Art Pact 162

Bronwen ran the flower shop at the bottom of the tower block. The flower shop ("Full Petal Jacket") had occupied the fourth of five small retail caves in the ground floor ever since the tower had been constructed, and was owned (and, sadly, named) by a recluse known only as Mrs. Janis. Bronwen had never met her employer, having been interviewed by an employment agency, a placement specialist, Mrs. Janis's lawyer and finally the incumbent manager of the shop, who had one month after hiring Bronwen emigrated to Thailand for unspecified reasons. That had been seven years ago, and although Bronwen had taken the position without the slightest hint of managerial or administrative skill she had grown into the task, keeping the shop ship-shape and profitable despite the lack of either passing trade or a proximate customer base. The people of the tower block were not natural flower givers, although they did tend to resort to flowers as an apology - either post-fight or post-infidelity - and so their natural appetites and lack of control did provide a certain baseline income.

Working in a flower shop was hardly a dream she had had since childhood, but it was a cosy and easy life. She had in her early twenties struggled with the idea of finding meaning in her life, but unlike so many of her friends she had been able to come to a simple and easy conclusion - that since there was no meaning to life, there was no point in searching for it. Meaning could be where you found it, and that meant that she was free to choose or build her own meaning. Bronwen chose simplicity - books from the library, a few friends that she'd managed to keep from university, a small flat on the outskirts, and her job to finance it all. She eschewed the idea of working for the weekend, opting to stay in a job that gave her plenty of time to think and to spend the weekends and evenings in almost interchangeable ways. Three times a year she would go away for one-week holidays (the longest she could leave an agency assistant in charge of the shop and hope to return to it in any reasonable state), and at Christmas she got leave from Mrs. Janis's lawyer to shut up completely between Christmas Eve and New Year's Day, completing her annual round of time off.

Thomas lived in the estate to the north of the tower, a maze of red-brick terraces that had been built as a family-friendly alternative to the block itself. It had not been a success - or rather, it had been too much of a success, quickly gentrifying so that the houses were unaffordable to the original target audience. They were bought up by rich city types - not types that Thomas would naturally have gravitated towards, but the flat had been left to him in his elder brother's will. The brother, dying without a wife or children (that they knew of at the time, although ten years later Thomas and Bronwen would be visited in their home by a teenage nephew searching for his family), had bequeathed his home to Thomas as a way of attempting to make peace for a decades-old fight over a woman which had lead to an estrangement. Thomas, himself at the time barely finished with his doctorate in entomology and emerging from his chrysalis into the cold hardships of the outside world, could not afford to pass up free accommodation - even if it did mean paying inflated council tax bills. He was a frugal liver, and managed to pick up through a contact from his school days a low-paying job in the local park maintenance department - too poorly paid to be useful to anyone with a mortgage to pay, but offering him the perfect blend of low pay and scant work.

They met one day in the middle of summer, on the hottest day of the year. Roses and tulips wilted in the midday heat, Bronwen dancing around the shop from display to display attempting to keep as much of the stock well-watered and shaded as possible. The sun moved unpredictably across the sky, vanishing behind other tower blocks and suddenly reappearing at strange angles as powerfully hot reflections from the mirrored surfaces of the huge modern office buildings to the west. No sooner had Bronwen moved one set of plants into a more comfortable position than a sunray would burst across another.

Thomas had the day off, and was sitting on the bench across the road nursing a bottle of premixed Pimms which he'd hidden inside the shell of an old thermos so as to avoid the disapproving stares of his rich neighbours and imprecations to share from the tower block inhabitants. He was reading a book, and out of the corner of his eye kept becoming distracted by a cerise shape buzzing from left to right, right to left, vanishing and reappearing. Looking up, he saw that it was the shopkeeper of "Full Petal Jacket". He'd always assumed that the owner would be older (which indeed she was, but Thomas did not at that time realise that Bronwen was not, in fact, that arcane worthy), and he permitted himself the (as he thought then, and again, more ruefully, later) somewhat seedy privilege of observing the young woman at work, enjoying the spectacle of her wavy hair tumbling unruly over her face at every opportunity - at which point she would have to lean backwards and flick the loose locks back into place, a manoeuvre which caused her curves to heave alluringly. She was, Thomas thought, a marvelous example of embonpoint - fleshier than the pared-down yuppies in the gentrified estate, nor yet corpulent or skeletal as many of the tower dwellers were.

He watched her work for an hour - an hour he would later describe as the worst waste of time in his life - before summoning the courage (and the alcohol content) to cross the road and introduce himself.

"I'm Thomas," he said bluntly, stepping into the shade of a badly-placed awning. "I was just wondering if there was anything I could do to help?"