Last Day at the Orifice

Leaves on the line, a bit of London rain - and she’s running late. No one in the lift except her. She arrives on floor 5 with a gentle ting. Like toast popping up.

She steps out of the lift and nearly into someone.

Oops! Sorry!

No, sorry, my bad, he says.

It’s that same guy again. Keep bumping into him, literally this time. Thick flowing hair, beautiful dark blue eyes… Now blushing as he smiles and disappears round the next corridor.

She feels hot all of a sudden. Gets out her keycard to swipe the magnetic reader at the next set of double doors. Almost weak at the knees. Was that real desire in his eyes or random playfulness because he’s had a good week?

All the more shocking in this building - financial firms and banks on every floor. She can’t remember the last time any man pretended to notice her unless it was to hold open the door for her. Funnily enough, that’s how you came to notice him. He held open the door for you as you were leaving the cafeteria one day.

Thank you.

Absolutely, he said with a smile.

Was that an Irish accent? she wondered.

As she pushes open the glass door, she tells herself not to look over her shoulder, but she has to - just in time to see him walking jauntily back to his office.

Why do men like that never work in any of the places where I work? So many offices, so many jobs and so many years - hardly seems fair.

Last week she ran into him standing outside the Gents talking to two older men - ironic and self-aware, brimming with the confidence of a man who’s convinced he’ll soon be tackling more interesting, more lucrative challenges. He pretended not to notice her.

You wonder about this cheeky confidence he has. It’s not presumptive the way private school boys are, it’s rougher around the edges. Girlfriend, wife? Probably not kids, not yet. Kids suck cheekiness from most men, and the ones who do have kids and somehow keep their cheekiness are usually arseholes, she’s found.

==

Why must office corridors always be so dull? The nondescript brown carpet under foot, the boxy booths and echoey little office to your right… If you were to ask yourself, what did you do here last week, you wouldn’t be able to say, would you, nothing specific comes to mind. You just know you were here for three days out of five, tapping on keys, gazing at a screen, moving gridlines and boxes about.

It’s a bit scary to think that the standard office furnishings and artificial plants may be the most memorable part of her time here since she joined a year ago. You might also include the 5-story view of the tall, half-empty office block opposite… And maybe the toilets. Yes, the toilets. She’s in there a lot. She’s found this is the one place nearby where she can have some quiet time, time that is often spent scrolling through useless dating apps where she appears only in silhouette and anonymous close-ups.

Keycard again. She swipes the magnet. The door lock goes thunk. She pushes the door, which closes behind her with a more weaponised thunk. She continues round the ever-shrinking stationary area making a beeline for her desk, a couple of metres before the exterior wall of glass.

So - your last day at this office, she thinks to herself.

She was wondering when it would happen, moving to a smaller premises. How can you justify spending so much money on rent when, so few people come in nowadays? Presumably, the lease must have expired. The new office, its location yet to be announced, is likely to be half the size. She wonders if she’ll be allowed to choose her desk. Somewhere far away from the two noisy sales guys she sits next to.

She places her rucksack on her chair, and her croissant in its little bag on her desk. She seems to be the first one in. She turns round to scan the larger area behind her. She can spot a couple of women stationed at their desks, already locked into their screens. She doesn’t know them, never speaks to them, has no interest in speaking to them. She imagines the feeling’s mutual.

She takes her company laptop from her bag. Unzips it from its cover and turns it on. While that’s booting up, she walks to the kitchen with her dinky metal cafetière that nearly everyone in the office has commented on as if it were a rather elegant expression of abuse of employee legislation, and her little bag of organic, mould-free coffee.

She pretends not to see the bits of limescale flakes at the bottom of the still warm kettle and pops the button.

Nice and quiet. Like a library. Without the comfort of books. Completely defeats her effort to put on a fitting black skirt and fresh red blouse in the morning. To think she used to walk into a rowdy ad agency every day for nine months, a year before Covid. The boys there used to look at her, imagine something, possibly even to the rhythm of the dance music blaring out from speakers dotted around the designated creative area.

