by John Eider
Above the lettering on the building’s wall were the first-floor strip windows of the architects’ office itself. Through these the visitors could see the looming corners of four-metre-square drawing boards. The ground floor was a floor-to-ceiling glass foyer. Through those windows they saw large-scale card and plastic models of the firm’s current projects displayed for visitors and passers-by. Finn moved closer to the glass to see these in more detail,
‘This one’s a train station, I reckon.’
‘No, it’s a shop. See the displays?’ spotted Sylvie.
‘Look at the little cars in the street outside,’ he noted with awe at their craft.
‘I think this one’s a church,’ she guessed.
‘Don’t be daft, they don’t make new churches any more,’ he muttered with distain.
‘No, it really is one,’ confirmed Bel with a confidence that hinted at secret knowledge, and so which beguiled her returned friend.
Finn knew why Bel had brought them here. As Sixth Form students, working on a Business Studies project, he and Belinda had played a silly game. Asked to come up with a mock-business plan, they had then spent more time coming up with their new firm’s name and logo, than in consideration of what their business would trade in. Finn had been quite proud to come up with title Oration Corp, whose principle Bel then took to form her Imie Ltd. They had settled though, in the inexplicable humour of youth and to the mystification of their tutor, on the trading name Associated Something.
The details of the business plan Finn could not now recall. However, he remembered how as a young worker in town, during those months of turmoil that would soon see his self-imposed exile from the only city he knew, he would walk past the building they were now stood in front of. And every time he saw the sign he would recall their made up name.
‘You remember?’ asked Bel.
‘Of course.’ He smiled.
Bel amazed them then by producing the keys with which she unlocked the foyer’s front door, and invited them all in. Jack then let himself behind the receptionist’s desk, to open a panel there and type numbers into a flashing alarm console.
‘He has to do it – I can never remember the combination,’ laughed Belinda. ‘Come on then.’
She led them through another security-locked door and up the stairs. At the first-floor landing they met a man in a blue polo shirt bearing the same name and logo as written on the minivan, SUPERCLEAN CHAMPIONS.
‘All done?’ Belinda asked the man.
He nodded sagely and silently.
‘Right, gather them up then, and go to the van.’
‘Yes, Miss.’
His accent was African. Nor had he been in Britain long, Finn guessed. Without the man having to do very much gathering, from the door onto the landing trickled a steady stream of others in blue polo shirts, carrying polish, chamois and rolls of binbags. One woman, so fair that her hair and skin seemed almost translucent, paused to roll two mop-and-bucket appliances into a cupboard on the landing, and lock it closed.
‘And they’re all still wearing the old shirts,’ noted Belinda to her underling. ‘Why aren’t they wearing the black shirts?’
‘They don’t like the new colour,’ answered the African man. ‘They like the brighter colour.’
‘But the bright ones show up too much dirt. I told you, we can’t have you walking around covered in dirt.’
‘The dirt is always there, Miss,’ he offered philosophically.
Though this didn’t confound Belinda for long,
‘Right then, chop chop. All off to Brown’s,’ she instructed. The workers and their kind-of supervisor left with Jack, to be carried away in the vehicle Finn and Sylvie had just been brought there in.
Chapter 26 – At the Architects’ Office
Finn watched the workers file out. When he recalled this moment in the future, he would remember them as seeming downcast, oppressed. Yet he could never be sure how accurate that image had been, and how much of it was his impression imposing on the memory. He watched the scene feeling like a Government inspector visiting a colony in the days of Empire. It left him feeling dirty, and he wondered how the British – and other nationalities – back then had felt the right to walk into someone else’s country and expect the locals to start fetching their drinks?
Belinda held the door to the architects’ office open, and Sylvie and Finn walked through onto the open-plan floor. Still fully-lit, Finn felt exposed before the wall of windows. At night, and with the lights in the buildings beside them snuffed out, the plates of glass seemed like obsidian reliefs or flawless black marble.
‘What a life for the cleaners though,’ thought Sylvie as she moved through the spotless office – for they’d done a fine job regardless. Entering the palaces of finance and power and art, but only when the real occupants weren’t there to see them. The superclean champions were not allowed to be there in their own right, but only to clean up after those who were. ‘What a life,’ she repeated to herself, drifting apart from the others to look at what was on the drawing boards.
Amid the boards was a break-out area: two sofas by a whiteboard, at which Bel bid Finn to sit by her.
‘Superclean Champions,’ he muttered. ‘So that’s what you do?’
‘Well, not personally!’ she laughed. ‘I’m not Mrs Mop.’
‘But it’s your business?’
‘It’s a franchise; we own this city’s branch.’
So odd was all of this that Finn could not quite settle.
‘Relax, Finn,’ Belinda told him, noticing this. ‘The floor is ours for the evening. Jack will be back once he’s dropped them off at Brown’s.’
Brown’s was a department store, Finn remembered. Nowadays it was part of a national chain. However, in name only it was one of Sommerhill’s oldest businesses. For Belinda to have that contract must’ve meant that things were going well.
‘Where do you find them?’
