Joy

by Jonathan Lee

  ‘Weird,’ she told Peter back in London, ‘to think how quickly those towers vanished.’

  ‘My uncle died on September eleventh,’ he said solemnly.

  ‘He did? You never mentioned.’

  ‘Nineteen ninety-one. Gallstones.’

  Another cloud-like patch of memory gathers mass, obscuring her sense of getting dried and dressed and entering the lift, until eventually a man’s voice, addressing her with excessive energy, pulls her back into the present.

  ‘I mean, Swindon’s another planet, another universe. It has roundabouts and supermarkets, but no irony or proper coffee. People are loud and animalistic without recourse to cocaine. Everybody has a cold. They get their hair cut by people whose own pelts and manes are harrowingly ill-advised. My dear Joy – are you feeling OK? – it’s like stumbling onto the set of a horror film, a British one, after the funding has gone. And, as is the way with horror films, the more you see the more grisly it gets.’

  It is Charles, a senior partner in her team. The chicken-pale flesh of his throat is taut at the Adam’s apple, making every swallow look contrived. He stares forlornly through the lift’s glass doors, bits of the office sinking from view.

  ‘This young Swindon client,’ he continues. ‘He does all this pensive chin-stroking. Whatever the context, he’s always quietly stroking his chin, with that sort of bland philosophical puzzlement that doctors have when you’re telling them about kidney pains or stool trouble. It’s this little gesture he’s picked up from some adult or other. I mean, there is no beard, there never will be a beard, it’s impossible!’

  Charles’s great accidental strength is his oversized outrage; he has the comedian’s gift of making little things matter and big things disappear. A combination of his colourful performance and her recent shower has left Joy close to relaxed. Barbara, the only other person in the lift, is the one who looks tense, refusing to meet her eye and share a smile – embarrassed, probably, about her boss’s meltdown.

  ‘Peter grew up in Swindon,’ Joy says, focusing on Charles again. ‘His first contact with Hanger’s was through the inaugural Make Law Fun Day. You know, as a schoolboy.’

  ‘Really? How did he survive to tell the tale? Luckily for me Project Rioja is coming to a close, so I can shortly abandon the West Country Hellhole and return full-time to Planet Earth. You may recall Projects Claret, Merlot and Malbec? Same client. Of course, I’ve got a Junior Partner and a Senior Associate working with me. I’m there to provide a bit of grey hair, really, and it’s just unfortunate that the grotesque finger of fate has, this time round, pointed me sixty miles up the M4 to Poundland Central, rather than in the direction of Mayfair, say, or Hong Kong. Of course, my main Hong Kong contact, Steve Lurie, popped his clogs last week.’

  The lift stops to pick up a canteen girl holding a tray of pastries. Lost for a moment in the half-moons of croissants, Joy thinks about the cabbie, Charles’s mention of death casting a shadow on her improving mood.

  ‘Although,’ says Charles, the floor beneath them moving once more, ‘the one plus in working for this client is that when you finish a bit of litigation with them they give you this deal toy trophy thing which is actually a bottle of extremely good grape suspended horizontal by this, this’ – he makes a hammock with his hands – ‘clever curve of plastic. Last time I got back from Swindon I downed the Claret and Merlot right there in my office, I was that depressed. Alas, I ended up a little worse for wear…’

  ‘Julie had to clear that up,’ mutters Barbara.

  ‘Belinda! What a pleasure! Didn’t see you down there.’

  ‘Did nothing for her whatschacall, knee joints, scrubbing that carpet.’

  ‘I’m dreadfully embarrassed. A sixty-three-year-old man acting sixteen! But Julie is so very big of heart. Big of everything, in fact. Fourth floor, here we are.’

  The offices and meeting rooms are arranged around a bright atrial space. Builders have almost finished installing a viewing platform on each floor. The idea is that employees at all levels will be able to look down into reception and the ground-floor function space: an opportunity to see if your client has arrived, or to deliver a speech to the assembled crowd below. The pastry girl goes left. Joy and Charles, followed by Barbara, head right. They pass a serenely smiling Julie, red-lobed as if to prove a person’s overhearing ears really do burn. She’s big of heart, it’s true. Joy remembers receiving a letter from her after Wimbledon. A surprising number of people, including some supposedly close friends, decided with humorous awkwardness it was best to say nothing at all. Julie’s letter, like many others, conferred a bleak but special benefit on Joy, the unique indulgence owed to the bereaved. The attention came perilously close to pleasure, at times. For a while, a short while.

  ‘Now we’re having a sort of Friday partners’ meeting at half past. Just a fifteen-minute job before your ceremony. Small on content, big on pain au chocolat. Has anyone mentioned it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, you’re one of us now – will be shortly, anyway – so you should join. We’re due to resurrect the old redundancy debate. Room 4.57.’

  ‘Thanks, Charles. I have to finish something for a client, but I’ll try my best.’

  ‘Finish something,’ Charles repeats, drifting away. ‘Good for you.’ He isn’t a fan of work, but doesn’t mind it in other people.