In just four years, she seems to have aged dramatically, like in a time travel film. Now put out to pasture with the apologetic grown-ups, who shuffle their small talk like a greasy pack of old cards. Almost no one here talks to her unless it’s to say sorry when they have to walk round her on the way to the kettle or a box of tea bags. Almost no one here really has much clue about design or creative concepts. The only people she speaks to for more than five minutes at a time are the people she meets over Teams or Google Meet. The people actually here rarely want her opinion on anything.

Look at it this way, the slower day job life leaves you with more time for new pursuits - like crypto trading. If she didn’t have that, her brain would shut down. Some days she dares to imagine making enough monthly profit so she could trade full time and become a coach, like everyone else. This was her escape plan: through her laptop she was building a tunnel out of the office world to a place called WFA (Work from Anywhere). She might finally get back to painting again, real canvas, real oil on her hands, in her hair mostly, but anyway, it would be more satisfying surely than the dense homogeneity of shifting virtual colour on a screen - two screens if you want to get technical about it.

She pours the boiling water into her cafetière and drops the metal plunger to the water line.

Walking back to her laptop, she sees Pablo has arrived - he’s at the desk to the right of hers.

She says a friendly: Hey, how’s it going?

Yeah, good, he says, in a way that gratifyingly expresses a blend of melancholy and happiness that complements perfectly her own habitual saudade.

She likes Pablo. He’s from Northern Spain. He has an avuncular air about him - the beard, the belly, the twinkling blue eyes, greying hair - she finds truly endearing. Almost every time she greets him in the morning she has to stop herself from flinging her arms round his broad shoulders to give him a hug. Like that huge teddy bear she had when she was four. He’s just so huggable.

As they strike up some easy, catch-up conversation, she hears laughter in her voice. It reminds her of waves crashing on a beach and, for a moment, she could easily believe life is a lot less lonely than it has been for some time now. She even feels fleetingly sad when their conversation dries up, as it always does after about five minutes.

Her computer is asking her for her login. She’d better pop it in and stop chatting. Pablo swivels back to his screen and puts his headphones back on. Concerto de Aranjuez. It was one of her own favourites in her early twenties, when she still played the classical guitar. Pablo doesn’t even seem the musical type, but it’s nice he plays good music and at low volume.

She pours her coffee into her mug. She chose the mug with white and red spots today.

She takes her almond croissant from its branded bag. Why is it so flat? Like someone sat on it. Paul, the bakery, has let its standards drop - and put its prices up. Like everyone else. She takes a bite. Gosh, too sweet.

She takes her plate and sorry looking almond croissant to the kitchen. She grabs a spoon from the cutlery drawer and sticks it inside the croissant. She hopes no one comes along and asks her what she’s doing, it feels vaguely obscene, but we go -

Fuck, you idiot.

She flicked almond goo all over the window.

She reaches for the Kitchen Towel. It looks like the guts of a squashed fly. Disgusting. She needs two sheets to wipe it up and closes the bin lid.

With her eviscerated almond croissant back on its plate, she walks round the pointless assembly of chill-out area furniture to her desk. She sits down and pauses a moment. She doesn’t want Pablo to think she’s a glutton. Mind you, he’s always eating crisps, nuts and other crap… and thick slices of gooey cake whenever the equally large office manager feels an impulse to cheer everyone up, usually Mondays and Wednesdays.

She types in her login. Two-step verification obliges her then to tap the green tick on the Duo Mobile app on her phone when it pops up… OK, that gets her through the first layer of security.

While the system boots up and takes her to the next step to her login, she has a sip of her coffee. And almost instantly, she feels she can face her heaving inbox now.

She taps in her email and password again. Into the next box that appears she taps the secondary password she has on the app.

She takes a second bite of her croissant. Definitely an improvement less the giant fly’s guts.

She was off Monday and Tuesday, so, yes, as predicted, her inbox is an infestation of emails. To stem the rise of panic gripping her stomach, she reminds herself that 90% of these messages don’t concern her. Everyone gets blasted with everyone else’s business here, which just adds unnecessary anxiety to your day, but what can you do, you’d be out of a job if you ever complained. You’re supposed to be taking a healthy interest in all areas of the business, even if you are a designer and have no clue what developers and product managers are talking about half the time.

