Ten minutes to go. I sat silently, obediently answering the phone for what seemed like at least ten minutes.
I slowly raised my face up towards the clock, one eye closed and the other squinted as to slightly distort the time in a bid to make it pass more quickly. Five minutes had passed. I sighed deeply and glanced around the room at hundreds of bored faces sitting in their cheap, uncomfortable chairs, occasionally standing up to relive cramp which builds in your upper thigh after a prolonged period of sitting still, only to quickly sit back down after a piercing stare from the boss.
One minute to go. So close. I began to flex my toes in my shoes ready for a quick escape up the stairs. Thirty seconds, twenty, fifteen.
Oh that was it, I sprung up out of my chair slightly too fast, only just keeping upright after catching my foot on the telephone wire.
Almost immediately every head in the room snapped up then slowly turned their focus simultaneously towards the boss for his reaction. I stood on the spot paralyzed and watched his eyes flicker up to the clock, and then he stared at his own watch for some time before hesitantly nodding in my direction.
Yes! A few others joined me, practically sprinting from the room for their twenty minutes of escape, freedom, possibilities, many just standing outside for some air which had been changed in the last five years. While other people threw me filthy glances and dutifully dropped their heads back to work. I grinned smugly and made my way towards the stairs, developing a slight swagger in my walk from pins and needles in my left foot.
The cold air slapped me in the face as the door swung open leading onto the roof. I closed my eyes and slowly breathed in until I felt a slight ache in my chest, a strange noise escaped from my throat in reaction to my lungs being used again. I rolled my head onto the side and cringed as it cracked loudly, echoing around the roof. I wondered if running a few laps round the edge would class me as weird. The idea was too appealing to care about being spotted so I stumbled forward into an odd kind of gallop.
I turned the penultimate corner coming round onto the back edge of the rooftop, onto the longest straight, with an intention of breaking out and winning the race, maybe I’d even continue into a second lap but suddenly my legs buckled beneath me, my rubber shoes skidded on the hard ground and I came to a halt.
I was no longer alone in my escape, this was bad, and I might be caught.
Someone else had discovered my little sanctuary and I prayed that as I watched them from a distance standing on the ledge that they too were simply admiring the epic view. I shuddered, I was sure that the view wasn’t beautiful from there.
My foot pivoted on the spot, taking me a hundred and eighty degrees until my feet began moving back in the direction I had come from. I tiptoed quietly, I just had to round the next corner and then it would be as if I had clicked reverse and my knowledge of that person’s existence would be completely erased. Nearly there now and I didn’t dare look back, what if they had seen me, or what if they were no longer there to be seen. What if they had jumped off the edge, and I was their last hope.
I turned the corner with great haste and sighed with relief, it was over, gone, never happened. I began my descent back down the stairs which would lead me back to the comfort of my seat and my work. Suddenly I wanted to be anywhere else but that rooftop which I had longed for only moments before. But as my fingers touched the door handle a flicker of hair caught my attention, for it was not blonde like my own, it was dark, almost black. I knew whose it was, but I pushed it out from my mind and continued turning the stiff handle.
The door didn’t move. I screwed up my face and closed my eyes for at least three seconds. Why couldn’t I just have spent my break stood on the gum and glass stained pavements below like everybody else?
My forehead rested against that door for a while longer until finally I spun on my heel abruptly and began tearing round to the other side of the building.
It seemed a shorter distance than before and I stopped only five metres behind the woman this time. With my heart beating wildly I failed to conceal my heavy and irregular breathing, it was loud and I was sure she must of heard my arrival. I expected her to move or flinch, or maybe fall, but instead she did not move an inch, her arms stay completely immobile by her side, the only sign of movement around her being tendrils of dark hair moving silently in the light wind.
I cleared my throat. She didn’t stir.
‘H-hello,’ I began, stuttering, my throat was dry, I swallowed some saliva and tried again. ‘Hi, I’m Lindsey; I work on floor three in this building. I was just wondering if, ummmmmmmm…’ I could feel my speech slurring as the pace quickened. I was practically shrieking at the back of this woman’s head trying to conquer the ever-growing wind.
