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It was a course on therapeutic storytelling that I had asked to go on. I seen a poster for it in the college holidays and had time to vet it all, look it over on the writer’s blog to check for some semblence of sanity. The college had the same day decided to pick up the bill. Perhaps I would have to review my hatred of certain key people in the organisation who judge people by their spiritual credentials, ensuring that they fulfil certain criteria before extending to them some kind of empathy, or indeed, even greeting them.

I stood around once I had signed in, drinking my green tea and looking out of the open window as others formed into chatting couples and groups around me. I was determined to be standoffish, a writer, as much out of defensiveness, anticipating the social mess I can make out of talking to strangers, something that doesn’t come easily to me, as anything else. Read the rest of this entry »

I came back from a run yesterday, my last day of absolute freedom, the last day of holiday without M who had gone to Prague for a few days - she booked it last minute to get away when she had a few consecutive days off work at the same time as her brother’s birthday - and as usual, tried to find something constructive to do with the short period of time I had before leaving for the airport. Read the rest of this entry »

He hadn’t meant to raise his voice. She had had a hard day, he knew that, even if he had to make an effort to remember, like he had to remember to speak slowly to the new girl at work, Irina, the girl who made him nervous with her long brown hair, flawless complexion and that hourglass figure that made him feel her time and tolerance was running out as she stood there smiling effortlessly at him as she did; he didn’t want her, at least, didn’t think he did, but all those adolescent traits of tender tongued awkwardness came back to haunt him. Still, even then he could only hold back his impatience for a moment. He was patient, gentle, calm, but a perfectionist in the kitchen and once his creation was plated up, bums should be on seats. He flicked the landing lights a few times. She was listening to Harry Potter over her hairdryer again. He only hoped she had her door open.

He caught himself thinking that if she had not, he would not go up there but simply shout the louder, possibly act all mardy. He noted that that thought that once would have followed that could be summed up as “is this what things have got to?” didn’t, possibly hadn’t for some time.

He sat down with his dinner, setting hers down besides, lit her new fancy candle with his no longer contraband lighter, took a mouthful, and then jumped up again, grabbing at her plate, first with his hand, and then more angrily with the tea towel he had brought in, the one with the charred corner she always joked about - first, as he had noted once again on its presentation to his hand as the first neatly folded towel in an ever-rotating stack, hilariously, then endearingly, then once again invidiously as the drawn out joke seemed to . Red in her Eeyore dressing gown she caught him storming out to the oven and smiled, jokingly blocking his exit. He walked back and placed the plate on the table, taking his seat.

“One day I’ll come up and put vinegar in that bath and give it a good stir before you jump in. You’ll poach yourself you have it that hot.”

She had caught him on the hop. Her nonchalant manner always made him feel like a fool when he overdramatised his efforts. He always realised in retrospect. Every time. Not once had he stopped himself from going through the motions once again. And then, as he always realised in that same regretful sigh of a sequence of thoughts, he was always late for dinner at his mum & Dad’s, talking over the cricket, the Formula One or the golf, talking about work with his dad, with whom he would roll his eyes at the constant bangs on the wall and the shouts. And then that dusty old comment, not even a joke.

They ate in silence. It had come out well. The bacon had firmed up nicely with the little blowtorch she had bought him because “he liked his kitchen gadgets.” he had resented that, but had always eyed them up in the shops though he felt the need to mock them on the television. (He had worried once or twice that if she could pick that out, how much more easy would it be to pick out that peculiar timbre in his voice that he could feel inside his throat when he intoned that Irina just wasn’t up to the job with these pedantic e-mails she took so long to send, and that Karen just loved to bitch, that she wore only the latest label goods, revelling in the fact that they were ephemeral, and listened to that Ministry of Sound album or whatever that she got free on her MP3 player.) The chicken was deliciously soft - and didn’t look undercooked through all that Gorgonzola. The anya potatoes were a revelation, the broccoli just so.

He enjoyed the food for a while with not a thought in his head. Bliss. He then realised they weren’t talking. He chewed on.

“I used that little blowtorch on the parma ham,” he said. He always wanted to demonstrate that her present was a good choice, that he was grateful.

“snice,” she said.

He chewed on.

She carried on eating.

He still had to work on presentation. They make a big thing of that.

She hadn’t said a thing about it. Any of it!

And there was something desultory about the way she was holding her fork. And her wrists were limp.

It has always struck him as token of his being genuine that his anger burst up too quickly to think of something pointed to say. She would never get angry like that, whereas he was rarely shitty and incisive with it, something she could be so much of the time. He put down his fork and knife noisily beside his half-full plate.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” He said. She looked up at him in what seemed like mock surprise. “Is it still about this sixty fucking four?”

