From then on, whenever he doubted himself, or had one of his ‘moments’ in his pool, or felt empty, sad, unknown to himself, he knew all he had to do was go to William Street. And buy a Lamborghini. Over the years he bought five of them. Occasionally he’d drive past a homeless person and relish the clarity of the Roadster’s glass. Sometimes he would hear stories about poverty on the radio, climate change, the imbalance of global labour, and delight at the crispness of the speakers. He would sigh and change the station to his favourite kind of music. The second something lost its sheen, he would buy another one. Newer. With different trim and bigger wheels and more hot throat. Soon, he had too many for his garage. It made him realise how wrong he’d been, asking that question, what do I have? No.
The real question, and one he would ask repeatedly henceforth, more than any other question, was why? Ohmygod.
Why?
Why is my garage so small?
Out to Lunch
At the start of my career, I worked with this guy, Al Grisby. By the time I joined the firm, an accounting one in Pyrmont, with mid-cap clients, some high-net-worths, he’d been on board six months, though you wouldn’t know it, he was that lousy at what he did. He got more things wrong than anyone in the office, by a long way. He worked the Foxton account mostly, a difficult file – shopping centres and multi-storey car parks – so you could make an allowance for that, I guess.
The first thing I noticed about him was his buck teeth and his freckles and how his eyes were close together. He looked at you with his head held back – something to do with his eyesight – and got around with his mouth open; he’d broken his nose as a kid. The guy was tall and gangly and bumped into things. He’d sit on desk edges and tip them up. I don’t think I ever saw him without a stain on his shirt. He had the air of an eccentric, the clumsy bearing of a maths genius misread by the world. Only here was the thing: his maths was shit.
The second thing I noticed was his sense of humour. He didn’t have a quick wit, but he could do impressions. I s’pose he liked me ‘cos I laughed at him when he did them. Also, he could piss and moan about Phelps, our boss, and know I wasn’t gonna blab. He was right there. I wasn’t the kind of guy to rag on a mate, even one as remiss and, let’s face it, stupid as Al. Besides, Phelps laid into Grisby so hard, so consistently, if he couldn’t unload on me every now and then his angst would’ve eaten him whole.
‘Grisby!’ Phelps would yell, without fail, every morning. ‘Why’d you forget to send that response? Milne’s our biggest client.’ Or, ‘Grisby, come on now, you haven’t included a P&L in the statements.’ This was pretty standard. Some days, though, he really cut in.
‘Grisby! Where did you learn to count?’
Phelps bothered him. But what could Grisby do? He had a pass degree from an online uni. His last job had lasted less than a month. He couldn’t spell, from what I’d seen, and to top it all off, he’d gotten his Catholic girlfriend pregnant. They’d only been together six weeks.
‘Don’t tell me I can just pack up and leave.’ We were sitting in the park at lunch. He’d just been grilled again. ‘‘Cos I can’t.’
‘I wasn’t gonna suggest that.’
‘That fuckin’ Phelps,’ he said, gazing across the lawn. ‘Who does he think he is?’
‘He runs a tight ship.’
‘My arse. Ever see him shit on Mayford?’
‘His time will come,’ I said, lying. ‘Besides, you’re on Foxtons. Be proud of that.’
He looked at me. ‘Shit,’ he whispered.
‘What?’ I said.
He jumped up from the bench, stuffed the last of his sandwich into his mouth and made back for the office. Over his shoulder, he said, ‘I fucked Foxtons up, mate.’ He ran off, his shirt hanging out, his hair messy like usual. Not certain, but I believed the white mark on the back of his trousers was bird shit. I looked down at the bench. Yep. Definitely bird shit. ‘Grisby,’ I yelled. But he was already too far away to hear.
He had me over to his place for dinner. The idea was, he’d put on the food and I’d explain the GAAP system he’d been struggling with at work. His girlfriend, Beth, opened the door. She wore a yellow dress with short, frilled sleeves exposing her upper arms. They were mottled and pudgy. I looked down at her belly. She was already showing. What stood out more though was the mess on her dress. Little pieces of mince-meat were stuck to the front.
