The Ball - Erik Pethersen

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seems quite slow and quite far away: it will get to the roundabout after me.

      I press my break and I put my car into second gear to prepare for the narrow roundabout, while I am looking at the porphyry stripe that borders the central island, where I want to drive over with my two inner tires. I steer to the left, while I just feel a sudden tingling in my nose: I sneeze. The air that comes out so suddenly from my lungs makes me jump. My left hand swerves the steering wheel and brings it back to the standard position.

      Bloody hell, I lost control, I ended up in the camellias. The car jolts a little. I go straight and I slow down. I stop by the roadside, and I put the hazard lights on.

      The electric blue car drives past me and goes on.

      I get out of the car and I head to the porphyry stripe which runs around the camellias. I made such a mess. I have driven over the three plants on the outer side.

      I squat down and I reach out to the plants: they snapped, crushed into the soil, broken up. Poor them.

      I get back to my car, feeling sad.

      The electric blue car too has stopped with the hazard lights on beyond the roundabout. I look at it for a few seconds: the LED light bulbs off the lamppost light it up from up above, making it a more sparkling blue.

      I make a U-turn and I take the road leading to the university. I drive to the very end, I turn left and drive into my driveway.

2 A DAY IN THE LIFE

      I say hi to Mauro, busy reading the Giornale di Brescia every morning in his small glass house, and I head for the lifts.

      A dark spot materializes down there. I continue with a slow pace and reach the area in front of the push button panel. The black spot greets me and I reciprocate. Maybe I smiled too much, but I did it naturally, surprised by the friendliness of a character with such a gloomy appearance.

      The central lift reaches the ground floor and we go in. I’ve never seen him, but he behaves as if the place is very familiar to him, so I don’t think he’s an occasional visitor in the building. His gaze is gentle as he asks me what floor I’m going to.

      «Seven, please» I smile. Maybe too much again. But this time I smile because of his hair, really messy.

      After pressing the buttons, he sticks his two thumbs into the pockets of his jeans. His other fingers stroke his thin legs, not very masculine, which look perfectly straight though, inside his tight jeans.

      I am examining him. His appearance looks a bit dark to me, but with an implicit elegance: educated and from a good family, quite probably. The body is lean and his height is probably a few centimetres above average. He has green, almost phosphorescent eyes. I think he may be an alien.

      The elevator reaches the seventh floor.

      «Hello.»

      The black spot wishes me a good day. I get out and walk to the office.

      I get a sense of restlessness and warmth all over my body: if I weren’t stoned, I would think that I had never seen anything so amazing.

      2.2 LIFE - ONE

      I take the keys out of my bag and put the long one in the lock, placed under the writing Sbandofin in gold lettering. Four turns of the key and I open the door.

      The office is still empty: the foggy light that filters through the windows makes it even more sleepy than it appears at this time.

      It is only the second day that, after so many years, I see the office in this new light, after so many years. With the clock gone back, everything is postponed: I no longer arrive at nine, but an hour earlier, so I can leave the office at 1:00 pm instead of 2:00 pm. I always work five hours, but I have the whole afternoon to do what I want. I don’t know why I didn’t think about it before: all it took was asking Teresa to change the timetable, and so it’s much handier.

      I have got here early because there is no traffic at this time, so a cup of coffee, drunk in peace and quiet, can help me kill the twenty minutes left till the official start of my working day.

      I sip the squeezed espresso and look out the windows, staring at the fog and the slow setting in of the sun. The landscape looks rather bleak to me.

      Amedeo also made me nervous last night: he is increasingly jealous and pictures ridiculous stories in his mind, he accuses me of having flings and of betraying him, even just on a mental level. It will be the fault of work, indeed, of his non-work, but he is more and more unbearable.

      We’ve been together for just over seven years now. The first few years went by quite smoothly and happily. We were in love and I always thought of him as my only serious relationship. There had obviously been other previous individuals, but nothing significant, just a few short-lived acquaintances, randomly scattered over my thirty-five years of life. Then, I began to long for a lasting relationship, I felt mature enough to handle it.

      I have been thinking about it for some time, but I cannot be sure if it was just my will or whether it was influenced by my parents, especially my mother: all the stories about getting older, about the need to settle down, to give your life some sort of stability...

      In any case, a hidden force, an invisible hand, the flow of events or whatever else, brought me closer to Amedeo. We met at a friends’ party, and I found him nice, funny and quite attractive. It was 2010 and I had already been working here at Sbandofin for a few years; he was a real estate agent: he was still with the Borgosatollo agency. Later, when we decided to move in together in the house we now live in, he continued to work as an independent agent, getting business straight from building companies and specializing in the sale and rental of large compounds.

      The first few years of our life together were not bad, thinking about them now or, perhaps, they surface like this in my memories only because I make an inevitable comparison with the current situation: heavy, stressful life together with an ill-tempered, sad, depressed, detached and certainly not loving person. Sometimes almost violent. Verbally abusive.

      Amedeo has always been jealous and controlling, but never like the way he has been lately. If he had any real evidence, I could actually think that he is not going crazy; his scenes would make sense if I behaved like so many acquaintances of mine who regard themselves as being happily married, despite the fact that they constantly go out with other men. But since we’ve been together I’ve only ever been with him. And not so much because I wanted to but as a matter of principle: if I wanted a different situation, I would break up with him. Four months ago, we have in fact legally registered at the Town Hall as a couple living together: we are a real couple, but we could just say it and we would no longer be.

      Yes. So, at the moment, I’m stoned: stoned in a relationship.

      But it is a momentary situation, that is, not a temporary one, but not even an indissoluble one. This is a recent event and I can’t remember welcoming so much Amedeo’s idea of registering our relationship, but, I agreed to avoid a scene on his part. After all, we had already lived together for quite some time, as an actual fact, nothing would have changed.

      It is now 7:53 am and I have to start working. I have to settle the issue regarding consumer credit that I was looking into yesterday, that is sending customers’ documents relating to loans already approved and granted to the various institutions.

      We work as mediators: we look into people’s requests, evaluate all the various offers and suggest the best solution to the customer. The lowest rate loan or the financing suitable for specific needs and, for these low amounts and concerning consumer credit, the choice almost always ends up on the blue puppet: everyone likes it and it is the most advantageous.

      I head to the bathroom, rinse the plastic cup

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