She looked at him, her brow knotted. He wasn’t sure she had understood: it hadn’t come out too clearly.

“What?” she said eventually, and, he was sure, disingenuously.

“This whole fucking thing.”

He was aware he wasn’t being too specific.

“What thing? There is no thing, I’m eating my dinner.”

“In silence.”

“Well, look, it was you who was storming off to the bloody oven two minutes after you called me with this look on your face. I’ve just had a bath. I’ve had a long day. I’m relaxed. I’m eating. Is that ok?”

He didn’t answer. He picked up his cutlery again.

“It’s nice,” she said. He looked at her. “It is nice,” she said, laughing a little, inscrutably. She took a bite.

“And the bacon is crispier.”

He said nothing and took another bite before shaking a little more salt on his potatoes.

She stood up and walked off. He ate uncomfortably. She didn’t come back. Was she crying? Should he go after her? Wouldn’t that be admitting fault? He wasn’t at fault, was he?

He had a little broccoli on his plate when she came back with a bottle of wine. He always cooked too much. And there was some left over. The cauliflower cheese had been too much. Maybe she picked up on these kinds of things. She had two glasses. She poured them. There was a little piece of cork floating in his. These things annoyed him, but it would be churlish to pick it out.

She carried on eating.

“That Ragi Omar thing’s on tonight,” she said eventually.

“That one you wanted to see,” she added, redundantly. If there was nothing wrong as she was maintaining she would never have said that, he noted. He began a sigh and tried to turn it into a normal breath, losing his natural rhythm of breathing as a result and trying consciously to bring it back down as he finished off his last piece. That and the subject. He knew she wasn’t interested. He felt a reverberant low timpani drum beat of dread. She would perhaps force herself to watch it only to break later in the night into some long held-back complaint. The tension would stretch out the whole evening and continue then into one of those DMCs, deep and meaningful conversations such that Ollie, the mature student at uni he used to look up to with the longest relationship of any of them, used to talk sardonically about as he swung across jungle ropes on his irony dial TV with the rock band stickers transplanted from his ‘pawned’ Les Paul copy, the kind she dragged him into just as he was falling asleep so he had to talk while treading water.

” Yeah,” he said. “I don’t know, though, maybe it’s too depressing.”

Sometimes he talked automatically, he realised, no doubt for the umpteenth time. All these defensive strokes, never just letting fly with what he thought.

“We could watch a film,” he said. He wanted to distract her.

“Yeah,” she said, “if you want.” The reply, and its tone, dismayed him. It was clear she wasn’t that keen, that she was trying to go along with what he wanted. He resented the idea all the more now, and it was clear he wouldn’t enjoy any film they chose, and especially if they decided to go out for one. He had registered for this film club with DVDs being posted to his door. Roped in by all the canny advertising over the urinals at the shopping mall, calculated no doubt to catch all the men in their lowest level of cerebral immune defense. She was never in the mood to see the films he chose. And there was no backing away from it now. Thinking he wanted to watch a film, she would insist, and it would only postpone any potential argument for later.

He really wanted to see that Ragi Omar thing.

“I’ve got one,” she said, finally lying her fork and knife on her plate beside a hillock of cauliflower cheese and the mound of Waitrose’s finest gorgonzola she’s managed to surreptitiously squeeze out of her chicken breast and draining her glass of sharp wine. She walked out taking both plates with her.

Why did he have to suggest it.

He turned the TV on as she got ready. He flicked around the channels, news, a woman of indeterminate attractiveness walking in the Lakes (he remembered walking around campus with Ollie talking about this and that and commenting on the endless girls walking by, picking out those like this and going over their originally improvised routine of asking one another whether she was “unconventionally attractive” and responding that, being “conventionally unattractive,” she was half way there: it seemed funny at the time, but then, everything did), and settling on the One Show, a magazine show with the Baggies fan who used to live down Hagley with a piece about a pig farmer making lard. He resolved, as lazily as he could in the few remaining moments of laziness available to him, to use it more often.

He sipped at his wine and felt a tension rise to his head as he heard her come down the stairs, walk straight round to the kitchen and turn on the kettle. A peculiar thought struck him. He should have bought Ollie’s guitar when he had the chance. He had considered it. He had never thought of that before and it unsettled him.

