one
In the city around the corner, where the streets blur at the horizon, the girl sat in a small kitchen and made a sandwich. It was a salami sandwich, inside two thin pieces of Vogel’s, with a slice of cheese under the salami, and butter spread on the inside of each slice. It was a Monday at about nine in the morning and she started work at eleven.
The job was pretty good. She liked it well enough. She worked at the bookshop on the edge of the university precinct. Supposedly in customer service, or so the title page of her contract read. In practice she hid from the customers whenever she could without being noticed. She carried a duster in her hand, or tucked a pile of books under her arm to be shelved, put her head down and walked purposefully. She had perfected the art of looking like she was in the middle of something.
Fiction was her specialty, and her favourite place to hide. The fiction section was tucked away in a corner of the shop, and the customers who ventured there were easy to help, because they usually knew what they wanted. People who came to buy fiction came for Pratchett, or Kim Stanley Robinson, or George R.R Martin, or McCaffrey. Or McCauley. Or Le Guin. The girl could walk confidently up to the shelves and find the books in precise order, just as she’d left them.
There was an hour before she needed to leave. The walk down the hill to the bus stop took about twenty minutes, the bus ride itself another twenty. She wrapped the sandwich in the beeswax wrap her mother had sent down for her birthday, and put it in a blue ice cream container, along with an apple she found at the bottom of the fridge. It didn’t look too bad.
Seventeen Seconds was playing on vinyl on the stereo in the lounge. The needle had just wound past the end of the last song, and was making a quiet circular crackle. She walked towards it from the kitchen, through the wide bright rectangle of sun staking its claim on the worn carpet, and lifted up the arm of the turntable. The second side was the best, the title song surprising you at the end with its warm chords, that steady existential rhythm underneath. Her flatmates couldn’t stand The Cure, so she had to play it when they were out. They didn’t understand how happy it made her.
It was the right thing to be listening to while she waited for the time to pass, she thought. It just felt like a good way to start a Monday. Soon she would need to get dressed but she would only do that at the very last minute. She sat on the floor in her pyjamas (blue with a small pale floral pattern, sent down by her mother) right in the middle of the warm patch, and shut her eyes.
Her grandfather had given her the album just before she moved down for university. He was one of the quality boomers, the best boomer there was, as far as she was concerned. He had been arrested protesting the Springbok Tour, had spent most of his working life as a landscape gardener, and had recently started a community group to protest the subdivision that was planned for the valley behind his house. He played the mouth organ, and made excellent edibles which he had sneaked her a small package of on the day she left, without her mother noticing. And he had very good taste in music. She rated almost everything he listened to. When she was younger he had introduced her to The Cure. She never looked back.
If it was up to her, the girl would have been born in 1980. That way she could have been a teenager in the nineties. This was the best decade to be a teenager in, she’d decided. The fact that she would have had to get through the eighties first was neither here nor there. As an innocent child she would have passed through the decade oblivious to the rampant superficial materialism and vibrantly distasteful fashion, and arrived safely into 1990 untarnished and ready to flourish. And once there she would spend every afternoon lying on her bed listening to the original beginnings of the only music really worth paying attention to.
This was more or less what was going through her mind as she sat in the sun listening to side two. It wasn’t anything new, it was a well worn track of thought which had served her very well over the years since she had first conceived it. It was familiar, comforting, but more than that, it was correct. She was quite sure. She could trace one path from punk to post-punk and new wave and goth, and another from punk to hardcore punk and emo. The paths blurred early on, right at the start of the nineties, as she saw it. She’d had a lot of arguments online about it. But she was firm.
Side two ended and the needle crackled. She got up off the floor and went to the stereo. It was important to put the vinyl away correctly. She lifted the disk carefully off the turntable with her fingertips, and dusted it with the grey microfibre cloth she’d bought from the vinyl shop. She tipped it carefully into the inner sleeve, turned it and then dropped it into the outer cover. It went down on the second shelf in the new wave section. Which was right next to punk, and just over from emo. And that was just the second shelf.
By this time she only had five minutes to get out the door. She ran into her bedroom, got out of her pyjamas and put on the clothes that were hanging over the back of the chair. Black pants and a white t-shirt. It wasn’t a uniform but it was her uniform and that was how she liked it. She pulled on a pair of sneakers and ran into the bathroom. A cursory brush with the toothbrush. She glanced in the mirror as she walked out.
The wind was brisk, but not cold. She enjoyed the blast of it on her bare arms, and the way it whipped around her legs as if it was trying to tip her over. She ran for a bit, just to feel it pushing against her body. She wished she wasn’t going to work. If she wasn’t going to work she could just keep on walking, ignore the bus, keep going down and across the web of streets to the ocean on the other side, and spend the afternoon walking up and down the esplanade. But she needed the job too much.
Music for the bus drive. Something to distract her as the bus whined on past grid after grid of suburban streets. It was definitely a Cure day, but not Seventeen Seconds again. She opened up Spotify as the bus lurched away from the bus stop, and found Boys Don’t Cry on a playlist which didn’t look too bad. She was generally, as a rule, not into playlists, but sometimes they were just the right thing.
It was a good choice. Boys Don’t Cry was, as her friend Niko would say, a bop. She couldn’t help nodding her head slightly in time with that steady, cheerful 4/4 beat. She tried to do it subtly, of course. The bus was only a third full, but she wasn’t going to draw attention to herself. This was the right way to head to work. If she could just hold tight to this vibe and not lose it. If she could just sing this to herself in her head all day So I try to laugh about it, cover it all with lies, she would be all right. Surely.
'a quiet circular crackle' ❣️