Here is one for her. She clicks the ‘View comment’ link. Her page refreshes. Monica in Estonia is asking her to add a third bullet to the design template. A machine could do this. A machine soon will be doing this. Which is why she must crack the crypto trading before too long, this month, ideally, or risk being put on an AI training programme run by the local dole office.

Talking of which… Another login, this time to Binance, shows her that of the five positions she has open none of them is green. The biggest (unrealised) loss is now more than £153 worse than it was yesterday. She reminds herself: The direction is right, we just have to wait. We have to put it in a box and not think about it.

She glances over her shoulder. One more person has arrived - the Russian woman with the funny, piping voice and big chin. She’s dyed her hair rainbow colours. It looks like an accident. Now she both looks and sounds like an old bag lady on meth. Please don’t let me run into her in the kitchen, I won’t know where to look.

==

At around midday she returns from the bathroom to find Ben, the Marketing Director, flopped in a chair behind Pablo. She rather likes how some men flop into chairs and seem to remain flopped until they get up. Women can’t do that. They just look hideous if they even try.

The two men are talking about numbers, she soon gleans. Of course they are. Metrics. Conversions. Impressions. At least it’s not football, for a change.

She quite likes Ben. He’s one of those typical quietly upbeat English blokes who smiles ironically when he says: Everything’s a bit shit, which he freely admits, quite often. Stocky build, slight belly, receding grey hair. Walks about the place like a sporty eight-year-old looking for pals to round up and go down to the woods for a bit of harmless mischief.

He likes everyone to know he cycles to the office twice a week and that his journey times are improving, also his pulse rate recovery time. His lively blue eyes rev with team keenness expressing excitement to come. She wonders what that excitement looks like. Bigger numbers, presumably. The way he talks about the business, now in staccato bites of surprise and consternation, she could almost believe that marketing was like Raiders of the Lost Ark, if only she knew how to see it that way. Although, she suspects that behind his display of professional confidence there’s a roiling brew of fear of failure.

It’s perhaps not the right time to interrupt, so she simply sits down and taps in her login, for like the hundredth time today.

This is not a sensible time to check your crypto, of course, although it is in fact the time to check your crypto. Perhaps she should scoop up her laptop and move to one of the booths in the corridor. Was she being a bit stand-offish, though, not turning round to say hi to Ben. Show some interest in the business that pays her salary. Act like you’re happy to be part of the team, in case you’ve forgotten how to. Some casual chat about the office move, anything really, just so she wasn’t with her back to them the whole time?

Five years ago she would have done just that. No problem. Men like how she laughs, she’s noticed. She can switch it on just like a good actress, even on a bad day, as if totally charmed by her company. But somewhere along the way, probably dating back to the first lockdown, she’s got out of the habit of joining in, unless it’s absolutely necessary.

It occurs to her perhaps they don’t even see her there, really. She’s just this shape in a chair facing a screen, tapping at keys, moving shapes about. It’s how she feels after all.

Four million we’ve spent on ads, she hears Ben say. And our numbers are still very low. I’m still very positive, but, y’know… Lots of people are signing up, then disappearing, not even funding their accounts. Val in Cyprus was saying, the numbers he’s seeing are worse than the tiny start-up he used to work for. And then we had that massive spike of volatility. Did you see it? No one knows what’s going on. Israel, Ukraine - now Ukraine’s invaded Russia, Israel wants to wipe out Hezbollah, Trump just rambles on like a deranged person about Kamala Harris’s origins, even though he’s changed his hair colour from blond to orange…

His face, too, Pablo chips in.

Isn’t it crazy! Ben exclaims.

She was expecting an outburst of laughter, but the two men have fallen silent. This is unusual, almost disturbing. Perhaps they’ve fallen into a hole in the office carpet to a room below where Putin is greeting them with a pot of Polonium tea.

A friend of mine said he thinks it’s sunspots, Ben resumes. There’s been massive explosions on the sun’s surface apparently, and they can affect our behaviour here on earth. I mean, look at the debt! 315 trillion global debt I heard a macro expert say the other day, and fifty per cent of that’s been in the last 8 years! I think people are really worried about credit drying up. We’re all doomed, I would say!

