by Jonathan Lee
In the end both Jess and I were here till three in the morning, hence the tired eyes today. I’ll need to stay late again tonight. I always stay late, Doctor Odd, and what you need to appreciate is that a day in office life is too varied and rich to waste working. Productivity is for the night.
What does my wife think of what? The antisocial hours?
She works here too, don’t forget. And anyway she’s not around at the moment. Stomped off to her parents’ house at the end of last week, and she’s been stubbornly silent ever since. Sometimes she likes to have, and I’m quoting her here, space to think. I’m pretty sure some minor mix-up with her cousin Isabel is to blame. Isabel is in advertising. She exaggerates for a living. Just as a new brand of tampon is transfigured into a lifestyle choice for active mothers, so a friendly pat of encouragement or support from an interested in-law becomes, to the advertising executive, a serious attempt at intercourse. And I suppose Christine, through my voicemails, now knows about Joy’s condition. Another reason she might want space to think.
Time to try a different line of communication. Just before catching the lift up here I took a reassuring glance in the gents’ mirror, tightened my double Windsor, and phoned Mother.
Peter? she said. Peter, it’s your mother.
There was no point in explaining to Mum that I called her, no point at all.
Now, Peter, she said, I’m sorry to bother you, God knows you’ve got your own troubles.
I told her patiently that I don’t have any troubles, and then we got into this time-draining exchange about light bulbs, with her saying she has to change one for the first time since Dad took to bed, that these days he barely knows if he’s alive or dead, but that he might nonetheless appreciate a visit and a bulb-change, and me asking if she needed bayonet or screw cap, and her saying she wasn’t fussy either way. Mother’s technique is to hold up a problem, ask for help, and then show complete disinterest in the solution.
I told her I’d try to drop round next weekend and then I cut quickly to the meat of the conversation, namely whether dear old Mum could give me the phone number for Christine’s parents. My mother and my wife’s mother are quite friendly, you see, liking nothing more than to exchange monologues re primetime soap series and my perfectly good marriage.
Mother ended the conversation by saying she’d try to find the torch and, following that, the address book. She hung up. I was left listening to the dial tone, the sort of sound that’s simple but – within that simplicity – complex. Do you know what I’m getting at? Formless yet intricate, not unlike a nightmare. The sort of experience I have every time I bump into Dennis.
Indicating? He’s a deeply hostile and unpredictable presence, that’s what I’m indicating. Has some irrational grudge against me.
No, no reasons spring to mind. Although…Well, in the spirit of full and frank disclosure, I have slept with his wife. As in, we had a bit of history before he turned up. But even if he knew about that bygone business, which he doesn’t, would it be an excuse to treat me so aggressively? Everyone sleeps with everyone sooner or later. Has he not heard the one about monkeys, typewriters and his beloved Hamlet?
Me. Joy. My fine wife Christine. We all started as trainees together. It was…2001, must have been. It was a great time. The time, perhaps, when I was happiest. Fifty of us sharp young things, picked from the country’s best universities to work at Hanger, Slyde & Stein. Quite a few of our crop did non-law degrees. I was History. Joy was PPE. Christine, I’m embarrassed to say, was Geography. And the thing we had in common was that, approaching our finals, each of us suffered one of those Oh Fuck moments where you panic about your place in the world. So you go to the Careers Office and the big-pored buffoon behind the desk, who’s never managed to find a career for himself, confirms what you’ve always suspected. For the middle classes, there are only six available professions: investment banking, accountancy, civil service, journalism, teaching and law. If you like money but can’t do maths, that leaves law. We were fifty twenty-somethings who liked money but couldn’t do maths, so we did law. If it didn’t work out, so what? For me, getting a job here meant something, announced something. It said: Peter Carlisle hasn’t spent a decade working his arse off in piss-poor Swindon state schools for nothing.