‘Who? The workers? The Jobcentre mostly, word-of-mouth or ads in the paper.’
‘Where are they from?’
‘Kenya, Somalia, Romania. Anywhere really where they don’t speak very good English or have qualifications they can use here.’
‘And that African man. Is he their supervisor?’
‘If you want to call him that. He’s kind of group leader. Lord knows what he did back home, he was probably a witch doctor. He gives me the creeps.’
‘You say group leader. So how many groups?’
‘Three as it stands.’
‘All somewhere in the city?’
‘Even as we speak. We also have another assistant; he does most of the driving between sites. Jack and I try to give ourselves as little to do in the evenings as possible now.’
‘And it doesn’t all feel a little..?’
‘What?’
The fact that Belinda had not a clue of what he was referring to was all the proof Finn needed that the girl who’d been his best friend, who had shared his mind, who had known what he was thinking even before he thought it, and vice versa, was that girl no longer. Indeed, she had become her own boss, as they had both often dreamed of being. Only this was in a rather different line of business to that which they’d imagined.
He heard his own thoughts – ‘the girl who’d shared his mind’ – how teenage it all felt. Yet Finn had learnt that this was what could happen when you met people (or perhaps even read a book or heard a song) not encountered for decades.
Finn looked at the room around him – he wasn’t sure if he was more alienated by the cold clinical office they were sat in, or by the strange human display he had just witnessed. At this point he was prepared to drop it, smile along until his freedom came. He could feel sad about Belinda later. But she had clocked on by then, and answered,
‘Exploitative? Is that what I should feel?’
‘Well, I only mean.’
‘Is it perfect? No. Do I feel great about it? Is it what I dreamt I’d be doing? Does it match the record stores a
nd fashion houses we dreamt of? Never in a million years. But it’s real, Finn. And life is tough, and we’re lucky to have this.’
‘But the workers…’
‘What about them? No thanks that we’re helping immigrants who’ve just arrived here? That we’re giving them the only jobs they’re qualified to do? Did they look mistreated? Did they look unhappy?’
‘Well, they were hardly leaping for joy, were they?’
‘Well, neither have you been this evening. You think I’ve changed, Finn? Have you seen yourself lately?’
Chapter 27 – Air-Holes for Orcas
Since arriving, Sylvie had been drifting around the architects’ floor: looking at the city from the windows, and at the miniature versions of those buildings on the architects’ desks. Yet, from across the silent office she had been unable to avoid overhearing the others’ conversation. She didn’t like to eavesdrop – it made her feel a snoop. Yet she had nowhere to go to avoid their carried voices. Nor could she join them, as they obviously needed to talk.
Now, from the far end of the office, Sylvie’s hearing caught Belinda asking Finn that last question. On that point the women would agree – Finn hadn’t been himself. But what did Sylvie make of those other half-heard snatches of conversation? Such as the young hopes of Bel and Finn’s shared past? A past that pre-dated hers and Finn’s. And what of those ambitions she’d never heard him talk of: his dreams of record stores?
The pair on the sofas though were scrapping. Finn launched in with,
‘Don’t you moralise me to make your own choices feel acceptable.’
Belinda countered, ‘You criticise my business; but did you ever try it? Have you a clue of how tough it’s been for us? And you thought that running a shop would be easy!’
‘I just can’t help feeling a little…’
‘Disappointed?’
‘Yes.’
‘How dare you. How could you?’ she accused.
‘What?’ he answered. ‘Be disappointed to come back and find you running a chain gang? Why don’t you take them out onto the State Highway, Bel, and have them dig you a few miles of service trench?’
She let out an exasperated gasp that seemed to shake her entire body, then said,
‘I’d forgotten just what a piece of work you can be.’
‘What?’
‘Finn, you are the single most cynical, judgemental, fault-finding, vain, unaware…’
‘Don’t hold back there, Bel.’
She paused again, before asking, ‘Did it ever occur to you, when you went away, that some of us might have thought that it was you who were the one going on to better things?’
It hadn’t occurred to him.
‘Finn, it was you who broke the shackles and got to live the dream. The example to us all, who we could pin our hopes on and could say, “Well, we’re stuck here by chance and circumstance, but not Finn. He left it all behind, he flew the nest, he went off chasing the sun. I wonder what he got to do?”’
She concluded, ‘And yet, of all the things in the world you could have done, you left us to become an insurance salesman? And now you’re putting families out on the street to boot!’
He squirmed, ‘You know I can’t do that job. That’s why I’m in the mess I’m in.’
‘But still.’
‘You feel let down,’ he summarised.
‘And haven’t I the right to be? At least to feel as disappointed in you as you are in me?’
At this Belinda cried. Sylvie, who hadn’t even wanted to be listening, knew she had to risk going over and interrupting. But before she’d gotten very far, Bel had composed herself, leaving Sylvie at safe distance.
Finn hadn’t realised his absence had built up a mythology. Without him there to offer the reality, others could imagine him living the life they’d only dreamt of.