This time - Ben explodes with laughter. He slaps the arm of his armchair. Pablo chuckles obligingly like a wet twig popping off in a bonfire.

Anyway, Ben rounds up, better get on! I’ll catch you later, amigo.

She remembers a time when almost all her friends were colleagues. Then Covid happened, and she stopped seeing them. When she returned to the office, for two days a week, she noticed they often chose different days to come in. So, she might see them only once a week, and sometimes not at all.

Post-Covid, she noticed their lives had begun to branch off from one another. It was barely noticeable at first, then more obvious as female bumps appeared, fingers zooming in on photos of babies and small children, new bathroom tiles. They would often wind up a conversation with one of those sad-and-hopeful promises to catch up one night - we must, we must - a girls’ night out. But it hardly ever happened. It was a shame. Then it wasn’t, and she realised their conversations - her friends’ search for a new school, their worry over the fees, the cost of childcare, their boyfriend's dirty habits or quirks, their holiday plans - carried barely a spark of interest for her. She found exchanging sounds with her Bengal cat more meaningful. A deeper connection.

It must be your age. 45. She struggled with this number. The number 5 is a number you have to jostle with every time you see it. Like it wants to grab you by the wrists and throw you over the wall into your fifties. She would rather be 46, but that would be a year older, and she didn’t fancy that, either.

But it wouldn’t be her age if things with Dylan were more… what exactly? If only she could put her finger on it. She loved him. Good looking, smart, go-getting guy. When she was mocking up a survey yesterday, it occurred to her he was somewhere between 5 and 6 in love with her. But he didn’t seem to need her. Not that she was needy or liked needy men. But she did require a certain level of immersion, otherwise dark chocolate was more fun.

He says he’ll be more available in a month or two, but he’s travelling more, she said over the phone to one of the few close friends she has left. Without you? Yes. Why? the friend said. Aren’t entrepreneurs supposed to do their meetings over Zoom? You know what men flying solo do in Dubai, don’t you?

Gosh, friends can be so cruel. Girls anyway. They get off on it.

But someone has to tell you.

She had to stop herself from telling him to wear a condom the last time they had sex. But then she’d have to air her suspicions, wouldn’t she? She had no evidence at all that he was cheating on her.

But where’s this going? she’s been asking herself again recently. She meant ‘the relationship’, obviously. Like it was a ship. Even when they went places - another five star hotel, another pool, another menu - half the time they were together, he was on his phone, so you went on yours. At least she could see it was a sad cliché, she wasn’t sure he could, so there wasn’t even any irony to sustain her.

It’s not as if she wanted kids, or to move in with him, the usual ‘next stage’ people are alluding to when they say: Where do you think it’s going? Maybe she was jealous of this re-branded Dylan he was working on, almost overnight obsessed with the fast life in the world of AI. Whenever he expressed excitement, it wasn’t about her, it was about tech and money, what he called real freedom. Which surely could only lead to one thing? The freedom not to be with her?

Oh, God, you can’t think about this stuff at the office. You’ll have a panic attack.

==

Ronny, one of the sales guys, has arrived. A dapper little man in his mid-fifties, always a tan, always in a suit and white shirt. He stops by his chair looking slightly harried and tense. He throws his sunglasses on his desk, slips out of his jacket and wraps it carefully around the back of his chair. I might be late, he seems to say, but I’m ready to catch up. Watch me.

She allows him a minute or two to acclimatise himself to his two giant screens and flashing FX tables before saying hello.

Yeah. You alright? he says, no eye contact. Never addresses her by name. It’s Zinha, she feels like reminding him. Maybe it’s too exotic for his tongue.

Yeah, fine thanks, she says.

Good good. Hot one out there.

He seems rather wary of women like me. Broad Kent accent - probably voted Leave.

After some furious tap-dancing with his mouse, he’s got his headphones on and is slapping down his best offer to a client with an abiding interest in Gold and Dollar/Yen. Five minutes from now the whole office will be able to hear.

