Tail

by Julian Duenker

Tail

  Published by Julian Duenker

  © Julian Duenker 2015

  All rights reserved.

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in reference to the book.

  Copyright of cover Julian Duenker 2015

  CHAPTER ONE

  It’s always the cafés, the cafés that instil that relaxing vibe, one which everybody so dearly demands to be the main ingredient of their very fine coffee. For Freckles the café this was no exception. The walls were mainly pale blue, which perfectly reflected the seasickness that most people felt whenever they ate the food. Ya the drinks were great, but none of the workers seemed equipped enough to serve even the slightest bit of edible.

  The handful of customers that risked their stomach linings occupied themselves on the outskirts of the place, entertaining their conversations with the play of people that walked passed on the nearby street.

  Sitting on a loose chair was the most interesting person anyone would want to serve, unfortunately she was too preoccupied to indulge those fictional conversations. Maybe a push would trip her into sharing words, who the fuck knows ya know?

  Her jet black hair dripped down her face, caressing her tall cheek-bones and collapsing on the rest of her shoulders. Twenty six is a perfect age for her, just old enough to be respectable and young enough to accept the slightest bit of naivety that inflicted her abrasive movements. Her shoulders creeped over the table creating a physical barrier with her arms as if trying to protect her limp drink. Her black strapped boots danced at the bottom of the table controlled by what was left of her ADHD. Her jeans were the definition of wear and tear, peppered with historical holes and charismatic threads. Hidden beneath her relaxed sleeve was a tattoo. It wasn’t your typical tattoo, the type filled with senseless squiggles irreverent pop art and generic quotes cherry picked from a foreign language. It was a very simple tattoo, coloured by nothing. A collection of thin black lines circled all the way around her wrist, ten of them in total.

  Her name is Susan Murphy. She was never sure if she liked the name or not, going through various phases whereby she would either loath or respect someone for saying it. This was particularly frustrating for close relationships. On particularly rough days she would suppress the desire to bite the tongues off of anyone that said the wrong name. Aware that no one could keep up with her fickle preferences she had to swallow whatever punching anger she felt. Nothing crippling, but frustrating enough to leave a wet mark behind her ear.

  Mid sip of her coffee a waitress filled to the joyous brim with professional friendliness came up to Susan slapping her across the face with her Polyethylene smile.

  “Hey! Is everything good over here? Need anything else? Because I would be happy to help with anything you desire from the pits of my heart.” The waitress rested her fingers on Susan’s curved shoulders, making sure to make physical contact as it said on some online promotional article. Susan arched her neck to take a glimpse at the smile that desperately tried to make a good impression.

  “I’m fine” Susan looked at her expecting the woman to pick up on the fact that she wanted absolutely nothing to do with her, but the smile was determined to achieve what it set out to do. “Well if everything is perfect then would you care to spend two seconds of your precious time to fill out this service quality survey? I would appreciate it so much.” She spat from the corners of her plastic lips. Susan’s knee-jerk answer was to say no and fuck off unceremoniously, but the more she thought about answering the survey the more attractive it appeared. “You know what throw it to me” Susan never thought that the waitress’s smile could get any bigger, but her preconception was destroyed the very moment she asked for the survey.

  The smiley woman pulled the survey from her back-pocket and gently placed it in front of Susan as if it were an exquisite dish. She then proceeded to place a pen perfectly perpendicular to the piece of paper. Every second that the smile took to place those two simple objects on the table exhausted Susan. The waitress threw one last smile at her and left. She noticed how the waitress placed the pen in such an exact position, so out of spite she shoved it at an angle to the paper. If you looked hard enough you might have been able to see a modest bit of joy seep through her locked lips.

  Leaning back in the chair she picked up the survey and breezed through the questions. Simple and to the point. How would you rate the service of Freckles café? Her immediate thought was to draw a beautiful depiction of some genitalia, but her attention was uncontrollably drawn to a table not too far from her own.

  There sitting a distance from her was a young couple bound by relatable ideologies. The young woman had a beige scarf wrapped around her neck, with her fingers similarly twisted around her boyfriend’s palm feeding off of each other’s lust. In fact they weren’t even touching the croissant that was ever so lovingly placed in front of them.

