‘I’m sure she can’t,’ I said. There was no way. It was unthinkable. I couldn’t do that to the mayor. She’d helped me, nurtured me. I owed her something.
Before I could respond there was a loud thump and a bird bounced off the window. It was fine; it flew away unhurt. But the seven of us were left looking at the view.
We could see the car park and, beyond it, the golf club. There was a large billboard out the front. It said, Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation Ball—SOLD OUT and had a photo of Mayor Bainbridge. She beamed across at us.
‘There’s not enough time to raise fifty thousand dollars,’ said Celia. ‘But there’s plenty of time to have a conversation.’ She looked at Jack. ‘I mean, how long would it take to check some email? See? Not long.’
Checking the mayor’s email was not a good idea, really it wasn’t. It wasn’t like there was going to be anything incriminating anyway, she and Don being innocent of the crime they were suspected of.
‘There’s no harm trying, then,’ said Celia.
Even as I sat there, spouting excuses, I knew Jack would do it and I knew if he asked me, I’d help him.
What was happening to me? It wasn’t so much that I’d changed; more that they seemed to think I was already that sort of person. The sort who wrote letters and took risks, even when they made no sense whatsoever, just to help other people.
What a terrible way to live. I was playing right into their deluded expectations.
I told myself I’d go and see Jin-Jin as soon as I got home. Then I said, After a shower, and then I said, After dinner and then, After one more sudoku. It was eleven o’clock when I tiptoed into the corridor holding a typed note to slip under the door in the event she didn’t answer.
I knocked softly but the door swung open anyway. For a moment, Jin-Jin was a dark figure silhouetted against the light from her kitchen.
‘Hello, Germaine.’ Her voice was not friendly. She held on to the door like I was an Oxfam collector.
‘Hi. Can I come in?’
Jin-Jin waited a beat before responding. She was not a tall person but I could feel her looking down at me. ‘Can you come in? I thought good neighbours didn’t invite themselves in.’
‘I—’
‘That’s what I was told recently. By a “good neighbour”.’
People forget things all the time but the one occasion you’re slightly out of order they’ll remember forever. ‘I may have been…a bit rude to you, Jin-Jin.’
‘May have been?’ She was wearing one of her cartoon jumpers. It made her look friendly and approachable, an appearance in contradiction to the sharpness of her voice. This was a side of Jin-Jin I hadn’t seen before. If it had been directed at someone other than me I would have enjoyed it more.
‘I was rude to you.’
Jin-Jin said nothing. Down the hall the lift doors opened and the man from number 24 appeared. We waited in silence as he walked past. When he was gone, Jin-Jin looked at me expectantly. Well? she seemed to be saying. I looked closely at the door jamb, which, as expected, wasn’t very interesting.
‘I’ve got an assignment to do, Germaine.’ Jin-Jin started to shut the door. I put my foot out to stop it from closing.
‘Wait.’
It wasn’t that I didn’t think she deserved an apology. She did deserve it. But I could feel my apology lodged there, inside my clamped lips. I was concerned that if I opened my mouth all of my inner thoughts and worries would tumble out, not just those that pertained to Jin-Jin.
‘Germaine?’
‘Okay.’ I swallowed. ‘Look…I’m not very good with people.’
Jin-Jin didn’t respond but her grip on the door softened.
‘I’m like a mathematics textbook. I got problems. Ha. That’s a joke…Okay, look…’ Another swallow. ‘Jin-Jin, I’m sorry.’
‘For.’
‘Being rude. And not just that one time, for some other times too. Which is not to say I want you to hang around all the time but maybe occasionally, sometimes, every now and then…It wouldn’t be completely unenjoyable.’
‘Not completely unenjoyable?’ The kitten on Jin-Jin’s jumper was not to be underestimated. It might have been pink but it had claws.
‘Maybe sometimes I’d like it,’ I said.
Jin-Jin weighed this up and seemed to find it acceptable. ‘You’re a funny lady, Germaine.’
‘Am I?’ I felt less encumbered, like I’d taken off a heavy backpack. It wasn’t that hard, apologising. Maybe my thing was people after all.
