picked up.
A tram, one that he had successfully overtaken only a few lights before, prattled up and stopped next to him, promising to make it harder for him to overtake again. It opened its doors to pick up more passengers.
The lights turned green.
“Come on, come on,” Henry seethed through his teeth, “Hurry up and get on the damn thing!”
He watched with no little anger as a woman with wet hair and a hassled look on her face raced in from the footpath with her hands waving. The doors, which had just begun to close, were thrown open again.
“Oh, come on!” yelled Henry, exasperated, slapping the steering wheel with his hand, “Ah! Ah, hell! Geez! Hell's bells!”
He wiggled his jaw, squeezing it with his hand to stop the sudden, jarring pain. He moaned a little, forgetting the annoying amber light that signalled Traffic's victory over his pathetic vehicle, and reached into his mouth to pull out two loose articles.
Opening his hand slowly and looking down through the blood and saliva, he spied two shining white lumps on his palm.
“Hell's bells,” he said again, rattling them a little.
A horn from behind him shocked him back. He hurriedly put the car in gear, swore, lifted the clutch, swore again and bunny hopped to motion. His teeth ended up somewhere in the passenger foot-well. He would have to fish them out later.
“Always something,” he complained to himself, “There's always bloody something.”
He stuffed a handkerchief into his mouth to stop the bleeding. Using the back of his hand to wipe his face, he concentrated on the rest of the journey to work. A minute or two to find a park. A few minutes to grab a coffee across the road. Another minute to get upstairs. And that meant that he would be late, again, and be grilled by Mister Miro, again.
He gritted his teeth, stopped doing that because it hurt, and gripped the steering wheel hard instead.
It wasn't like he meant to be late. And it wasn't like he was half an hour late. And it wasn't like he didn't make up the time during lunch, or by working late.
It was two damn minutes every time. What was two minutes, anyway? Spend a little longer at the water cooler, bang, there's your two minutes. Spend a little longer on the crapper, bang, there's your two minutes. Spend a little longer checking an email... Ah, what was the point?
It was going to be the same thing today, as it was yesterday, as it was the day before that. Only he would have to do it with a busted toe, an aching jaw and without a couple of teeth.
Work
The park was not great. Across the main road and a side-street away, it was better than having to park the next street over, close to the shopping strip. The walk from there was longer, and there was a higher concentration of nannas milling about, especially on pension day.
At the crossing he stopped to wait for the lights with the rest of the hordes that had dragged their sorry corpses out of bed.
There, in front of him, loomed Atlas Holdings. Its grey and brown exterior, aged and cracked to the point of crumbling, did nothing to imply that inside was anything different. The windows needed to be cleaned. The sign wanted a fresh lick of paint.
The only thing that stopped it from being just another concrete slab in the forest of concrete slabs was the gigantic statue of Atlas. Muscular, strong, bearing the weight of the world on his back, he was the archetype of what a man could be.
He could carry the heaviest of loads. He could bear the unbearable. He stood until the end of time, reliable and invincible, stolidly facing his task. Atlas could not be shaken, not matter what the world could throw at him because, after all, he was holding it.
The lights went green, Henry pounced off the pavement, coffee in hand, to enter the dull doors and nod politely to Miss Fisher on reception.
He attempted a smile. She reciprocated.
“Hi, Henry.”
“Hi, Miss Fisher. How're you?”
“Fine thanks. How're you?”
“A little sore, actually.”
“That's good.”
She drove a knife into an envelope and pulled the innards out, roughly splashing them on the desk.
“Do you need something?” she asked.
“Ah. No,” he said, “Sorry.”
He hustled over to his cubicle, keen to slip in before anyone noticed. If he got his monitor on and his computer powered, he would be just fine. The machine buzzed to life, flicking through to the login screen after a few seconds.
Henry's Boss, Mister Miro, had seen his entrance and was watching him from under his shaggy eyebrows. This was the menacing pose he struck when he needed to be authoritative. He stormed over.
“Late again, Henry?” he asked, appearing behind him.
