Striking the Sun – All Chapters
“We should all go out for drinks after work,” Steve said. “Susan, you’re up for it, right?” He held his head and pretended to be in pain, then gestured to hungover Susan. It got a couple of laughs.
“I’m always up for beer, Steve, but I have to do the young filmmakers event tonight.”
Susan walked back to her desk and sat down. She was feeling better now, mostly. Her colleagues at the paper had ribbed her a bit, and the music coming from Nathan’s office was louder than normal for reasons she expected were malicious, but her constitution was strong and a hangover couldn’t keep her down for long.
A follow-up email from the event promoter distracted her for a moment. She absently reached to pick up her mug and noticed Steve was stood next to her desk. His presence made her jump.
“So, young film makers. I’m a bit of a film buff,” he said.
“I don’t think the next Tarantino is going to be there.”
“I enjoy experimental films. Maybe I should come and have a look.”
“You could write the feature if you like. I need an early night.”
“Well I’d want you to be there with me,” he said. He put his hand on her desk, moved her papers absently.
“Don’t touch my notes, please.”
“What time are you heading over there?”
“Steve.”
He looked at her. She began typing self-consciously.
“I don’t need any help,” she said. “I want to go, watch the films for long enough to have seen that they’re awful, and then I want to leave.”
“It might be more fun with two of us.”
“These kids will get upset if we talk through their movies.”
“I can take them,” Steve said. He raised his fists.
“I don’t want you to take them,” Susan said. She leafed through her notes and circled a quote in red pen. She could still see Steve lingering in her peripheral vision. He scratched at his forearms a bit, and then he faced away from her toward the paper’s editor passing through to the kitchen.
“Boss man, I want a word with you. You know what we need more of on the sports pages?”
“I hope it’s not even more Everton coverage, Stevie. I’ve noticed how blue it’s getting back there.”
Jonah now took on the burden of Steve’s attention, not quite out of earshot, but out of her personal space.
It didn’t matter anyway. She was leaving at 3pm to pick up her things and go to what the organisers were optimistically referring to as a film premiere, so she only had another hour of this place.
An email, now.
From: Nathan Sanderson
To: Susan Hayes
Subject: Re: Column 3/1/11I’m sorry, Susan, but you know this is f**king unacceptable. You received the updated style guide like everybody else. It’s not my job to clean up your em and en dashes, or the rest of the mess. Fix this.
FYI, I will be out of the office on Friday on personal leave, so I require this week’s column by Thursday morning.
Nathan Sanderson
Senior Copy Editor
The Globe
He’d worked in the gutter press for eighteen months, some despicable red top somewhere, bullying interns until they could successfully hassle celebrities and demonise the working class. He’d bring the experience up when he wanted to pull rank, but never mentioned why he was no longer with the company, why he was stuck here copy editing for the UK’s most terrible newspaper.
When she left for the event, she didn’t look through the glass into Nathan’s office, found some way to appear distracted, held her phone to the side of her head and mouthed words into it, hoping to avoid so much as a wave goodbye.
Amanda Grass was in my science class. She always had been. On this occasion I’d been late to the lesson again and forced to occupy the vacant seat next to her.
At the back of the class, disinterested, I pushed my pencil tip in the gas nozzle for the bunsen burner, and dug around in there, wondering if she’d think I was a rebel. If she did, she thought it silently.
I turned the nozzle to see if the pressure from the escaping gas would push the pencil out back toward me, but there was no movement. When I removed the pencil and opened the nozzle again, still nothing came out.
“He has to turn the gas on first.”
She said it without looking at me. Her voice was high and quiet.
With her glasses and walnut ponytail, her sensible work ethic and introverted personality, she’d always been plain and unattractive to me. Even now I was discovering women I thought of her not as a potential object of attraction, but something else. An example of what not to desire. A physical shorthand for boredom.
Up front, the teacher told us it was time for a test. He was to shout of the name of some elements and we were to write their chemical symbols in our notebooks. I slouched in my chair, scribbled in my margins, and waited for molybdenum, the element I’d decided was my favourite.
