotating posts upheld by the museum. There was a brief period of time when Joe had developed a mild paranoia after seeing the two of them talking one day when he had come to pick Angela up from work.
But Angela didn’t feel much sentimentality towards her colleague.
She also felt extremely uncomfortable at his consistent lack of maturity. The salty lemon fragrance had risen to such a point that it now clogged her nose, and she felt the need to hold her breath.
“Why not just learn how to use a fucking computer like who does he think he is?”
Angela caught the young man’s baby blue eyes for a second as he turned to walk back to his place at the desk. She exhaled and smiled in acknowledgement, but he had turned to return to his seat.
“Yeah, so my Colleague says the same thing, you’ll have to book online, do you have... a son or daughter that could help maybe?”
“No...sorry”
A dry voice. The old man seemed to shake more and more with each word. Lifting her body onto her toes, Angela noticed that his knees were crouched ever so slightly. The student hummed loudly and without turning around, in a deep voice, called for Angela. She walked across and stood with the palm of her left hand pressed firmly on the top of the desk, supporting her weight. She looked at the man. Now quite close, she could see that his scalp was almost entirely visible and remarkably smooth. It glimmered ever so slightly beneath the little flecks of white hair. The mouth was slightly open and had a natural tilt downwards to the left.
“Explain it to my colleague”, the student said.
The man looked up at Angela and again widened his eyes directly into hers. She watched as his mouth slowly closed and the drooping nostrils flared at a short intake of breath. He dragged his grey eyes back onto her colleague and then back to Angela. In a crumbling voice he said,
“...stood by the door”
Angela could feel the density of the desk pressing slightly too hard into the bone of her wrist. She lifted her palm off the desk and straightened her posture.
Her attention was momentarily stolen by a child in a bright red t-shirt who seemed to be laying face down on the far side of the hall.
“Who’s stood by which door?”
The question slipped out of her lips without much of a push.
A woman walked over to the lying child, grabbed his arm and yanked him off the floor, they jogged off into another room. She returned to see the man staring somewhat aggressively at her. His face had changed since she had first seen it just a few moments ago, it had become much more detailed and quite red. She could see each black pore across the weak skin. She maintained a smile as he whispered,
“...if I ..I wish I knew”
Expecting the student to say something, she looked down at the empty chair next to her and realised her younger colleague had moved.
He was now sat at the opposite end of the desk typing at a pace on the computer’s keyboard. She heard the old man sigh underneath the clicking sound of the keys . “...I wish I... knew what...”
The man’s shakes seemed to increase in intensity after each word and had reached quite a ferocious point by the time he finished his sentence.
Angela recognised quite a distinct expression of fear on his face and after cutting his sentence short, he quickly gripped the top of his thigh and tensed his jaw so tight a little dimple on either cheek appeared.
Angela remembered the sensation of butterflies she had felt just moments before and slowly they faded into the forefront of her mind. She pictured butterflies flying in a field. Then, she pictured her breakfast that morning and realised she was hungry.
“I... don’t have it.”
he said. She pictured the three scrambled eggs on her cracked pale red plate with blocked, white letters spelling ‘Margate’ around the edge. That morning, she had rushed and put far too much butter in the pan, and she could now picture the yellow liquid flowing in five tight little streams away from the nucleus of egg.
There was a period of time where Joe stopped eating her meals out of fear that he would not like them if he did.
She remembered her father first teaching her how to poach eggs when she had just finished secondary school. He had told her the easiest way to do it was to crack them into a mug of water and microwave it
Angela missed the past. She used to tell Joe that the past is ‘always something to miss’ and ‘a beautiful burden’. Joe disagreed. He claimed that ‘sentimentality’ made him ‘ill’. Angela didn’t understand what he meant.
Brushing the hair off her forehead, she reminded herself to never microwave her eggs and to never use too much butter. She could not stand the image of the fatty, horrible liquid spilling towards the edge of her plate. Something tickled her throat, and she gagged out loud.
“Angela!”
The student’s hand gripped her shoulder. She turned to face him and noticed he was growing a sparse, teenage moustache.
“Why did he run away like that?”
Angela turned back towards the man, but he was no longer there. A deep, short groan escaped from Angela’s neck. She kept looking at where the man once stood. As she did this, she made fleeting eye contact with a baby being pushed along the hall in a black stroller.
“How could he run so fast, what the hell.”
said the student.
The baby and its stroller entered an elevator, the doors shut behind them.
Without moving, Angela said
“`What did he want?”
Angela did not know why she asked this question, and the student did not feel like it
was a question worth answering. He silently returned to his station at the desk.
Angela did not move. She wondered what Joe was doing at that moment. If he would be at home or at work. If he was eating or using the toilet. If he was
speaking or reading. If he was anxious or calm. If he was inside or outside. If he was moving or still. If he
was thinking about her.
The temperature changed in the hall suddenly. Angela realised she was overheating and so she took off her cardigan.
“Where is Gallery C?” A visitor asked