7
Vince has steely square glasses. If he ever took them off, I’d flick him in the eye.
‘Hello Vince.’
‘Hi.’
That was the extent of our enthralling conversation earlier today.
I have always found Vince hilarious. There’s something about the name Vince, isn’t there? I could just say it over and over, Vince, Vince, Vince, Vince Vince Vince Vince Vince. It never gets tired. It’s a stupid name. What’s more, Vince looks exactly how you’d expect a Vince to look: steely square glasses, big forehead, dark curls, frown lines.
I have been here for about a year. Vince was here a year before me, and took it upon himself to instruct me in the workings of the office. This goes here, that goes there, put more paper in the photocopier when you’re done, and so on. Since then, he’s reverted to one-word exchanges with me in the corridor. For example,
‘Hi Vince, how’s it going?’
‘Great.’
or,
‘Hey Vince, nice hair today.’
‘Thanks.’
or,
‘Hey Vince, where’d you get that hawt shirt?’
‘Uh… Shop.’
Needless to say, I wanted more. I began devising elaborate schemes to bring out the full flavour of Vince’s character, and I wanted to do it so that he wouldn’t know I was involved. I convinced a friend of mine to majorly hit on him outside the office one afternoon, but she couldn’t get him to drop the one-word routine. Another time I spilled a mug of coffee down his pants, by total mistake I should add, so he went out and came back five minutes later with an identical pair. I began to think that Vince was some kind of a robot. It all made sense, if you thought about it, which I did.
Just when I started wondering if Vince was an impenetrable fortress, a code that could never be cracked, I broke through in a simple but nonetheless ingenious manner. I wrote him an email, posing as a (female) company employee from another town. It was a small prank, one that I hadn’t intended to go any further, but I detected something in his reply that I’d never witnessed before, not even when he was showing me how to open the resources room on my second day. This fictional employee had something that Vince liked, which had caused him to open up just a little bit, so I kept her alive, I fed her and watered her and gave her a mouth and breasts and a beating heart, and somehow she and Vince became internet lovers. It’s sickening, isn’t it, and yet I too became engrossed in the whole process, to the extent that if either Vince or Sophie (she’s called Sophie, the imaginary girl) were to disappear, my entire world would feel as though it had been irreparably damaged.
