5 - Reflections

The sun dipping below the ochre horizon was the signal to Cammie that her shift at Juiced finally finished. She gratefully took off her juice-stained apron and threw it into a basket that they kept next to the trash can.

"You off?" Steve asked in a neutral voice. The cafe was well populated at this point, although every customer had a juice or a coffee and so there was a brief respite in Steve's beverage making requirements.

"Yep, I'm beat." Cammie said, adding a heavily rehearsed yet quite, she thought, realistic sigh of exhaustion to indicate just how beaten she was.

"Can you stick around until Tam gets here for her shift?" Tam was one of the other waitresses who worked the night shift on Thursdays. She was often late. Cammie didn't like her very much.

"She'll be along shortly." Cammie protested. "You can hold the fort until then." This much was true, but still, Steve hated being left alone in the cafe before closing, and Cammie often gave into his requests that she stick around- sometimes out of sympathy, but more frequently due some form of bribery on Steve's part. She didn't want to stick around tonight, though- her encounter with Anthony, the strange, quiet man with all the papers; had left her feeling not shaken, but perhaps a little stirred, and she wanted to head home and sit quietly, perhaps to try and listen to nothing some more.

Steve began to start begging earnestly, but Cammie cut him off before he could get started. "You'll be fine," she said, backing slowly towards the door as she spoke. "I really gotta go."

"Fine!" said Steve, covering his genuine annoyance over with a polite veneer of over-the-top, fake annoyance. "Leave me to the jackals. I'll probably be serving juice on toast and bacon in glasses by the time bloody Tam shows up."

"I'm sure it'll be a big hit." Cammie laughed, now turning to head towards the door. She paused and stepped to one side as she reached the doors, one of which had been closed against an earlier summer shower that had passed by with the oncoming chill of the night, in order to let two customers into the establishment. Before she proceeded, she turned to Steve and queried him:

"Hey, Steve?"

"Yes, Judas?" he said, with a smile, heading back behind the counter in anticipation of one of the new customers, who were seating themselves on the same red couch that Anthony and she had shared earlier that same day. They were regulars, two girls who lived together around the corner. Steve had bet Cammie twenty bucks that they were a couple, but Cammie thought they were just friends. It was sort of a game she and Steve played whenever they came in to figure it out one way or another without asking them directly, they were always on the lookout for clues. The evidence shifted one way and another, but neither result had been proven conclusively thus far, so the bet remained.

"Did you ever see that guy before," Cammie continued as the patrons walked by her, "the one ... the one with all the papers?"

Steve thought for a moment before answering, his eyes darting across his internal mental files before he did so. "Oh, brown-suit guy? Yeah, he's a bit of a regular. He only showed up a month or so ago, but since then he's been coming in a few mornings every week for the vegetarian brekkie. Quiet, but he always tips."

"Always with the briefcase, and with all the papers and stuff?"

Steve didn't pause this time- the file was accessed, the information on display. "Ah, yeah, always does lay out a lot of paperwork. I think I asked him about it one time, perhaps when he first showed up, but as you saw today he was pretty, uhm, quiet, just kind of mumbled me away. I figured he didn't want to be disturbed so, y'know ... that was the last time I inquired."

Cammie didn't respond for a moment, she was looking down and to the left, thinking about Anthony's strange quietness, thinking about Brownian motion and unseen things. Noting her reticence, Steve followed up with a question:

"I saw you guys talking, did he give you his number or something? Better hope Lachlan doesn't find out you're flirting with the customers!" he said jovially.

Steve's question snapped Cammie out of her momentary reverie. "What? Oh, no, he didn't give me his number. Didn't say much at all, really, but seemed nice enough. Say hi to him the next time he comes in, okay?"

"Will do, love."

"Night boss." She held up a casual hand as she turned and left through the open door. Steve was already talking to one of might-be-lesbians.

The summer shower had passed by quickly, as summer showers do, and while the air was still warm, it felt clean and drier than it had been before the fall. Cool rain often had that effect on the otherwise humid summer air. Cammie liked it, and was feeling reflective, and so she decided to walk home rather than take a tram. After the sun set, the sky darkened quickly into a deep blue running smoothly into the horizon, getting imperceptibly lighter as it approached the point where the sun had last showed its face. Cammie admired the city skyline against the blue as she walked towards it. As always, it did not fail to impress her deeply. She didn't walk home often, like everyone else her time was short and she always felt she had to be getting on to the next point in her day as quickly as possible, but one those rare occasions when she did decide to walk, she never regretted it.

She walked down the high street, occasionally stopping to look in the windows of closed boutiques, admiring the dresses and shoes that stayed on display during the night, silent sentinels in frocks and dresses. She saw a white piece she particularly liked and leaned right up to the glass to get a look at it, admiring the oversized black buttons until her breath on the glass steamed her vision. She walked on.

