Comfort Zone E-Book

alastair macleod

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

"The polished mahogany counter gleamed, light bounced from the glass mirror through the bottles on the wall behind the bar. Yvette, a flaming red head, tarty in black top and short green skirt was polishing glasses. As she turned he noticed her purple fingernails, the dark eye shadow, the deep red Goth girl lipstick. A snake tattoo slid tantalisingly out of sight down her cleavage.
She got his espresso with slow deliberate movements, from cup rack to coffee machine. She knew he was watching, knew his eyes followed her body as she stretched down for the cup then up to the lever.
It was a show, she was the performer. There was no eye contact until she turned and pushed the coffee towards him touching his hand with hers. It was hot and moist.
Then she looked straight at him, her face framed in vibrant red hair, her lips parting to say the price."

Leseprobe

Alastair Macleod

Comfort Zone

BookRix GmbH & Co. KG81371 Munich

Comfort Zone

Comfort zone; the range of temperature and humidity within which the human body feels and works comfortably and efficiently, typically 19-24 degrees centigrade.

Whiteness; he watched as each crystal was added so the white, like a living thing, spread. In it he saw blankness, emptiness, purity, the capture of rampant moisture, the locking up of vapours, a mini arctic.

He stood up from the freezer cabinet and began to repack his tools. If only global warming could be fixed like this, replace a component, reset, switch on, the ice caps reform, suck up the moisture, cool the earth.

But, he thought, the component that needed to be replaced was man himself; take him out of the machine and you would fix things.

His overall was neat, a cool blue with the “Freeze” logo emblazoned across his back. Florent was 21. Dark hair, medium build, deep brown eyes, a lightly stubbled jaw line. ”Freeze “was his own fledgling business, only a year old. Redundancy from Peugeot saw him take his skills on their air conditioning units into freelance work – anything to do with cooling, refrigeration, air-conditioning.

Last summer in France, 2003, thousands of old people had died in a heat wave – a scandal that rocked the nation. The result was a rocketing demand for domestic air-conditioning units as well as units for old folks homes, offices and shopping complexes.

Humans perspire to provide natural cooling but it hadn’t been enough. Their old hearts could not pump fast enough. The hotter the air the more moisture it can carry and the harder for your perspiration to evaporate. You needed something to take out the moisture so you passed the air over cooled plates, condensed some of the moisture, then recirculated the air. That was a simple description of how it worked.

If you cooled the air too much you got “deposition”, frost. You did just that to make a freezer cabinet work, but if you took out too much moisture you dried things up.

Florent stowed his tools in the Citroen van. He checked his watch. It was 8 am. His next job was at the district morgue. As he thought about that job he suddenly smelt the tang of freshly ground coffee and the sound of laughter from the Café Juliette.

Metal chairs were stacked against its wall; only the tables stood out front, silver flowers without petals. He headed for the dimly lit interior.

The polished mahogany counter gleamed, light bounced from the glass mirror through the bottles on the wall behind the bar. Yvette, a flaming red head, tarty in black top and short green skirt was polishing glasses. As she turned he noticed her purple fingernails, the dark eye shadow, the deep red Goth girl lipstick. A snake tattoo slid tantalisingly out of sight down her cleavage.

She got his espresso with slow deliberate movements, from cup rack to coffee machine. She knew he was watching, knew his eyes followed her body as she stretched down for the cup then up to the lever.