At the end of the quiz, my answers came out as:
No, Fu, Ck, In, Gw, Ay, Sh, It, Pa, Nts
We had to swap textbooks with the person next to us and have them mark our answers. Amanda Grass looked away from me to her left, saw the only two people on our row already swapping with each other. She slid her book to me along the table.
Her writing was tight cursive, not the big loops and heart-shaped dots above the i’s I had expected. I preemptively marked all her answers correct and skimmed through the rest of her notebook.
She’d filled the opposite page with scrawlings and scribblings. The letters HC scratched inside a love heart. On another page, I found the words Holden Caulfield.
I glanced over at her. She was looking up at the front of class with her hands resting on my book. The teacher was still dealing with question number one, explaining platinum and plumbum and all the other P letters. Amanda’s grey skirt was thick and heavy, but it hung spectacularly around her thighs and hips, traced a neat shape from her waist down her posterior chain. A special shape I’d never think to look for on her.
“Dominic?” The teacher.
“What?”
“Wake up. Platinum has the chemical symbol Pt. Another element uses the symbol P. What is it?”
“Phosphorus, sir.”
Amanda looked at me and smiled knowingly.
“Correct. Stop daydreaming in future.”
A smile appeared on her face when we reached number three. I took a second glance at her thighs.
Her notebook wasn’t the book of a person who monotonously participated in the school system. I had thought she was interested only in memorising the facts in textbooks, but she was apparently bored enough to dedicate whole pages to drawings and words and statements of love to fictional characters.
We swapped books back wordlessly. She had marked mine using a red pen. Four neat crosses next to my answers before she’d stopped. Underneath, she’d written 10/10.
The class ended. The thick fabric of her skirt outlined the round of her buttocks when she stood up. Through the back of her white shirt, a black bra strap.
“Welcome back to our coverage and we’re in ah as I was about to say this region you see those bulls they’re all over the motorways here that house look ah so they start to build the houses and because they only pay tax when the building is finished they leave them incomplete with the scaffolding visible so they can live here without paying the tax on the property. It’s a real problem in this part of Spain. As I was saying the bulls as we see ah the er the ah rider from the ah the ah Galincianos team ah the bulls are all over the motorways in this part of Spain the metal bulls as you saw ah I’m not sure what the cameraman is trying to show us here ah and the bulls have become really iconic now haven’t they Roland?”
“Attack.”
“Ah yes an attack from ah a counter attack from the from the riders from the ah peloton but the bulls ah this area is ah obviously paella haha but of course this area in particular is famous for its paella and also its rioja which we ah ate and ah we ate and drank last night and it was fine fine food ah er and ah fine wine too of course really rather splendid and ah what’s ah what’s he what’s happening here then Roland?”
“What we’re seeing is the Galincianos team dropping back from the peloton because their leader has had a mechanical problem, it appears to be something to do with his brakes. He already has a rider waiting with him during the bike change and when the pair of them reach the rest of the team we’ll see them all working together to pace him back to the peloton.”
“So ah is there a danger they’ll obviously there’s a danger dear viewer that they’ll exhaust themselves to catch the group and—”
“Well it looks like the peloton is moving quite slow at the moment, Henri. I’d expect them to make contact in the next couple of minutes.”
“So there you have it viewer and ah Roland obviously knows best he ah was a rider for ah all the big teams eh Roland? all the ah and until recently too so ah yes anyway the rioja in this ah this area has produced rioja for over half a century 560 years more or less and ah using the same ah recipe um techniques since that time ah is ah they are still using these techniques as we see 20km to go and the reason this region is so ah famous for its wines is the sun is very warm but also it’s mostly due to the soil which is very arid and the ah the soil viewer is what’s he what’s happening there the soil of course we see they grow oranges here too as well as the wine the ah wine rioja vines they grow oranges as you can see on your screen and lemons—”
“Desanter.”
“Yes an attack now from Descender from the ah from the Xanox Team ah and surely it’s too soon to ah well what do you think will he stay away Roland? or will he ah will we see will it be a sprint? or will somebody else? ah what’s the cameraman doing here?”
Hold it in your hands
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