Just after six on a Thursday was after the bulk of the rush-hour, but before everyone who had gone home decided to come back out again for dinner or a beer in the evening shade, so the streets were relatively quiet. Maybe the shower had kept some people inside. She passed an old couple who were walking a puppy on a long, retractable leash. The puppy ran back and forth excitedly on the pavement as far as the leash would allow, sniffing everything, leaping into the air, it's tiny legs jackknifing up and down in order to propel the dog forward as fast as possible. It ran up to her legs and sniffed her feet, then ran past her, causing the leash to twist around her ankles. Like the puppy, she nimbly leapt into the air and came down on the other side of the now disentangled leash, and continued walking in the same motion. The old couple smiled apologetically at her, and she smiled back. She was not good at telling age, but figured they must have been in their seventies. The man held his right arm out in a manner boys didn't seem to do anymore, and his partner gripped it with both arms- it was clear that he was supporting her as she walked, which, in spite of their pets most earnest entreaties, made their forward progress slow. Cammie walked on, wondering if the puppy was theirs, and who it would go on to when they were gone, if it outlived them.

She stopped at a crossroads, pushed the giant the giant silver circle of the crossing button with her elbow and waited for the red man to go green, listening to the button click at one second intervals. Click. She bobbed on the balls of her feet for a few moments. A tram rumbled through the crossroads in front of her. Inside, bored commuters stared blankly. Most of them had headphones on, and she hoped whatever they were listening to was making them happier than they looked. Ya shoulda walked, she said to them in her mind, still bouncing up and down on her feet. Click. As the tram passed by her, the transom switched power lines and a shower of sparks emitted from the connection point with a flash, before drifting downward to the wet pavement slowly. Cammie watched the sparks as they fell, little orbs of light generated from nothing. She wondered what caused them, what they were made from. Were they pure energy, or had some bits of metal been knocked off by the tram's passing?

Click. The dark, wet pavement created a subtle mirroring effect on the lights above the street. While no object was visible in the reflection, the lights from shops, headlights, traffic signals and street lamps were all replicated in the concrete, making Cammie feel as though the street was twice as big as it normally was. She watched the reflection of the sparks from the tram lines as they ascended towards the ground to meet their real-life counterparts, each spark meeting to kiss briefly, bounce away from each other, kiss again, then die as they faded into nothing more than a retinal afterimage on Cammie's eyes.

The light from the trams read window as it passed her illuminated Cammie briefly and for a moment she saw herself looking back at her reflection from the pavement. For not the first time in her life, Cammie let her mind play with the possibility that there was another world living on the flip side of reality, a world that was only revealed by mirrors and wet pavements, and furthermore that the world she saw reflected was the real world, and that she was the reflection, and that while she thought that she was in control of her destiny, she was really only copying what her other-self was doing, waiting for the moment when they might glimpse each other through the looking glass.

She looked about her and tried to soak the moment in. She wished she could capture it, capture the experience of standing at a crossroads after a shower on a warm summer evening, watching a tram pass by, watching sparks fall to the ground. She wanted to gather that moment up, put it in a crystal, and give it to someone as a gift. Could there be a greater gift than to let someone experience a moment from your own eyes? No-one else would experience this exact moment, the way it is right now, for the rest of eternity. She wanted to wrap herself up in it and enjoy it for as long as possible, appreciate that, after the moment was gone, it was gone forever. How could she possibly convey to another person what it was like to be in this moment? A photo or a painting might give one an impression of how it looked, to be sure, but how could she tell them how it felt? The warm breeze, the wet pavement beneath her feet, the sluicing of water as cars passed by? Not a smell, not a sound, not a sensation, but the subtle combination of infinite details that came together to form her experience. Nothing could capture that. She thought about poems that would evoke a feeling or an emotion, but even those were contained, singular notions, devoid of the richness and clarity that this one single moment of existence was providing to her. How grateful she was for it, how happy to be here, at this time and moment. How confused she was, that she was herself and not another. Click.

Things were as they were, she supposed, and would never know why. Whether she was the reflection or the origin was, ultimately, of little concern.

"Got a cigarette?" asked a voice from beside her, pulling her back from her musings.

Pale, drawn skin. Bulging, bloodshot eyes. Worn, hooded top. A junkie. They usually accosted you on trams or trains, where you couldn't just walk away. The trick, she had been told, was never to engage them. The moment you spoke to them, they were drawn into your world. But Cammie was unfailingly polite, she couldn't help but to respond. What did she know about this person, why should she prejudge him, assume him to be a threat merely because he appeared, to her, so threatening. Click. She replied:

"Sorry, no, I don't smoke."

That was all it took. They were right, after all. He considered her polite refusal as an invitation to ask her for anything.

"Got any change then?" He stalked around her as he talked, watching her. To Cammie, he seemed reptilian in his movements. She felt the cold hand of panic rising in her, but struggled to stay calm. The red man had not turned green. The signal button clicked, clicked, clicked. She froze, not knowing where to go.

"N-no." She said simply. She didn't want to say, or do, anything that would offend him, or set him off in some way. Internally she cursed herself for her cowardice, after all, they were on a busy street in the middle of town in the early evening, what could he possibly do to her? But still, she felt very afraid.

He said nothing for one very long, very quiet second, then tried anew:

"Can't spare a dollar? I'm sure you've..." he was cut off as the red man turned green and the clocking of the signal button turned into a long, solid buzzing. Without thinking Cammie walked instantly forward, not turning her head or even breathing. She dare not look back, but she could hear no feet behind her. She forced herself to take a long slow breath, and when she passed over the crosswalk, over the space where the sparks had died, she turned her head slightly and saw with a rush of relief that the junkie had not followed her, and was now wandering down the road in a different direction, on to terrify some other pedestrian.

In spite of the warm weather, she shivered for the rest of the walk home.