I lifted my hand to reach out and touch her but quickly dropped it again. I didn’t want to scare her, I wasn’t even sure she knew I was standing here, so instead I moved another two metres closer.
‘I’m not going to jump.’ Her voice easily split through the air. It was gentle yet powerful. I didn’t speak. Should I now leave? I mean yeah sure it was a bit odd standing right on the edge of a skyscraper building, but I wasn’t the police and I’d never really been one to intrude in others business.
I should have turned around and left, walked away, gone back to my job and my friends and everything waiting for me below. But I didn’t.
‘Well that’s good, I mean, there was once someone who did jump off here, funny story actually…’ I was now rambling, mumbling into the wild air, on a rooftop to a woman whose face I had not seen. ‘Well, not funny!’ I laughed uncomfortably. ‘There’s nothing funny about someone that jumps off a building, it’s just that he didn’t die that’s all. He was rescued two minutes later hanging on to that window edge two feet below the top!’ I exclaimed, the punch line to this fantastic story. The audience applauded, except there wasn’t any audience, only myself and this dark haired woman, I couldn’t even hear the street noise below, only a long and ongoing eerie silence.
She remained still. Had I imagined her speaking only moments before?
‘Ok, then well I should go, it’s nearly the end of my break and don’t want to make the boss angry….’ I shouted into her back, for some reason trying to justify my reason for leaving, even though I stared at my watch I knew I still had fifteen minutes left. I just wanted to get off that rooftop and as far away as I possibly could. I began backing away, step by step.
Suddenly she began to turn, her legs moving systematically on that small ledge; although the wind was building she was slow and strong, twisting her body until her front faced me. Once again I stopped moving and stood with my feet parked a metre apart solidly in the ground.
‘I’m…..’ she hesitated, turned her head slightly to the side as if picking her words very carefully, ‘…lost.’ She finished, stepping carefully off the thin ledge, placing her feet firmly onto the rooftop. ‘Came up here, for a better view of things.’
Seemed plausible; on a clear day you could see the whole city from the rooftop, one of the reasons why I spent my precious breaks here. Today was not clear though; the skies were full of mist, the only visible objects below were small flashing lights, reminders of life, from cars and lampposts, the streets and the people were hidden from view.
‘Oh right, ok…..’ I smiled at the girl. She stood with her legs close together, both her arms hanging loosely by her sides, her eyes looking straight at me, she looked calm and in control, the harsh wind having no effect on her posture. I felt down at my side and delved my hand deep into my bag, passing my fingers around indefinite objects until I handled something which felt about the right shape, size and texture. ‘Ahh, here we go!’ I yelled across at her in delight, manically waving the city map my parents had bought me three years ago when I first moved away.
Unexpectedly her eyebrow furrowed and she took a step backward. She looked surprised. But almost as quickly her features snapped back to her calm composure and she widened her mouth into a wide grin. ‘Great!’ She exclaimed! ‘I’ve heard about those things.’ A musical laugh radiated around the roof, and I was rapidly aware of the cold air seeping into my clothes. I shivered. She opened the map with delicate fingers, gently tracing the outline of the page, her eyes darting across words and lines.
‘Why did you come here, to the city I mean, this says ‘good luck’?’ She questioned me, breaking the natural silence which had occurred. ‘Oh, I ummm, I…’ for some reason I felt taken aback by her question, embarrassed even. It was a simple enough question and I explained how I had taken a job in the city to be closer to life and journalism. How I thought if I was here it would be easier to grasp opportunities and get internships at magazines, and I would have a job to pay the bills. It had seemed like a great decision, the beginning of a new life, an exciting adventure.
I was rambling on; I knew she was now probably seriously regretting asking that question. ‘So, my parents gave me that when I came,’ I explained, ‘they said even though there was lots of people to ask for help in the city, people are too busy and it’s easy to get lost.’ I laughed at the irony of the situation. ‘As you would probably agree, this map has come in handy after all!’ She smiled at me, and I smiled back. I didn’t notice that she had carefully closed the map and it now rested gently in her hands.
