Petrol Wonderland

Two | Tick Tock

CLUNK.

Blake whirled around. A gloomy figure was emerging from the white staff-room door behind her. Noisily, the slim shape of a human brandishing something long and straight shuffled its way into the front of the store.

Her co-worker, Cleo. She had a mop.

The brunette regarded the darker girl's berserk expression with a look of mild annoyance. Blake was hurriedly stuffing ten-pound notes into the pockets of her shredded black jeans (which were definitely not part of work's strict dress code) for some reason. Why? Cleo didn't really care.

"Are you stealing money from the fucking till?" she asked nonchalantly, mouth half full of gum.

"No!" Blake cried and raised her palms. "Some weirdo just came in and gave me two hundred quid!"

"Riiiiight..."

"I swear! He was dressed in this weird suit and he bought like all of our sweets and then handed me half a grand."

Cleo simply pushed the thick, square frames of her glasses up her nose and shrugged. Dragging the bulky form of the mop and bucket behind her, she began trudging towards the booze isle.

"I knew you were on drugs."

Blake's forehead crumpled up like a walnut.

"I'm telling the truth."

"Sure you are. Why the hell are there sweets all over the floor? Is that a dirty handkerchief?"

"I just told you."

"I thought you said the guy bought all of the sweets, not that he threw them all over the floor. And what's that smell? It smells like somebody took a dump in here."

A hiss of air escaped Blake's lungs and she brought her palm to her forehead. The shop was a mess. The sheer amount of chocolate bars and crisp packets littering the ground would be enough to convince anyone that a rhino had gone on a rampage through the store. Lord have mercy if the boss decided to do one of her impromptu 'surprise' checks now...

"I don't know. He stunk. He was really weird. He started talking all this random shit about how he was having a tea party. And then he invited me to it. And then he was telling me to quit my job or I'd die and regret it. And then he gave me five hundred quid and just left!"

Cleo dunked the mop head into the bucket and began to mercilessly drag it across the floor to the beat of the 'zany' boyband music crackling faintly from the wall-speaker. Back and forth. Back and forth. She flicked a strand of impossibly straight and impossibly shiny hair from her face and Blake began to wonder if the other girl had even heard her at all.

"You really do attract weirdos," Cleo finally muttered, although seemingly more to herself than anyone else.

Cleo had never been the greatest listener, to say the least. However, right now, Blake was mildly freaked out and required at least the slightest bit of human empathy to calm her nerves. Yet talking to Cleo in this situation was somehow proving about as useful as talking to a slab of concrete. She glared at the brunette through mascara caked lashes and began to drum her fingers against the plastic of the till in an irritating, irregular beat, mentally willing Cleo to at least pretend to give a shit.

"He really gave me the creeps," Blake said.

The mop clattered to the ground.

"If I hear this song one more time I swear to God I'm going to shove a wine bottle up my ass..." Cleo muttered as she stormed over to silence the chunky box radio attached to the wall.