by Mari Reiza
It was odd. Most people go through the motions of decency in order to soften the inevitable indecency at the end. Instead, Peter had said to Lucy that he had interfered with her transfer then told her that he was there for her. Lucy insisted it had happened exactly like that and then refused to discuss it any longer.
‘We should have a drink before my last day,’ she added. And then she left.
We all discussed Lucy’s episode endlessly.
We gossiped. We went in and out of our offices and of secretly borrowed offices again.
We deduced Peter thought that it was fine to do things to people which would have been an outrage when done to himself, and that people owed him things that he would not have expected to owe to the same people. Would he have asked Lucy for advice if he himself was leaving? Would he have told her in advance? He had lost it. The vindictive little prick. He must have really had it in for her. Lucy, she was no harm to anybody. But he could not take rejection.
Some of us thought he might have felt guilty at the last minute. Perhaps he had wanted to redeem himself, to leave the door open, and that is why he had told her he was there to help her. Or was it that he was gagging for her to humiliate herself by coming back to him as if she was accepting defeat?
Whatever Peter’s final words, was the whole incident not a case of commanding with authority, taking charge by fear? This was no leading by trust. Was it? Where were the respect and genuine concern we preached about at Enterprise? Peter was brilliant and personable and powerful, but he was not fair. Wasn’t it a key quality for a good leader, fairness? Instead Peter was one sick fuck. But maybe it was power’s fault. It was money’s fault. Conspiracy, wounded pride rebounding, belief in his own justice. Sick. A sick man, a spiteful man, an unattractive man. I hoped that his liver was diseased, Dostoyevsky, of course.
Peter had become Attila when his virile pride had been assaulted. He had to mortify Lucy with his spite, even though he would lie awake with whole continents of self-hatred and shame to be explored for months. Or perhaps he wouldn’t even manage that, the self-hate.
I thought it seemed astonishing how so many important decisions in the world were connected to the sexual appetites of prominent men. It was part of us, even if we were ashamed of our pleasures because they made us weak.
But not everyone thought like I did, not at all.
Alakrita could see nothing wrong with Peter’s behaviour. ‘I cannot see the point in Peter having great daggers from Haephestus if he cannot be licensed to destroy,’ was her point. She understood it may have been too tempting, the moment you see the light come out of your victim’s eyes and you become God. (Especially when the victim was Lucy.)
‘Yes, but that is the precise moment in which you lose your decency,’ I replied to her. But, unfortunately, I knew well that Peter could detach from that moment almost immediately. Or maybe he would cherish it. Because if he could not be loved, then he would rather be admired, and if not, then at least feared. And if he could not be feared, he would rather be hated or despised. For Peter, it was of utmost importance that his attentions were always deeply felt. Anything but ignored, cast aside like a dead animal. Sadness lacked the panache of fury or madness.
And you, Reader, are probably thinking that you could see it coming, that I was going to crucify Peter. I had to. Because there would be no other way for this story. And at some explicit moment I had to choose between him or me. Me or another me. Did I have it in me to pick which, to stop sitting on the fence?
I thought about it most days. Could you accuse Peter of hubris? What he had done was not the requital of past injuries, it was not revenge. It had nothing to do with what happened or might happen to the abuser, but it was merely done for the abuser’s own gratification. Peter enjoyed ill-treating others and how it made him feel. Was it the pride that blinds, the one that comes just before the fall? We were witnessing what lack of love could do to people. Where did all that animosity come from? Was it the final rendition of Peter’s love? Did he really believe that love was the freely given right by the beloved to be victimised? Was he testing Lucy’s commitment by hurting her? He should be punished for it.
Yet other days I thought that maybe it didn’t matter in the scheme of the Universe that certain human acts went unrecorded, perhaps it was the norm. What Peter had done was in clear breach of what Enterprise stood for, but he would get away with it, of course. Because Enterprise stood, before anything, for protecting itself at any price, because we were what we did and we were nothing without Enterprise. We had a heartless governess specifically tasked to keep the bothersome and undesirable at bay, and Peter had enough juice to have anyone terminated.
The question was, would this little episode with Lucy weaken him or make him stronger?
It was time for our goodbyes. How I hated people parting and its steps.
Incorrect. How I hated Lucy parting, every step.
Lucy said that she thought it was difficult for Peter to talk about his pain. That her great-grandfather had been shot in the back in the Spanish civil war, but she had only learnt about it after a historian had written a book fifty years later, because people don’t want to talk about pain. ‘Maybe I pushed him too hard and I brought out the worst in him. Perhaps it is my fault,’ she said. Then she looked at me and told me that I should never have time for hostility like that, because it could destroy a man.
It struck me there and then how much Lucy wanted things lived, even the bad things, she wanted them to be suffered. Suffering was an invention of man but not a bad one, according to her. She wanted things suffered as intensely as possible for fear of lack of feeling, as if suffering was so much better than feeling nothing. It was like if she constantly overcame herself in order to live more fully. Peter sacking her was better than indifference. I knew she had enjoyed being the object of his jealousy, even if it had costed her dearly. Did she believe that I felt nothing for her because I acted like nothing? Had I hurt her more than that philandering narcissist had?
