Petrol Wonderland

One | Sugar Daddy

Blake hated her job. She'd been working at the petrol station for the last two years and, quite frankly, she was at her wit's end with the place. She was tired of the driveling boredom, the scandalously low pay, the jerk boss and the absurdly late nights. Especially the driveling boredom. Girls her age should have been at raves at two in the morning, not stood shivering behind a till.

And then there were the customers.

She worked a midnight-to-five-AM shift and so it was inevitable that she'd encounter some particularly strange strangers. And some particularly strange regulars too. Usually drunkards.

Blake had to wonder why anyone would frequent a petrol station situated along a long, winding road in the middle of a large, spruce forest in the dead of night. Perhaps it was the best route to and from their late-night jobs. Or, perhaps they just had a lot of dead bodies which needed dumping in the woods. Either way, it was none of her business.

The clock hand of her beaten-up watch had just struck two when the automatic doors of the store slipped open, signifying the rare arrival of a customer. She'd been busy drowning in the sleep-denying light of her phone screen and picking her nose, so she hurriedly allowed the phone to clatter to the counter and pretended to be fiddling with her nose ring instead.

The young man who waltzed in was almost one of the strangest customers yet. She hadn't seen him before, else she'd definitely remember. Freakishly lanky, he was dressed head to toe in an oversized, burgundy suit with vertical, red stripes. A long mass of curly, ginger hair fastened into a loose ponytail peaked out from beneath his pine-coloured top hat. There was a ring of almost-convincing plastic flowers intertwined around the brim. He looked like a man who was so rich, he could afford to sprinkle gold flakes into his cereal. An eccentric young millionaire. Or a man who still lived in his mother's basement and didn't pay rent. It could go either way.

"Good evening," he said with a broad smile and a tip of his hat. His teeth were gold and not the shiny kind.

"Evening," said Blake, her own smile considerably faker.

Definitley the mother's basement kind. Oh well. However crazy he may be, at least this customer didn't seem like he was going to be rude.

The man flicked out the pointed toes of his leather boots as he continued to stalk his way around the meager shop isles. When he reached the sweets, he abruptly dropped to a crouch. To say he was there for a while would have been an understatement. Once the man had begun shoveling chocolate bars into his arms, it seemed there was no stopping him. The uneasy rustling of plastic packaging filled the nippy air of the small shop and Blake wondered if it was rude to stare. Meanwhile, her fingers ached for her phone like a long-lost lover.

By the time the man was finished, the nineteen-year-old wouldn't have been surprised to see rays of sun poking through the glass of the floor-to-ceiling windows. The stranger grinned to himself as he waddled up to the counter with a stash of sweets so large he may well have needed a wheelbarrow to carry them back to his car.

"Just these for me, my dear! And it's pump number one for the petrol," he exclaimed.

The pile tumbled from his arms onto the counter with an unceremonious roar of crinkling. Several even slid off the thin, marble surface and tumbled sadly onto the tiles below. Neither moved to pick them up. Blake cleared her throat and tried to conceal the flicker of annoyance across her face.

"Are you... sure you're going to be able to eat all of these?" she asked, realizing that she was going to be stuck here for a long time scanning the items and that conversation was unavoidable.

"Oh, no silly!" the man said with a shrill laugh. He clutched his belly. "They're not all for me. No no no. I'm having a tea party!"

Blake raised her eyebrows and tucked a strand of frosty, blue hair back into her bun. If possible, she tried to scan faster.

"Oh, right. A tea party?"

"Oh yes! A marvelous tea party. It's going to be a lot of fun. All of my friends are coming. All two of them. Would you like to come too, my dear?"

A stench wavered off him. Something rotten, like the scent of a man who hadn't washed or brushed his teeth in a good few months. Blake wrinkled her nose but had no choice other than to continue inhaling, else her skin would soon go blue to match her hair.

"No, thank you."

"Oh, whyever not? It will be so much fun! Where there's free food, there's fun. There will be games, like tag."

"I have to work."

"Who cares about work, Blake! You don't even like it here."

She faltered for a moment and her deep-brown eyes flicked up to meet his: two impossibly large and lime-coloured pools. Definitely contacts. He'd read her name tag. She hated when people read her name tag.

"H-how do you know I don't like it?"

The man pouted dramatically. "Oh peaches, I can see it in your eyes. There's no point wasting life doing something you don't enjoy. You never know when life might end."

She swallowed.

"I... just need the money."

The man whipped out a purple polka dot handkerchief and began to dab frivolously at his brow as though he was in a panto. Blake briefly wondered if the pasty, white tone of his skin was due to makeup or if it skin was genuinely peeling from his face.

"Ah. A terrible thing, money, isn't it?" the man said melodramatically. He allowed the handkerchief to flutter to the ground below and began to idly drum his dirt-caked nails against the counter. Blake returned her eyes to the task at hand and refused to budge them. "In my opinion, people care far too much about the things they can have and hold. Not experiences. Like the feel of adrenaline pumping through your veins. It really is a pitiful world we live in. That's why I make my own world."

"That sounds lovely. But, unfortunately, I have bills to pay and they don't really care about 'experiences'."

He laughed. "That's why I don't pay bills either. I'm something of a nomad."

"Like a gypsy?"

"Call it what you want. But I'm free. Free as a bird! Not like those people who slave away in office cubicles and remain in unhappy marriages who will never be free until the day they die, my dear."

"... Okay."

Stifling a sigh of relief, Blake dropped the last of the confectionery into the bulging shopping bag at her side. Her own acrylic nails pelted against the till screen like rain against metal as she hurriedly added the petrol sum from pump number one to the bill.

"That's... three hundred pounds. Um. Three hundred pounds and ten pence for you, Sir," she informed him.

"Wonderful. Three hundred is my favorite number," he replied with a brilliant grin, releasing yet another cloud of dreadful-smelling air into Blake's vicinity. Delicately, he plucked a wad of notes fastened with a pair of elastic bands from beneath his hat and dropped them into her outstretched hand, then winked. "Keep the change."

Blake fumbled to pry the tenners apart and count them but by the time she'd yanked the damned bands off of it, the automatic doors were already sliding open in his presence. Several sweets had fallen from his bag and he left them deceased on the ground without a care.

"Wait a minute!" she called, eyes darting rapidly between his retreating form and the soft orange of the notes. Up and down. Up. down.

One note... Two note... Three, four, five...

"I like your hair, by the way!" the man called out behind him as he disappeared into the inky night and started towards the red sedan he had parked outside.

Blake huffed and shuffled the notes in her grasp. Nine, ten, eleven... Her jaw suddenly became weighed down by some invisible force as she continued to count. Five hundred. He'd left her exactly five hundred pounds. That left her almost two hundred pounds in... tips? Bloody hell. She was only paid seven pounds an hour!

The muffled roar of an engine could be heard outside and by the time she'd looked up, the strange man was already gone.