Yet what cruel twist had come to pass, that on his return he came only to represent the suggestion that there was no mythical escape, that all roads led back to the same place, just under a different postcode? This was not what others had hoped to learn from Finn on his return from El Dorado. Yet it was this that he symbolised. It felt to him now, that had he merely stayed in Sommerhill and plugged away in dull jobs, then he couldn’t possibly have done so much harm.
Bel spoke again to Finn, quieter now,
‘Do you know how hard I work? How much this cleaning business takes of me? And how little of what I make from it is left for me at the end?’
He answered, ‘But you live at home. How much can that be costing you?’
She let out a slow, tired breath, before answering,
‘Finn, I own that house now. The mortgage is mine; sold to me three years ago by someone just like you. Someone who can’t wait to nab the lot back off me the moment I slip up with the repayments.’
Finn took that slight on the chin. Though he found the next one harder,
‘An insurance salesman…’
I’m not in sales, he wanted to say. But it would have been a moot point.
‘An insurance salesman. To think that’s all you are, Finn. You’d have done better staying away and not telling me. Why did you leave just for that? And jobs in banks?’
Bel was clearly on a roll. Finn accepted it, knowing she needed it saying. His role in the discussion for those few minutes was purely to accept.
She continued, ‘I saw the way you looked down at my things, my ornaments. You thought them passé, what any middle-aged woman would have in her house. That’s how you see me, isn’t it? Just a fat old housewife.’
‘A lot of men dream of a fat housewife.’
‘Stop trying to be funny, Finn. It never suited you.’
‘I only meant to…’
Stop talking, Finn.’
‘Why.’
She caught her breath, ‘Because… every time I hear you speak, I think of the words that used to spill out of you. And it makes me sad to think you did nothing with them.’
Chapter 28 – Countering with Joy
Finn paused, but couldn’t help himself, saying to Bel,
‘Then you won’t want to hear that I loved your room, and that it brought a smile to my face. And you won’t want to hear what I think of you now?’
‘Which is?’
‘That you’re more beautiful than ever, that you’re the woman I knew the girl would become.’
He paused, suddenly embarrassed. She answered,
‘You’re right; I didn’t want to hear it. But thanks.’
‘You know I could never help praising you.’
‘And my curse that I could never accept it.’
Once absolutely sure that their old understanding was still in place, she placed her hand on his, saying,
‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to shout. And you are kind; and you’re not yourself. When did you last feel joy, Finn?’
‘This morning, actually.’ He surprised himself to realise this, remembering running out of the conference.
‘And the time before that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Jack’s had depression; he was in treatment for years.’
‘I know.’
‘I know you know. Because we told you how bad he was, and you never came. It was the last letter I sent you. I suppose you’re on online or whatever now. I’ve meant to look for you, but it’s difficult when you think you’ve been…’
‘…rejected?’
‘…left behind. You think the other person’s moved on, that they wouldn’t want the past dragging around their ankles.’
‘It was good we had the distance.’
‘It was. But look at us now, neither of us happy with the way that the other has turned out – how amazing that we had such high hopes for each other.’
‘Till life caught us.’
‘Like a tar pit. Is this all we’ll ever be, Finn?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Then what was the point of all our dreams? Just to be burnt off like dew in the morning sun?
’
The sitting area in the office was less cosy than Belinda’s own room. It had black leather sofas, and a coffee table of metal and smoked glass. Yet upon that table, among others, was another copy of that same nature magazine. Cover price eight pounds. This though was a different issue with a different animal. Instead of zebras, it offered a deep-gloss photo of a bright blue sky over Arctic plains. The nose of a killer whale was protruding from a crude opening in the ice. It looked to Finn like it was smiling. Did Orcas smile?
‘Air-Holes for the Ice-Bound,’ read Bel.
‘It’s broken my daydream,’ muttered Finn.
‘I bet its smiling because it’s just eaten a sea-lion, or some other poor creature. You always loved predatory animals, Finn, I remember now. You found them exciting. You weren’t worried if they killed something cute and furry.’
‘Well, animals aren’t humans.’
‘But still, for someone who claimed to love the little guy… You’re not a sea-lion, Finn. You’re an Orca – you’d eat a bear cub for breakfast. You may still be one, inside. You never admitted your ambition to yourself; that was your problem. You placed it all on me, wanted me to change your world for you. You saw me as this goddess.’
‘You were.’
‘It was all too much pressure – I could never have lived up to it.’
‘And there was I thinking you were holding out for something better.’
She drew a deep intake of breath. He went on,
‘You had your own dreams too, Bel, with yourself cast as queen. You just didn’t see me as your king.’
‘That’s harsh, Finn. That’s harsh. And doubly so as you see me now. For he hardly came along, did he, my king? I’m hardly in Camelot.’
She caught herself. ‘No, that’s not fair though. I do love Jack, in his way.’ She said this effortlessly breaking her secret, which was a relief to her.
‘Just not in a grand-passion way?’ asked Finn.
‘No, not the way I dreamt I’d love. But then perhaps we love differently when we’re older?’
‘Lesser?’
‘No, deeper, less like excitement.’
‘And more like..?’