by T M Heron
She’s had a lot less sex this afternoon than she thinks. Once before passing out, to be precise. Just so I could go longer with Michelia. But I don’t think knowing this would improve her current outlook.
I’m tempted to tell her to go and not come back but the arrangement is perfect. As she would be the first to admit, we see very little of one another. Ava lives in Waikanae, a nice safe hour away, longer in peak traffic. Our “relationship” is mainly phone calls and expensive gifts. Both of which are a small price to pay for not really being in a relationship.
“Maybe I should shift closer to Wellington?”
I shake my head. “That would be career suicide.”
Ava has a thriving business in Waikanae, which is a godsend for me. She provides outsourced IT services to a large number of over-priced rest homes, of which Waikanae has no shortage.
She shakes her head in frustration. “You just don’t get it.”
But I do. I get more than she thinks. Ava wouldn’t have to worry about career suicide if she was Mrs. Jackson Ray.
And because Mrs. Jackson Ray is what Ava is angling to eventually be, she departs not much later with a minimum of bad grace. Leaving me reflecting once again on just how horrendous this woman would be in the wrong hands.
3
There is naught of last night’s escapade on the news in the morning. Have Michelia’s parents done nothing? What kind of people are they? I always choose girls who are well educated with the innate sense of self-entitlement only a good upbringing can produce — pretty much like Becky. I’d have expected more from the parents.
Traffic, they say on the radio, is backed up on both north and south entrances to the city. Wellington traffic, however, is nothing compared to Auckland and I see no reason whatsoever not to love this city.
The highway I happen to be on is right beside the ocean. Wellington city literally wraps itself around the harbor. A waterfront which, unlike many other cities, boasts deep aquamarine water so pure people swim in it. If you work in the city, no matter where you are, if the building is tall enough you can see the ocean.
It’s 7.30 a.m. and already the mood at work is frantic. It’s hard to tell who has left and had a weekend from those who have slavishly worked through. But soon, my treat, they’re all in for a diversion. And just for a while, along with the whole city, my firm will go crazy. Wellington’s Park Rape Team (not my term, it’s what the media dubbed us) has struck again.
No one, of course, would guess that I am here among them. They are closer to the action than they would ever know, these normal people. The thought of being a normal person depresses me.
My executive assistant is a fat, whiskery, middle-aged woman with a slight limp. And although she should probably try, I doubt there’s much make-up could do for her. She has no redeeming qualities, either. She’s not proactive or fast or even accurate.
My executive assistant’s name is Jo. It’s probably short for Joanne but I don’t care enough to ask. I’d like to fire her and get someone else but as a senior associate my influence doesn’t stretch that far. I’m already sick of looking at her special RSI keyboard, and custom-made foot-rest and back-support lumber-roll. All paid for by the firm. If she lost a whole lot of weight and did a little exercise, she’d probably need none of them.
I breeze past, completely ignoring her, and into my office. My rudeness doesn’t astound her now, nor does she waste any more time wondering whether it’s personal. Of course it is. When I saw myself as a senior associate in one of the country’s top legal firms, I didn’t visualize an assistant like this. What does it say about me to the outside world? I hate to think. I often wonder if the colleagues with whom I sometimes share Jo’s mediocre services harbor similar thoughts.
The other EAs at Bakers are sleek and coiffed, with voices like silk. That mine should be such an affront to the senses is an endless thorn in my side. Ensuring I don’t take it personally is something I have to work at.
The offices at Bakers used to epitomize everything I loved about old-school. Walnut-paneled walls and leather inserts in the desks. Then some genius decided we needed to modernize and that the incumbent décor was too exclusive, too much like a gentlemen’s club and, as such, hostile to women. They hired a design consultant who stripped everything, painted the amber walls white, and replaced the beautiful wooden furniture with glass-and-chrome abominations. I nearly wept. And every Monday morning when I first walk into my bland modern office, I feel a quiet sense of nostalgia.
My melancholy is interrupted when the door opens, and Mel Kilbride walks in and sits down. Mel is tall, articulate and charismatic. Women love him. Especially, thank god, his wife.
Mel flicks some non-existent lint off his jacket sleeve. “So, Friday night,” he says.
I laugh and lean back in my chair. “How much of it do you even remember?”
“Enough to wish I didn’t remember any of it.”
This morning Mel has a nervous slightly sick look on his face. His entire way of functioning is pure confidence, so it takes someone like me to identify the nervousness. But then he should be looking nervous. The big Friday night he is alluding to was probably the most exciting night he’s had since he got hitched.
Last Friday I took Mel to visit a little-known brothel in Eastbourne, on the other side of the harbor. Mel has minimal general knowledge of brothels to begin with. He is aware, of course, of the high-end brothel in Oriental Bay. Who isn’t? I know of women at our firm who have taken clients there.
