Black Monster

Emma stood at the bus stop, the sky was a miserable grey dish cloth, over used and under boiled, there was a faint smell of dank grease in the air. Her cream mac was not protecting her from the incessent drizzel and the bus was as always late. She hugged her metallic gold shoulder bag with its quilted diamond pattern and impateintly tapped her booted foot. The bus finially pulled up in a halitosis of frying oil and brake fluid, the doors hissed open and she dashed her bag over the yellow spot, the oyster card binged true and she slumped wearily onto on of the roughly covered seats. The bus shuddered away into the urban morning, lights hazing on the ganster scrawl etched into the windows.

Emma recoiled slightly from an orgainc looking smear on the window and extracted her current paper from the recesses of her violumous bag. The photocopied pages were grainy and some of it smugged, she’d read worse. The title was not something you would think to see from such an emminant journal, Hydra, Delphi and creatures of the deep. She sat absorbed in the dry words, teasing out the unwritten conclusions of the papers author, a very important man in Archeaology circles, she hoped he would be back from his latest dig on Crete.

The bus wheezed around a tight bend making her tense to keep her seat. She was almost there, she shoved the paper back in her bag and tucked a stray strained of hair back into the plait she had struggled with that morning. The style was too server and a pain with such long thick hair but French braids tamed her dark chocolate and caramel hair and lent her an authority. It was also more sophisticated and fun compared to a school teatcher bun. She sighed at the rain pitted reflection of herself, the distortion hid the silver hairs she had noticed creeping in. Thirty six was not supposed to be old, but she felt it. Felt the sickness of humanity in her very bones and now something else had come, some trouble and hide the shore of this land she had made hers.

An arthitic juddery stop saw the bus momentarily montionless, she got of the bus bearly waiting long enough for the doors to swing open. As always the streets were packed with youthful vibrant and often half asleep students. She was impressed that they had made it out before their nine o’clock lectures had begun, she personally had always struggeled with that one and even now in her thirties she would rather sleep till ten. Not that it really mattered with shift work, sleep routines were not something that featured heavily in her life. Emma picked her way through the crowd avoiding the lost tourists and the chuggers who lay in wait by the station entrance, she could not abide being asked to give money to charities, it was as if however much she did it would never be enough. Humanity stank to her.

The chuggers were always good looking and always put on the guilt trip and she knew they got paid – the bastards – when she’d fundraised she’d done out of good will alone – the charities were getting synical though and so was she. The telecomunications tower glowed in scifi surrealism, a reflection in a modern monstrousity of glass and steel. She turned the corner and was confronted with the older red bick and large cream stone buildings. These had a sense of confort too her, a similarity to were she had found her tertary education comforted Emma. The large black metal gates stood aside and the sercurity guard was half asleep. It amused her that in a time of security tightenening the places with posoin gases and military grade lasers still ambeled along thinking the worst that could happen was a student prank, it made her smile more that this was generally the case and when it wasn’t the academic community themselves would reek its wraith upon the trespasser.

She walked past a cluster with a thoderlite, and almost collided with an arty coming out of a domed structure she was sure had once been for astronomy though with the light pollution in the city she could easily understand why it had been turned over to the art students. She crossed the quad carefully and then stood at an entrance, heavy metal studded wood showed the prestige and grandure the place had once had now it was like all universities, struggling for survivial. Her boots squeeked on the marbled floor as she walked through to reception. A harassed looking man too fond of his office buffets sat behind glass dealing with an almost continous flow of people. October and Freshers were new and shiny and mostly lost.

She joined the small fluid queue, and was flattered to recieve a slight double take at her announcement of who she was and who she was here to see, the man had taken her to be over a decade younger than she was, these small triumphs mattered too much too her. She did not want to grow old, she was already too old by far.

A swip card and ident was handed to her along with a map, still printed on paper – she tried not to roll her eyes and simply took out her phone calling up Open Street Map, univeristies were one of the first things put into the thing and due to the nature of students it was kept faithally updated. She turned and followed it’s little rendered lines. She had to swipe herself through several sets of heavy door and passed a room with the smell of over brewed coffee and stale biscuits, she glanced at it and was starteled to see banks of wood and glass cases containing fossilised skulls and pretty coloured rocks. Her hands itched but she didn’t stray, she had been picked for this assignments becuase of her interests and her experiences. She wished they weren’t useful in this instance but it appeared they were.

She came to a little set of steps, lino covered in a pukey pink with pastel blue and green flecked, it spoiled the cosy wood and marble grandure, it looked as if the wall had been hacked to place the stairs there and the doors corridor after it had a tampered fill to it, suddenly much lower with more and more encroachement of offices and lecture theatres on the corridor, it all closed in. Land in London had always been expensive so large victoriana was built up on the inside with extra floors made of suspendion wires and asbestos tiles. The walls were stained with nearly centry old nicotine stains, for the last 50 yrs no one could wash such walls for fear of releasing the very fabric the walls were made off, asbestos fibres, lungs had clogged and choked their owners due to the substance. One of her papers had informed her that one of the greek islands had the mineral weathering out of the rocks and millions of tourists breathed it in quiet happily with their sunbathing each year.

She turned a corner and found herself in different decor again, this time it was like being submerged in the bowls of a seventies deranged submersable. Peach and brown and port holes as windows, it was a bearly disguessed bridge taking her through into bare concrete floors and breeze block, chipped green metal tubes formed the hand rails on the gritty stairs. She climbed.

On a half level under too yellow light she came to rest outside a door. The plaque read Dr Atkins Professor of Theological Archeology. She took a deep breath, and nocked, he could easily have decided to stay on his prescous islands and just forgotten to tell her, she knew academics of old.

She almost jumped when she got the reply ‘come in’.

Posted: Friday, November 2nd, 2012 @ 4:54 pm
Categories: Uncategorized.
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