Joy

by Jonathan Lee

  Does that make sense? Does that make any sense?

  4.58 p.m.

  IN SOME pockets of the office it’s as hot as Bangkok. The glass-walled building seems to have slid beyond the Square Mile, down the frozen banks of the Thames, through ice-shard shingle, under bridges and a restless sky, over fish and mud and the deliberate dead, out and out into the cleaner ocean, still and blue, where the equator waits with outstretched arms…

  ‘On top of establishing a taller railing,’ Charles says, causing a kink in Joy’s daydream, ‘they need to find a less aggressive way of heating these platforms. That vent’s like a blowtorch.’ He rises from the bank of chairs he demanded a moment ago.

  ‘Blowtorch,’ says Brian, repeating for the rest of the row. Beside him Joy nods, mimicking the colleagues seated to her left. She alone unfurls her legs and thinks how, under the fluorescent ceiling panels, they are all ghosts, casting no shadow.

  ‘Did you burn your hand?’ someone says.

  She blinks as Charles moves closer to the ledge. He begins to hush the rising chime of voices, plates and glass, mingled sounds you only really hear up high, and she imagines him on the edge of a bridge. ‘Quiet please, thank you, thank you.’ She feels hot, a little afraid, that gaseous weight in her brain is back, the pain expanding, but now her sister is downstairs waiting all the disappointments of the day seem to have a purpose and a shape. Those piecemeal grazes on her knuckles have acquired the significance of survival scars. The fingers of suicides fished from the Thames are often shredded, she’s read; too late they tried to cling to things, groping at the river’s piers and props.

  ‘Ladies, gentlemen and yet-to-be-defined species of this firm. Most of you will know that I am Charles Jestingford, a partner in the Dispute Resolution team.’

  He holds the microphone gingerly, as if scared the mesh ball will come loose, plummet forty feet, leave him with a trickless stick. The tips of his oxfords are shiny and black, snug against the base of the railings. Each iron bar tapers and twists as it reaches his knees – a candle, Joy thinks, becoming its flame.

  ‘I had a strange incident this morning which I thought I might share with you by way of introduction. I have, of late, been spending quite a lot of time visiting a client’s offices in Swindon. Now, hang on’ – he shades his eyes – ‘is my lady-killing Swindon-born Senior Associate down there? Ah yes, there you are, Peter, how could I miss you? Now, good people of Hanger’s, I must say that having visited Peter’s home town – really is your home town, is it, Peter? – it is much easier to see why he works so bloody hard here, pro bono for our charity panel all day and billable all night. It came to me during rush hour as I was crossing the third bleak roundabout in as many minutes, listening to the incessant West Country whinge of the radio disc jockey, the ghastly monotony of his voice: Peter’s terrified we’ll send him back!’

  One thing about Charles: he won’t play to a particular audience. You’d get the same speech at weddings, funerals, gates of hell. Over the weak crackle of laughter from below, the M&A lawyer to Joy’s left says into her ear, ‘Got to make a call; back in two; very quick call,’ and scuttles away. She is tired of scuttling. She is tired of making calls.

  ‘And of course we wouldn’t dream of sending Peter back. Swindon’s bowel-looseningly banal business parks would certainly not know what to do with his talents. In the headquarters I was visiting, talent was a scarcity. Indeed, mere attendance at work was a scarcity. The employees were clearly unhappy. Never was an organisation so in need of a workplace counsellor to improve productivity and protect itself against the risk of getting…Anyway, over there the average number of sick days per employee per year is somewhere over the twenty mark, which is worse even than the public sector, on which don’t get me started. It seems only the CEO is happy to attend to the nine to five, and he has the consolation of – every Friday – heading to the BVI in a private jet.’