‘Did you find an internship?’ Ah, another rather painful question. I didn’t feel inclined to answer, like so many times before, normally I’d casually shrug this question off, but I wanted to tell her how I had to get a second job to keep up with the rent. And then I was so busy and tired that it had become almost impossible to even look for writing work. The city had caught up with me and become too much, and now I just lived to get by, day by day. I barely went out because I was too tired so I hadn’t made many friends. And somehow even with all these people, the city had become a very lonely place. We were talking and she listened, and told me how she was in a similar place in her life, but she had decided to create a new adventure and had found a job in Hawaii. I told her how lucky she was, and that I’d think of her in Hawaii while I was sat in my small flat in rainy England.
Gradually I became aware that the sun had broken out from behind the clouds and beat down heavily on my back and on my eyes, and the air had warmed around me and I felt… relaxed. I yawned. Her expression quickly became quite serious, ‘If this isn’t what you want then why are you doing it?’ She pelted this question at me, the cold harsh of the words surrounding me cruelly in this sunny paradise.
But as I looked around this small grey rooftop, the familiarity made me cringe and I avoided eye contact with this confident woman and fiddled with my fingers. I looked at my watch without meaning to observe the time.
I leapt backwards from where I was standing and swore silently under my breath. ‘I have to go, I’m so late, oh my god, I’m going to get fired, what am I going to do.’ ‘Would that be so bad?’ She interrupted me.
A second passed quietly. Her hand lifted up towards me, ‘Thank you,’ she passed the map back to me, ‘but I think this map is old, maybe you should just chuck it away and get a brand new one.’ And then she walked away. She walked tall, quick, with purpose and then she was gone.
And I stayed standing there for some time, standing on a rooftop, clutching that map and feeling honestly quite wholly baffled by the whole last hour of my life.
I looked around me; there was no evidence of the women with the dark hair. I couldn’t picture her face anymore, had she ever existed? I wasn’t sure if it even mattered. I held my head in my hand, closed my eyes, opened them and I knew I was ready.
My legs moved robotically back towards the exit, through the door, down the stairs and into the office. Where I walked straight up to my boss and handed him my map of the city, then I walked right out the door and onto the street. And the city looked beautiful.
I had absolutely no idea where I was going but for the first time in a very long time I felt I could go anywhere, I just needed to find the right map.
Maps
Ten minutes to go. I sat silently, obediently answering the phone for what seemed like at least ten minutes.
I slowly raised my face up towards the clock, one eye closed and the other squinted as to slightly distort the time in a bid to make it pass more quickly. Five minutes had passed. I sighed deeply and glanced around the room at hundreds of bored faces sitting in their cheap, uncomfortable chairs, occasionally standing up to relive cramp which builds in your upper thigh after a prolonged period of sitting still, only to quickly sit back down after a piercing stare from the boss.
One minute to go. So close. I began to flex my toes in my shoes ready for a quick escape up the stairs. Thirty seconds, twenty, fifteen.
Oh that was it, I sprung up out of my chair slightly too fast, only just keeping upright after catching my foot on the telephone wire.
Almost immediately every head in the room snapped up then slowly turned their focus simultaneously towards the boss for his reaction. I stood on the spot paralyzed and watched his eyes flicker up to the clock, and then he stared at his own watch for some time before hesitantly nodding in my direction.
Yes! A few others joined me, practically sprinting from the room for their twenty minutes of escape, freedom, possibilities, many just standing outside for some air which had been changed in the last five years. While other people threw me filthy glances and dutifully dropped their heads back to work. I grinned smugly and made my way towards the stairs, developing a slight swagger in my walk from pins and needles in my left foot.
The cold air slapped me in the face as the door swung open leading onto the roof. I closed my eyes and slowly breathed in until I felt a slight ache in my chest, a strange noise escaped from my throat in reaction to my lungs being used again. I rolled my head onto the side and cringed as it cracked loudly, echoing around the roof. I wondered if running a few laps round the edge would class me as weird. The idea was too appealing to care about being spotted so I stumbled forward into an odd kind of gallop.
I turned the penultimate corner coming round onto the back edge of the rooftop, onto the longest straight, with an intention of breaking out and winning the race, maybe I’d even continue into a second lap but suddenly my legs buckled beneath me, my rubber shoes skidded on the hard ground and I came to a halt.
I was no longer alone in my escape, this was bad, and I might be caught.
