Vernon had his tongue out when the girl’s reflection sidled in at the seventh floor. He reeled it in politely enough, but he was fairly miffed. He’d been waiting all morning for a squint at his potentially engorged tonsils.
After nine floors of cloying silence, the doors slid open at neither of their stops to reveal precisely no-one.
‘Wonder what happened to them!’ said Vernon. It seemed the appropriate thing to say. The girl didn’t laugh. Vernon couldn’t much blame her.
‘Well, she’s there, isn’t she,’ said the girl, flatly, nodding into the emptiest corner. Vernon laughed, considerably too loudly.
***
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6 comments:
She blushed and turned smartly away from Vernon to look straight at the doors ahead, but he noticed, in the tiny second before she did that, she shrugged at the empty corner.
Another floor sank past.
Vernon wasn't happy. His throat hurt, he was embarrassed at being caught with his dignity down; now he shared a lift with a pumpkin.
"Do Mondays have to be this way?" he thought.
At last his floor. As the lift slowed, he decided to go for broke.
"Sorry I laughed at your friend," he said, "but you gotta admit she's unusual."
A bulb flickered.
The girl looked up at the flickering light and back at me. Her eyebrow flicked and she went back to looking straight forward waiting for me to exit the lift.
I felt silly, like I had done something wrong. I looked back at the corner, still vacuously devoid of anyone.
I stepped out onto my floor and turned back to her, questions half formed on my lips, though what exactly these questions were I wasn't sure. Before I could ask anything the doors were sliding shut and the luminescent numbers unformed me that the girl and the mystery were gone.
I waited a moment in the lobby outside the lift, thinking.
I'm no believer in ghosts and all that paranormal malarky, so the only explanation of the girl's queer behaviour must be a rational one.
After all, when I entered the lift on the sixteenth, I could see she was alone. So what was with the "Well she's there" comment, and the raised eyebrow to the empty corner by the mirror?
I thought some more. Well, I hate mysteries. Terrets? No, probably not. Perhaps a bluetooth set that I didn't see? Yep, that would explain, wouldn't it.
Tourette's even! Bugger it! Sorry!
Despite her blue teeth the mystery girl was patently nothing to write home about. Probably empty headed: a woman of no substance. My mind went back to the man I had met last night, not in a lift, but upon the stair. He had claimed to be from Wells. I wished so much for him to go away I had taken the lift expressly to avoid him. And now this. A paradox within a pumpkin with undertones of flickering buggery. I grinned wryly, though fetchingly. Life must go on: it was time to return to work. Teeth don’t gnash themselves.
And then, in mid-gnash, I suddenly realised the truth. No-one had been there in the lift. In the sudden transition from third- to first-person, Vernon had become me! Yet I knew him to be a fictional character. Neither of us existed. Shame really, for I had fallen in love with the laughless, nodding, blushing, shrugging, eyebrow-flicking, forward looking girl: she who had crammed so much into a tiny acquaintanceship. Luckily, no-one had read the blog for months. I was able to sidle out unnoticed, save for an adenoidal croak of reproach from Vernon and a tiny sigh from the girl.
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