Perceptions (2) 'I've been sitting at my screen since 9 o'clock, waiting for people to arrive. Then I went to the little girl's room. Why?' 'Thank God.' 'That I went to the toilet?' I managed a smile. 'That's better,' she said. 'You're frowning so much your eyebrows will meet your nose.' 'It's this place, this emptiness. Tell me everybody's hiding. It's a joke on me - right?' She followed the sweeping glare of my eyes. 'Is there a special Bank meeting or something?' 'No,' I said. 'I don't know, maybe there is. But it doesn't answer the question why the whole town is empty.' 'The whole town?' 'When you arrived this morning, were there other cars, other people on the streets?' 'Yes. Of course.' I was stunned. 'But I didn't see anyone.' Teri shrugged her shoulders and I went on. 'If you look outside now, there's nobody, not a single person on the streets. There's nobody in the building; and security - did you see the guards at reception?' Teri was already heading to the nearest window. 'Teri?' 'No,' she answered, staring out of the window, glancing at me as I joined her. Her face told me everything. 'Now do you believe me?' 'The streets are normally buzzing with activity at this hour.' 'Yeah, but not today.' Teri looked at me. Now it was her turn to frown. 'What's happened?' 'I don't know, but we have to go. Lizzie's expecting me. She's at home,' I added, anticipating her questions. 'She's the only other person who hasn't disappeared. Yet. So let's go.' 'My bag. Let me get my bag first.' 'Be quick.' Typical woman, I thought. There's an emergency and all they can think of is their luggage. Lest one of us should disappear, we both went back up to Accounts for it. Together, we made our way out of the building via reception to the underground car park. It was practically empty except for the usual miscreants that liked to leave their vehicles over the weekend in the safety of the Bank security. Not a soul was to be seen, and the thought of leaving the premises without security troubled me. I should have tried calling the police, but I felt that it would be a useless waste of time, especially since there was no immediate danger. Teri and I were truly alone. We’d have loved that last year. Even here, next to my parked car, in no great passionate surrounds, we’d have locked in a fervent embrace and groped each other through our clothing, fingers everywhere, zealously exploring each other’s body. Just thinking about it now turned me on, as we got into my car. Teri was looking at me as if she’d somehow read my mind. The warmth of her proximity made a bulge in my trousers, despite the fear in me. ‘Let’s go,’ she said. I nodded, turning the key in the ignition. It was only after the engine had started that it struck me. If this had been a movie the motor might have been lifeless and we’d have been stuck here, at the mercy of an unknown nutter. But this wasn’t a movie. Out in the open air, the sky was blue and the sun radiated between the hauntingly empty buildings of the town. I drove quickly. There was nothing to impede us, and even the traffic lights seem to remain green in our favour. Derelict, I thought. The 4-minute warning wouldn’t have cleared the streets so thoroughly. ‘Who are you calling?’ I asked Teri, as she extracted her mobile phone from the handbag placed in her lap. ‘Len.’ Her husband. I’d forgotten about him. ‘He should be on his way to work by now, or stuck in traffic.’ ‘In the normal world.’ Teri’s eyes exposed her thoughts, the phone pressed to her ear. ‘It’s ringing,’ she told me. ‘Come on, Len. Where are you?’ I had expected, at least, to be faced with clusters of hastily abandoned cars and a bus or two, obstructions of some nature if there had been a catastrophe that had incredibly avoided us. But there was nothing. Not even the odd parked car! This was weird in the extreme. Dread churned my stomach uncomfortably. ‘No answer,’ Teri said at length. ‘I’ll try home.’ It proved to be the same. We drove out of town and through the country road towards my home where Lizzie would, I hoped, be waiting, tortured by my long and silent absence. Till now, there was no hint of peril, no source of threat. The sunlit trees and the meadows offered instead a kind of solace, the pleasant scenery a diversion from our gloomy fears. We might have been out on a serene Sunday drive for the lack of action. In fact I was just beginning to think of food when Teri spoke. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. Suddenly I pulled over, compelled by an irresistible urge. Just past a bend in the road, marked by trees secluding a narrow, snaking river on one side and a ditch on the other. No houses for miles. I got out of the car while keeping the engine running. Teri joined me as I gazed back over the road we’d just passed. There was something, something gnawing at me about this place. I started to walk a few paces, mesmerised by some invisible summoning force. Snap glimpses of a car off the road. A restraining hand grasped my arm. ‘Mark! What’s wrong? What have you seen?’ ‘I don’t know.’ I looked down at the road, searching for an answer, shaking my head at questions that blighted my mind. ‘There’s nothing here. Nothing!’ The ditch? The river? ‘Mark, you’re scaring me.’ Teri waited for me to stand still - I’d been flitting about like a deranged bluebottle vainly trying to find an opening. Then she came to me, stared me straight in the eyes, and hugged me tightly. ‘I’m sorry,’ I replied, squeezing her likewise. It felt so good being this close again, to breathe the scent of her perfume, her hair. Vivid memories sobered me. The sound of a phone ringing split us as promptly as an electric shock. We ran back to the car. It was my mobile. Teri must have been desolate as I answered it. ‘We’ll be there shortly,’ I said, glancing at Teri. ‘Yes. One person. Five minutes. Bye.’ I closed the line. ‘Lizzie. She was getting worried. I know - you thought it might be Len.’ Neither of us could approach the issue without emotion, so we said nothing more and hopped into the car. Home was literally five minutes away. As I pulled into the drive, I smiled at Teri. ‘By the way: Lizzie still doesn’t know about us. Okay?’ I wasn’t over the moon about bringing Teri - my brief fling - to my home and introducing her to my wife, even as a friend. Not that she would blab, but what about me? Could I look Lizzie in the face? Would the guilt shine out of my eyes? Would Lizzie guess what I’d been up to behind her back? There was no reason why Lizzie and Teri should have met, even at the annual Christmas office parties. Teri and I were in different departments and socialised within our own, until the day we met in the lift when it got stuck. But that was another story. When I entered the hall via the garage, Lizzie was there, waiting, distraught. She jumped into my arms at first sight, and momentarily I feared the worst. She held me so tightly I thought she’d discovered the world was about to break apart with just the three of us still living on it. The three of us. I kissed Lizzie and reassured her of my well-being, while answering a short barrage of impossible questions. Then I stepped back, trying hard to be normal, and indicated the third member of our survivors group. ‘This is Teri Linden, Lizzie. She’s the only other living soul on the planet, and she works at the Bank.’ The two women looked at each other and said a strained hello, the truth coming into sharp focus with my introduction. At home, life had become unbearably tense and wearisome. Lizzie and I were not getting on as well as we used to. There were days when we argued. Fought, sometimes. Handbag stuff really. Never with missile cutlery or crockery, but it was certainly physical. One or the other of us would end up bruised, and it wasn’t always just our egos. I carried a few knuckle-jabs and she endured one or two slaps on the arm. But whether the fault was with Lizzie or with me, I couldn’t be sure. It would start from something innocuous or trivial, a word or a gesture, largely from my part, and immediately after the cessation of hostilities, when pride had been sufficiently wounded (if not pride alone), I would wonder at the true cause. The underlying factor was definitely hormonal, because the frequency of our collisions was monthly. But maybe it was also personal. Maybe I did or said something that triggered her? So I concluded that the blame for our problems was mainly mine. Yet she would rage, venting her frustrations at me, quite often without clear reasoning, which confused me and upset me deeply. The day after we would be hurting and often made up by having sex. But rarely did she apologise, and less often did she come out and say that it was her time of the month, unless I gently put it to her. Anyway, all of this, not to mention the simultaneous stress at work, began to tear me up. Drag me down. I would in turn have moments of petty insanity. I would feel the victim, the innocent; at other times I felt that Lizzie was the one being unfairly maimed by my pithy tantrums. Either way, our marriage was sliding into trouble. We had to find a cure. Quickly. It was never my intention to find it in the form of another woman. Ten years of wedlock could so easily have been destroyed in six months of frivolous flirtation. A chance occurrence coincided with Lizzie’s 3-day domestic absence to attend an out-of-town business conference. I was taking the lift to the fifth floor when an attractive brunette joined me following a stop on the fourth. We were the only two people in the lift when it jammed in between floors. Naturally, we contacted security via the emergency link. In the meantime, while waiting to be rescued, we traded names and initiated conversation. The woman happened to be Teri. First impressions count for a great many things, and Teri was instantly drawn to me as well. The primary reaction to her accent was: Hey, you’re French! As I’d worked in Paris for 10 months during a self-employed period in my career, I’d picked up some of the language, and even though I hadn’t used it in a long time, it didn’t stop me trying to show-off, as one did when flirting. She laughed at my silly attempts, but gave me credit for trying. Her alluring eagerness to talk combined with that sexy French accent captivated me, on top of which she was more than just a pretty face. Teri had an appealing figure as well as an enthralling nature. It took the engineers just over 2 hours to get us out, and gossip, naturally, spread like wild-fire throughout the building as to what we’d been up to during that time. It