  She likes Charles. He was the one who first put her forward for promotion. It seemed to Joy then that joining the partnership might give her a sense of belonging. There were no real female role models, but there were partners like Charles who were, at least, at home in their own skin. Then it dawned on her: his career arc, which reached its zenith at a time when fax machines seemed sci-fi, was not comparable to hers. During the partnership interview process she got to know a sample of lawyers the firm had made up in the last ten years: Arianne, who cries in the ladies’ loos each morning; Eddie, who is on his fourth wife and second ulcer; James, who reads stories to his kids via speakerphone. She realised what she always, in the depths of her bones, suspected: that the younger partners, raised in the age of email, were having as terrible a time as the associates below them, and that partnership at Hanger, Slyde & Stein would provide her with none of the tools she needed to make a happy life, none at all, it would be like receiving a gift box from God containing a squashed kumquat and a novelty ultra-heat-resistant hand-puppet oven glove and being told ‘Best of luck’. She wanted to complete the partnership process, prove to herself she could do it, but she did not want to spend the next decade eating kumquat off an oven glove or using the oven glove as an impromptu kumquat-storage device or whatever other scenarios would emerge as she muddled into old age with whatever was to hand. She became envious of Dennis, whose job at the university seemed to come from an urge in his heart rather than an idea in his head. She’d always wanted to do something special with her life, she never quite knew what, baulked even at stating this vague plan out loud, but she certainly did not intend to end up doing this, a career which divorced her, daily, from her own temperament, the way a puppet is divorced from the true self pulling strings up above. Someone like Dennis, or Samir. They have less inner clutter, she thinks. Less mess. And as she walks into her office and switches on the lights, sending yellow splashing across piles of paper, this is what Joy wants: less. Happiness, that thing she’s always associated with outward acquisition, is maybe just a shrinking deep inside.

  ‘Yours I believe,’ says Barbara, dangling the plastic bag with Joy’s muddied clothes inside. The folds of skin under her chin, they dangle too. With age our layers get looser.

  Joy takes the bag. Barbara turns to exit. And it is only then that both women see a third figure – hardly human – lurking in the corner of the room.

  Samir

  YOU MUST promise not to think I am insane. I feel with the discussion of the bowel difficulties and the counting to seven I have conveyed a ve
ry bad impression. The tracksuit also perhaps does not help my case. In a shirt and tie I could seem merely eccentric. Father says elasticated trousers do not do a man any favours. But this is my uniform. This is my skin.

  That is kind.

  You are a brilliantly kind man.

  Well I was…

  Before your timer did those three neat beeps I was telling you how it felt to be behind the hanging lemony towels. In the towel room by the gym. I had just seen Miss Stephens outside crying with Barbara. And I was counting to seven with my pencil. Two people had stumbled in so I was…yes I would say I was hiding. From my mother I have learnt truthfulness. From my father how to disappear. And I was beginning to realise that Peter Carlisle would engage in activities with the young lady with nice hair.

  Then I see something else. Crouching as I am I notice under one of the benches to my right a cage. Not a lost-property type of cage. No. Something much smaller. The kind of plastic cage Mrs Hasan uses to take her cat to the vet. Mrs Hasan’s cat is named David Cameron. She says this is on account of him only licking his own bottom and the bottoms of other cats of a similar breed. And I cannot quite stretch to see inside the cage which has a blue plastic top. Not without being seen by the two visitors. At one stage it might have been good if they saw me or I made a noise to alert them to my presence but now it is too late for that. It is too late for the Astaire. It is too late to perform the Full Bollywood and in their moment of surprise and wonder shoulder my way out of the room. And it is also too late to zip up my cleansing gels and hide them again.

  Oh yes very. I hate to hide things but I have already lost the Fitness First job with this kind of thing. So I try to sit and wait while they whisper things such as I knew you would be a talented trainee and Well the Make Law Fun Day really is fun. Things of that nature. And then Peter begins to make very very small humming noises and the lady on her knees goes quiet. I take a quick glimpse between towels. It is bizarre. He is wearing what appears to be an all-in-one green Lycra outfit. Something suited to the Tour de France. Something not out of place on a marathon runner attempting to be a muscular space alien. It is peeled down to his waist. His waist is where the lady’s hair begins. And being present for this performance I begin to feel quite tense and upset. Not very bad but on my way to feeling very bad you see?

  My cycle of sevens has been broken. I am trying to say them under my breath but that is not the thing. The thing is to say them out loud and the towel room is the place to say them out loud and if I do not do my counting I occasionally get this looming. I do not wish to make it seem like a big problem but I have been known to get this looming feeling that something bad will happen to someone I care about. A sense perhaps that the Raj restaurant will catch fire with Father inside. He is old now and cannot get in and out of places as quickly as before. And just as soon as I have convinced myself that will not happen that the Raj has a number of modern smoke detectors I get another looming. A sense that Jack will leave the office on Wednesday to go to his five-a-side football and he will be thinking about Miss Stephens’s smile all distracted and will be hit by the number 100 bus. Just because I did not complete the cycle of counting to seven seven times. I fear you will think me very very strange but these are my feelings and like most feelings they are not accompanied by a full set of reasons. So I am hiding and getting very tense hoping for a brilliant thing to happen that will make them both go away and all the time there is slurping and grunting grunting and slurping. And I end up spreading out a towel on the floor and lying on my stomach with my fingers in my ears. And I can feel my legs shake. I am there for a while. Shaking.

