Gavin Marshall's Acetate

Gavin Marshall’s Acetate

Clickety-click, clickety click click click. Spreadsheets, E-mails, orders, accounts. A whole world of little electronic letters and numbers right before my tired eyes, all contained in one little glowing box of tricks, which stared defiantly across the desk at me everyday….all day. Being born was the crime, and my sentence was 9-5. Forty fucking years of clicking, dragging, cutting and pasting somebody else’s figures - and then you die. It probably would have bothered me if I wasn’t already in hell. I turned to the cheap plastic phone to the left of the monitor. It hadn’t rung in about five minutes, and today, that was a new record. Ring-Ring Brrring-brrring. I had a funny way of tempting fate, and the ironic coincidence made me smile at myself. Poetry. I let it ring out, it was probably just one of the girls through in the admin office tracing back through one of their fuck-ups again. Then she ruined the silence.

“You should really answer that Gav. It could be important. You never know.”

I lifted my head over the top of the monitor and glanced at her for a couple of seconds, before ducking back down like a bandit in a gunfight.

“And you should mind your own business. You could interfere with the wrong guy one time. You never know.”

The sarcasm with which I delivered the last three words, in my opinion, was enough to have shut her up and given her the message. One-nil to Gavin. Poetry.

“What happened to you Gav? You used to be so…..”

Why the pause? Was she thinking of something nice to say? I used to be so what? Trusting? Laid-Back? Social? Maybe I used to be all of the above until I found out what you were really like, you lying, dirty, two timing slag. Maybe I used to be the average happy-go-lucky Joe that populates places like this all over, until I learnt the hard way why the inter-office relationship was a bad idea. She still hadn’t finished her sentence, even though she had rolled her sky blue eyes right into the top of her blonde head, desperately hoping to catch a passing glance of the right word. “I used to be so what Angela? Eh? I used to be so what?”

“Normal, or something”, she replied, nervously pulling at a loose thread on her beige knee-length skirt, and trying her best not to catch my eye as I reloaded my gun and popped up over the monitor again. If I was a bandit, and this was a gunfight, I would definitely have smoked her by now; the shrill tone of her look-at-me voice and the blinding scent of her Avon perfume would have blown her cover. Bang. I would probably have put one in her knee first, just to see her suffer, and then beg, sniffling and crying for me to finish the job and blow her head off. The coup de grace. Poetry.

The office door swung open. Mr Grimm stood in the doorway.

“Did I hear shouting Gavin? Are you talking to yourself? Are you that bored in here on your own?”. Grimm laughed, the ways guys like Grimm did. Haw Haw Haw. Fucking tit. “Anyway pal, could you do me a favour? Could you pop upstairs and give this to Angela?”

He dropped the envelope on the cabinet beside the door and threw me a wink. Prick. Now what was I going to do? I’d just acted out shooting her in my head, putting a bullet between her brilliant blue eyes, all because I’ll never have her, and now I have to go upstairs and give this to Angela. In person. Face to face. I’d have to prepare. Maybe another conversation in my head with her, scripting how it’s going to go upstairs. Maybe I can engage her in some sort of ‘cool’ conversation. About Politics, or Coldplay, or George Clooney. Maybe we’ll talk so long I’ll get to pull up a chair and share a custard doughnut with her, or maybe a kit-kat. Maybe. Or maybe I’ll hand her it, and sheepishly run away, numbly mumbling an inaudible stammer, because I knew I was riding on borrowed time, so out of place beside her perfect existence…..like the school geek asking to fuck the prom queen.

Maybe I wouldn’t give her the envelope at all. Maybe I’d keep it. Who knows what’ll happen. This isn’t prime time tv. This isn’t Friends, or Cheers, or fucking Dawson’s Creek. This is as real as it gets. Life. Seen through Gavin Marshall’s Acetate.