A Working Relationship
Harvey Bates looked long out of the window, out onto the field spread like a great green lake there outside, beneath the blue sky. He reminded himself that he should be looking inside to what he wa supposed to be doing. He tried, but the screen swam and he shook his head at the dancing numbers. With a sign he looked once more out to the fields and the sky, seeing a bird fly away with envy in his eyes.
The clock on his desk trudged round to five, and somewhere nearby a bell sounded. Without so much as a look around the room he packed up his meagre belongings and walked out of the room. He knew he was being followed, but he couldn’t be bothered to stop and swap pleasantries so he walked on quickly, trying to out run the insistent sound of shoe snot made for ruining closing in behind him. He was almost at the door to the car park when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked around with barely concealed disgust in his eyes. He knew who it was, and Amanda’s eager grinning face looked up at him. She had the kind of face which always pushed glasses up her nose, despite the fact she wore none. She was clutching a folder to her chest in a poor attempt to give her intrusion reason. Harvey looked at her, raising his eyebrows ever so slightly when he saw she was almost skipping from one foot to the other.
‘Hello Harv, how are you?’ she giggled.
‘Fine, Amanda, I’m fine.’
‘Good. Um, wait, Harv! I’ve got something I’d like you to look at, if you’re not too busy.’
‘Would it make the slightest difference if I said I was too busy, Amanda?’ The woman giggled again, assuming his icy tone was supposed to be funny. She offered him the folder, which he took with one hand and turned to leave.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me what it is?’ said Amanda, obviously searching for an answer other than "no."
‘If I did that, would you go away? I think not. I’ll read it and tell you what I think tomorrow. Please can I go home now?’
‘Of course, Harv, don’t let me keep you.’
‘I won’t, Amanda, ever.’
Harvey walked away, and Amanda looked after him with a smile more fitting for a saint than a man.
* * *
The next day Harvey didn’t come into work. No one noticed, really. No one that is, except for Amanda. She sat, looking long and hard at his empty desk, feeling screwed up at his absence not because he wasn’t there, but just because he wasn’t there.
After work she wandered over to his desk and pushing things around, tapping keys on his keyboard. She stopped short of sitting in his seat, but she stroked the back of it fondly. Her co-workers looked at her and shook their heads despairingly. They knew she had a thing for Harvey, although none of them could see why. He was always moody, never spoke to anyone and only did the bare minimum of work. It was as if he didn’t care about carpets the way the rest of them did.
* * *
A week later, when everyone had mostly forgotten that Harvey had ever worked in their little office, a package came for Amanda. She opened it with the kind of excitement that she only usually felt when she watching Harvey. It was her folder, tied with string and postmarked as being sent from Los Angeles. She grinned for the rest of that day, and didn’t let go of the folder once.
After this her work began to suffer. She watched Harvey’s chair all day long, and spent more and more time by his desk after work was over until one morning the cleaner found her sleeping in his chair and sucking on his pencils. Amanda was fired soon afterwards for being incompetent.
* * *
Meanwhile, Harvey was in L.A, spending most days on the beach looking out to sea and most nights in his small room, looking as best he could into the sky. After he had posted the package he forgot Amanda quickly, and now never thought back more than two days. He had been bored the first week he had been in the city. He tried looking for work, but his memories of the horrible office and the green fields haunted his mind and sapped any enthusiasm he had for getting work. One day, while he was walking on the beach, a man had approached him. Harvey knew enough not to listen to men who approach you, but he was feeling very low and this man looked like he was at almost the same level, so Harvey listened to his few words.
‘Hey, man, you looked pissed to me. What’d you say I give you a little something to brighten your day up, eh?’
Harvey looked at him.
‘Drugs?’ he asked, a little to abruptly.
‘No man, blenders. Of course drugs. Interested?’
‘No thanks.’
‘Hey, why not? Makes it all seem less cold, take it from me.’
‘It’s not the world that’s cold, it’s me, and you and any other sorry son of a bitch who thinks they can do as they please. To everyone else the world’s rosy as hell.’
‘So what? That’s them, and you don’t seem to give a shit for them. So come on, man. I’ll give you the first hit free, to see what you’re missing. You won’t get a better offer tonight, I guarantee.’
Harvey them looked around himself, and in the second he had so many thoughts that his mind buzzed. He was talking to a drug dealer in LA when only last week he had a job, a house and a woman who, against all odds was infatuated with him. Neither of the two scenarios was what he wanted but it seemed like he’d never get that so he was ready to try and find at least a glimpse of it by other means.
‘What the hell, I’ve got nothing to lose.’
And that was the end of Harvey.
* * *
Amanda, after being sacked, got on the first plane to Los Angeles. She didn’t know what he was going to do there, she just knew that Harvey was in the same city and that made her feel better. She found herself a job, got a small room and almost forgot why she had come to the city in the frist place. Almost, but she always had the small staff photo of Harvey that she had stolen when she had been fired. It was pinned in her room, looking with a fake smile down to her every day.
Amanda could have sunk into her job, but instead she spent all her time off looking for Harvey. There was no pattern to her seeking, she just wandered around the city looking around herself. In time, and because she was lonely in the city with no friends, she decided to record her trip in a journal. She saw business men, she watched store owners, she grinned at children playing in the park, and she wrote it all down. The writing soon took precedence over the looking for Harvey, and she spent her time on the beach, looking out onto the Pacific and writing about anything she wanted to.
She saw sitting on the beach one day, writing earnestly in her book about the sunlight on the waves, when she heard a voice. No one had spoken to her for weeks and she ignored it, until it sounded again.
‘I said, I bet you’re a poet, aren’t you?’
Looking around she saw a man looking at her and smiling. He saw she had heard him and looked out to sea, squinting in the strong sunlight.
‘So what’s your muse today?’ he said, walking to stand next to her.
‘Sorry?’ she said, putting the pencil down because it was drawing a scribbled line across the paper of it’s own accord.
‘What are you writing about? The clouds, maybe? Or the way that the surfers are in their own little tribe out on the ocean? Or maybe you were wondering about the why of hermit crabs. I know I would if I were a poet.’
‘I think you are, because I wasn’t thinking about any of those things.’
‘Were you not? So, what were you writing about?’
Amanda spent the afternoon talking with the man who seemed to know about more things than she would ever know, but he still looked at her poems with a hunger that she was flattered by. When the sun was going down she stood up to leave, but he held her arm.
‘You can’t go now. Sunset is the best time of the day. Or sunrise, but that’s not until tomorrow. Stay a while longer.’
‘But it’s getting dark, and you know that we shouldn’t be one the beach at night.’
‘I didn’t know that. Why not? Does the sand suddenly get carnivorous?’
‘No,’ she explained, feeling awkward under his irrepressible attitude. ‘We might get mugged. Strange people come out at night.’
‘You have a point, strange people are out at night, but they are out all the time. I’ll tell you what, my place has a good view of the sunset. Would you care to accompany me and witness a daily miracle?’
She smiled at her feet, then suddenly realised that she was having the best day she had ever enjoyed. The thought made her look up, taking in the whole afternoon scene of the beach. She nodded strongly.
‘Yes, yes, I would like that very much.’
‘Good, come.’
Amanda walked away, arm in arm with the man whose name she didn’t even know. From the top of the beach a huddled bundle of rags watched her leave with something like regret in his eyes before he plunged the needle into his arm to find the fields and the sky…
