Morris leaned over the bruised paint of the pier's railing, giving comfort to its rotted skin of rust and crusted scars. The salt in the air was strong enough that even the cigarette couldn't wash it away. The trapped echoes of the pier's peak years were immortalised through the whispered wails that slipped through the cracks of his fingers.
It had been a long time since the pier had a youthful coat of paint on the poles and music in the air. The boardwalk would have been a hive of activity, with laughter and chatter and the clatter of teeth as the waiters served fresh fish and soda floats. Now, the buildings were hibernating and no alarm would ever wake them up again.
He looked out towards the paint strokes of blues and greys to where two small boats swayed in the water. Then even further away, off to the blurred line where the sea joined with the cloudy sky, there was a large container ship, balancing a colourful display of metal crates for an unknown destination.
Morris was fascinated with them all -- his imagination squeaked in to gear and pondered the story behind each vessel. For a moment, he was a contestant on a game show, his hair a little more slicked than it was now, clothes more presentable than the three-day-old shirt currently draped upon him, rhyming off his guesses to what was inside the mystery boxes. Flat screen televisions as big as his arm. Enough cigarettes to see him through the next couple of years to the ripe old age of forty, if he was lucky. Or maybe it was fancy sports cars with more curves than the women from his magazine stash.
Then Morris grew bored and he drifted back to the peaceful isolation of the smaller boats. For a moment, he felt more alone than he had ever been, and he liked it.
'Still here?' Nancy's voice was the full stop to the fantasy as she danced over the ageing wood without a single complaint from the planks, before punctuating her perfect en-pointe performance with a practiced pose against the rails. Her soft silhouette sniffed the air, pulling against heavy eyes and a chestnut mane bundled together with a salvaged scrunchy.
'Still here. How did the phone call go?'
'Well, I've missed the last five shifts so I think they'd already took the hint that April's waitress of the month wasn't coming back.' She reached over and plucked the tobacco stick from his hand, clutching it between pursed lips and gave him a cloud of thanks, 'you looked a little lost in thought. What were you thinking about?'
The cigarette was back after a quick grab and he wiped away crumbs of broken burgundy from his forearm. 'Nothing, really.'
'That's your response to everything,' she sighed as her voice dropped as low as it could go, 'nothing really!'
Morris turned back to look out to the water and lowered his brows, swimming through the memories of the past few days while working up the courage to actually speak. Nothing, really had been such a go-to expression for so long that it came as natural as a breath.
'I'm thinking of the guys in those boats,' he inhaled from the cigarette. 'Thinking about what it'd be like to be them. All the way out there, surrounded by water and more water. Being able to look at the land in the distance, just like I'm doing with him, and going that's not my problem for once.'
His forehead scrunched as the words escaped, and his shoulders suddenly weighed down just slightly less than they had before.
'Wow. I was not expecting that.'
Morris's cheeks brought some much-needed warmth, 'what were you expecting?'
Nancy shrugged, 'that you hate it here? That you wanted to keep driving? To keep ahead of them? That standing here, looking out at the water was just stupid and boring.'
'It is still sort of stupid,' the harsh lines of his ego had began to soften from the tide of youthful maturity. 'See, this is why I don't say anything.'
Her smile deflated, she looked like she was going to cry, or maybe she wasn't. Morris wasn't very good at reading emotions and he suddenly felt like the worst guy in the world. For once, he wasn't proud of it.
'Look, don't be like that.' He scrubbed as his eyes, 'you're right, okay? I get so caught up with all the problems in front of me that I never see past them and look off to the little dot in the distance and go that's sort of nice.'
Nancy's smile returned. Morris realised he liked it when she smiled.
'Maybe I'm starting to become a good influence on you,' she said.
'You mean a bad influence,' he replied with another smile of his own.
It was Nancy's turn to look towards the huge ship and wonder what the contents of its cargo were. 'It's funny, when you told me what you were thinking, I honestly expected you to say you wanted a drink.'
'Well, when I was thinking about being out on that boat, I was also drinking a beer.' Morris's fingers crawled along the railing, and his hand rested on top of hers.
'Of course,' Nancy beamed from the warmth of cool fingers, 'that sounds more like it.'