‘Not funny ha-ha, the other funny. Funny strange. But thank you.’
37
The next day Jack and I went to the café. We ordered sandwiches and sat in a corner booth so we could see everyone in there: the guy making coffee, the lady on the till, people at their tables talking. It seemed like a safe place. No excuse for Jack to be so blasé, however.
‘I logged on to her email,’ he announced to me, to everyone. ‘Ran a search on Don but—What? I’m not being obvious. You’re being obvious, I’m being normal.’ Grudgingly, he lowered his voice. ‘Fine. Is this better? I ran a search on Don but there was nothing.’
‘Did you try Donald Thomas?’
‘Yes, I tried Donald Thomas. And senior citizens centre and just senior citizens and…’
He listed all the words he’d searched. It was a serious business and I should have been concentrating but I found myself losing the thread. The problem was we were sitting so close. It was a two-person table. One person was meant to sit on the bench and the other on the chair opposite but when I sat on the bench Jack shifted the seat so instead of sitting at 180 degrees, we were at 90. There should have been ample leg room, but we had not quite enough. Our knees were almost touching.
‘I even tried old people…I don’t know what else to do, Germaine. Germaine. Are you listening?’
‘I’m listening.’ I was listening. I was. He’d searched the mayor’s email and there was nothing. I had the vague sense this wasn’t right but I couldn’t pinpoint why. I was distracted. Why was Jack wearing a long-sleeved shirt? He never wore long sleeves. And was that aftershave I could smell? It was subtle but…pleasant.
‘So?’ He was waiting.
‘I’m thinking.’
Right, focus.
The mayor and Don…No emails. Now I thought about it, something was odd. There was an anomaly somewhere, a misstep in the pattern. I went back to the beginning and plotted all the points:
(x1, y1): my first day.
(x2, y2): meeting the mayor and Don. i.e. the first complaint.
(x3, y3): meeting with the mayor after she received the second complaint—
Then I had it, my ‘aha’ moment. Don had sent the mayor an email, complaining about the banners. Photos attached—the mayor had shown them to Francine and me. If Jack couldn’t find it in his search, she must have another email account with a different address.
When I said this to Jack, he said, ‘Interesting.’
Then we were interrupted by the waitress. She put the plates on the table side by side. I picked up my sandwich.
Jack waited until she was gone and said, ‘What are you doing tonight?’
Bread lodged in my throat. ‘Nothing. Why?’
‘We should get together.’
‘Us? You and me?’ What would Marie say?
‘To get into her email,’ he said. ‘We could go to the mayor’s office after everyone’s gone home and check her search history. Hey—are you okay? You’ve gone all red.’
What a tense afternoon. I was wound up like a spring. When Jack came to get me I said, ‘Maybe you want to do this by yourself?’
‘Relax,’ he said. ‘Everything will turn out fine.’
Of all the sentences in all the world, that has to be my least favourite. But I went with him: up the stairs and down the corridor, the town hall was quiet and still. Everyone had gone home and the only sound was the soft pat of our feet on the carpet.
As we entered the mayoral
suite, the air seemed to get cooler, the silence more eerie. It was dark outside and the long glass window reflected our faces back at us. Mine did not look relaxed.
We stopped in front of the mayor’s door. Jack held a security pass above the lock. ‘This is unexpected, eh?’
‘Can you hurry up? I want to get this over with.’
‘Calm down. Stacey said Bainbridge is in Canberra all week. And anyway’—he said this louder: acting—‘we’re just updating some software.’
Jack pushed the card in the slot. A green light appeared, there was a faint clicking sound and the door opened.
The room was dark. As our eyes adjusted, we could see the outline of the mayor’s desk, her computer, the filing cabinet. It wasn’t until I saw there was no one there that I let go of the breath I hadn’t known I was holding.
Jack flicked the light on and went and sat himself in the mayor’s chair. ‘This is comfortable. Ooh, this is very, very comfortable. Germaine, you have to try—Okay.’