But Lily’s in Eastbourne is special. For a start, it’s so exclusive it’s off the radar. And the clientele are creatives, not corporates. This makes for a whole new experience and a whole new kind of hooker. These girls are just like their bohemian, over-inflated clients. They’re flighty, unpredictable, petulant. And from time to time they’ll outright refuse some poor bastard for no good reason, or even no reason.
Men don’t go to Lily’s and chose a woman. They go there and turn themselves inside out trying to win one over.
Me, there’s nothing at Lily’s that meets my specific interests. But I like spending time there. The brothel and I have a symbiotic relationship. I’ve introduced many a man to Lily’s. Many a man who wouldn’t dream of using prostitutes because he is far too successful and eligible to ever consider a brothel.
Mel is all these things. And up until now he’s also always been faithful. In fact, I don’t think for even one minute of the time he was with Mary-Anne that it even occurred to Mel he might be in a brothel. It may still not have. At the time he was horsed up on coke and busy pulling out every trick in the book.
So now, like quite a few men here, Mel and I share a secret. One I’ll probably never need to cash in on. He’s my closest friend at Bakers, after all. But I feel safer for having it there.
I tune back in to hear him still bleating on about Friday. “Yeah, ah, Mary-Anne, what a girl,” he’s saying. He looks behind him even though he’s closed the door.
“She’s something special,” I say.
“You know her well?”
“Not as well as you do,” I joke.
But Mel is one hundred percent sober now and fully grounded in the reality that constitutes his life. He doesn’t laugh. “I don’t know if I told her my surname,” he muses. “Do you remember?”
“Why would I? Who cares?”
“She’s probably going to make contact. She’ll want to see me again.”
And there’s the arrogance he’s fallen victim to.
“I didn’t say I was married. Christ, what am I going to do?” He leans forward, willing the right answer to come out of my mouth.
“Mel, she’s a hooker,” I say. “I don’t think she’ll be expecting a follow up unless you’ve got platinum.”
Mel raises a hand to silence me. He does this in the authoritative manner of successful men the world over. “Please,” he says. As if this explains everything.
But underneath, his arrogance is fading. “A hooker?” He
swallows.
“Maybe it was a freebie? She did seem to like you,” I suggest, sounding non-committal. I’m not going to tell him at this moment it was me who footed the bill. In advance.
“I don’t believe this.” He buries his face in his hands. “If Tara finds out about this I’m dead. My life’ll be over. Why did you take me there? I’m fucking married.”
“I only heard about it when you did. You were the one who wanted to go.”
I watch Mel unsuccessfully search through his coke-addled memory for something real to pop up and negate this. Then, after a suitable amount of time has passed, I say the words he needs to hear. “It was a one-off mistake,” I say. “It stays between you and me.”
There’s another knock on my door and Jo lumbers in. She places a stack of papers on my in-tray. I don’t thank her. Why should I? Imagine if you had to acknowledge every aspect of every action people were obliged, by way of salary, to execute.
Have I mentioned the worst thing about Jo? Somehow her only daughter, Charlotte, is at a private school. The same bloody school as our managing partner’s kid. Jo has a photo on her desk of said daughter in full regalia. It sits there and needles me on a daily basis.
I shake open the Dominion Post, making eye contact impossible. There is nothing about last night on the front page. Instead it’s swallowed up by some stupid crone who has turned one hundred and fifteen and attributes her longevity to fish oil and gardening. I feel a flash of rage at the incompetence of a newspaper that can’t produce front-page news about an incident that happened a good eight hours ago.
Jo is still standing there, and I swear there’s satisfaction on her stodgy face. The great start to my week is dwindling and it’s only 9 a.m.
“Have you typed up that proposal for Galaxy?” I ask.
“It’s being checked by Nick Wilson.”
From time to time she gets it right. Which makes me wonder if all the rest is deliberate.
“You still have two separate mobile phone bills coming in?”
“Yes. Like I told you my other one went missing weeks ago. I got another.” I hold up my current phone. “But keep paying for it because it has to be around somewhere. It’s got a whole lot of stuff I didn’t have backed up.”
I try to conceal my frustration about this. Deep down I have a feeling, which I fully recognize to be irrational, that Jo took my phone to get back at me for being such a prick. God, it’s caused me inconvenience. Her smug look does nothing but fuel my suspicion and I feel myself prickling with irritation. Is she bringing up the bill on purpose?
I’ll make her pay for her smug look. Later today when she’s not at her desk I’ll stroll by and delete part of whatever document she’s working on — so long as it’s not mine.
◆◆◆
At midday I take an elevator down to the associates’ car park. I sit in my car and listen to the news. Still nothing about last night. I’m beginning to wonder who drugged who and if the last laugh was on Ava — maybe I dreamed the whole outing? Or are the parents holding back? Or even worse, the cops? The thought of the parents holding back makes me angry. The thought of the cops holding back makes me nauseous.