  The word ‘jet’ flies like one, quick and crafty, a reminder of why all those people down there work so hard: the yearly promise of more money, more treats, more stuff. Up here in this stark box of light, on a level with Charles, her headache brings a resharpening of the senses. As he turns to look full-faced at her, she can see inside his complex smile, can unpack the many compressed longings in his lips: to apologise for this inane corporate banter (we’d both rather dispense with the formalities); to nevertheless soak up her gratitude (I am up here doing this for you, delaying getting blotto in Private Liaisons); and to indulge his own lawyerly need to assess a thing from every angle (the crowd down there are warming up, are you on board too?). The process of decoding his expression makes her remember what she felt looking at that poor cabbie’s slumped posture, his body despondent at its own dying. She could not have helped him, probably couldn’t have helped anyone at that time, sleepy-weak as she was. She saved herself. Head pain, tingly limbs, dots in eyes, but she has saved herself and sabotaged a client’s feathery poisonous plans. On this accident-strewn day she has improvised and survived. What more can you do?

  ‘So I said to the CEO, a terribly nice chap, I said, What do you do when a repeat offender phones in sick? And he said – how’s this for hands-on management? – that this very week he’d been faced with just such a problem, and decided to phone up the employee personally. The phone rang. Eventually the employee picked up. He sounded tired but basically fine. The CEO explained who he was and felt a satisfying ripple of fear pass down the line. So, the CEO said into the phone, I’d like to hear exactly why you can’t come in to work today. And the employee, sounding grave, hesitated. Come on, the CEO said, out with it. At which point the employee, apologising with some sincerity, said, Look, I’m terribly sorry, I really am, but I’ve been in bed all morning, and I’m simply too sick to come in to work today. For God’s sake, man, the CEO shouted, I’ve never had a sick day in my whole life, just how sick can you possibly be? Well, the employee sighed, if you really want to know, I’ve just had a double blow job from my brother and his dog.’

  The silence gives way to three or four inert laughs, a dozen bewildered claps, a hundred muted expressions of derision or disbelief, and the needless repetition of ‘brother and dog’ by Brian. Joy herself joins the ranks of the clappers, but as she starts a slow show of approval, the motions that politeness require, she notices something strange about herself: her hands will not join up. Once, then twice, a cupped palm misses its target, succeeds only in slapping the shapely base of the other hand’s thumb. Even on the third attempt she fails to find the sweet spot that amplifies sound. Her own fingers look Martian in the synthetic light, gadgets of creaseless pink. Her arms seem limp and inhumanly thin. The floor tiles are made of a substance she can’t name and the air around her contains a chemical tang, an alien influence.

  ‘Without further ado, please give a warm round of applause for our star litigator and brand-new partner, Joy Stephens!’

  Must have missed some words somewhere, but she sees now that Charles has put the mike back on its stand, that she’s expected to get up, and on high heels that are as much a part of her as teeth, as lungs, as her healthy British heart, she floats dreamily to her feet and detects the silky tickle of Charles’s mouth touching, not her lips exactly, the soft skin to the side, his warmth, his breath, intimate enough, it turns out, to make her wonder, as she reaches the railings, how she has felt so removed from life these last few years.

  Dennis

  HAS SHE been behaving normally? the louder of the two officers said, one thumb on the steering wheel and the other up his nose.

  What’s normal? I said, staring out of the window at the fuzzy pedestrians we passed. A few of them flicked furtive sideways glances at our car, perhaps remembering past crimes they’d committed: jumping Tube barriers; stealing penny sweets.

  Then he asked, with a slight smirk jerking the corners of his mouth,19 whether I could think of anything which might explain, in the absence of concussi
on, why she hadn’t reported to a police station.

  Concussion? I said. (Nobody had mentioned concussion, or the possibility of concussion, or intimated towards any head injury whatsoever, until this point.)

  We can’t rule anything out, he responded. Even a small blow to the head can induce temporary memory loss.

  And that’s the moment, Counsellor, at the mention of the phrase memory loss, that I began to think about dates. Dates are just dates, little boxes on a calendar that you squeeze your life into, but to forget an important date – an anniversary of a life event – is a kind of suicide, the death of past and present. This was the overwrought thought that came to me as we raced through London streets, and I took out my expensive phone, the one Joy-Joy made me buy, and I saw in the flawless screen that today really was the twenty-first of January, and I shuddered.