No point in complaining… She picks up her laptop and retreats to one of the booths in the corridor.

==

Assuming there are no cameras in this area, she can now check her crypto account unobserved by anyone. At first glance she wonders if she’s lost her internet connection. There’s barely any movement even on the 1-minute candles. She has an uneasy feeling about it all.

She opens LinkedIn, skim-reads and scrolls. Somehow entering this virtual space is noisier than sitting next to Ronny. She writes a couple of comments. She reads them back, and decides she ought to soften her language a little, some of her own personal frustrations filtering through…

She checks her own Outlook. 2,995 items in the delete folder. She clicks Delete and watches the thin blue line move from left to right as her trash is emptied. She finds herself gazing at the subhead ‘Recoverable Items’ and wonders how many items in her life might she like to recover. Her mind’s gone blank. This is not the kind of question you can entertain seated at a shadowy little booth like this in the complete absence of natural daylight.

==

At 3.44 she receives a WhatsApp message from Dylan. Someone hasn’t turned up to a meeting and he’s going to have to extend his stay, or the whole trip will have been a waste. He’s really sorry. He’ll definitely be back for the weekend, though. He misses her.

No, he doesn’t. That’s what she says to him. He’s told her he prefers to use the words: I look forward to seeing you. It’s probably a healthier way of putting it, but it’s not the same thing.

She reads it again. As if it might contain code for something deeply ominous.

She writes back, That’s OK x.

This is why you’re on that hook-up app. It’s an insurance policy. A means of balancing the difference between the fun Dylan is having compared to what she’s been having, which hasn’t been much fun at all.

==

Compared to work-from-home time, office time these days feels like being under water. When her lips parted just then, she imagined seeing air bubbles escapes her mouth, rise up… and pop silently when they touched the ceiling.

She breaks the surface at 5.17 pm, having just completed the design for a new email template ahead of deadline. She picks up her phone and keycard and heads for the Ladies.

She presses the green button to exit the corridor and booth area. At the next set of doors, she presses another green button and walks out, past the lifts, two lifts either side of her. Dead ahead, through the glass wall at the end of this walkway she sees the open plan office opposite - it’s nearly as empty as her office.

She’s about to turn the corner and hang a left, when she sees that guy again - to her right, near the Gents exit. He’s on his phone - talking animatedly to someone. A sudden impulse takes hold of her. She stops by the glass railing overlooking the cafeteria and takes out her own phone. She thumbs randomly at the screen pretending to write a text. Like a spy.

She steals a glance at him. He doesn’t see her. She hears him laugh, then he says, Mate, that’s better than what I have!

So it’s not a girlfriend he’s talking to.

She carries on pretend-texting. What are you doing? she asks herself.

We’re lurking, finding out about him.

She swivels her hips and steals a second glance, this time maintaining her gaze.

He’s seen her. Yes, he’s definitely clocked her. He seems to be holding her gaze, but he’s disguising it well, as if she were merely in his field of vision, his mind being on the call he’s on.

An explosion of pop music. Fuck. It’s her phone. Stop it. You must have hit on a YouTube video. Idiota. It won’t turn off!

…There, it’s off.

He’s looking at you again. Smiling.

He seems to be winding up his call... Yes, he is.

Now he’s texting someone, unless he’s doing what you were doing.

He could walk off at any second.

What are you going to do?

She pushes herself -it’s like pushing a boat out - and walks over to him.

Belatedly he acknowledges her with a sheepishness that makes her think perhaps she misread that look in his eyes earlier this morning.

She smiles, inviting him to feel relaxed. He returns the smile, if a little more puzzled than he should be.

Nearly finished for the day? she says casually.

Yeah, close. You?

Pretty much, yeah.

In a fraction of a second she can read that he’s noticed she’s smiling at him in a way no one smiles at you in an office corridor with a view of the cafeteria.

Do I have a bit of spinach or something stuck between my teeth? he asks.

I don’t know, I didn’t notice.

A spot on my nose?

I don’t see one, she replies, still smiling at him, encouraging this little game to continue.

I saw you this morning.

You did, yeah. She waits a beat. How was that? she asks.