Someone else had discovered my little sanctuary and I prayed that as I watched them from a distance standing on the ledge that they too were simply admiring the epic view. I shuddered, I was sure that the view wasn’t beautiful from there.
My foot pivoted on the spot, taking me a hundred and eighty degrees until my feet began moving back in the direction I had come from. I tiptoed quietly, I just had to round the next corner and then it would be as if I had clicked reverse and my knowledge of that person’s existence would be completely erased. Nearly there now and I didn’t dare look back, what if they had seen me, or what if they were no longer there to be seen. What if they had jumped off the edge, and I was their last hope.
I turned the corner with great haste and sighed with relief, it was over, gone, never happened. I began my descent back down the stairs which would lead me back to the comfort of my seat and my work. Suddenly I wanted to be anywhere else but that rooftop which I had longed for only moments before. But as my fingers touched the door handle a flicker of hair caught my attention, for it was not blonde like my own, it was dark, almost black. I knew whose it was, but I pushed it out from my mind and continued turning the stiff handle.
The door didn’t move. I screwed up my face and closed my eyes for at least three seconds. Why couldn’t I just have spent my break stood on the gum and glass stained pavements below like everybody else?
My forehead rested against that door for a while longer until finally I spun on my heel abruptly and began tearing round to the other side of the building.
It seemed a shorter distance than before and I stopped only five metres behind the woman this time. With my heart beating wildly I failed to conceal my heavy and irregular breathing, it was loud and I was sure she must of heard my arrival. I expected her to move or flinch, or maybe fall, but instead she did not move an inch, her arms stay completely immobile by her side, the only sign of movement around her being tendrils of dark hair moving silently in the light wind.
I cleared my throat. She didn’t stir.
‘H-hello,’ I began, stuttering, my throat was dry, I swallowed some saliva and tried again. ‘Hi, I’m Lindsey; I work on floor three in this building. I was just wondering if, ummmmmmmm…’ I could feel my speech slurring as the pace quickened. I was practically shrieking at the back of this woman’s head trying to conquer the ever-growing wind.
I lifted my hand to reach out and touch her but quickly dropped it again. I didn’t want to scare her, I wasn’t even sure she knew I was standing here, so instead I moved another two metres closer.
‘I’m not going to jump.’ Her voice easily split through the air. It was gentle yet powerful. I didn’t speak. Should I now leave? I mean yeah sure it was a bit odd standing right on the edge of a skyscraper building, but I wasn’t the police and I’d never really been one to intrude in others business.
I should have turned around and left, walked away, gone back to my job and my friends and everything waiting for me below. But I didn’t.
‘Well that’s good, I mean, there was once someone who did jump off here, funny story actually…’ I was now rambling, mumbling into the wild air, on a rooftop to a woman whose face I had not seen. ‘Well, not funny!’ I laughed uncomfortably. ‘There’s nothing funny about someone that jumps off a building, it’s just that he didn’t die that’s all. He was rescued two minutes later hanging on to that window edge two feet below the top!’ I exclaimed, the punch line to this fantastic story. The audience applauded, except there wasn’t any audience, only myself and this dark haired woman, I couldn’t even hear the street noise below, only a long and ongoing eerie silence.
She remained still. Had I imagined her speaking only moments before?
‘Ok, then well I should go, it’s nearly the end of my break and don’t want to make the boss angry….’ I shouted into her back, for some reason trying to justify my reason for leaving, even though I stared at my watch I knew I still had fifteen minutes left. I just wanted to get off that rooftop and as far away as I possibly could. I began backing away, step by step.
Suddenly she began to turn, her legs moving systematically on that small ledge; although the wind was building she was slow and strong, twisting her body until her front faced me. Once again I stopped moving and stood with my feet parked a metre apart solidly in the ground.
‘I’m…..’ she hesitated, turned her head slightly to the side as if picking her words very carefully, ‘…lost.’ She finished, stepping carefully off the thin ledge, placing her feet firmly onto the rooftop. ‘Came up here, for a better view of things.’
Seemed plausible; on a clear day you could see the whole city from the rooftop, one of the reasons why I spent my precious breaks here. Today was not clear though; the skies were full of mist, the only visible objects below were small flashing lights, reminders of life, from cars and lampposts, the streets and the people were hidden from view.