He heard the spoons go into the mug and heard her as she clicked off the kettle manually, poured the still-bubbling water and opened the freezer for her favourite ice cream. She came in. There was a fist sized corner of ice cream left in the tub she sat on his lap. She put the mug of hot water on the table in front of them and rested her knees on his leg, taking out two hot dessert spoons for them both. Putting her right arm slackly around his neck, she took her spoon in her left and dug the tub into his legs and crotch digging out a good mouthful. She had changed into her newest sexy outfit (she always had one) and

- Remember, you can’t powerdress a resume!

These were Jeff’s last words to me as I left the appartment, slamming the door - no easy job with these damn sliding doors of his with the scarcely recessed handles. I was overreaching myself. A few months with him and I was telling myself I was something I was not. This was the undertone of his screaching delivery that weekend. He had always treated me well. Like a princess. But I had got the feeling preparing for this interview, buying suits and countless shoes, that he liked me to know my place. He was the hotshot. I had charmed my way into his life, but I oughtn’t to get ahead of myself.

   What he said was true. I had exaggerated my past. Not even that. Invented it. I had held down a few pissy jobs. Had learned a little deportment, confidence, even sass when it was needed working tables in silver service restaurants. I had got a little perspective, learned to be tough working nights with a homeless charity. (An uncle, a vietnam vet, had froze on the streets of New York. I had a phase of taking it all on myself.) A couple of years of dealing with prostitutes, addicts followed. I was a mother theresa. And I intend the irony: I wanted them to remain destitute, fucked-up, needy. That’s how I can read Jeff so well. I was in a state when I met him.

   Maybe I’m being hard in myself. Maybe I meant it all. But I needed a change in life. I got one. The first of many. I’ve made quite a habit of it now.

   And so I walked into that place with heels and a skirt a discrete but determined four fingers or so over my knees (before I sat down of course).

   If it weren’t for Jeff I would have been intimidated. The building alone would have that effect on anybody, but over our time together I had become so accustomed, tired, exasperated with architecture that it left me cold. But that’s not what I meant. It was that callenge, and that rebuke as I walked out that morning. That was something I knew, and it was something I had not known for some months. Years it had taken me to steel myself against such put downs, and yet steel myself I always had since that time with a proud anger and an unshakeable equinimity. Had he wished me luck, I never would have got that job.

   You wouldn’t say Krogh was a likeable man, nor that the prospect of working for him was so appealing, but if you were one of the few who could be themselves around him there are far worser fates than to be his PA.

   - How are you feeling?

This he asked once I walked up to him, with the giant airlock opening around me, framing him, and my steps echoing around me. he standing stock still as I approached, taking me in from the ground up (my first impression of a man is often of where he looks, and I took him for a leg man, if not an outright foot fetishist).

   - Rather like a scene in Fall[], with the prospective secretaries lining up to be judged by Hitler.

   He didn’t exactly laugh, and his mouth was pulled if anything fractionally, but then neither did he seem offended. The airlock closed behind me. I had anticipated it, and didn’t give him the satisfaction of a jump, nor even of a tensing of those leg muscles I was sure he appreciated so much.

   He was a fan of pregnant pauses, and inspected me a little more.

   It was a big room. A meeting room. My room was to back on to it, and his beyond that.

   The interview was little but mind games. It was clear he loved power for the sake of power but why should that be a foible worse than any other.

   - You have satisfied my criteria, he said. I have many. Intellectually, temperamentally you seem suited to the work. You may think I have asked few questions pertaining to the work, and that the customary questions were notable by their absence. I would only ask you to trust my methods, as I would ask you to do in a typical day at work, if there ever can be such a thing. Suffice to say I have discovered you to be up to the work. What I would say my dear (and be advised that such endearments will avowedly not become a familiar part of office life), what I would say Kirsten, is that you also fulfil all the criteria, if it is not unseemly to use such a word, of all that is beautiful, appealing, attractive in a woman. Perhaps this unsettles you?

   - It does not.

   - Good, because just as it would be unreasonable, illogical and unfair to choose a PA by virtue of her looks (and I would have you note that I do not find it morally unappealing from the standpoint of fairness to the women concerned as I find it weak and inefficient from the standpoint of business; if the stimulation of beautiful women was such that I worked twice as hard, believe me, you would see little else, just as you would find me with a bloody nose were it so that cocaine trebbled my output, but my dear girl it is more of a distraction) it would also be perverse to deny oneself a beautiful girl for the sake of propriety. I can only trust that your efficiency, which believe me I have gauged justly enough that you might believe in it yourself, should be adequate recompense for the distraction.

