Offence #1
Sue Breem was not an angry woman. You didn’t get to forty-three, managing a trio of kids, one husband, one ex-husband and a part-time career by being angry. No, she was righteous. She believed in order, fairness, and people not parking in front of her fucking office.
She set down her mug of steaming Tassimo coffee, squinting through her thick spectacles, the water vapour and the slits of the window blinds. The Range Rover was back. A growling black tank, occupying one of only two spaces outside the front of imPrint’s South East branch. Its yummy mummy owner slipped out the driver’s side, pushing the door shut with a thump that Sue mused (and hoped) might have twisted her porcelain wrist. She jogged across the carpark in her spray-on yoga pants, like the offspring of a marionette puppet and an inflatable doll, before disappearing into Studio Spin.
‘Did you see that?’ Sue said, turning to the woman at the desk opposite her.
Mona nodded her head in agreement, then shook it in disgust. ‘Disgusting,’ she said.
‘Every one of them, completely and utterly obnoxious,’ Sue continued. ‘Not many things grind my gears, Mona, but I tell you, those gym bunnies could do with a good helping of myxomatosis.’
Mona laughed, a husky, strained laugh that set Sue’s stomach on edge. She liked Mona – as much as she liked anyone – but the woman could be so unsettling sometimes. A similar age, with a similar number of ex-husbands and offspring, they had much in common. More so than the others in their small, satellite office: Malcolm, Mona’s sullen middle-aged logistics underling, and Freddy, the intern so dim-witted Sue was convinced he must be some kind of diversity hire.
Or even Jerry, for whom – as his dedicated PA and all-round life-manager – Sue had the greatest respect. But he was away most of the time, jetting round the country on important operations business, forever calling Sue up with last minute hotel rearrangements or dry-cleaning requests. No, Jerry would never be a friend, but Sue could imagine one day shedding a tear as she made a lauded and well-applauded speech at his funeral.
‘She tail-gated me all the way from the BP garage the other morning,’ Mona said, snapping Sue out of her reverie.
Sue didn’t need to ask who she was. She was the owner of Studio Spin, which she managed with her boyfriend, he. She and he were a life-size Ken and Barbie couple, with matching sportscars in glossy blue and neon pink, matching bleach blonde locks, sunbed-bronzed faces, taut abs and overdeveloped buttocks. Watching them strut in every morning, as she glared through the blinds, nearly made Sue wretch into her Tassimo.
‘What is her problem?’ Sue replied. ‘I hope you had it out with her.’
‘No,’ Mona said, ‘but I did drive the whole way here at twenty.’
Sue chuckled, and congratulated her colleague. They’d show them how bunnies could boil.
Offence #2
The next day, there were two. Sue came back from the toilet – resenting as always the fact that the smallness of their branch meant sharing a bathroom with men – and saw them right there. Outside the windows. Outside their office.
She felt her blood begin to bubble, like the liquid from her beloved coffee capsules. imPrint occupied one of eight units in the Applegate Industrial Park. They’d been one of the first to move in. Each unit was bordered by parking spaces. Ergo, each unit has its own parking spaces. Allotted spaces. The landlord had practically guaranteed the fact – or at least reasonably insinuated it. Yet Studio Spin, in which he and she ran some kind of fitness sessions for private members, let such private members dump their vehicles all over the tarmacked lots.
Sue had to hold back a growl that was threatening to claw its way out of her stomach and through her gritted teeth. Jerry was due back for a meeting this afternoon. A meeting with important clients to make important deals. What would they think when they saw imPrint’s entrance clogged with the spinner’s 4x4s? Sue could almost feel the weighty contracts for high end printing equipment ebbing away like a migrant child in the riptide.
This called for action. Fast. And as a veteran of twenty years in the telecommunications business – first fax machines, then conference calling, before making the leap to commercial printing solutions – Sue knew how to act.
She dropped into her wheelie chair with a little bump, booted up Microsoft Word and hammered her message into the keyboard. Their own office printer – Epson WorkForce Pro – whirred into life and out rolled her notices with the PrecisionCore quality and unbeatable speed that made the WorkForce Pro the best in the business.
Mona gave one of her disquieting chuckles as Sue marched round the desks. The intern Freddy gazed at her, gormless as ever. Sue barged through the door, circled the obstructive vehicles and took great delight in craning back each windscreen wiper to pin down her message.
That would show them, she thought.
Offence #3
It didn’t show them.