‘Oh right, ok…..’ I smiled at the girl. She stood with her legs close together, both her arms hanging loosely by her sides, her eyes looking straight at me, she looked calm and in control, the harsh wind having no effect on her posture. I felt down at my side and delved my hand deep into my bag, passing my fingers around indefinite objects until I handled something which felt about the right shape, size and texture. ‘Ahh, here we go!’ I yelled across at her in delight, manically waving the city map my parents had bought me three years ago when I first moved away.
Unexpectedly her eyebrow furrowed and she took a step backward. She looked surprised. But almost as quickly her features snapped back to her calm composure and she widened her mouth into a wide grin. ‘Great!’ She exclaimed! ‘I’ve heard about those things.’ A musical laugh radiated around the roof, and I was rapidly aware of the cold air seeping into my clothes. I shivered. She opened the map with delicate fingers, gently tracing the outline of the page, her eyes darting across words and lines.
‘Why did you come here, to the city I mean, this says ‘good luck’?’ She questioned me, breaking the natural silence which had occurred. ‘Oh, I ummm, I…’ for some reason I felt taken aback by her question, embarrassed even. It was a simple enough question and I explained how I had taken a job in the city to be closer to life and journalism. How I thought if I was here it would be easier to grasp opportunities and get internships at magazines, and I would have a job to pay the bills. It had seemed like a great decision, the beginning of a new life, an exciting adventure.
I was rambling on; I knew she was now probably seriously regretting asking that question. ‘So, my parents gave me that when I came,’ I explained, ‘they said even though there was lots of people to ask for help in the city, people are too busy and it’s easy to get lost.’ I laughed at the irony of the situation. ‘As you would probably agree, this map has come in handy after all!’ She smiled at me, and I smiled back. I didn’t notice that she had carefully closed the map and it now rested gently in her hands.
‘Did you find an internship?’ Ah, another rather painful question. I didn’t feel inclined to answer, like so many times before, normally I’d casually shrug this question off, but I wanted to tell her how I had to get a second job to keep up with the rent. And then I was so busy and tired that it had become almost impossible to even look for writing work. The city had caught up with me and become too much, and now I just lived to get by, day by day. I barely went out because I was too tired so I hadn’t made many friends. And somehow even with all these people, the city had become a very lonely place. We were talking and she listened, and told me how she was in a similar place in her life, but she had decided to create a new adventure and had found a job in Hawaii. I told her how lucky she was, and that I’d think of her in Hawaii while I was sat in my small flat in rainy England.
Gradually I became aware that the sun had broken out from behind the clouds and beat down heavily on my back and on my eyes, and the air had warmed around me and I felt… relaxed. I yawned. Her expression quickly became quite serious, ‘If this isn’t what you want then why are you doing it?’ She pelted this question at me, the cold harsh of the words surrounding me cruelly in this sunny paradise.
But as I looked around this small grey rooftop, the familiarity made me cringe and I avoided eye contact with this confident woman and fiddled with my fingers. I looked at my watch without meaning to observe the time.
I leapt backwards from where I was standing and swore silently under my breath. ‘I have to go, I’m so late, oh my god, I’m going to get fired, what am I going to do.’ ‘Would that be so bad?’ She interrupted me.
A second passed quietly. Her hand lifted up towards me, ‘Thank you,’ she passed the map back to me, ‘but I think this map is old, maybe you should just chuck it away and get a brand new one.’ And then she walked away. She walked tall, quick, with purpose and then she was gone.
And I stayed standing there for some time, standing on a rooftop, clutching that map and feeling honestly quite wholly baffled by the whole last hour of my life.
I looked around me; there was no evidence of the women with the dark hair. I couldn’t picture her face anymore, had she ever existed? I wasn’t sure if it even mattered. I held my head in my hand, closed my eyes, opened them and I knew I was ready.
My legs moved robotically back towards the exit, through the door, down the stairs and into the office. Where I walked straight up to my boss and handed him my map of the city, then I walked right out the door and onto the street. And the city looked beautiful.
I had absolutely no idea where I was going but for the first time in a very long time I felt I could go anywhere, I just needed to find the right map.