Seven

Ty was already inside the car as she slammed the door shut, chest heaving from exhilaration and rainwater dripping from the cropped lengths of her dirty blonde hair. Before even bothering to deal with her glasses, through which she could barely see as tiny droplets clung to their surface, she shoved in the keys and woke up the slumbering engine, hurling her bag and its cargo onto the backseat. Two strong beams of light made their path through the torrential rain as she cranked up the aircon and the music simultaneously, letting the jazz fill her and laughing despite herself and her saturation. It was boiling hot, 32 degrees, with humidity enough to choke the people running frantically through the surrounding streets. The onset of the rain had been sudden. Ty had just been leaving work.

After a brief shimmy, Ty cleaned her glasses and set down the hand break, reversing out of the space with cool precision. She never allowed anyone else to drive her car, a navy blue BMW that had rolled its way right out a vintage showroom with a cool zero on the speedometer. It had taken her years to track down a car without any imprints.

From the legacy of their manufacturing, Ty detected the misery embedded within any tiny scrap of metal. More than that, cars were thick with lovemaking on their backseats, with arguments ignited from the passenger seat, with near-death scares and tragic accidents. Imprints. Hundreds of them. The E23 BMW was an absolute miracle.

Alice Russell blasted through the speakers as she navigated the streets of Sydney, Ty drumming on the steering wheel and singing with abandon as the crisp notes of the piano penetrated her body. Taking a sharp right onto Hunter Street, she pulled up ten meters or so after the fluorescent red glow of the sign for Frankie’s Pizza Bar had danced off her glasses. Ty glanced at the clock. Just before eight.

She hadn’t meant to stay back late, but when she hadn’t found herself hungry at five she could find no reason to head for home. Ty wasn’t sure what had compelled her to grab the manuscript as she left.

It wasn’t as though she had broken any rules or any laws. As an archivist, even as a lowly assistant archivist as she was, she could access the stacks and even check out choice items with express permission from her superiors. The problem was that Ty wasn’t much interested with permission.

Ty quickly re-evaluated her first thought. She had broken a rule.

The stacks had been crowded. Despite their arresting size, as stretching on for kilometres and well below the basement level, Ty hadn’t found herself alone for more than a few moments the whole day long. The staff of twenty or so other assistants, as well as an array of the archivists themselves, had been sorting and cataloguing intensively for a week now. An unexpectedly large donation of recently procured artefacts. The exhaustive end of year stock take. It was easy to work late in December – there was always more to do than people to do it.

As the day drew towards a close for most of the employees, however, she managed to find an hour all to herself.

Both headphones in, the music had been loud enough to spill out and surround Ty in a cloud of muffled tunes. Voice echoing throughout the space, the mellow tones of the jazz flowed through her body and out of her mouth.

She danced.

When Ty was alone, everything she did was a dance. In her hand, the long list of call numbers, references and dates directed her movements as she spun and shimmied and slid around the space, gathering the documents and placing them onto the cart. Her movements had been sultry, alluring, pervaded by a sense of desire that extenuated every movement from the flick of her hand to the sway of her hips.

It had been the forth item on the call sheet that was the first of them she could feel. Ty had dropped the book to the ground with surprise, having lost herself completely to the song. This was not an uncommon occurrence, much to the disgruntlement and general confusion of her colleagues. Pure emotion coursed through her body, and before her eyes began to flicker the first moments of the imprint, skewed like bokeh in the back of a photograph.  With a yelp she released the documents from her hands. Those who had converged in the minutes prior, unseen by Ty, coughed with menace and eyed her off, forcing her to abandon the imprint as she tossed the book into the cart.