didn’t help that we emerged radiant and undaunted by our imprisonment. The two of us later met in the cafeteria for a coffee, and talked some more. It was at this point that I mentioned I’d be working late for the next several days. Teri needed no further inducement. Come 6pm, the office was empty, except for me. With Lizzie out of town, there were a few things I intended to finish off in the relatively tranquil part of the day. My chance to concentrate on some work, I thought. Teri changed all that. I hadn’t expected her, because she hadn’t given me notice, but it turned out that her timing couldn’t have been more apt. Her fragrance approached with her. ‘Hello,’ she said, with an effervescence that was influencing to my energy. ‘Hi,’ I responded. ‘What are you doing here so late? Working on evening shift?’ She laughed. ‘I came to see you. I hope I’m not disturbing your work.’ ‘No’. I grinned, flattered by her presence. I released the mouse and turned my chair to give her my undivided attention. My smile was full-on as I looked into her sparkling eyes. ‘So, you’ve missed the last bus and you need a lift home?’ ‘No, silly.’ She stood a few feet from me, with one finely manicured hand rising to touch her ponytail. It was a give-away sign of coyness, totally opposite to her earlier manner. But now she was making advances. ‘Are you busy?’ ‘Not especially. Just doing some minor maintenance. It’s been a long day and…. well, actually, it’s been a short day thanks to our confinement earlier today.’ She laughed. ‘So I thought I’d better review a few files I’ve updated. The operators will kill me if they have problems tonight because of me.’ ‘Staying very late?’ ‘No more than a couple of hours. You?’ ‘Ouf,’ she said, in a typical Gallic response. ‘We’ll see. Il n'y a aucune hâte à partir.’ ‘Really. No one waiting at home for dinner?’ Teri laughed that I’d understood. ‘I don’t get much opportunity to speak my own language around here,’ she said. ‘Not even at home?’ ‘Len is Irish. His French is schoolboy. We always speak in English.’ ‘Too bad. I’m sure you’d make an excellent teacher. Wish my French teacher at school looked like you. Might have changed things.’ Teri flushed, but rose to it. ‘And did you get smacked if you didn’t do your homework?’ ‘No, but she’d lock me in the closet.’ ‘Alone?’ ‘She had a face like the backside of a bus, and she was old. I’d have screamed ‘child abuse’ if she had tried anything.’ ‘You poor thing. Did she frighten you?’ ‘Constantly. Ugly women always do.’ ‘But you wanted to be smacked if she wasn’t ugly?’ ‘Now, you’re being naughty. Sounds to me like you like smacking.’ ‘Depends who I’m with.’ We were both turning bright red with the rapid exchange of suggestive insinuations. ‘I see,’ I replied. ‘Makes me wonder what kind of company you keep in secret.’ ‘Wouldn’t you like to know!’ She was grinning, excited by our repartee. ‘You know nothing about me, yet.’ ‘I’m keen to learn.’ Needless to say, but that night, alone in bed, my dreams were full of sexual romps with Teri. She had aroused me immensely. Sexual intercourse featured highly, so much that I found it difficult to keep my mind off of her the next day in the office. Her face, her hair, her hooped earrings, the delicate curves of her waist and hips, every stimulating verbal tease we’d uttered - served to choke my thoughts with sex. I was glum until a message popped up on my screen. >Linden: "Smacks get you going?" I blushed, glancing across at Geoff and Bob, as if my astonishment had been transmitted across the tiny office. Instantly, I replied in kind. "What if it did?" I typed back. >Linden: "Did it help you sleep?" "Quite the opposite. It kept me UP all night." >Linden: "Is it UP now?" "That is privileged information." >Linden: "You are alone?" "I might be." >Linden: "You are?" "Alone in front of this screen." There seemed to be a long pause before the anticipated retort. >Linden: "Do I turn you on?" My heart missed a beat, but my counter was further incisive. "Let’s say that if I moved from this chair right now I wouldn’t go unnoticed." >Linden: "What?" "I’m still bulging. Is that clearer?" >Linden: "Tu es un garçon vilain." "C'est ton défaut." >Linden: "I’ll see you later." "When later?" User Linden logged off, the computer system informed me. I was mortified, and my heart was beating away with elation. The dirty little fox had awoken me, and then left me hanging. All day I worked with Teri lodged in my brain. As the afternoon progressed, I became somewhat agitated, clock-watching, and it was because of her. Would she really see me later, or had that been a fabulous tease? Towards 5.30pm Geoff persisted in tying me up with insignificant matters. He wouldn’t leave. At 6pm, we were in the middle of solving a system-file riddle that had confounded us since this morning, but one that I really couldn’t get into tune with. At 6:15pm I was practically begging him to drop it till tomorrow. At 6:25pm, finally, he left, and I could hardly hide my relief. Miffed, I returned to my PC to discover unopened e-mail. One was from Teri. I opened it with trepidation. I’d known her barely a day, and already I was flipping over her. "Reply when you are alone." It said. My heart was racing as I replied:
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