She stared at me blankly, as if she couldn’t believe what had just happened. ‘I spilled the sauce just now,’ she said. ‘I don’t think we’re going to have any dinner.’ She led me inside to Grisby, then went straight to the bedroom and closed the door.
They lived in a small one-bedder on the ground floor of a tower on the corner of two busy streets. As I sat in the cramped living room, with its depthless piles of washing, dirty mostly, and its cat smells, a constant stream of people passed by outside. Some looked in through the windows. Those who did looked away quickly, recoiling.
‘Honey,’ Grisby said over his shoulder towards the bedroom. ‘Don’t worry about the sauce, okay?’
She said something I couldn’t understand.
Grisby looked at me. ‘She’s embarrassed,’ he said.
‘There’s absolutely no need for that,’ I said and I meant it. Who doesn’t spill stuff on occasion?
‘Not ‘cos you’re here,’ he said, sipping his beer. ‘She’s done it every night this week.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘She’s spilled dinner?’
But Grisby didn’t respond. He just sat there, staring.
A little while later – we’d had a few beers – I tried explaining amortisation. Grisby ogled me through his close-set eyes like I was speaking Chinese. ‘It’s a depreciation measure,’ I told him, ‘to offset tax liabilities and also…Grisby,’ I said, ‘are you listening?’
He stood up and walked towards the galley kitchen, stopping where the carpet and lino joined.
‘That fuckin’ Phelps,’ he said, his hands on his hips. There was a silence. Then he turned around. ‘Remember the time he lost his shit in that meeting?’
I remembered alright. I remembered even better after Grisby took him off, right there in the dankness of the living room. Once he got going, he really fired up. It didn’t take long until I thumped my fists in laughter, as Grisby walked around, mimicking Phelps.
‘Why haven’t you added every number in the phone book and sum totalled for me?’ he said, all nasal. It was incredibly accurate. ‘Grisby. Come in here and count to a hundred.’
He had this way of raising his elbows, sticking them out, his chin held high and his nostrils flared, just like Phelps. As he got going, he broke into caricature, more extreme than the real thing but, somehow, a truer representation of fact.
‘I asked you three times already to work backwards from eighteen billion, four hundred and seventy-nine million, forty-four dollars and twenty-six cents. Come in here and count.’
I couldn’t stop laughing. It was hurting. I waved at him to quit. But he wouldn’t. He kept going until a bit of wee came out and I half ran, half stumbled to the bathroom. When I returned, Beth was standing next to Grisby’s chair in her soiled dress.
‘There, there honey,’ he was saying. ‘It’s fine. We’re getting pizza,’ but like a child, she turned on her heels at the sight of me, ran back to the bedroom and slammed the door. After our pizza, I offered to go through more accounting stuff, but Grisby said no, it was late, Beth was tired and, frankly, so was he.
Alison McCann had come into my life three years before I started at the firm. She too studied accounting, though in our first semester, we’d not crossed paths. She took the spare seat next to mine one afternoon in second term and at once I felt a force pulling. I’d never been literary, but as we sat through the lecture, in which I recorded nothing on my pad, I wished I’d learned Shakespeare, or French, or some old English poetry so I could use it on her. Luckily for me, she broke the silence first. The students peeled away as the lecture closed. She
turned to me; I saw her face front on. Jesus, I thought, and my lips, I was pretty sure, made that word. She said, ‘You wrote nothing down,’ and I said, ‘I was distracted.’
It could’ve gone either way. But she smiled, and then we walked together out across the courtyard, through the long arched tunnel to the street where, without even saying anything, we both sat down at a café. I wasn’t sure then, and I’m still not sure, how I could’ve gotten so lucky. Our relationship developed as if some genius had planned it, from start, to middle, right through to marriage and beyond. We never fought. We still don’t. We look at life logically, which is to say, like algebra. What is calculable, we calculate, while unknowns we leave unknown. We have two daughters, exactly what we wanted, and a house in a tidy suburb, with two large trees and two small ones ranged across the neat backyard. I often think that my having life so good, at work, as with Ali, affected how I felt for Grisby. Guilty, maybe. One man struggled, while I excelled. It seemed unfair, somehow. The world. With its infinite imbalances. Yeah, I guess you could say I felt guilty.
One morning, I arrived at work and noticed him in Phelps’ office. The door was closed. Through the glass I saw him standing beside the desk with his head down. Phelps was sitting with his feet up, talking with his hands.
He stayed in there for ages, copping it for Foxtons, that fuck-up he’d made the week before. The git had forgotten to file returns. When he finally came out, he didn’t look at anyone or say anything. He walked to his desk, rigid, sat down and stared fixedly at his screen. There was a silence. In it I could hear Grisby’s teeth gnashing. Then, with great force, he punched his monitor. Typing ceased. There were sixteen of us on the floor and another eight in the offices, and we all watched Grisby. I got the sense that something bad would happen. That Grisby would pick his screen up and throw it through Phelps’ window, say. But he composed himself. He straightened the things on his desk and picked up his phone.
‘Yeah, it’s Al here. Extension forty-one? There’s been an accident with my screen, Joe. Thanks mate, I’ll see you then.’
I’d met Grisby on day one. Morning one, in fact. As I’ve said, he’d started six months before me. Angela from HR had led me through induction, then introduced us.
‘Al,’ she said, ‘meet Dave. You’ll buddy him, as we discussed, and answer any questions he has as he settles in. Be good now, you two,’ she said, and gave us a wink.
Before I’d even logged in to my computer, which I was supposed to do immediately so all the files could load, he took me for a coffee. It was 10:30. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘The files aren’t leaving.’
We sat in a café a block from the office, surrounded by men and women in suits, having meetings, drinking coffee. They seemed important, seated at their tables, pointing at sheets of paper in earnest. Looking across at Grisby, with all that business going on around, I could tell right then he wasn’t cut out for it. His face didn’t have the focus in it. His eyes. His buck teeth. He looked at his coffee cup. Up at me. Back again.
‘Wanna know what I think about accounting?’ he asked.
‘What?’ I said, uneasy suddenly.
He grinned. He frowned. Then he picked up a fork and brought it back and forth towards his eye. He did this for longer than he needed to for the joke; I watched him mock-stabbing that eyeball, with that fork, for what felt like ages.
‘We should be getting back,’ I said, after we’d finished our drinks.
‘What?’ he said. ‘On your first day? We’re staying put mate.’
I succumbed to another coffee and then, at 11:30, I got up and left. Grisby stayed where he was tensely gazing at the table. As far as I knew, he didn’t return to work.
For the rest of the day.
It happened the week after his kid was born. In hindsight, it was a cruel thing my bosses did. But at the time, I could only watch on, kind of rapt, as you are when a natural disaster happens somewhere in the world. Phelps and Mosely, the other partner, took Grisby for lunch.
‘I don’t know what that was about,’ he said after they’d returned; he’d sat back down at his desk.
‘What happened?’ I asked, assuming he’d been fired.
‘They’re promoting me.’
‘Huh?’
‘Making me manager.’
‘That’s great,’ I said, confused as hell, ‘Well done, Al.’
‘They’re not giving me a raise, though.’
‘Oh?’
‘They said I’ll get a raise when I’m ready, they said they knew I had a kid and would need a raise as quick as possible, but it would come when I’d proved myself. Mosely had this dumb grin on his face when Phelps was saying all this. Like it was a joke.’
‘You know what they’re like,’ I said, without really understanding what I meant.
‘Yep,’ he said, ‘I sure do,’ though I knew he didn’t understand either.
The next few months were hard to watch. Grisby got stacked with three times his usual load, which, everyone knew, was already heavy enough. They were doing it to break him, this much was clear.
I had to commend him. He had a crack. He got in before me every day and left at midnight, well after everyone else. His skin turned a fishy grey colour and he started smelling bad. Like stale meat, or something. The hardest thing though was that Anna, his three-month old, had been born anaemic. Not life threatening, but it meant she needed special treatment, a course of pricey drugs. And guess what? Grisby wasn’t insured.
‘Grisby!’ Phelps yelled one morning, not long after his promotion. ‘Why didn’t you do the Sanders books? You were supposed to stay back and do them.’
‘I was here till three,’ he said. ‘I got halfway through and went home. I got back in at seven.’
‘Give me your pass,’ Phelps said and he snatched it off Grisby. ‘You’re not leaving until they’re done.’
The next morning I could tell he hadn’t been home. I couldn’t figure out where he’d slept. The couch in reception, maybe, although it didn’t look slept in. Then I realised. He hadn’t slept.
‘You alright?’ I asked, getting back from lunch – Grisby hadn’t taken his. ‘You look like death.’
He was typing into a spreadsheet so large and dense with figures, it stretched across both his screens. I caught a glimpse of one of the columns and saw he’d made an error. When he went to the toilet a bit later, I took a better look. The whole thing was wrong. The wrong formulas. The wrong entries. If Phelps saw this, Grisby would be finished.
‘Your Sanders spreadsheet’s a shocker,’ I wrote to him over messenger. ‘Want me to do it for you?’
He wrote back immediately. ‘Fuck felps fuck felps fuck felps.’
‘You need sleep,’ I wrote. ‘This is criminal.’
‘What’s sleep?’ he wrote. ‘Dave? Tell me what it’s like.’
Around that time, Ali became pregnant herself. I arrived home from work one night to find her standing at the front door, waiting for me. I knew, from her wide smile, and the way she put her hands on my face, she had something big to tell me. I can still remember the red bandana she had on, her long dark hair bundled up inside it, layers of curled chocolate. I thought, as soon as she’d told me the news, if our child was as lovely as her, one tenth as lovely, life would be pricelessly sweet.
We spent the next few nights delirious with excitement. We talked names, we got out the baby photos our mothers had sent us, tried to picture what ours would look like. We both knew, without saying as much, we’d arrived in a moment of grace, which would last, unbeknownst to us, and last.
Phelps and Mosely came to work one morning together, wearing golf clothes and acting drunk. They stood on someone’s desk, both of them, and announced they’d sold the firm to a competitor. At forty-two and fifty respectively, a golden parachute into retirement. No one had seen it coming, though now it had happened it was clear it’d been their plan from the start. I’d never seen a pair of accountants smile so much.
Abrahams w
as the firm that bought us. It had twelve partners and fifty accountants and planned to take on everyone following what it called a ‘get to know you’ interview. Mine lasted fifteen minutes. And revolved around rugby union. A sport I knew a lot about.
A week later, they sent out letters offering the same positions, with a five per cent raise and a bonus scheme for the best performers. All of us got one except Grisby.
‘We regret to inform you, due to concerns about performance…’
Grisby read the letter to me in the car park. His voice flatter than I’d ever heard it.
‘You know what’s fucked, Dave?’ he said, holding his box of belongings.
‘That Phelps’s now a millionaire?’
He pursed his lips hard. ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Mate. Nah. That Beth’s pregnant again.’
I looked at him. I had no idea what to say. He stared back at me. It was as if he wanted me to offer him something. Though what could I offer? God knew how he’d pay his rent, for his baby, where and how he’d get a job and whether they’d be out of their flat within the month. Maybe I should’ve told him he had our couch, and Beth and Anna could too, whenever he needed it. But I didn’t. He looked at his feet. He said, ‘Dave,’ he said, ‘Can I ask you a favour?’ I looked away.
The silence between us beat at my ears like water.
I shook his hand a moment later and watched him walk off to his car. His box a sad, brown receptacle for a career that should never have been.
Our first child was born on a clear night. I remember seeing the stars through the hospital window and thinking, of all the worlds in all the different universes, mine was the greatest. I sat on the bed with Ali, our small hot loaf nestled between us. They told us she was healthy. They needn’t have bothered. This was clear from the bright pink glow of her face, and her eyes, which, even then, gulped for knowledge. Next day, we were back at home. A family unit. The dream ongoing. I didn’t think of Grisby at all. That is, until Abrahams began to effect its reign.
No Neat Endings Page 2