He turned the computer on and the sound of it whirring to life filled the room. It was so noisy I was sure the whole world could hear it. Or if they couldn’t hear that, they could hear me, my heart beating so hard and so loud in my chest. It was like a drum sounding across an amphitheatre, echoing, echoing, echoing.
‘I just have to log in as her and then we can…’ Jack whispered to himself and tapped at the keyboard. I stayed where I was, by the open door.
The air was cool but a clammy sweat formed and began to run down my back. We were going to get caught. I was one hundred per cent sure of it. Would they call the police? Life would not be worth living if I went to jail. Even if I survived the experience, when I got out I’d have trouble finding a job and forming relationships. It would be…Well, strangely familiar. But that was less comforting than it should have been.
‘Are you going to shut the door, Germaine?’
‘No, I’m the lookout. I have to look out.’
Everyone knows the lookout is an accessory. My role was to stand where I was and say: ‘They’re coming,’ if perchance they did come. And if that happened then I would enact my second role, which was to deny all involvement. If I shut the door I’d go from being an accessory to being an accomplice. An accomplice gets a much longer sentence.
‘You won’t believe what her password is,’ said Jack. ‘VerityforPrimeMinister. Yep, one word, capital V, capital P, capital M.’
‘Hurry up, Jack.’
‘I’m going as fast as I can.’
Imagine if I had to shower in front of other people. And in a communal bathroom.
‘Can you shut the door, Germaine? It’s a one-way corridor. If someone comes you’re not going to be able to escape that way.’
Jack was not being helpful. In fact, he seemed to be rather enjoying himself.
I went and stood behind him, hoping to hurry him along.
On the screen, the council logo appeared and the mayor’s official mailbox opened. Jack closed it and clicked the internet browser instead. When it loaded, he went to the history tab and scrolled across until he found a line that said Inbox–Verity Anne Bainbridge. He pressed enter.
The mayor’s personal email opened and rows of emails filled the screen.
‘I would have thought you could do that remotely,’ I said.
‘You can probably can…I don’t know how, though. I did a TAFE course but that was in the nineties. Technology’s changed since then.’ Jack moved the mouse to the search bar. ‘You want to do it?’ he said.
For the record: I liked the mayor. Even if she was using and/or lying to me, I still felt gratitude towards her. A kind of gratitude—it was complicated.
I typed D-O-N-space-T-H-O-M-A-S into the search box.
A tiny hourglass appeared. It was only there a couple of seconds but each second seemed to take much longer than usual.
There were no results for that search.
I tried D-O-N-A-L-D T-H-O-M-A-S.
There were no results for that search, either.
And then: A-L-A-N C-O-S-G-R-O-V-E
Bingo. A match. Multiple matches.
The screen filled with emails from Verity Anne Bainbridge to Alan Donald Cosgrove and from Alan Donald Cosgrove to Verity Anne Bainbridge.
Jack clicked one open.
From: Verity Anne Bainbridge
To: Alan Donald Cosgrove
Don,
Special project to proceed.
How are you going to make this up to me?
Verity xx
‘Huh,’ I said.
‘Yes. That’s very—’
From: Alan Donald Cosgrove
To: Verity Anne Bainbridge
I can think of a few ways. The first involves—
‘Oh.’ I patted my hair flat, suddenly self-conscious.
‘That’s fucked,’ said Jack, and then he did something very unexpected. Instead of patting my hand in a consoling fashion or giving me a pitying shoulder rub, he began to laugh. And his laugh made me laugh. I don’t suppose I even knew what we were laughing at. The situation was absurd.
‘I thought you and Don were an item,’ said Jack.
‘I thought we were too.’
It was confusing. I was laughing but it wasn’t funny.
Jack’s voice softened. ‘I never liked him.’
‘I did.’
I didn’t want to read any more emails. I stood up and told Jack to print whatever he thought would be useful. I didn’t want to touch the keyboard myself. It seemed dirty.
Jack said, ‘I told you he was an idiot.’
‘Just print the emails. I want to go home.’