Before leaving, she told me that she had had a dream.
She was wearing her rosewood silk Ralph Lauren dress on a hot evening at Kabila in Tétouan. She was being buried in it, with insects all over her hair, looking like a flower pot, a slug slithering across her cheek. ‘Earth back to earth,’ she said. Next, very suddenly, all was burnt, with the smell of scorched hair going into a black, powdery ash. She could not feel her charred skin.
The dream was around materials, she said, and yet there was something immaterial, the majesty of a presence. She had felt something magical in her, bearing life, crossing time. ‘I was flourishing and wilting at once, like a piece of art where there was violence in its making.’
I was scared to hear Lucy talk like that. I thought that she was too emotional and wasn’t making any sense. I wanted to bring her back, ‘What did Trojan say about what happened?’ I asked.
‘He said that he had nothing to do with it.’ She paused but it felt like a robot talking down a schedule of menial tasks. ‘I told him that he was the biggest ordure I have ever met in my whole life.’
‘What are you going to do, Lucy?’
‘A cleaning lady at the Conrad Hotel in Tokyo.’ She suddenly pretended to be cheerful, as if someone had touched a button and the robot had changed mode. ‘I always liked how meticulous they are with the service there. Pride in a job well done. I love their checklists.’ She paused again. ‘Or a department store presents wrapper.’
‘Come on, Lucy, it’s not a joke. Don’t let him get to you. You know that you could be anything.’
‘That is the problem, Vittal,’ she mumbled, looking at a speck on my office carpet. Then, as if she had a final energy push, she came back to herself. ‘I guess if heart disease, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or any of those other genetic bastards I have lined up do not get me first,’ she blabbed out, ‘then I plan to mutate again and again. I abhor those people who make a choice and keep telling themselves that they have to stick with it! Says who? W
hy can’t we just experiment? In the end, we are only rehearsing ahead of eternal life!’
She could tell her desperate mocking was getting to me.
‘Don’t worry about me, Vittal,’ she insisted. ‘It could be worse. I could be a poverty-stricken porn actress looking forward to a double penetration scene on a cold winter morning in a lost forest in Bulgaria.’
‘Lucy!!’ I screamed at her. Why could she never be fucking serious when it was required! But she reacted to my disapproval with a fit of rage that took me by surprise.
‘Vittal, you’re always saying that we need to move on,’ she was almost yelling. ‘One day, I will die and you will still be saying to yourself that you have to move on. It is not very fucking reassuring, you know. What if I don’t want to move on? Maybe it’s not good to move on all the time.’ I was taken aback and she immediately apologised. Then she continued in a whisper, her hand on mine, although I could not figure out how it had come there. ‘The first thing we give to our children is roots and the last is wings,’ she said softly as if to a child. ‘You got both all right, Vittal. Use the wings to get out of here. You don’t belong any more than I do. You are right about moving on, but YOU are the one who should do it, out of here, before it’s too late.’ She kissed me on the cheek and left.
Too late for what? That was the kind of thing you said when someone died!
How I wished I had been the one to hold her hand and not the other way round.
After Lucy had left, I needed a coffee badly.
I found my heroin-chic chick at Coffee Plantation wearing tresses like on the Little House on the Prairie.
I said to her that I had had a very bad day and joked about whether she had any drugs. ‘I have read that when a man is full of opium, he feels full of water. He is useless, a child.’ That was appealing to me at that moment.
‘You want the scenic route to nowhere,’ she said. She was right. I was ready. Ready to get away to nowhere. It was better than the somewhere I was stuck in.
That night, I could not sleep thinking of Lucy and Peter, and Peter and Lucy. I could hear her in my dreams, chanting verses: ‘Finish me tesoro, don’t I look divine, in silk and gold, gulping that wine; grab me know, moments are so few, and I deserve it not being loyal to you.’
I didn’t feel invincible in the slightest anymore; perhaps I never really had. Perhaps nobody in Enterprise had ever really felt invincible. I felt like praying to the Moirai who controlled the threads of my miserable life. It was like the collapse of the Roman Empire, some seismic shift in atmosphere, hysteria was floating in the air. It was time for a break for me, if not a final one, at least some time to think. Perhaps I was due a slacking day from Enterprise after fifteen years of hard work. One full day to myself, to meditate, to potter in my new flat with my brain on, to do something new perhaps...
I sent a few emails around telling people I wouldn’t be there the next day and felt ridiculous at how momentous taking the day off felt. Would I really know what to do with myself? Would I use my time well? Next, I arranged to meet my cousin for lunch, Anita’s youngest daughter, who I hadn’t seen for years, even if she lived in London, in an ex-council house called Fircroft, somewhere up the Essex Road.
When I arrived to my cousin’s flat the next day, I was alarmed by how much her ground-floor apartment was small and unattractive, with flimsy windows facing a big road hardly a metre away from the tarmac. Every time a truck took a turn on to her street, which was often, her living room walls seemed to tremble in some sort of pre-earthquake shake.
