:: Bottleneck ::

Most women in their late forties fend off Father Time with fear and sour melancholy―ah, lost youth―but Ms. K is a cheerful exception. She welcomes him with opened arms and heaving bosom―fuck you, Mother Nature―and while she hides the middle-age spread under brightly-coloured jackets and matronly skirts, she spills her ample cleavage with generous joy, and snaps on jewellery with the loud energy of a misspent youth.

I like her. She's our receptionist―and she's a joshing antithesis to the straightlaced ways of our business world. Her voice is polished to hotel-desk precision, her Os rounded and her Gs firm and sharp, dipped low for a certain British emphasis. She isn't clipped nor accented, and she's not naturally well-spoken, but she's been here too long not to be good at what she does.

'Hello, sayang!' She sings at me, her eyes wide with mascara. I look at her and I see Boy George sometimes―the same edgy sexuality, and the same pent-up electricity. She's a live-wire, a doll with a string, a woman longing to be loved.
'Hello gorgeous,' I reply, narrowing my eyes with fake sultriness.

We giggle. She wriggles in her seat.

'My boy, you know―he's giving me such a headache. I found an empty cigarette box in his drawer yesterday. Susah lah. Marlboro Reds, you know―the really heavy kind.'

I grimace sympathetically. Ms. K lost her husband eight years ago, and she's been bringing up her two kids―I use the term loosely; her son is probably older than me, and her daughter is just a few years younger―by her lonely, repressed self.

'No father, what to do. No role model, you see.' She continues, fingering the plastic hoop earrings she has on. Those eyes. Always blank after the ripples of brash laughter have left; sometimes hued with strangled hope, sometimes keen with hurt when she knows she's being patronised. But mostly blank, with a famished sheen to them.

I try to draw her out―talk to her as I collect an overseas parcel, joke with her when I walk pass her, praise her style or her taste in jewellery. I sometimes sense her jealousy, when she hands me a bouquet of flowers or a box of chocolates―'You know, when I was your age, I also had many admirers'―but I know she genuinely finds me harmless, and young, and she indulges in our conversations with a languid voltage, charged with loneliness and reluctant neediness.

Perhaps she's strange, by our bigoted standards of normalcy; maybe she's unattractive, when measured against our impossible benchmarks of beauty. But aren't we all?

***

Leave me alone.