She was tall, much taller than me, and ugly as sin. She moved like the grim reaper, swiftly and smoothly, keeping her bony body upright and her skeletal neck outstretched. Her skin was almost the same milk chocolate shade as mine except hers was marred by dark blotches, indented acne scars and hardship of sorts. Her facial features were parodies of themselves, all excessively large and jostling for attention. Protruding teeth like oversized square plates jutted out of her mouth and her lower jaw projected outwards in a permanent frown of judgement. Chasmal barren eyes inspected proceedings with a blank glacial stare, embedded above cheekbones far too wide set to be beautiful. I couldn't stand her.
I walked over to where she was. 'Hey, do you have any clue where Andrea is or what I need to be doing?' I asked, contorting my face into a smile and adopting a nauseous tone. A friendlier voice than I'd have liked, and a higher pitch than my own; telephone voice. She studied me for a while with no change in her deadpan face. Her mouth was slightly parted exposing the cartoonish teeth and I was too polite or fearful to meet her gaze, I wasn't sure which. The way she stared at me was both demanding and moronic, and I felt I owed her everything, whilst being in full knowledge that I owed her nothing. I felt others staring gormlessly. The moment lasted too long before she scanned me from my toes up with her horrible eyes, and she spoke. 'No.' she spat briefly with as much innocence as venom. Even in the monosyllabic resonance of her singular word, her strong Jamaican accent rang in my ears. I instinctively backed away a step, before muttering a half-hearted 'oh right then,' and wandering away towards the door I'd come in from.
It was only my second shift at the Mail House. The Mail House was in a large unit in a business estate bathed with the stench of defeat. It had dirty corners and grey walls, and trolleys full of dull trays littered the space, each tray lined with stacks of envelopes. Bored and pathetic faces stood behind rows of long desks carrying out menial tasks; putting letters into bags and sealing leaflets. The work was more than mind-numbing, it was heart-breaking. The large majority of the staff were too old to be carrying out such work, with their weathered faces and delphic accents, thicker than pulp. They spoke sparsely to each other in furtive individual dialects, pausing only to chuckle guiltily and emit the parting sigh that comes with all indulgent laughter.
As I loitered by the doorway feeling as useless as the very place I was in, I couldn't figure out if I'd conceded too easily or not. I mean there was very little I could have done, once more she had simultaneously done everything and absolutely nothing. It had been the same last time on my first shift, always a certain innocence heavily laced with malice. She'd knocked over my day's work but apologised with a blank stare before doing it. I fucking hated her. My body throbbed with scorn as I reeled from the meaningless public battle.
After a while of standing by the entrance feeling incompetent, one of the supervisors came through and piteously gave me instructions with a pleading smile. I clutched the envelopes as if he had given me gold and positively rimmed him as we walked towards a desk; full of 'yes sir thank you sir' bullshit. You should have seen me. He placed my name tag on the end of the terrible girl's desk. 'You can work here with Georgia, she's been here for a while and she's just about your age,' the man smiled with a strong Bangladeshi accent, as he peered over his square framed glasses. He stood too close and his breath smelt strange and yeasty, like stale beer and Wotsits. I turned and looked towards this girl that I despised, Georgia. I stared at her long and hard in a bid for some worthless rematch but she didn't give me the pitiful satisfaction I wanted. After attempting my deplorable aim I stood in mild shame at the edge of the desk and began sealing poorly designed corporate leaflets into polythene bags.
We all had to stand for hours on end as we did the gruesome work, making the duty take on an awful semblance of a sweatshop. My right hip creaked and prickled with pain from an unexplained drunken injury two nights previous, yielding at no point. The envelopes sapped all of the moisture from my hands leaving my fingertips agonisingly dry. My fingernails were too long so I had to scratch and scrabble for the tops of envelopes. A cringe inducing grind of abrasion against the paper on the table came each time I scraped my nail across the casing, missing the opening of the letter. I knew I had a nail clipper in my bag, but it was holed up in a locker on the opposite side of the room. The room was too warm to wear a cardigan, too cold to take it off. I would glance over at Georgia and she'd be away from her work post, conferring with another woman in the corner in broken English and pointing periodically at me. It was hellish.
I looked up and directly opposite me was a boy of about 20. He was pale and he reeked of idiocy, the perfect distraction. I smiled as I looked back down at the polythene bags I was fiddling with and sighed out loud, signalling the start. Through a mild spasm he looked up as I met his stare with a deliberate concentration. He was dopey as fuck, I could spot it from a mile. He was chewing gum like a camel and he had white earphones dangling from the top of his black polo shirt. Aesthetically he was perfectly acceptable, maybe even more than that, however I was merely looking for something to pass the day, I told myself as I ended our spell of eye contact with a wink and a smile. A wink, as if I’d just winked. Tacky bitch. It was almost annoying how easy it was being a girl sometimes, I considered. As long as you had a body you could certainly use it in a way boys could never do with theirs. You want something done and you push out your chest and pout, if a boy thrusted his cock and pouted as a form of bribery it’d be harassment. I labelled a few more envelopes, thoroughly aware of him gawking stupidly at my every move. Leon was his name, I remembered from my first shift. I took off my cardigan and allowed my baggy t shirt to slip down my right shoulder, exposing a red and white polka dotted bra strap. With a slow lean across the table I placed my cardigan at the top left corner of the desk and flicked my tongue across my pout in an action that could easily have been mistaken as moistening my top lip. I turned around and leant back in a masquerade of tying my hair. I lifted my arms, exposing the top of my black leggings and allowed my hair to dangle by my upper thighs, framing my bum. Halfway through the display I was offering, I paused and conceded defeat once more, this time to my better sense of judgement. I sped up the hair tying and turned around to the work, avoiding the eyes of the now lecherous Leon.