As Sue returned from the kitchenette with her lunch – a light salad – she thought it had done the trick. The offending juggernauts were gone.
But then she saw the papers half-stuffed through their letterbox. And the tire marks, seared across their spaces. She gasped.
‘Did you see what they’ve done? What happened?’
Mona was out for a Costa lunch, but Malcolm turned round in his chair and shrugged. Freddy stared blankly at her for a moment, then returned to do the same at his screen. Useless pricks, she thought.
In a huff, she extracted her notes from the letterbox, mangled and screwed up. She’d been fair, direct, justified. How could they possibly have taken offence?
These spaces are for anyone – scrawled in biro on the back.
Sue gasped again. It was like the author had taken their biro and poked it straight in her chest. She turned over the sheet to check her message once more.
Please do not park in our spaces again! They are for imPrint, not any lycra-swaddled selfish pig-heads.
There, nothing offensive.
Sue took a shivering breath, her veins thrumming with rage. No, not rage. Outrage. Justified anger against these arseholes out to get her. She muscled back to the kitchenette, which was in the corner of their adjacent warehouse, and let out a silent scream, arms flung back, eyes bulging from their sockets.
It was then she noticed the delivery drivers had left the crates in front of the display printers. ‘Fucking imbeciles!’ she spat. On the very day clients were coming to inspect and be wowed by those machines. She made a mental note to remind Jerry later how lucky he was she got that forklift license, jumped into the cabin and started shifting the crates.
Offence #4
Sue had never spoken to the gym bunnies until that day. She liked to rise above them, and save her attention for the things that mattered in life. Attending her daughter’s clarinet recital, combing over her husband’s bald spot, or cleaning her dog’s anal glands. But when he parked in her space, a line was not just crossed – it was stamped over, bulldozed and redeveloped into a block of luxury flats for wealthy Russian investors.
She stopped dead in the carpark at the first sight of the glinting blue Porsche in her spot round the side of imPrint (she always insisted her colleagues keep the front spaces empty in case Jerry or any visiting clients turned up unexpected). Rain hammered her windscreen. Blocking the way, she was only jolted out of her stupefaction by the honk of a waiting vehicle. As she went to wave an apology, she noticed the honker was wearing sportsgear, so instead gave him the finger and reversed into a space she usually left for M&G Electricals.
‘Wha… did you… I ca…’ She could barely get the words out as she trudged into the office, instead grabbing a startled Mona by the shoulder and guiding her to the window to see the travesty for herself.
‘Unbelievable,’ Mona said. ‘I’ve a right mind to bump into it on my way out. On purpose.’
Sue balled her fists, still seething too much to talk. Bumping into his car was the least that man deserved.
‘But you know we don’t own, like, any of those spaces, right?’ a voice chirped up behind them. It was such a rarity to hear Freddy speak that the sound made Sue recoil.
‘Uh, wha…’ Sue floundered. ‘We have a right to them!’
Mona nodded and gave Freddy a withering glare over the rim of her glasses. The boy shrugged and turned back to his PC.
‘I’m going to sort this out,’ Sue declared, marching back towards the door.
‘Sue, I need you to put through some deliver–’
‘Not now, Mona,’ Sue cut her off. ‘Work can wait, I have business to attend to.’
Flinging wide the office door, Sue was just about to storm through the downpour to the gym, when she noticed that Mr Gym Bunny was still in the car. Chatting away on his mobile phone, smug grin on his face, smug cream cheese bagel in his hand. Utterly oblivious to the destruction he wrought.
‘Fuck!’ he squealed, as Sue’s fist thundered on his bonnet. Cream cheese spattered down his tank top. His eyes, twitching like a real frightened rabbit’s, met Sue’s.
‘You’re in our space!’ she shouted.
‘Huh?’ he said, unable to hear her through the rain, his windscreen and obnoxious earholes.
Sue leered through his window, miming to the idiot to wind it down. ‘You’re in our space,’ she said again, once he had. It threw her for a moment, being so close to her nemesis, touching distance from his poreless, botoxed face. With his glowing white teeth and glossy blue eyes, he seemed childlike, pitiful.
Until he waved her off. ‘Sorry, just had to finish this call.’ He laughed, the window already whirring back up between them. ‘Nah just some woman from one of the offices,’ he was saying to his phone, with a smirk.
And with that he left Sue standing there, alone in the pouring rain. Just some woman with her parking space.