  Susan dropped the survey and softly eased into the same position as the woman in front of her. She even forced her legs to stop exercising, sliding them into the same loved up arrangement as the woman she stared at, forcing her body to mirror the scarfed stranger.

  At this point in the afternoon the café had emptied itself of all the filth that it had accumulated during the day. Hence half of the customers were gone, leaving only a handful of people dumb enough to still sit there and suffocate themselves from the fumes that leached through plastic smiles, toxic and all. She filtered out all of the unnecessary noise around her, digging her eyes into the couple opposite. The boundaries of Susan’s thoughts filled with black, leaving a tiny hole in the centre which slowly focused on the strangers. The scarfed woman then detached her well-polished fingers from her boyfriend and ran them through her light brown hair, as if it were an ad for some generic hair product. Susan mimicked her every move, even attempting to position her fingers the same way as she ran them through her hair.

  Her state of transfixed buffering was so strong that she only passingly thought about the boyfriend across from the woman. His Ibiza boy look was reduced to an insulting afterthought. The woman guided her hand down to the outside of her thigh, banging her hula hoop jewellery against her dress. She dug her thumb into her flesh as she gave her boyfriend the longing look that everybody knows the meaning of.

  Susan participated in this sensual dance across the café. But instead of copying the face into dead air, she targeted her expression directly back to the woman. She even dug her thumb into her jeans in exactly the same way. But the woman was absolutely oblivious to the bizarre admirer from across the café. Susan could never pinpoint precisely why she always behaved this way, just entered into this minimal state of mind composed primarily of the desire to imitate. She reached a point where embracing it, cracked logic faults and all made sense to her.

  The couple continued their very subtle conversation about what they were going to stuff each other with later on. The boyfriend made a joke and the woman let out a laugh filled up with sexual pressure. Laughter that tends to rely upon a feeling of release never turns out to be elegant. Susan without thought replicated that exact unflattering laugh, which immediately grabbed the couple’s attention, throwing all of their built up sexual tension out the metaphorical window.

  They cranked their necks towards Susan, giving her a mixed look of confusion, embarrassment and anger. By simply pointing out the most trivial flaw of the couple Susan had undermined their private pleasure. In return she didn’t move an inch, leaving her coal boots to revert back to their ADHD inflicted stage and offered them nothing but pure apathy.

  At that point the couple didn’t know whether or not to confront this intrusive stranger,
move on with their conversation as if nothing had happened or the more attractive option; to simply leave the café and make their conversation a reality at home. As they quarrelled with these thoughts Susan felt a sudden sense of calm. She didn’t particularly care about the couple and their sexual priorities, but instead was more enamoured by the type of person that the woman portrayed herself to be.

  Within this contrived and confused café this woman had entirely cut her surroundings from the moist bed that she played around in. She was able to ignore the walking smile working as a waitress, the cold food in front of her, the smell of the meat that had no reason to even exist in a café and even the three particularly huge holes on her boyfriend’s sweat pants. She was able to filter out all of these incessant things and focus on the man in front of her. When Susan thought about this she felt an undeniable amount of respect for the stranger. She never saw her imitation as mockery, but rather it was more of a natural reaction, rooted from emotional innocence. So she continued and ingenuously echoed the woman across the café.

  The moment the couple looked over to Susan, she couldn’t help but give them a two second smile followed by a quick attempt to change her expression to reflect that of the woman’s emotionally frozen face. So, torn abruptly from their idyllic state the couple decided to play it out and just ignore the anti-social woman. Susan instinctively played along. Not being able to get back into the warm and wet bed of the conversation the couple decided to talk about something a bit more neutral and family friendly. She then decided to finally eat the cold croissant that lay before her. She fumbled around with it a bit, eating it with a frigid taste of self-consciousness. As she ate it she tried to maintain some sort of a conversation while simultaneously trying to avoid the gaze of Susan, who started to similarly fumble around with her coffee. Susan was aware of how she made the woman feel, but never felt guilt, because the way she saw it she was merely paying deluded homage to the scarfed woman.

  They all continued with this façade for an unreasonably long time, up until the boyfriend finally turned around resting his protein bar arm on the chair and gazed towards her. He didn’t say a word. It’s as if he just turned around to observe the peculiar situation without the need to protect his woman. So he just sat back and studied this dark haired woman from across the café. The scarf gave up and just decided to briefly confront her, so she stared directly at Susan and raised her arms “what!?” Susan ignorantly shared her look and then without pause did the exact same gesture back to the shaking scarf.