My cousin had made the most of an old pine table and a couple of cheap benches from somewhere like Argos (a place I knew because Miriam used to rant about Argos shoppers often as if they were the scum of the earth), and put on an old tablecloth I recognised from Awa. Her walls were covered with past family photos hiding the dirt marks and the holes from previous tenants.
I took my shoes and socks off and let myself feel at home.
She was so proud to have me there and kept kissing me like a long-lost brother.
From somewhere emanated an orange blossom perfume that smelled of summers in India when we were kids. She had opened a bottle of Rioja Crianza for me, which she had got from Tesco for five pounds and kept for a special occasion. I hadn’t been a special occasion in years.
As we munched some delicious Indian recipes (Aunty Anita had done a good job of teaching her), she told me that she was in some arts group, fulfilling temp drama jobs here and there. She added that she had just landed a very small role for a piece on BBC 4. But I was barely listening. I was looking around at the pictures and remembering how I was when I had really been myself, full of hopes and dreams and opinions, and surrounded by people I loved and who loved me back.
What had happened?
And then over my cousin’s shitty speakers I heard a divine call, by John Denver, to come back home, through country roads. Next, all I could think of was going home, wherever home was. I had to find home.
We took our time over lunch, and post-lunch tea and a nap, and I ended up having an early light supper with her, because I didn’t want to leave the place, although I had to eventually, with a mixture of contentment, nostalgia, hope, despair and inebriation, reassuring my cousin that I would come back soon.
I cried outside her window and lit a cigarette I had pilfered from her. Then I went up Cross Street still crying, passed what I thought was that house in James Meek’s novel, the one about the malaria researcher who outdoes her rock star brother before he damns her, and at the corner with Upper street, I stopped at that pub where, apparently, Peter had celebrated his offer from Goldman Sachs soon after university.
I had a pint at that pub and then walked all the way home, still crying, overwhelmed by the love of my cousin, the memories of when we were kids, Lucy, Miriam, my ruined life...
When I arrived home I realised that Lucy had sent a message.
‘What is the most spectacular way to die?’ she had asked. And then a screenshot with someone’s poem: ‘I want to die in a wink, on a Wink, on THIS Wink, designed by Toshiyuki Kita, in 1980. It could be left anywhere: in a bare field by an electric power station on the Aegean coast to Ephesus; at top speed on the motorway to Lecce or back from Stansted airport; amongst garbage in a rent-a-car parking lot of a local airport in Emilia-Romagna; in run-down outskirts by the Valley of Kings amongst the human dump with a kingly view; by the lonely castle facing the harbour caressed by the sea breeze and tortured by traffic noise, where boats take off for fancy Capri. I could die anywhere in a wink, on THIS Wink, the colour of the Mediterranean.’
I sat on my old armchair my parents had brought back for me.
Human temperament is volatile and Lucy’s more than most. She must have been feeling the weight of circumstances, of her perception of circumstances.
And me?
I was too afraid to feel anything, so I called it a BLUFF.
Not even as the author of my own story could I guarantee to be present where I was required. Pitiful. And I knew in my heart, for the second or third time in this story, perhaps even the fourth, that that precise moment could have changed its course.
Next, I knew that everything would have to end badly.
Zainab follows
Zainab had used her good looks to wrap a Truth Leader – Keith, the one Lucy should have been working for if it hadn’t been for Peter – around her little finger. She apparently reminded him of his adolescent daughter. We were righteous but we could easily overlook such weakness at Enterprise if necessary.
In reality, Truth Leaders could enjoy a consequence-free world. They could operate unimpeded; they had earnt it. And Zainab was really pretty. Keith had been seen with his tongue hanging out more than once in his office with the view of Leicester Square’s advertising placards, lost in space or some erotic thought, staring the wrong way round, into Zainab’s buttocks resting on her chair. We knew that he had not requested that office for the Leicester Square view or its vicini
ty to Daniel’s office. He could not help himself helping her. Most of us mere mortals of the male kind could easily understand that.
But Gert, the office manager, would not have it. She would be ruthless. She would terminate her; it was becoming a habit from our caring leadership not to care anymore.
Had Zainab asked me to rescue her then, with those eyes that melted my heart and gave me a tingling sensation in my loins, I knew that I could not have denied her. But it all happened so quickly, with German efficiency. Gert had Zainab kaput in an instant, then she insisted on joining Zainab’s leaving party, in her little blouse with scenic printed boats crossing the English Channel. How touching.
Zainab got naturally trashed at her own leaving do, despite Gert’s appeal for restraint, and the one glass of wine per person policy went out of the window. Actually, all Enterprise policies were amply disregarded that day; it must have been expected, given the sense of finality everyone was living through at Enterprise, for strange things to be happening all the time by then. And to end in glory, Zainab managed to send her ten-inch heel three metres across the long table to land on Gert’s face, gifting her with five stitches.
Another day, another death, and all we would have to remember of Zainab’s outstanding beauty were Gert’s five stitches.
We all knew, though, that things were getting out of control.
Turning it off