Offence #5
They left a folding stand, advertising off peak membership, in clear obstruction of pedestrian access to the imPrint building. Sue tossed it in the nearest skip.
The Final Offence
Sue had to get revenge. It was the some woman remark. It was the way he hadn’t even bothered to acknowledge her, to look at her, the moment he was done. Like she was just a piece of trash he’d chucked out his car window.
She’d never be a size minus-six, juice cleansing, yoga classing, eye-grabbing gym bunny, but she was still a human being. She deserved the time of day. She deserved respect. Hell, she deserved admiration, for all the shit she dealt with. And at the very least, she deserved her fucking parking space.
But Sue had a plan. Her car was new and rather than trading in her beat-up old Polo, she’d kept it, ready for when her eldest boy started learning to drive. Well, unfortunately for Tom, he was going to have to find another engine to stall. Because Sue Breem, mother of three, anti-arsehole activist, had taken said car out for a drive on a dark Sunday night, and parked it up. Driver’s side against their precious warehouse doors. So close it was almost touching.
That was three months ago.
Pulling in every morning since and seeing her anonymous blockade in front of their building was the highlight of Sue’s day. She wasn’t ashamed to say she even swung by on Saturdays sometimes for a giggle. Knowing that all those gym bunnies would have to squeeze by her rusty old banger to bounce into the warren made her light up with joy.
But then, the police came. Sue sipped her Tassimo as the marked car glided by the windows, her interest perked. What enticing drama was about to unfold? The officers strolled up to their door and the excitement began to pulse through her veins. They muscled into the quiet office, their bulky uniforms and threatening presence so out of place, like a nosebleed on a bright sunny day.
‘Miss Breem?’
Her heart stopped. Her colleagues’ heads swivelled round. Mona’s threaded eyebrows shot up.
‘Mrs Breem,’ she corrected the officer, out of habit.
‘Mrs Breem,’ the officer echoed. ‘Has a red Polo, licence RF64 7JT, registered to yourself, been stolen recently?’
‘No.’
‘Then would you be able to explain why it has been reported abandoned’ – he craned his neck to look across the carpark – ‘over there, for the previous three months?’
Sue was struck dumb.
‘Should I assume there’s been some… animosity between yourself and your neighbours, Miss Breem?’
‘Mrs,’ she said again. ‘I… no… I…’ Sue was all too aware of her gawping colleagues. Oh, how they must be revelling in her discomfort. She could just imagine Mona regaling the story to her (second) husband that evening over a glass of rosé.
‘Do you still have the keys to said vehicle, Mrs Breem?’
‘Yuh… yes.’
‘Then I would suggest you move it. Before we have to take this any further.’
As soon as the policemen left, Sue locked herself in the staff toilet, her face burning. Those bastards! How dare they report her to the fucking police?! Cowards! They really couldn’t walk over here and face her? They’d rather waste police time about a pissing car?!
‘Are you OK in there, Sue?’ Mona said, with a little knock on the door. Probably just anxious she was missing out on the escalating action.
Sue ground her teeth to hold back a growl and thumped the toilet roll. The metal holder bent off the wall, the paper unspooling onto the floor.
That was it. Sue had to show these fuckers she couldn’t be ignored.
Flinging open the door, she jolted Mona off her feet (the bitch had clearly been listening up against it) and barged past her into their warehouse. A prod of the red button rolled up their shutters like the opening act at the theatre. And boy, would she give them a show.
Mona, Malcolm and Freddy were all pressed against the windows like a trio of braindead ventriloquist dummies. Sue waved her fist at them and imagined she got a slight nod of support from Mona. Then she turned back, her target in sight.
The wheels of the forklift whirred beneath her, slow but mercilessly persistent, like the bringer of death. She was inevitable.
Two and a half minutes later, she had crossed the carpark. Sue was face-to-face with her destiny. Studio Spin. She revved up and began her final approach.
It was the pink Porsche outside the front of their office today, but Sue could only see red. When the talons of her truck connected with the convertible, they saw her. Sue’s grinning mask of rage, their sportscar shunted towards their glass-fronted building, sparking as its bumper grazed the tarmac.
Him and her, jumping up from their desks. Fear draining the bronzer from their faces. The bunnies in her headlights.
I hope you enjoyed this story, and that you’ll think twice before crossing a woman like Sue in the future… I also have some exciting news to announce - ‘Gym Bunnies’ features in a new collection of short stories called The Other World, published in February 2020: