things move around

The tax guys are unusually industrious today. Mike - at least I think that’s his name - hunches over his desk-calculator, the fingers of his left hand dancing gaily. Often he lifts his head to glance at the screen of his laptop, and in his eyes I see a shining earnestness and a Corinthian vigour; or I would, if I could look into his eyes. But if I am at the centre of the clock face, facing North, then Mike is at one o’clock, facing East, and all I can see of his face is the baggy, saggy, flop of his right cheek, charred as always with a day’s growth, and his right ear, and his short brown hair, thinning slightly at the crown, and the beginning of his right eyebrow and the profile of his nose.

I take a swig of Barg’s Cream Soda and turn again to my own work.