  When I open my eyes I see two things. One thing I see is the shadow of a ponytail wagging here and there on the wall. She has obviously tied her hair back which I suppose is a sensible precaution for the manner of activity she is engaged in. And the other thing I see from this position is what is inside the cage.

  Please guess.

  No.

  Please try again.

  No.

  Lizard!

  There is a small lizard inside the cage and it is looking directly at me with its brilliant little bubble eyes. I have no idea why a lizard would be here. I am very confused. And there is no movement from the lizard at all. It occurs to me it is dead. Then whoosh! In one of the little squares between the criss-cross wire bars his tongue comes. Just a second and then gone. And suddenly I feel the need to do a movement of my own.

  You have understood.

  So I am dreaming of a nice clean bathroom but instead I am lying here on my stomach and unfortunately the towel keeping me from the carpet is picking up fluff. And then a further bad development. I feel in my nose the itch of a sneeze coming. Very very bad. I pinch my nose with finger and thumb. I hate to block the airways it is a far from brilliant strategy but there is no choice. And I am very tense because I am recalling once reading in the TestoTrivia section of Testomuscles Monthly that by holding your nose during a sneeze your eyes could pop out.

  I keep on pinching my nostrils. Then it happens. One two three four five six seven boom! The sneeze finds a way through. The noise is muffled but loud enough that the lizard disappears to the dark back of his cage. The shadow ponytail stops wagging. So I am thinking this is it. This is not at all brilliant. I am going to get sacked it is going to happen again what will Jack say. All these worries whirring in my head. One second. Two seconds…

  Then I hear the voice.

  Peter’s voice. After perhaps two seconds Peter’s voice says Well come on do not stop. And I think he is telling me Do not stop watching us you pervert. Something of that nature in the sort of smirky way people at school had that makes everything sound like they are keeping secrets. But then the wagging and the sucking recommence and I deduce he was talking to her.

  Can I please take a tissue?

  Thank you. Thank you very much.

  So following further unbearable noises they laugh in an awkward way and Peter says something strange such as That is not in the pastel care manual and finally they leave me with a neat click of the door. But it is too late you see. It is too late to recommence the counting. The counting is ruined. And not that it is important…it is just a few numbers…but I have carpet dust on my hands and I am shaky and upset. I pick up the propelling pencil and if it was not metal I might break it into seven pieces right there. That is how upset I have allowed myself to become. And what I wish to convey is every second that passes after you fail to count in accordance with the set schedule is a second where someone may be chosen to be harmed. I know how this must sound to a man of your expertise but I do believe in the possibility. That someone can be harmed by small failures of this nature. I am not very religious but that does not mean I do not see reasons for things. It does not mean I do not see consequences. So what I do next is I lay a further lemony towel a completely fresh one in front of the cage and I kneel on it. I am thinking how the last time I failed to conduct the counting properly Mrs Hasan’s grandson got sick almost died and this time someone closer to me is at risk. And there are clips on the blue plastic top of the lizard cage which I click with my thumbs.

  With the top open I held the propelling pencil in the manner of a dagger like this. I peered forwards and there he was. Tiny and still. Not even a flick of the tongue. Little eyes like those fish eggs they tried in the canteen only once. Not roaming. Just still. And I was amazed to find that my hand was not shaking. I could not swallow smoothly and my brain felt swollen but the shaking had stopped and I could see very clearly what I would have to do. I would have to choose the lizard to be harmed. Before Jack or Father was chosen instead. I half closed my eyes. I hovered the propelling pencil with its sharp little metal point above the lizard’s speckled head. I lowered it. I lowered the pencil slowly until the tip was perhaps two inches above him. And I waited there. He looked tiny and harmless and somehow lovely but I had no choice but to hurt him. I had to bring the metal
pencil tip down. One two three four five six seven and I would thrust it down. I would put the tip of the pencil through his eye. Pop. The fish egg would burst. I would kill him quickly. It would be easy. It would be bad but necessary. It would save people I like from being hurt. I would have to do it.

  But I could not. I needed to even wanted to but I could not kill the lizard in that place of invisible dust.

  I closed the top of the cage. I zipped and hid my gels. I covered the cage with a brilliant fresh towel and I carried it out of the towel room and up the goods-bay ramp and past Terry from Security scratching his ear. A sort of tic of his. I ran down the street feeling sick. I could guess at the strange looks of people…they always look when you do not want them to look and they never look when you do…but I did not meet their gaze. They existed only in the corner of my eye. Panting I entered the small walled space of Postman’s Park. There is a tiled wall there that I sometimes like to look at. It says it is a monument for ordinary people who saved the lives of others. People who would otherwise be forgotten. I have memorised some of them. Sometimes at night it is nice to say them to myself.