She can hardly believe how slick she’s playing this.

He laughs, blushing, clearly enjoying himself, she reckons. He glances over her shoulder as if the answer might be there - unless he’s looking for an excuse to flee.

How was your day? she asks.

He points a finger at her: Spanish, right?

That’s not the segue she was looking for.

Portuguese, she says.

Ah, very little accent, that’s cheating.

He smiles cheekily again, confident but ironic, a man genuinely interested in her, or women like her, seeing her less as an ‘opportunity in the market’ than a source of knowledge and self-discovery.

That’s usually what happens after twenty years in another country, she says. How was your day?

Ah, y’know, same old same old. Pretty quiet really.

It is. Do you think people are not coming in because of the riots?

Could be, he says.

She senses the riots have barely encroached on his consciousness, a slightly noisier event than a viral video, soon to blow over.

How was your day? she asks.

Oh, pretty uneventful to be honest. You?

Same.

She leans on the waist-high railing, so he can get a better look.

Are you bored?

He gives a little puff, as if that were only the half of it.

What can I say? The wonderful world of banking.

Wanking?

He laughs loudly.

Fair enough, he says. How about you?

Graphic design.

Well - creative at least.

Not here, not really.

Boring then.

They see a woman heading in their direction. She disappears into the Ladies.

She waits a beat until she’s got his full attention again. He’s wearing contacts. Talking any longer is just going to kill the impulse. She reaches for his hand. It feels warm and soft in her overly air-conned hands.

Come…

She’s begun heading for the Gents. He hasn’t yet wrested his hand free of hers. She keeps pulling him along.

What’s wrong? Are you OK? he asks.

Just come… follow me.

She hears an authority in her voice that makes her think of a paramedic leading a sick man to a place of safety.

As she opens the door to the Gents, she glances over her shoulder - there’s no one there, watching them - and bundles him inside where there’s a short corridor. There’s a Disabled toilet on her left. She slams down the handle and bundles him inside.

She flicks the lock and swivels round to face him.

He gives a nervous laugh and asks her if everything’s OK. Like a man who’s just woken from a magic trick.

It could be, she says, keeping her eyes locked on his and taking two steps closer.

He might smile, at least.

One step closer and she’s close enough to smell his breath. He’s clean-shaven, she notes, whereas Dylan always wears stubble.

Her eyes maintain their influence, reeling him in, as she asks him, in hushed tones: Do you want to fuck me?

It excites her that his eyes fill with all kinds of thoughts and emotions bringing him to the brink of panic, possibly an explosion of desire.

He doesn’t reply. She doesn’t want him to. Just stay where you are…

She brings her mouth close to his. He has quite a beautiful mouth.

A soft kiss to start us off. Her tongue, his tongue - they have lives of their own. With Dylan it’s a dance. This guy? More like a collision, a spillage of pleasure. She can’t tell yet if it’s the right kind of chemistry but it’s good enough to launch them into another round of lustful groping and deeply penetrative kissing.

This is crazy, he says, breaking from her mouth, breathless and moist. He laughs as he says this, a slightly ambiguous laugh.

Is it good? she asks when they next part.

Yeah, fuck. I was just…

What?

He kisses her again, trying to explain, presumably.

…Bottled up? she whispers.

Ooh, look at him, now you just said that.

A strong whiff of sweat hits her nostrils. Is that hers? And so soon. She thinks it is. A shocking rawness to it that she finds surprisingly arousing. It’s as if middle-age has equipped her with a mechanism that might better entrap her prey from the outset. Has he noticed?

He picks her up and carries her to the basin, gently depositing her there, still glued to her mouth. This may work in the movies, but the tap is pressing into her coccyx.

No, wait, try this.

She hops off the basin and steps up to the toilet. Lifts her skirt. Peels off her panties. Lifts up her skirt again and reaches out for the large grey rail meant for disabled people so they can pull themselves up from the toilet seat. She plants her left hand on the wall and sticking her bum out, she asks, That better?

Yeah.

She hears him unbuckle his trousers. His index finger finds her clitoris. Only now does she realise how wet she is. A protest of wetness. They’ll have her arrested. Deported on the first plane to Rwanda. Almost embarrassing. Normally it takes a while.