On the first day of the induction period, after the slapstick mimes of cheek-kissing, vice-like handshakes and insistent eye contact – the sort of public-school pantomime the rest of them had rehearsed in the womb – a hard core of around ten of us decamped to the pub. And we pretty much stayed in that pub for the next two years of our training contracts. For hundreds of hours at a time we were elsewhere, of course – proofreading into the early hours, making ourselves sick on too-strong coffee, becoming acquainted with palpitations and panic attacks. But, as the working days became increasingly open-ended and our non-law friends fell away, the Wig and Pen was the barracks to which we returned, waiting, tense and wild, BlackBerries at the ready, for our next call to war.
I started sleeping with Christine straight away. There were several other interesting girls in our intake, but none with whom I could speak so easily about the onset of Dad’s dementia, or my plans for world domination. At expensive team-building dinners laid on by the firm we found our lives overlapped. There was the relative pauperdom of our backgrounds (for all we knew back then, broth, jus and foam were the new Stock, Aitken and Waterman); there was Oliver Stone’s Wall Street being our favourite film. It didn’t matter when it transpired that Christine considered the whole movie to be a critique of eighties capitalist culture – we were married by then – the point was it spoke to both of us. Our personalities kept chiming in these small ways. And because Joy was sexily aloof, it took longer for me to chime with her.
She was chatty on the first day of the induction, but some time thereafter must have read a dangerous little book about the rules for bedding men and decided, I suppose, to play hard-to-get. She didn’t become part of the hard-core Wig and Pen club, and even when she did join us for Wednesday drinks, or Thursday drinks, or Friday drinks, she was attentive only to Christine or her other closeish girlfriends. On the very few occasions she submitted to being chatted up by David or Harry at the bar she seemed always to be standing like some exquisite flamingo, one foot slipped out of its expensive shoe, painted toes touching polished wood panels, a look of disinterested beauty about her. She was unthinkingly elegant. That’s one of the reasons why, a few years later, when her nephew went missing, I could tell it had a profound effect on her. She was still elegant, but the elegance was so effortful all of a sudden, as if some part of her character had fallen out of place. At that time Joy started, increasingly, to resemble her sister, a woman I’d met once or twice and now saw on television, jumpy but tearless, jolting out words: Instinct tells us our son is alive; If you know anything please come forward; He’ll be back for his birthday, we know he will. A policeman usually sat next to her, holding up an identikit picture of a suspect. The face looked like everyone and no one: chin of a TV presenter; hair every middle-aged man has; lips you’ve seen somewhere, on someone, probably.
A year into our training contracts, before all that mess with her nephew, just as we were realising that our chosen jobs represented a unique combination of mundanity and stress, a group of us went on holiday to Morocco. Who else were we going to go on holiday with? I was, by now, officially seeing Christine. Harry was dating Jennie. Mark was trying to get into Rachel’s knickers. Joy only joined the attendee list at the last minute; David, stuck on some nightmare transaction, had to cancel.
Essaouira was hot, empty and windy. The men in robes had frightening eyes. On the beach, sand blew into our ears; on the toilet, seafood blew out of our stomachs. There was something fraught and lonely about the whole expedition. The cocktail lounge in the hotel served no alcohol and in the early evenings, as doors in stone corridors slammed, us men sipped pathetic faux mojitos as we waited for the girls to ge
t ready. Harry and Mark talked about skiing and shooting, two things I know nothing about. You have to be bourgeois from the beginning to get the full benefits. One by one the girls turned up. For some reason my memory has dressed Christine in a ridiculous lime-green fleece. She asked impatiently, Where’s Joy? And in response I offered to go and chase her up.
When Joy opened the door to her room I saw she was still wearing the pearly bikini she’d lounged in by the pool.
What do you think? she said.
It took me a second to realise she was gesturing at the outfits laid out on the bed.
Difficult to say, I replied. Give the locals a treat and go out as you are?
They stare enough as it is.
They’re probably in love.
They think I’m a white whore, Joy said, and I mumbled some word like Gorgeous, and we got into this flirty battle about whether whores are ever gorgeous. Accused me of being drunk, I think, and I told her Chance would be a fine fucking thing, and she, what was it…?
You’re a lecherous drunk, Peter. That’s what she said, and I moved a little closer, seeing her adjust one of the see-through straps on her bikini top.
Stop it, she said.
You’re gorgeous, I said.
I’m not.
You are.
This is silly.
And then I kissed her, I kissed her with a sincerity I’d never felt in myself before, moving my hand down her back very slowly, nibbling her neck, glimpsing the shaped skin underneath her briefs, so white it almost glowed. A silly, highly charged sort of kiss.
But Dennis, he won’t know about Morocco, and the point is…What’s that alarm beep? Is that yours?
Ah, Doctor Odd, time flies in your company like a hijacked plane! Too fast, too easily. I’m starting to feel a cold kind of thrill in these sessions of ours. Fun, aren’t they? Fun fun fun.
11 a.m.
‘DOES OLD Dennis still sniff things? Before he puts them in the trolley?’
When Joy gives no response Peter grins, a hard shine to his teeth like the building itself. ‘It was the sniffing of nonperishable items I could never understand.’
‘I’m sure you weren’t this much of a cretin, back then.’
‘When I first fucked you, you mean? In that skimpy bikini of yours?’
‘I’m surprised you can remember a moment so fleeting, Peter.’
She looks at him across the circular table in her office, then goes back to focusing on the Handicom Full Duplex Conference Table Starfish Speakerphone (metallic grey) which lies splattered at its centre. She is so lost in the perforations she misses the next thing he says.
‘You heard me. Is this one of your little games?’
‘It’s a handover meeting,’ Joy explains, twirling a pen to keep calm. ‘If I went on holiday without handing things over to someone the whole case would collapse. I didn’t know Brian was going to pick you.’
‘What was yesterday afternoon about?’ he says. ‘All that stuff about how it’s time to be honest with yourself. Your crazy response when I mentioned the promotion announcement. Never seen you so agitated during office hours. I was just trying to talk to you.’
‘Best not.’
‘What?’
‘Best not talk to me.’
‘What are you up to?’ he says.
‘How’s your new trainee?’ she says.
‘Whatever you’re planning, scrap it. Think of the pain you’d cause…others.’
She half turns in her chair, takes a breath, counts to five, surveys her yucca’s more spirited leaves, her desk, her shelves of velo-bound documents, hoping to lull her heart’s skittish beat. But when she turns back he is staring at his own outstretched palm with the same expression he wore yesterday by the Coke machine, a look of such pitiful studied sorrow that she can’t resist breaking his spell.
‘Don’t talk to me about hurting others,’ she says.
‘And why shouldn’t I?’
‘Because you’ve always been a selfish, uncivilised little sex pest, that’s why.’
His hand slaps wood with surprising violence. The table shakes. The Starfish shudders.
Some things you can’t take back, there’s no returns policy for them, but all the same she’s been jolted into thinking of retracting ‘uncivilised’ when a shadow floods her thoughts and her red-soled high heels. It is Mental Brian, their walrus-cheeked Head of Work Allocation.
‘Campers,’ he says.
‘Brian,’ they say.
‘Sorry to keep you. Trying to plan a skiing holiday. This Make Law Fun Day is no fun at all, gets one hungry for a break.’
‘Good cause though,’ Joy says. ‘Getting kids into…legal stuff.’
‘Precisely,’ Mental Brian says, pulling up a chair.
Precisely? It wasn’t even precisely to her, and she’s the one who said it. She looks at the oily skin of his forehead, creeping crownwards like rising damp. There are more wrinkles than hairs, at least one rivet for each ski season in his life, unevenly spread, full of bloated blackheads. Hard to resist leaning over to give that big one above his eyebrow a squeeze, but feeling the strain of restraint in her neck Joy sinks her gaze down to some bullet points she’s prepared. As she does this Peter and Brian exchange a few further words about the Make Law Fun Day, a misleadingly named afternoon of City-related lectures presented to state-school students, and their discussion seems to conclude with Brian saying, ‘Terrific you purchased the lizard.’
Joy says, ‘Purchased the what?’ but the two men ignore her. However high you climb as a female lawyer in a City firm, there’s still this residual sense you’re on work experience, precluded from appreciating the full picture. This feeling is particularly prevalent when Brian is in the room; his brain seems to run on its own exotic logic, and conversations with him tend to snag in one place rather than evolve. Irritating though this is, part of her enjoys exercising the inventive vigilance required to unstick a subject, or to head it off several sentences in advance.
‘Your articled clerk,’ Brian tells Peter as an apparent afterthought. ‘Jessica, is it? Rather charming I must say. Must say.’
‘Anyway, Brian, Peter, very kind of you both to spare ten minutes of your time, and I just wanted to fill you in on Project Poultry really.’
‘Project Poultry,’ says Brian, somehow confused.
‘In advance of my holiday. I understand you’ve lined up Peter to help.’
‘Help.’
‘To cover me. That’s why we’re here, after all.’
‘Here. After all. Yes! Poultry. Thinking about the slopes. Peter here has kindly offered to keep things ticking while you’re away.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ Joy says. ‘Thank you, Peter.’
‘Over. Ticking over.’
‘Yes. That’s great.’
‘Tickity-tickety-boo.’
‘Lovely. Thanks, Brian. Thanks, Peter.’
‘Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.’
Peter and Joy exchange the sort of look that used to be frequent between them, a flickering sense of being appalled and amused by others, greedy to be alone, but, scared of dwelling too long on their shared past, on the refuge she once had from her unhappiness, Joy cuts the glance short and redirects her attention to the detail of the case. She alone speaks, keeps speaking as Mental Brian, distracted perhaps by some black run in his brain, retains the glazed look of a shop-window dummy, keeps speaking even when she loses Peter to his own reflection, talks and talks and bores herself, searches out her former lover’s eyes in the only window her office possesses, sealed shut to stop jumpers, chemically treated to dim the daylight. Layered behind his reflected features are squat chimneys, antennae skeletons, crystal towers, metal entrails, the whole robotic Square Mile shivering under a January sun. She wonders whether Peter sees these things too, whethe
r he sees anything other than himself.
‘Anyway,’ Joy concludes, ‘one thing to look out for in terms of managing the client is that they really hate any suggestion that their factory farming and nugget-making practices are cruel. Hate it. As far as they’re concerned, they are putting food on people’s plates. They are giving them fuel. That’s the thing the CEO keeps saying: There’s not enough fuel around, we’re mid-recession, no one can afford to worry about these birds. The publicity hurts though. Disclosure is six months away and we’ll have to see what our doc review turns up, build a settlement strategy that will keep the campaigners quiet.’
‘Been meaning to ask you,’ Brian says, producing an unrelated sheet of paper from his jacket pocket, ‘if you wouldn’t mind looking at this. It’s a one-para pitch to you-know-who for any CDO-type work they might have. Kind of area that’s in your, dum de dah, partnership plan.’
Joy picks up her pen and scans the twelve lines of text. ‘Extensive amount of experience sounds arrogant,’ she says quickly, ‘and it’s not – don’t laugh – that kind of bank. Better to say fair. By contrast, reviewing papers for sounds understated to the point of weak. How about managing multi-jurisdictional disclosure exercises for. Now, let’s see, several key clients’ – she guillotines all three words with a single streak of ink – ‘is perhaps a touch non-specific. Try leading financial institutions, then add something about our corporate governance experience, so they know we’re on message about the need for greater transparency in the City. And rather than took the lead on your biggest piece of banking litigation put assisted your in-house specialists with. It’ll make Chloe and Co look good, and they’re the ones who dispense mandates. Finally you might consider a fourteen-point font. The Head of Legal is half blind but in denial.’