This was worrying. As I’d told Celia once before, it was important to keep busy. Counterintuitive as it might sound, there was such a thing as too much thinking time. But it was obvious she wasn’t following my advice.
‘She’s not really doing anything,’ said Vera. ‘I don’t know why the council had to get rid of her. Seems petty if you ask me.’
Jin-Jin nodded, the pink fluff on her headband bobbing up and down. ‘Very petty.’
‘What does petty mean?’ said Charlie.
‘It means mean,’ Jin-Jin said.
This was an incorrect translation. ‘It doesn’t mean mean.’
‘It means very mean,’ said Jin-Jin.
‘It does not. Can you move?’ She was hovering around the door in the most infuriating fashion. ‘Some of us would like to go inside, you know.’ I stepped around Jin-Jin, to the door, and opened it with such force I nearly bowled the three of them over.
Later, Charlie and I were practising multiplication using flash cards. We were halfway through the pile when Charlie said, ‘Celia isn’t very good, Germaine.’
‘Isn’t she?’
‘She’s not doing anything. She just sits there most of the time.’
‘Maybe she’s meditating.’ I picked up the next card. ‘What’s four eights?’
‘Celia told Mum that she didn’t think she had to leave this place. She thinks someone made up the reason she had to go. Why would someone do that, Germaine?’
I dropped the card on the floor. I had to go under the table to pick it up. Blood rushed to my head due to gravity.
‘Jin-Jin’s right,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s very mean.’
Celia was being dramatic. Even if she wasn’t club president, she was still allowed to attend the centre, and if she didn’t want to attend the centre, she should do something else. Like knit, or walk somewhere. At the very least she should spend her time allocating time. She should make a plan for the day: fifteen minutes for breakfast, ten minutes for a shower, ten minutes to get dressed. If you didn’t keep yourself occupied, it was a problem.
At home, I thought about what had helped me after I got…after I resigned.
Sharon calling was one thing, but there’s only so much you can rely on other people for. What had pulled me out of the funk?
I looked around the room. The TV was there, but I didn’t think footage of Alan Cosgrove would help in this particular situation. But what about…My sudoku book was on the coffee table. I picked it up.
The whole first section was level ones. They were so easy anyone could do them. It would take me five seconds but someone else up to thirty minutes, maybe even more. If you had a lot of time on your hands, you might welcome suggestions for how to fill it.
I copied the sudoku onto a sheet of paper, put it in an envelope and held the envelope in my hand. One envelope was very light. In order to increase the weight, I repeated the above six more times with six different sudoku, producing six more envelopes, seven in total. Seven envelopes for seven days.
On the front of each I wrote: MRS CELIA BROWN.
On the back I put: ANON.
In the morning, at the office, I checked the files and found an address for Celia, on the very first letter the council had received.
I copied it out seven times. Then I walked out through reception and deposited the first envelope in the red post box out the front of the town hall.
The rest of that month passed quickly and so did the next. I didn’t see Don, either by chance or by organised visit. But that didn’t mean I didn’t think about him. I wondered what it meant that he’d come to see me. It had to mean something, but did it mean more than the fact that he’d left before anything had happened? Or less? I had no way of knowing.
In the meantime, Ralph and I worked hard on the safety audit report, a process that was every bit as excruciating as any other exercise in teamwork I had ever experienced. There were a lot of meetings, a lot of emails and many hours spent haggling. Ralph talked more than he listened, which meant I had to talk more and louder to compensate.
Together, though me more than him, we produced a forty-four-page report. It listed all the hazards and risks and ranked them in order of importance. Everything was costed, from new carpet to rewiring and retiling. I spent a weekend working out if it was more economical to buy cheap incandescent light bulbs that didn’t last or expensive halogen ones that did, before realising the council had a policy on lighting in its buildings, rendering the whole question redundant.
The finished product was a masterpiece. If he could have, Michelangelo would have wallpapered the Sistine Chapel with it. Instead, I paid for it to be professionally printed and bound with my own money, one copy for my office, one copy for my bookshelf at home, one copy for Stacey to give to the mayor. With compliments, said the slip paper-clipped to the cover. And then:
Nothing.
Not a word.
It was like waiting for Christmas or World Maths Day to arrive. I kept walking past the mayor’s office but Stacey asked me to leave. ‘You’re weirding me out,’ she said, and ‘Don’t you have somewhere to be?’
Three weeks later, on a Wednesday:
It was only 9 am but I’d been at work for ages. Team leaders and coordinators (even just prospective ones) have to be seen doing extra hours. It’s motivational for others. The only problem is that when you have your own office it’s possible this will go unnoticed. That’s why you need to document it via email. I’d sent:
• A scanned Dimmeys catalogue with cheap safety vests to Ralph.
• A link to an article I’d read on ergonomic workstations (Attention: All Staff).
• A memo letting people know I had found an earring in the ladies toilet.
Just as I was penning a follow-up, Earring owner found, my inbox pinged. Stacey. The mayor wanted to see me immediately.
I dropped everything. My heart started thumping and my palms got sweaty. I took a deep breath, picked up my notebook and power-walked to see her.