The whole process was a speedy one, but Georgia took note. When I’d finished tying up my hair, I grasped a group of leaflets from the pile we were sharing. She sensed my movement and clawed at my hand, producing 3 thin diagonal scratches across my right hand. I yelped in pain, to which she administered the same impassive ‘sorry,’ and began working on the leaflets I’d dropped on the desk in distress. I stood with my mouth indignantly open like the baby that the candy was stolen from. I searched the room for moral assistance but all I received were derisive shrugs at best, and a strange increase in confidence from Leon who now insisted upon winking and wiggling his tongue like a mentally limited snake. I stood silently seething. She’d done it. She’d made me pathetic too. She’d lowered me to the level of pettiness that I was now wedged into. My hand stung with the same resentful hurt that my eyes did, and it was all I could do not to burst into tears, floor her and claw at her face with the letter knives we were using, shredding her skin to perverse confetti.
‘Come here baby hey be my baby,’ the radio whinged. My hand was striped with the three slivers of cracking dried up blood. Georgia took to warbling along to the radio with as much emotion as she had over her awful heartless face. She sang with the volume and assurance of a virtuoso singer, but reality begged to differ. I bitterly stamped the letters I was assigned with and slid them over to the stack on my right. It puzzled me that she could grate on me so much, and manifestly vice versa. ‘Put your hands on my body, oh, oh oh!’ We all trudged around, placing boxes and trays into different boxes and trays and she wouldn’t stop her hollow chorus. My arms, my back, my hip, all of me was in agony. I kept cramping up at the joint of my shoulder and my upper arm, contorting sporadically to try and reduce the searing pain shooting through it. ‘Kiss me k-k-kiss me’. She had spent most of the afternoon on her phone, staring at the screen with her lips dangling in concentration, or scrutinising me in meetings with who I tragically gathered could be her mother. She stalked back over to the desk we were sharing and threw a handful of rubber bands in front of me, allowing them to bound across and off the surface. ‘Stop and tie those up,’ she barked at me as she pointed to her work, before smoothing back her thin black hair and seating herself on one of the supervisor’s chairs. I bent over, straining my sore back, and picked up the elastic bands from the floor, counting to 20 as I did so.
By our break, every piece of resentment I had for the job was patterned over her face, like a mosaic of hatred. I looked at her and I saw piles of nameless envelopes. I saw directionless catalogues. I saw someone so commanding and hapless that it killed me, she was ridiculous. We were dismissed for lunch and Georgia and I both attempted to get to the lockers, but with a defensive push, she sent me forwards, and into the corner of a table. My head rocked forward as I was winded by the impact. She drifted ahead with nothing to say and unlocked her locker. I stood and caught my breath. ‘Ya alright?’ a man with grey dreadlocks perfunctorily inquired as he walked past me. I mumbled something unconvincing and nodded my head, but he didn’t hear.
Georgia was already out of the side door when I got to my bag. I turned from where everyone else was walking and paced hurriedly to the same exit, picking up one of the knives we’d been using that day. The side exit of the Mail House led to a narrow road with the back of a council estate on the right, and an expansive bingo car park on the left. She was at the back entrance of the car park, sashaying along by the hedges. I increased my speed, breathing heavily with each step until I could almost overtake her. She gave me a sidelong squint with no expression, and turned her head dismissively. That destroyed me.
I stepped in front of her, lunged forwards with force and blindly sliced her neck twice. I didn’t have a fucking clue what I was doing but I felt the blade plunge into her flesh and snap on the second impact. A heavy flow of blood immediately began coursing down her collar but she didn’t make a sound aside from a small choke of surprise. Not one sound. I retreated a step, pausing to survey the horror, before keeling over as a violent trajectory of bile surged from my mouth and all over the lower half of her trembling body that had slid down the hedges to the floor. The translucent yellowish liquid mingled with her blood on her lap, diluting the crimson. My eyes flickered from her neck to her legs to the tarmac and back, following the stream. She was weeping but her eyes were glazed and her congested features remained void, swathed in the same moronic and condescending cling film that made me hate her from the beginning. I closed my mouth and let the remaining phlegm of my vomit swim in my mouth, now blending with the tears and snot running into the crease of my lips. Hysteria threatened but I was beyond it. My body vibrated as I stood over her with my face covered in puke and tears and her blood. I was intimidating, still on guard; that’s not very me, I thought frantically as I towered over her shrinking form and attempted to wipe my face with my sleeve, only spreading the fluid further. I sat very quickly next to her, too close, allowing her blood and my bile to seep into my clothing. We both quivered and wept silently. I fumbled around in my bag with unsteady hands until I found the nail clipper, and began cutting my nails down so that they all stung with raw tenderness. I took off my socks and my brown desert boots, and cut my toenails too. I picked up her limp hand and cut down her fingernails, before taking off her pumps and doing the same. Then together we sat wordlessly, and we waited.
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