* * *

He was wrong. There was a typical day. He had a brain such that it almost seemed remiss God didn’t ship it with a super-quiet cooling fan and to him the minutiae of business life became as variegated as timbre for a composer while the rest of us can barely pick out the most divergent notes. It wasn’t interesting. It wasn’t deadly boring. It was a good job, and good primarily because the money was good.

   But that airlock was something I never got used to. It was installed into the building, ostensibly, because this was one of our more impressive products, these giant safe doors, but also for the impression it made on anybody who came through it whether it be for a meeting or an interview.

- When that door closes Ms Szymanska, most of my negotiation is done for me.

   That airlock alone, and being trapped in there with him as he insisted in shutting the world out, made for a tension that put life into the day. And not only with him.

   The building I worked in was innovative, so my Jeff told me over and over in his usual belief that since I did not react with Y-chromosome-dominant child-like delight at what he was telling me, I hadn’t properly taken it in, because it incorporated both the bulky manufacturing ‘bunker’ with its hermetic air con system, and an office complex. It was more impressive than he knew, since every day, twice, three times or four on looking out from the meeting room through the briefly open air lock you could see the technicians going about their day in their canteen the other side of a setpiece corridor set out like the shark tunnel in a Waterworld. Invariably, the bulk of them were looking in as the door must have seemed to open so seldom (at any one time some tiny fraction of the thousand plus technicians were present), and invariably, when I was looking out, many were looking in at me. I have never felt so desireable, and so powerful as when I worked for Krogh.

   They wanted in, not least because the two sides of the building never met. Not least because I was unattainable by association. Krogh was right, that airlock had a power that affected everyone.

Whatever Krogh’s assessment had been based on that first day, whether it be that denied twitch of a leg or that brazen quip, he felt he had proved himself right. I had been efficient. He offered me a great deal. Tickets to big games, expensive meals. And not accompanied with him but with my own Jeff who in one sense I now had on suffrance, but in another, I had by the balls. One thing he was always reluctant to grant was a tour around the factory.

Early in the Fall of last year I ran an errand in my lunch break, and of course, lunch was by no means customary. I parked up by a chemist a couple of blocks away and got boxed in by some huckster in a jeep. I had to ask some guy walking by with his shopping to get me out. He reversed right up to the curbstone pulled on the handbrake and span the front wheels outwards. That evening I had a flat. Turns out he had nudged the inside of my dustcap so that it pressed against the valve, letting out a steady stream of air.

   One of the technicians came up to me to help. Somehow I had suspected him of sabotaging the car but with his manner I couldn’t hold it against him. One foible is as bad as another, after all - that’s the way my mind works. Besides, why shouldn’t a man resort to subterfuge when the place is so segregated. I had him down as some Lothario Rosa Parkes[], and handsome besides.

   He had the wheel off and we got talking. They worried about me. The last secretary had left in pretty bad circumstances. People talked of rape. He was surprised I hadn’t heard of it. I kept out of such things. Kept my head down, got on with the job at hand. It didn’t interest me. Perhaps that was what Krogh had picked up on.

   As it happens I didn’t believe him. Toni had been in a couple of times, heavily pregnant and pretty contented-looking. She was a looker. Could have been a model but that she wouldn’t have dealt well with the superficiality of it all. She seemed pretty friendly with Krogh. I remember being jealous - only I had that bond with him, that brazen jocularity (I had thought of it as that all along). This was another ruse somehow.

   I slept with him that night. It was passionate. It was involuntary. There was no analysing and second-guessing, no intellectualising and self-scrutiny. Something was driving me.

   It was the next morning I thought it all over. I had driven home after our encounter. Jeff had been working in Denver on some project an inexperienced team were getting into a mess over. Something about glass and expansion. People were losing faith. All the same I wanted the peace of my own bed. But I couldn’t sleep.

   Driving in that morning I made a decision. The moment the airlock closed behind me I stripped to my underwear. Like most days it was black and lacy. Krogh. [], looked on at me for an age. He pressed the button to activate the airlock, which began to open behind me.

- Kindly put on your clothes, Stephanie, he said, you’re fired.

He had never mixed up my name before.

I walked out as steely cold and proud as I had walked in. I’m used to change. I find it invigorating.

   The doors next rolled open at eight o’clock. It was his time lock. He had explained it one time with a reference to Mark Twain, but I hadn’t been listening. The truth was he liked routine and security. That, as much as anything, was what it was all about.

   All the engineers in their canteen, and the white collar staff in the shark tunnel turned to look at the irrepressible Krogh, slumped, a pool of blood around his head, or rather, some said, where his head should have been.

   They told me not to read his obituary. I haven’t yet. And as soon as I am free of the police and can leave this place, I’ll be moving on.