I hoped the mayor and I were going to discuss the report in detail. I had a dream in which she pointed out which parts were particularly insightful and asked questions about my methodology—when I woke, I brainstormed questions and thought about the answers in case it came true. But there was none of that.
The mayor’s face was serious. ‘Take a seat, Germaine,’ she said.
The blinds were drawn on the windows and the room felt dark. The vase by the cabinet was empty.
She held up a copy of my report and for the first time ever I started to second-guess the work I’d done. Had the costing spreadsheet included GST? Had I factored in CPI for longer-term projections? Did I misunderstand the level of detail that was required?
‘Thanks for this,’ she said. ‘And well done. It’s very comprehensive.’
A compliment; but I didn’t relax. I was uneasy. I shut my eyes and opened them. Blinking, I suppose you’d call it.
The mayor put her glasses on and flicked through the document, scanning the pages. ‘It’s not in very good shape, is it?’ she said. ‘I knew the old place needed work but not this much work.’
The feeling of uncertainty deepened, even as I explained the prioritisation system. ‘The criteria are outlined on page three,’ I said. ‘I’ve come up with multiple scenarios: short, medium and long term. Ralph’s satisfied that the short-term scenario meets the minimum safety requirements. He says in the next year doing the roof and a couple of small things is critical but we can hold off on the rest for a little while. Three to five years, perhaps.’
A pause.
The mayor glanced down at the document. Though the expensive thermal cover was flat, she pressed at the top corners with the palm of her hand, as though they’d curled up.
‘Germaine,’ she said. ‘Some people are dismissive of this position. They think the mayor is just an idiot in a ceremonial robe who’s here to cut ribbons and get her photo taken for the local paper. But that’s not true…It’s more than that. I have
to make tough decisions sometimes.’
Oh, I knew, I knew, I said. People were so naive. (What was she talking about? Were we talking about my report or was this a cautionary tale about her decision to enter politics? It didn’t seem relevant.)
‘You know how tight the budget is. Things aren’t getting any better. We have less money now than we did five years ago and more things we need to do with it.
‘Do you know how many buildings we have? We have one hundred and four buildings. A hundred and four. That’s not including public toilets. Some of them are new, of course, but some of them are quite old and the senior citizens centre isn’t even the worst.’
The back of the chair was digging into me. I moved around, trying to find a more comfortable position.
‘We can’t have people using a building that’s not sound. As you can imagine, this is a difficult decision…But.’
All at once, I was very still. I knew what she was going to say before she said it. I watched her mouth move and heard the words in disjointed phrases.
Not a decision I take lightly…Safety is of the utmost concern…And you’ve seen the figures, Germaine, the budget is already so tight…
It seemed important to maintain the idea that this was not in any way unexpected. That I had known it was coming. But it was unexpected and I had not known it was coming. I felt like an invisible belt had been looped around my chest. It was being pulled very tight.
The mayor pointed at the criteria in my report. It was a matter of capital investment versus usage, she said, nothing more than that.
And I agreed. I knew how it was, I said. When I worked at Wallace Insurance I made decisions like this all the time. ‘The numbers never lie,’ I told her, and she brightened.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Exactly.’
I wasn’t pleased. I was the opposite of pleased. I felt lightheaded.
And then she said his name. Don. And that one word seemed to change everything. It brought clarity: Don. I was helping Don.
More than I’d realised:
‘He’s interested in buying it,’ she said.
I kept nodding. What an excellent idea, I said. He could expand his portfolio; add additional holes to the course, and perhaps, at last, a car park.
‘I knew you’d understand, Germaine. Now, whatever you do, don’t tell anyone. There are a few ducks we have to line up before this goes live.’ She rubbed her hands together. ‘Funny how things turn out, isn’t it? I bet you’re glad you got rid of Celia Brown now. Otherwise we’d have a real riot on our hands, wouldn’t we?’
27
I went back to my office and stared at the computer. I hadn’t wanted to say this to the mayor, especially as I wasn’t an expert, but this sounded…unusual. If one was playing devil’s advocate, it might have been construed as…
But no, they wouldn’t be doing anything untoward. Because if anyone understood how the system worked, it was the mayor herself. And I had to be careful in my thinking regarding Don. Just because he’d been accused of cheating, one time, many years ago, didn’t mean anything. It was never proven. It was a rumour and rumours were not facts. People don’t do PhDs or even undergraduate degrees on rumours, do they? No, because it would be irrational.
In any case, it was out of my control. I was a cog in a wheel. A clever and productive cog, but a cog nonetheless.
That was how I’d explain it to the senior citizens. The senior citizens.
My heart slumped a little at the sides. I didn’t want to think about them.
I tried to focus on my computer instead. What was I meant to be doing? Something with a spreadsheet.
But they were insistent. Celia, Betsy, Gladys. I found myself visualising their faces, their exact expressions when they heard the news. I was glad I wasn’t on the helpline. Celia would be angry. She’d call and ask questions, things that were impossible to answer. Call times would be terrible. Perhaps I should tell Eva to switch the out of office on.
I got up to walk around the desk.