Is that his middle finger, or… No.

She hears that familiar muted groan of pleasure in her throat, taking her up a level. His corresponding exhale at a lower register.

We have to be quiet, she whispers.

I know, he whispers back. Are you OK like that?

Yes.

He goes a little deeper...

Her first thought was, Oh, he’s a bit small… Now that he’s got going, she discovers he’s quite the opposite. With every thrust she feels her chest give a little gasp and worries that a scream might launch from her voice box in spite of her efforts to keep much much quieter than at home.

You know how to pull out, can you? You can’t come inside me.

OK, he says breathlessly.

Knowing her luck, he’s got herpes, but you can’t think of that now. It had to be done. You can’t do this at 50, not even 49. Last chance saloon, girl.

At least you’re close to getting your period. That’s if you can even get pregnant these days.

Her head angled forward, her necklace has dropped out of her blouse and is dancing about around her chin. The last time she held her face level with the open toilet, she was throwing up at a wedding, another friend she’d lost to married life.

Her guy keeps going. Her yoga arms are beginning to feel the burn. If only she felt close… It’s not helping that her eyes keep alighting this dark green PROSTATE CANCER UK bin in the corner - DISCREET. DIGNIFIED. DISPOSAL. DESIGNED FOR MEN. What is that for exactly? Men with diapers?

A man’s leather shoes approach the outside entrance to the Gents.

She slaps a hand on her man’s thigh.

He freezes.

A door’s hinge pierces the room’s silence. A hand rams down on the handle, testing the lock.

Such violence! Like he wanted to break in!

She hears a groan of frustration in the corridor and a petulant shuffle of leather. A second door opens and closes. The footsteps grow distant the moment this second door closes. He’s gone into the main loo, with the urinals.

She lets out her breath.

Christ, the man behind her says, stifling a laugh. Are you OK?

…Yes, go on, do it, hurry.

He moves against her. He sighs, frustrated.

Fuck, he says.

What?

I’ve gone soft.

This is not what she wants to hear. She desperately doesn’t want to have to come to her senses and start apologising or whatever you do in these circumstances. No, this is not going to happen. She must think of something. Urgently.

I need to sit down, she says, remembering the fatigue in her arms.

As she turns round, she sees his semi limp cock, 30 cm from her face, bending off to his left, dribbling, like a sozzled alien from Francis’s Bacon’s Triptych. Well-trimmed pubic hair like a porn star, she notes.

She looks down at herself. Her hairless engorged pussy seems to be talking to him. Well, hopefully he’s listening.

I can do you, he says by way of consolation.

Could you?

He nods.

She drops the toilet seat.

Ah, gosh, that feels good. She runs her hands through his thick young hair. How old is he? 32, 33? At this angle the toilet seat is uncomfortable, but who cares, this cannot be allowed to end in ignominious failure.

She closes her eyes. A tap is turned on in the room behind them. Followed by the sound of someone tugging hard at the paper towels. The metal lid to the bin gets a punch in the face. A door’s hinges cry. The petulant man’s leather soles slap on the floor… and march off into the unknown.

Silence.

Why can’t she relax?

Well, it’s obvious why. Fantasies are just that, in your head, without other people’s toilet-break interruptions.

He’s stopped. She opens her eyes. He’s pulling a funny face.

Are you OK?

He sneezes.

Fuck, sorry.

Is it me?

No, I-I get - He sneezes… hayfever, he finishes.

He sneezes again, and again and again and again.

Oh, shit! he exclaims quietly.

He pulls himself to his feet, his boxers round his ankles, cock swinging drunkenly. He tears off some toilet paper and wipes his nose. He keeps sneezing and apologising. It’s almost funny. No, it probably is funny. Or will be, looking back. Right now, she’s just pissed off.

She leans on her thighs, waiting for this sneezing fit to end. Her body is cooling fast.

Her purple panties appear in her periphery like a twisted candy wrap. The next time he sneezes -

Oh, God, that’s it. She reaches for them, shakes them out. One foot in, the other foot -she pulls them up.