  The quiet officer in the back leant forward, head sandwiched between seats. Have you recalled something? he whispered.

  Nothing much, I replied. It’s just today is exactly five years since that whale got dragged from the Thames.

  They both shared a look, a look which delivered a cascade of mute announcements: one, I had now crossed the infinitesimal boundary between Normal and Abnormal; two, they hated their jobs; three, that was an end to the questioning.

  And do you know what I did next? Looking down at my phone, at the date and the time, I pressed a button to take me to the SMS menu, and I sent myself a text message, a text message which read To forget a date is a kind of suicide. I had a thought which I sensed might look pretty in my book, a thought about dates and suicide, something to tie in with the ahistorical theme of suicide in Shakespeare’s work and its links with the temporal matrix in which that theme, all of Shakespeare’s themes, are (for some scholars) enclosed, and I sent it to myself, lest I forget it. I think it’s important for you to remember that I did that, Counsellor, particularly if you’ve made a value judgement so far, an assessment on the nature of my personality. Perhaps you’ve decided that, of all the patients who walk through that door, I stand as one of the harmless people, the conceited but well-meaning, the pretentious but pleasant, a benevolent irritant, the extra post-meal Jaffa you neither desire nor despise?

  Well that’s nice, that’s nice of you to say, it really is, it’s very generous, but would any good man, travelling along in a police vehicle, aware that his wife is very possibly brain-dead and lying against a lamp post, no one stopping to check if she’s OK – because people don’t stop, do they, not in this Britain that is always changing its voice and values; they keep walking when they see someone slumped and in need, not in case the slumped, needy person is drunk, or else in case they (the slumped person) cannot be dismissed as drunk, and will instead require some kind of more serious assistance, disrupting the smooth flow of the passing stranger’s day – would any good man, knowing this, stop to text himself a pretentious little thought, stop worrying about his wife and instead text himself an empty little riff, just because the texted riff might add something, a small flavour of calm philosophy, to his otherwise paranoid prose?

  This isn’t the way to her office, I said. I reminded them what we’d agreed when they turned up at my door and perched on my sofa – that instead of messing about on the phone and continuing to wait for news we should do something straight away, go to her office straight away, see if she was there, see if anyone had heard anything from her since the crash.

  They shared another look.

  There’s a lot of traffic on the normal route, the loud one said, becoming quiet, quiet like the quiet one, but more eerie in his quietness, because it was not his usual style. Vehicles obstructing the road.

  I decided I needed to phone Annie. Having realised the date it seemed to me that Joy-Joy might have disappeared to Hampstead, to try and make peace with her (Annie). I googled her PR agency on my phone, found a number, called it. I told the receptionist I was a potential client, found myself – who knows why! – using an improvised Welsh accent in my verbal tussles with her, an accent which I suspect further reduced my standing among the two aforementioned members of the Metropolitan Police Service present to hear it. Eventually I was put through to Annie’s mobile number. We spoke awkwardly, hesitantly, but as the conversation evolved it dawned on me that my wife’s sister was concerned by my news – upset, even, to hear of the taxi accident – which perhaps shouldn’t have surprised me, but surprise me it did. She offered to meet me at the offices of Hanger, Slyde & Stein, and the next time someone spoke it was the Formerly Loud Officer, addressing the security guard at the reception desk of the very building you (Counsellor) and I (Dennis) are sitting in now.

  Various dark-suited people arrived, all acting like I wasn’t there at all, the Silly Eccentric Invisible Dennis.

  I interrupted their discussion. It’s ten minutes to five, I said.

  So? they all said.

  So, I explained,20 if she’s here, if she’s all right, then she’ll be about to start her speech, her pleased-to-be-partner speech, that may be why she’s not answering her desk phone.