What if I ended up in prison? You don’t have to knowingly engage in criminal behaviour to get caught up in something bad. There’s a hundred examples of innocent people going to jail because they were doing things for other people. Things that seemed perfectly acceptable on the surface, maybe even expressions of appreciation or admiration or even love, but weren’t altogether strictly legal underneath.
But Don would never. Or the mayor—she was far too intelligent. Intelligence had to be a protective factor.
I didn’t have to call the senior citizens; I could send a letter.
I rolled up my sleeves and started typing.
Dear Gladys Watts, President of the Senior Citizens Club, This is to advise…
Due to unforeseen circumstances…beyond our control…
± In the morning I didn’t feel well. I emailed Francine and said I wasn’t coming in. Then I dragged myself to Dr Smithfield. She asked what was wrong and I described my symptoms: a feeling of restlessness, agitation, difficulty sleeping.
She was quick to reach a diagnosis. ‘How’s your work–life? Anything making you anxious? Sometimes anxiety can manifest physically. It might be worth taking a few days out.’
That wouldn’t be it. ‘It’s probably just my haemoglobin,’ I said and held my finger out. Hb was in the healthy range, though, so it was hard to say.
At home, I put the TV on and sat on the couch with a blanket. I knew I was unwell because I found myself listening out for Jin-Jin, hoping she might knock on the door. I even looked out the peephole when I heard the lift, but it was the guy from number 24 walking past. I felt so sick I went to visit Sharon. If I was dying the least she could do was look after me.
‘You look fine to me,’ she said. ‘Want to stay for lunch?’
She microwaved two bowls of soup and we sat in the lounge with them like we used to. Only difference was, back then I’d have eaten quickly and gone to my room to study. I studied a lot in high school. How you went in high school determined where you went to university and that determined where you got a job and how much you got paid and pretty much the rest of your life.
Or so the theory went.
While we ate, Sharon got the newspaper out and opened it up to the quiz. She read the questions aloud and we wrote our answers down and compared them at the end. It was seventeen to twenty-seven in her favour.
‘That was rigged,’ I said. ‘You must have cheated.’
‘Feeling better, then?’ Sharon took my bowl and put it with hers on the coffee table. ‘How’s work?’
‘Fine.’ I don’t know why everyone was so obsessed with my job.
‘Just fine? What are you working on?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing at all?’
It was too long and involved to go into, I told her. And complicated, she wouldn’t have understood all the intricacies. I tried to change the subject but she persisted. She kept asking until I told her about the seniors centre. Then of course she got on her high horse.
‘That’s exactly what happened in ’97 with the wetlands. Paul Dibbley said the council couldn’t restore them because they didn’t have the money. But you can’t sign an international convention to save waterfowl and then just change your mind. You can’t tell the orange-bellied parrot they didn’t make it through the budget subcommittee.’
The problem with Sharon was she wasn’t rational. She got way too emotional about things.
‘No wonder you feel sick,’ she went on. ‘I’d feel sick too if I was responsible for evicting all those old people.’
‘It’s not my fault,’ I said. ‘Don’t shoot the messenger.’
‘You’ve let all your friends down,’ she said.
‘They’re not my friends, they’re acquaintances. I was only there for my CV.’
‘And here I was thinking you’d changed.’
‘People don’t change, Sharon. It takes thousands of years for a species to evolve.’
She lay back on the couch. �
��I don’t know what I did wrong with you. I was a very present parent.’
I can’t imagine why I then told Sharon that Don might buy the senior citizens centre. I suppose I was trying to show that the situation had an upside. I should have known how she’d respond.
‘Let me get this right…The mayor is selling the senior citizens centre to a friend of hers.’
‘A friend of mine.’
‘And this “friend” just happens to own the golf club next door? What a coincidence.’
‘Yes. It’s a coincidence.’ I didn’t believe in coincidences normally but this did seem to be one: two events, apparently related, actually completely independent.
I could prove it, too. All I had to do was demonstrate the conditional probability of (A) the seniors centre having to be sold and (B) Don wanting to buy it was the same as the probability of B occurring on its own.
Pr (A ∩ B) = Pr (A) Pr (B)
I explained this to Sharon, writing the equation on a sheet of paper, but her mathematical skills weren’t up to it.
‘What’s A again?’ she said, frowning.
‘A’s the centre being sold.’
‘Oh. So A is one? And what’s B? No, wait. B is seven.’
She didn’t understand that it didn’t matter what A and B were numerically, it was the relationship between them that mattered. ‘Think of it as a Venn diagram with two circles and no overlap.’
There was a long pause.
‘Doesn’t matter anyway.’ I took the sheet of paper back. ‘The centre’s unsafe and there’s no budget for fixing it. Who cares who buys it.’
‘If it looks like a rat and smells like a rat…’
‘You don’t know Don like I do. He would never do anything untoward.’ I smoothed the cushion on the couch. ‘Don’s the most upstanding person I’ve ever met.’ Maybe not the most, but he was fairly upstanding. I mean, there was no formal scale.
‘Oh, Germaine.’ Sharon sat up. ‘You’re not doing it again, are you?’
I picked up a cushion and plucked an invisible hair from it. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
The Helpline Page 16