He seems to have stopped, but she’s on her feet now, thinking fast - how do you bail from here?

Was it too shocking, too crazy? she asks.

Um… He smiles, it’s almost a smirk, maybe it is a smirk. It was a bit - but, honestly? That guy trying to get in, I just completely, my cock just… I’m sorry.

It’s fine, don’t worry. It was, it was just a, um

It was really nice though, he says, as sincere as an undertaker.

Good. Um, I was…

Having a bad day, were you?

Yeah, I suppose. Boring… y’know?

Yeah, I totally get it. But, y’know, we could try again, if you like?

He clears his throat, tucking in his shirt now.

Nice of him to say so, and yes, she was also hoping they could try again, but this sneezing of his seems to have blown a hole in her mood. To try again now would be like asking a man to stick in a new cartridge to her broken printer or something.

I don’t know, she says, puffing up her hair, I think we should probably call it a night, don’t you?

OK, yeah, no worries.

He gave in rather easily to that. On the other hand, there’s nothing worse than a begging man.

She glances in the mirror. Not that she had her make-up with her anyway. She sees him in the reflection pulling his trousers up.

She turns to look at him. The cocktail of fear and excitement seem to have robbed him of some of his good looks, and she’s not even sure now whether she fancies him that much.

And maybe he’s looking at her thinking something similar and he’s just being polite, smoothing things over, suspecting she’ll never speak to him again, not even look at him.

It’s as if she cracked some eggs into a pan hoping to make an omelette but the old gas hob was clogged with dirt and wouldn’t light. You’re too old for this sort of thing, even though it matters more now than ever.

She’s about to say something when the Gents door goes again. and another hand yanks on the disabled handle. What is it with able men and this disabled toilet!

I feel I should just get out of here, she whispers, after this other vandal has gone.

He nods graciously, and purses his lips in a deferential smile, reverting to his office persona.

She tiptoes toward the door.

He comes to stand alongside her. She likes the smell of his sweat.

The Gents urinals begin their short burst of sprinkling.

We cool? he asks.

She can see he’s anxious that she might regret what happened and later come after him with a career-trashing accusation of the kind that turns into a story that gets made into a Netflix documentary.

She kisses him on the lips.

You’re cute, she says. You go first.

They listen for the all-clear. She nods. He says: See you around, as if he assumed she’d be back to this office tomorrow.

She’s about to tell him, when he slips into the corridor and passes swiftly through the next door. She listens to his footsteps receding.

Silence.

A man exits the toilets and promptly vanishes. She takes a moment to return to equilibrium, or something close at least.

The silence has settled. The sound of the all-clear, she hopes.

Go, now!

==

She returns to her desk to find everyone has gone except the IT guy in his little office. It’s 5.47. What if someone saw her bundling her catch into the Gents and following after him? What if they had CCTV in that area?

As long as he doesn’t tell anyone, you could have been going in there to help him find his contact lens or something.

She checks her trades. Three red, one green. She’s made £79.38 while in that bathroom making a fool of herself. She closes it, locking in her profit. The plan was to let it run but she could really use a little consolation right now.

She shuts down her laptop. Slips it into its case and pulls the zip across. Stumm.

Last day at the orifice, she thinks to herself. Her boyfriend used to call it that - orifice - before he quit office life for work-from-anywhere, aka fuck other-women-from-anywhere-that-has-a-good-internet-connection. She misses how he was back then, when he was still going into the office. Kind of ironic, given how encouraging she’s been about his plans to leave. So many good times in the early days. Why must the good things die so soon?

She’s so tired of reminding herself to be resilient. She wants to curl up into a ball and cry like a little girl. Why can’t she do that anymore? Is it all the social media she’s ingested over the past few months, round after round of exhortations from coaches to stay stoical, never give up? Honestly, she could scream.

She steps into an empty lift.

She presses 0. The doors close. The doors open.

She walks past the reception desk toward the main exit. Don’t get stuck in the resolving doors, a voice in her head tells her.

Turn right for the tube.

She looks up - Oh, God, it’s that guy, hands in his pockets… Is he waiting for you?