  The tension between these three people seemed to exist within its own environment. The café just toddled along with its everyday routine, ultimately ignoring Susan and her unusual interest with the woman who had a beige scarf. There was only one other customer still left in the café. An elderly man trying to come to grips with his bizarre touched piece of flat metal. His desire to engross himself with… whatever it was, was held to a frustrating halt when the walking smile once more tried to capture another customer with her plastic coated lips.

  The woman tightened her beige scarf with haste and gave Susan a furiously smacked stare. She was half way out of the café when she gave her boyfriend the whip and called him to come. He sluggishly got up and slid his sausage roll fingers down his sweat pants. For the couple that was the last word, the final heave from their restless waists, but Susan couldn’t see the end. She didn’t even notice the boyfriend walking past her. Her thoughts were entirely centred on that woman and the more she indulged those thoughts the more they shifted towards her scarf. It was easier for her that way. It gave her a sense of voyeuristic comfort. It wasn’t that she went into some sort of alien state of mind, but instead it was a very innate emotion that she just willingly indulged to the greatest affect. It had consequences some of the time, but just like an addict it’s the contrasting highs that leaves the deepest marks. So, she followed them fitting her booted steps into the woman’s walk.

  Now usually when someone follows another person they leave at least a solid twenty feet between them and their prey. But Susan disregarded this and latched onto them like some underground grungy beggar.

  While the couple’s nerves slowly began to slaughter themselves, Susan kept calm, silently aware of the situation. All three of them started to pick up pace walking down a rather empty street. Their worried steps turned into tiny little frantic jumps. The scarfed woman turned to face Susan while walking backwards. She raised her boneless arms and flailed them about in fury as if trying to discourage Susan. “What, for the love of!! What do you want from me. Why are you being such a child? Just leave me alone.” Susan reciprocated by lifting her arms from her sides and throwing them carelessly into the air as well and wrapped her face with an acid expression. The boyfriend let out a patronizing laugh which surely enough grabbed the fractious gaze of the scarfed woman. He raised his shoulders unaware of which button he punched this time. She turned around and walked straight ahead trying to ignore Susan with the sound of her stabbing steps.

  As they all trudged down the street a handful of heads were turned by the unusually fast pace at which they walked. It was an odd sight to say the least. Susan didn’t know what the couple expected her to do, she didn’t give that line of important thought any room. She didn’t even know herself what she was going to do. She was enamoured by the feedback she was getting for her behaviour.

  The traffic and people emptied as if the gods themselves just wanted to watch how it would play out. The sound of the city filtered itself to the inner thoughts of the scarf woman. They bounced restlessly from one exasperated thought to another. Her shoes and Susan’s boots were the only clapped words left in her head, proper torture no? And on the other end of the group was Susan still banging her laces across the old pavement. The boyfriend came to his own conclusion that she was not a threat, so he began to see her as his pet. He always wanted a dog, he just wasn’t sure if he wanted one with clothes.

  As they neared the corner of the street and the couple’s final destination; home, the scarfed woman had had enough. She turned around on her heels and like previously kept walking backwards. She tensed her muscles into a pounce position and bit her own teeth. Susan as expected clamped up and got closer and closer to looking like a dog, which undoubtedly confirmed the boyfriend’s soggy thinking.

  The scarfed woman stepped off of the pavement and an inch onto the road. Straight from the dramatic handbook a tiny red car came unannounced around the corner. The scarfed woman’s knees were clipped filling her sweaty palms with dirt from the road. The driver froze to an abrupt halt as the boyfriend rushed to his woman like the ready meal knight that he was. Susan’s carefree appearance quickly morphed into a refrigerated stance as she watched the scarf trying to stand back up. Her singular thoughts were flooded by a relentless feeling of remorse.

  She couldn’t wait around, she didn’t want to apologise, she didn’t know how. She had built this situation with instinctive reactions and now she had to end it with one more. So her boots lifted themselves from the pavements and ran. They didn’t care what direction they ran in as long as it was a distance away from their consequences. It was easier for her boots that way, and in turn it was easier for her.