He was shorter than Henry. He was dumpy, and fat, and sour-faced, and quite ugly. His suit was permanently attached to his frame. If there was a human underneath the layers of material, Henry could not imagine it. And if he ever tried, his mind turned away, shuddering.
Apparently he was married. Apparently some woman out there had seen through his abrasive personality and obvious mental deficiency, and found him enough of a catch to slip a ring onto his finger. His thoughts turned to what such an amazingly resilient woman would look like.
In many ways, Henry thought to himself, Mister Miro was quite inferior to him.
Why, if it came to a straight line run, Henry would win hands down. If they had a game of chess, he would be sure to whip his Boss. If there was ever a chance of fisticuffs, oh! if ever there was a chance! But if ever there was, Henry would show him a thing or two.
But Mister Miro, Big M behind his back, was his Boss, appointed and approved by upper management. He was part of the furniture, part of the firm, and there would be no budging from his role as top-dog on the ground floor.
“Not really, sir.”
“Not really? Looks like really to me, Ludlow,” he retorted, holding up his shiny watch.
Henry protested, “It's only thirty two past. And my teeth...”
“Not by my watch. Mine says thirty five past.”
Henry looked at his phone. It agreed with Henry's assessment and, he imagined, pretty much every other electronic device in the office that had access to the internet.
“The phone says...” he began, but thought better of it.
Mister Miro was not one to be corrected. In fact, Henry might have the entire Chronological Institute of Switzerland backing his cause and still Mister Miro would shrug, point to his watch and shake his head.
“I'll add in five off my lunch,” Henry resigned.
“Make it ten to make up for yesterday.”
“But I already... Ah, whatever.”
Mister Miro forced a smile, “That's whatever, sir, Henry. You can lose the attitude.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You don't look very presentable this morning, Ludlow. I hope you haven't any on-site visits today. Why, look at you. You haven't even shaved. And you've got blood on your chin.”
“It's my teeth, sir. They fell out.”
“All of them?”
“Only two.”
He pulled his cheek back to show him. There were two gaping holes staring back.
“Tsk, tsk! Henry, that's no good. No good at all.”
“Tell me about it. One minute I was...”
“No good for the company. We can't have you talking to clients with missing teeth. Where are they, anyway?”
“In my car.”
“What are they doing there?”
“Well, if I'd stop to search for them, I would have been late.”
“You are late, Henry! And unshaven. And missing teeth. This is not how an employee of Atlas conducts himself,” Mister Miro barked, “It's undignified and I won't have it, you hear me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I don't want to see any more gaps in your mouth, Ludlow. At least those two are on the side. Try not to smile so hard and you should be fine,” he instructed in a fatherly manner.
“Shouldn't b
e a problem, sir.”
Mister Miro, having imparted his unworldly wisdom, nodded to himself, adjusted his tie and marched off to inspect the other cubicles. Henry ignored him and turned to face his rectangular prison.
He sat down at his desk and plonked his coffee on top. It spilled a little, creating a ring around the base that, in an hour or so, would harden to a semi-permanent feature on his desk along with all the other semi-permanent rings that he had built up over the month.
The cleaners never wiped his desk down, he noticed. The only time the rings ever disappeared was when he decided that the terrain on his desk was too uneven to rest his hands on. Surely the cleaners had some kind of vendetta against him. That sounded a little paranoid, and it was, but it was the truth.
The used staples on the floor remained there from last year. He had, as an experiment, coloured one of them with a marker. Every so often he would look down and note that it was still there, waiting patiently for a vacuum cleaner to lift it from its short-pile home and deliver it to a better place.
A better place. A better time. Somewhere that wasn't here or now, Henry mused, somewhere else entirely. Wherever that better place was, it was wherever he wasn't. It was not anywhere at home, or on the way to work, or anywhere around or between.
Perhaps it was in another country. Perhaps all the better places had already been consumed, and all that was left were the grisly sinews, bones and scraps of everyday life. Perhaps there was no such thing as a better place. It was a mythical construct designed solely with the intention of keeping the false embers of hope glowing.
That was a depressing thought, that the best was already gone, that there was nowhere left to go but down.
He looked at the confines of his