Among Others

The matte brown, A4 envelope clutched across her chest makes her feel important, this outward perception, why she has something to post, has eased the gnawing of uselessness.  Striding swiftly, jaywalking at speed has made the third walk of the morning feel less arbitrary. Perhaps the other legs trudging think her a solicitor, a harassed legal body delivering key components to a trial, the puffy, black keep-warm aiding the impression that fashion is beyond concern in such a successful and laden existence. She performs this gait to no visible audience. Life is now a treadmill of wasted hours. There is nowhere to be.

Committed to her street theatre, imagining onlookers, she takes a different route back to the Georgian building, the buoyant, navy sign, a place of BUSINESS, in order to return the envelope to the desk she took it from, and sit for another hour until they inform her she must go home.  

The train commute has become the best part of the day, the only place she can still be vast in her daydreams, willfully allowing her mind to wander to charred edges of her imagination.  Reality does not board her train.  

Raining, and while the superior coat is adept at keeping her chest warm, the lashings will cause disarray to the artfully curated face; reluctantly, her body has made the decision to turn back, a self conscious giggle, I’m always early, to imply efficiency, rather than the obvious fact: she is pointless.  

She eats a kiwi in the toilet for twenty minutes, while researching a gentrified coffee shop and rehearsing a fictional lunch-break she had there, in case anyone asks. No one asks.  Reasons behind her hiring evade understanding; there is nothing for her to do but be present, to lament the weather with co-workers that mysteriously type at speed. To what they write, she is clueless. No one has asked anything of her beyond tidying her penmanship on the clock-in sheet.  

The minute hand confidently circles, and she envies it, this glossy strip and its undeniable destination. As pathetic as it feels to sit idle in an office, she loathes the moment they ask her to leave; always asking, she is wont to overstay her welcome on the scratchy carpet, alarmed by the prospect of exiting the perception of work, and beginning the tricky second act. She feels time lied to her; it could not be a full working day. And now she must arrange her face in a vaguely harassed expression to browse the overpriced, leather handbags. 

The art of the expensive browse is something in which she excels, the reason she applies so much bronzer every morning, to turn a nose expertly, to squeeze quality and ascertain the sales girl’s (for it is always a girl) interest in cajoling her business. She feels a deep rooted validation when they mistake her for a moneyed woman; she has sprayed Chanel on her hair upon entering the shop, offering their Googled knowledge on the designer’s ambitions in creating this ridiculous, fringed vessel. Humming and clicking her tongue (a new addition, working with degrees of success), she utilises her own Googled learnings as a counter debate to the girl’s. Now locked in a verbal battle of regurgitated opinion, they dodge factual statements and rely on dubious observations. When she has used up the optimum twenty-minute timeslot, the bag remains unpurchased. She snaps a blurry photo of the window: window shopping with my gal. She posts it. 

She is now unclear who the “gal” might be. Is it herself? The sales girl? Definition does not seem to matter; she only has eighty nine followers, suspects they might not be humans, but robots. Her robot followers are treated to more photos: rustic coffee shop, gourmet salad bar, neither of which she enters, her street at filtered sunset. She rattles her keys and sighs with curated fatigue for the benefit of any neighbours that might be observing her through grainy, white blinds. 

Temporary relief from the exhaustion of performing normality can be found only in the brief period of forgetting what day it might be. 

Calendars mock her; her watch goes without a battery change because the ticking has become an unbearable soundtrack to a solitary life.  

Inane chatter fills the vacuum of the silence that can ferociously descend on her flat mates, their nonpartisan expressions suffocating her tongue, willing her to retreat back to the rented bed to stare at walls and waste more time until she is allowed to be among the others again.

Cáit Moloney is a writer from Ireland. She won the Patricia Legget Scholarship for Playwriting in 2021, has an MFA in Playwriting from the Lir Academy (Trinity College Dublin), and has won residencies with the Irish Writer’s Centre, Pavillion Theatre. Her work has been performed in Smock Alley Theatre, Phibsborough Arts Festival, Ranelagh Arts Festival, to name a few. She is currently working on her first piece of long form prose.

A Song for Cáit