True love asks for nothing in return; but if reciprocated is rarely shy to accept. When Jim McDuff fell in love with Janice he was quite happy to keep it to himself and savour the cherry syrup ooze of his infatuation alone. On the other hand, he certainly wasn’t about to break her heart if she just so happened to fall in love with him right back... but she didn’t.

Janice was Jim’s secretary and ten years his junior. Recently she had fallen eyeball deep in love with Derek the motorcycle courier and since then each moment of her daily routine simply led up to or followed his delivery. In the hours before he arrived she would tap out letters with an expression of vacant monotony but behind those eyes her mind was alive with ridiculous dreams; the touch of his hand, a gentle kiss, furtive forays in the broom cupboard and other such slushy stuff. When he arrived, of course, she became an awkward tangle of nerves. She would sign the form, take the parcel, try to smile without looking creepy and then he would be gone - until tomorrow anyway. The task of mechanically shifting paper from ‘in’ to out ‘tray’ would resume and her exterior would return to a deceiving state of vacuous tranquillity.

Unfortunately for Janice, the deliveries to McDuff Limited were, in Derek’s mind at least, a mere hoop through which to jump en route to a pizza lunch. He’d grown fond of pizza lunches just recently though it wasn’t the Italian food, in particular, that had caught his fancy... it was Julie the waitress.

She worked at ‘The Leaning Tower’, a none too fancy pseudo Sicilian pizza franchise owned by a German consortium. If you were to ask Julie to describe Derek at the end of her shift she would, no doubt, raise a frown and shrug; a customer is a customer is a customer and Derek didn’t particularly stand out from the rest as far as Julie was concerned. She, you see, was just hoopla crazy about Tony the manager (who in turn was itching with a caged hurricane of desire for a young beauty whose name was Isabella).

Isabella would walk past ‘The Leaning Tower’ at precisely 6.55pm every night on her way to work; she was reliable and Tony liked reliability, it reassured him. He would take a fag break in the restaurant doorway at 6.52pm and nod with a smile as Isabella passed by. She would wave back cautiously in a small functional way, an acknowledgement but not an encouragement, for she knew how men were and she didn’t like it at all. Once Isabella had passed by Tony would go back to his pizzas, the highlight of his day having passed he would immerse himself, once more, in the day to day business of making a living. If he was lucky he might dream about her. If not, there was always tomorrow.

Isabella worked as a dancer at ‘The Banana Bar’, a late night members drinking establishment where the clientele were predominantly male. Each night she would dance semi-nude before a handful of half dead drunkards with delusions of wealth and class. Her loves were all in the past, she was in an unconscious state of mournful regret passed off as a tired wealth of realism and an unwillingness to repeat unavoidable mistakes.

Her number one fan was Ricky, a barman who worked at the club on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. He loved to make her smile and secretly kept her photo in his wallet.

That wallet was sold to Ricky by Amber Reid who manned the leather goods counter at the Coen’s department store. She had been quite taken by the unassuming young Ricky, there was just something about his gentle manner and the soft grain of his voice that made her feel all gooey inside. At lunchtime she had gone on about him rather too long in the staff canteen, Paul had listened to her fawning with a broken half smile but inside he was churning with bad thoughts.

He had been obsessed with Amber for over a year and a half but hadn’t yet overcome his fear of the inevitable rejection enough to let her know how he was feeling. He could only get intimate with girls he didn’t care for anyway; that way it didn’t hurt quite so much when things didn’t work out.
For example, the day Dicky bought that wallet at Amber’s counter was the same day Paul woke up in the same bed as Holly (office party the night before, booze galore – you can picture the scene). Paul had drunk enough Ouzo to give himself plausible deniability, freeing himself to do things he knew he’d regret the next day. Holly, on the other hand, had found sufficient courage in her inebriated state to make a move on Paul... a man she’d secretly been obsessing about for over six months. Thus they ended up in the same bed.

Holly was married to Jim McDuff. He was a good man but the fiery passion that had persuaded them to take the vows five years previous had all but been extinguished by a seeping puddle of stale piss. They had held each other in stillness amidst the blissful breezes of those initial passions and it had been wonderful for a while but paradise itself is a thing that moves; one day they looked up and found that they were standing in a desert. Most of us have been there. Some stay forever waiting for paradise to return, some move on and some return many times.
Just recently the sandy soles of Jim McDuff’s feet had alighted on a patch of luscious green. Holly had noticed it, so had Janice. They attributed it, perhaps, to the onset of a precipitous middle age or some kind of premature senility but they were both wrong: Jim McDuff was not ailing or queer, he had simply found true love.