‘There’s one small problem. A technical glitch. Tiny, really, but I should have thought of it before…Anyway, the mayor’s not connected to the printer network. Because she’s got an assistant and the connection was at capacity, and we had to remove all non-essential staff. Yeah, I know…But it’s okay, I’ll just set up a new email address and we can forward them there. It won’t take a minute. What should I call it? The email. It can be anything. Nope, that’s taken…That’s taken too…Let me think…’
He set about creating a new email address and forwarding the mayor’s and Don’s emails to it. I did nothing except try not to think about Don. Or about anything.
Then all at once, there was a noise outside. Voices in the hall.
Jack and I froze. He turned around. Who’s that? he asked using only his eyebrows.
I don’t know, I replied with mine.
The voices grew louder and came closer and grew even louder. Jack and I had the same thought in the same moment. He pointed and I dropped to the floor, crawling between his legs so I was wedged between the chair and the front panel of the desk. In the same instant, the door opened.
‘Come through—Jack?’ It was Stacey, the mayor’s assistant. I recognised her voice. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Just updating some software.’ Jack slapped at the keyboard.
‘I thought Roland did the updates.’
‘Roland’s sick.’
‘Okay…I just came to get a file—’
The cabinet was behind us.
‘—for Francine.’
Francine? I curled forward, pressing my cheek to the floor so I could see through the gap between the bottom of the desk and the carpet.
In addition to a pair of black heels (Stacey) there were two brown Homypeds. Unmistakably Francine.
Stacey said, ‘You’ll have to move, Jack.’ Her black heels started walking across the room while Francine’s brown flats stayed by the door.
In five seconds Stacey would see me.
In four seconds she’d see me.
Jack said, ‘I’ll get it,’ in a desperate voice and rolled forward, knocking into me. My elbow thumped against the front of the desk. His knee was in my back.
‘What was that?’ said Stacey.
Jack rolled back, giving me some room. ‘What was what?’ She was coming closer.
I knew this
was a bad idea. I should never have come.
‘Wait, Stacey,’ said Francine.
‘Can you move, Jack?’ said Stacey, still walking.
My career flashed before my eyes, short and unremarkable but very precious now that it was about to end.
‘Stacey, STOP,’ said Francine again. This time quite loud.
Stacey stopped.
‘I, ah, just remembered,’ said Francine. ‘I do have the file. I don’t need you to get it. It’s in…in my bag. Look, that’s my bag, on the floor over there.’ Francine was talking about my bag. I must have dropped it on the floor when we came in.
There was movement as Francine went and picked it up. A zip opened. ‘Yes, here it is. Sorry, Stacey. I shouldn’t have—’
If irritation was represented on an analogue meter, Stacey’s needle was flickering somewhere between annoyed and seriously fucked off. ‘Are you kidding me?’ she said. ‘Shouldn’t have, what? Got me to come in from home? Shouldn’t have made me turn around and drive back in to print something out? You said it was urgent, Francine.’
‘Sorry, Stacey.’
‘Sorry? Jesus. What a waste of time. You people think I have nothing better to do…’
The light went off, their voices faded.
I drove Jack home.
‘That was close,’ he said.
I didn’t comment; I had to concentrate on driving. The chance of having an accident increases when it’s dark.
It’s also elevated when people drive in an emotional state. Like if they’re upset or feeling heartbroken. I held the wheel tight and watched where the dotted white line was going.
We didn’t talk until we got to Jack’s house. Then Jack said, ‘Don’s an idiot, Germaine.’
Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t.
Maybe I was.
Jack undid his seatbelt and it slipped back to its holder. He turned towards me. The silence was heavy and low hanging, like fruit rotting on a tree.
‘Want to come in?’ said Jack.
‘Not really.’
‘Please? I want to show you something. It’ll only take five seconds.’
It wouldn’t take five seconds, it would take many more. But even though Jack’s voice was soft on the surface, underneath it was pushy and imploring. He seemed determined that I see whatever it was. I realised it would be easier and quicker to go in than argue. I pulled the keys from the ignition.
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