Fred might have been right

Fred Brown talked a lot about sex, he was witty with it and it stayed just... just ...on the right side of offensive. His hooded blue eyes challenged you to believe that he told the truth, his smile teased so you suspected he didn’t and he was confident, good-looking and intelligent but due to a degenerative disease his spine was damaged, his years were numbered and his height was only 4’ 11”.

Secretary to the chemists in the plastics research department she’d had a shy and unconfident childhood and despite being three months married, was to some extent naïve and socially inept, so when Fred Brown told her “Every man in the lab gets a hard-on when you walk through” she assumed he was teasing. Every day she delivered the internal post to the laminating plant, where John invariably delayed her in conversation on the day’s topics, to the paper plant where she and Sam talked about music and to the filter section where Dennis asked her about what she’d done at the weekend, and finished up in the chief chemist’s office where he tended to come around the desk to collect his post if she didn’t hand it over and escape as quickly as possible, without being rude.

Dennis occasionally gave her a lift home, which was helpful because it meant she didn’t have to wait half an hour for a bus and walk the last mile, he asked whether she would be away during the factory shut-down, the first week of June, and she said “no” because her husband had to work. One day Dennis said he often thought about doing it with someone other than his wife, just to find out what it would be like and she laughed, as she did when he said he might pop round for a coffee during the shutdown – she was embarrassed when he did as he’d promised because it was a hot day, she was dressmaking and had only a short shift dress on and nothing else at all.