  They went back into their huddle and after a while the Always Quiet Officer broke out of it (the huddle) and said, Seems you may be right, sir, one of the guards says he lent her a temporary pass a couple of hours ago. You can relax while we go upstairs, to this viewing platform she’s due to speak from, and talk to her.

  So she’s here, I said.

  It seems so, he said.

  Then please, I said, please couldn’t it wait till after her speech? She’s done nothing wrong, there’s no need to make a scene.

  The Always Quiet Officer consulted the Formerly Loud Officer and the latter said, after a pregnant pause, Very well then, if it’s brief.

  Annie marched in at that moment. I’d met her only a couple of times in my life, years ago, but since then she’d become so familiar from the television and newspapers and my wife’s constantly consulted photo albums that I recognised her straight away. The denim of her jeans was an apparent blue which, in the bloodless glare of the reception area, moved through a subtle spectrum of other colours: greens, purples, silvers. She seemed almost annoyed that the drama had been resolved in her absence, whereas my mood was bright and buoyant, my sense of luck and light and life inflated by the assurance that Joy-Joy was not slumped against a lamp post, that she had been spotted coming back to work (so like her to come back to work!).

  Aren’t you relieved? I said.

  Of course I am, Annie said.

  Yes.

  Yes, Counsellor, I don’t doubt the sincerity, although in the course of our discussions that day – in the lobby, in the ambulance – it became clear to me that Annie is one of those people who instead of exhaling say I’m very relieved, or instead of laughing say That’s funny, or instead of loving say I love you. She had become one who did not see or feel, who instead merely played at seeing or feeling. This was my impression.

  Annie went to the toilets and, by the time she had re-emerged, a man called Charles Jestingford was telling leaden jokes and it was almost time for Joy-Joy.

  I was thinking about the speeches today, actually, as I sat in the hospital. I was feeling, yes, I must admit, a little low. And then I went outside to get some air, switched on my phone, and saw – ha! – that I’d received an email from Beverley Badger’s agent. Amazing, is it not, how a sense of abnormal dismalness can so quickly be transformed into one of abnormal joy? Below zero to beyond boiling; beyond boiling to below zero. Two opposite states which are nonetheless equally effective, I suppose, in shattering your average thermometer.

  Skip Notes

  19 For I think when I’d said What’s normal? he had taken it as a dry aside on the mercurial nature of my wife’s moods, rather than in the intended spirit of broad philosophical enquiry.

  20 (Wanting in my heart of hearts to take a machete to their bovine skulls.)

  5.09 p.m. />
  THE RAILINGS are the kind good parents like Annie put at the top of stairs, a gate to keep their children safe, so low for a five-foot-nine adult that Joy’s hands can only reach the cool metal when she curves her back, spine tight against skin. Each fingernail holds a perfect pastel moon. Beyond these moons the function space – big, square and stylish – meets a reception desk, two sofas, and pink newspaper splayed on glass.

  All this is clear, but maybe only in her memory. The furniture and the Financial Times are always there, whereas the impermanent parts of the picture – the slowly shifting bodies and faces below – resist clarity, form a smudged alphabet she can’t translate. The cloudiness in her vision is alarming. She’s always been a noticer, twenty-twenty eyes that thrive on small truths, the way in iced lemonade the smallest bubbles cling to the cubes. Dad said with her attentive eyes she’d be a pilot or a painter, had a gift of seeing through facades to the deeper details others miss, and although she’s a grown professional now and the fizz is from champagne not R Whites and her dad no longer emerges in striped pyjamas on the stairs to sing, deep and silly, like the ad, that he’s a secret lemonade drinker, Joy reflects on the last few hours and concludes it is still true. The realisation sweeps through her, thinning her fear, leaving a peculiar composure: she is still a noticer, she still has that, regardless of this temporary failing of sight. The squirrel padding its face; the leggy crow stepping over twigs; the complex tickle of Charlie’s lips. She has felt these details today. She has been alive to them.