The tarmac was webbed with messy yellow paint, which had been openly disregarded by the members of the public. The pavements had been bordered with eight-foot barbed wire fencing. Closely, lined far too many expensive cars to be respected. I pondered for a moment, just how many of these owners could honestly afford the cars they were driving, and, more amusingly, if they could afford the fines they had just bought themselves for parking obnoxiously close the the entrance. Another thought that skipped around was: how much would they miss them if they were to, for example, be fatally damaged or potentially disappear?
Among the citizen's various forms of transportation, dotted a few police vehicles. The luminous blue and yellow revolted me. I shamelessly scoffed at them.
A few moments later, a broad male officer accompanied by a petite female officer emerged from the building and climbed into a police truck. Once again, I rolled my eyes. I picked up my book and coat and got out of the passenger side door. I slammed it, hard. Not out of anger, mind you, but out of complete and utter spite at the grounds I was standing in. My family never took the slightest slither of warmth to the government-controlled services, especially the police force. In return, they had no dissimilar feelings towards us. It was a comfortable, mutual disliking and it had been so for generations.
We made a pronounced effort across the car park and Pin helped me up some cracked slab stairs to the sliding glass door of the foyer. The scruffy door mat displayed a meaningless welcome message, no more inviting than something a stray cat may have left on your front patio. To the left was a door with a wheelchair plaque bolted to the centre, likely calling attention to a rest-room. On the right, behind a large desk filled with posters about violence tolerance and gun safety was a stocky woman in a uniform stood with a notepad. She greeted my Guardian and I as she crossed our names to register us. Her soft Australian accent was noticeable and new to me.
She turned back to walk through a glass door on the far side of the office into yet another blocked off room, her muddy ponytail swinging unpleasantly at her shoulders.
I took an uncomfortable seat at the benches opposite, taking in my surroundings. A broken fan flittered in the corner of the desk, softly disrupting the still of the closed blue shutters. The single open pane displayed a crest on the glass. Pin hovered about the desk staring past the glass door we'd entered in to check on the car.
I kicked the thin blue carpet and grimaced at the glaring white walls. It earned a hard stare from the older man but me being me I didn't react. I continued to kick the floor.