Then something strange happens. As I open the car door it connects with something solid and someone screams. It’s a woman. She looks to be in her early thirties. The force of the door opening has knocked her over though I didn’t even see her walking past. Where the hell was she?
She doesn’t look badly hurt which is neither here nor there to me. But we have closed-circuit cameras here so I enquire as to her well-being in a solicitous manner.
She’s nursing something under her jacket. “Fuck you,” she says. Then she pulls a screwdriver from under her jacket and plunges it into my thigh.
I let out a high-pitched scream. I can hear myself scream and I sound like a woman, which in itself is distressing and embarrassing. Ideally, I now have plenty of reason to hurt her back. But my normal instincts have deserted me and instead I am doubled over looking at the screwdriver which is still sticking out of my leg.
Being a committed company man I attended a first-aid course only weeks ago and am intensely aware the screwdriver is close to a main artery. Hypothetically I could have bled to death in the firm’s car park in a matter of minutes had she struck a few inches higher.
Now every fiber in my being is shrieking at me to pull the screwdriver out. But I’m remembering from the first-aid course that this isn’t the optimal thing to do. I was high for the duration of that course and who would have known I took so much information in that day?
I look up just in time to see her come at me again, this time with a knife. It’s big, like a butcher’s knife, and I’m not sure where she was hiding it. Adrenaline surges through my body, along with another emotion that’s alien to me. Fear.
I grab her wrist but not before the knife slices right through my suit jacket and into my arm. I bash her hand hard against my car’s wing mirror. The mirror smashes and now there are tiny particles of glass in my hand. I hear the knife bounce along the concrete.
Another wave of adrenaline suddenly releases into my system, overriding all that is sensible and any differentiation between acceptable and unacceptable. And I’m thinking very quickly where I can take this woman and finish her. Without the security cameras catching it. Only they’re probably catching this. But it’s too late as I’m losing control. Not like me at all. But this wasn’t planned.
All by itself my right fist draws back, my gut clenching, my hand aching in anticipation of the sweet rush of that first initial impact.
Then something hard and cold butts up against the back of my head. “Let go of her,” says a woman’s voice. “And put your hands on the car.”
There’s a heavy clicking sound that seems exceptionally close to my ear and I’m not well acquainted with firearms but I’m pretty sure this woman behind me has a gun to my head. Firearms are illegal here, so you have to be slightly concerned about the attitude of someone walking round a car park in the middle of the day with one in their handbag.
“I’m not going to say it again.”
“I’m not doing anything to her!” I say. “She just attacked me! Look at my leg, there’s a fucking screwdriver hanging out of it!”
I glance down at my leg and the screwdriver looks even further in than it was before, which is not possible, but I feel light-headed at the thought. Then the deranged bitch I’m holding takes her opportunity to wrench free and hares across the parking lot, disappearing down the stairwell.
“Don’t let her get away,” I say, screwing my head as far around as it will go in an effort to make eye contact. “This wasn’t my fault.”
The woman pokes my head forward with the gun. “So why were you about to hit her?”
“Hit her? She attacked me. I don’t even know her,” I say coldly.
“Women don’t just go around randomly attacking men they don’t know,” she says. “You’re a tall guy and she must have been all of five foot four.”
A new wave of anger washes over me. She’s radiating aggression and it’s all towards me, the victim. I realize also, in my confusion over what has just happened to me, that she is in no place to be demanding an explanation from me. This whole floor is the associates’ car park. She’s standing here with a gun to my head and I’m damn certain she’s not an associate with Bakers.
“Drop the gun,” I say. “I’m an associate at this firm and you’re about to be in a world of trouble.”
I turn slowly to face her. She lowers the gun and stares at me, unapologetic.
“I should call the cops,” I say, although no one with my recreational activities is ever in a good position to do such a thing. “This is an outrage.”
She adjusts something on the gun and casually slips it into an expensive-looking handbag. “It looked like an attack.”
“It was,” I say. “It was an attack on me. And you’ve just ruined any chance I have of working out why.”
Then I fee
l a twinge in my leg and remember the screwdriver. She follows my gaze. Blood is trickling out of the hole that’s been ripped in my insanely expensive trousers. The knife wound on my arm is so gory it almost looks fake. I breathe heavily and brace myself against the car with my good arm.
“Do you want me to remove it?” she asks. She’s finally come to the blazingly obvious conclusion I’m not dangerous. But there’s no sympathy in her voice. It’s an even, educated voice with not one grain of compassion.
I look at her. Is she crazy? No, maybe she just hasn’t recently been on a course that warns about removing impaled objects from flesh wounds.
The thing is, I don’t want to see a doctor about it. There are currently no official records containing my DNA or anything else that may legally be to my detriment at a later stage, and I want to keep it that way.
A searing fire rips through my thigh and I scream like a woman again. I look down and see she’s just pulled out the screwdriver. She’s saying something but I’m in too much pain to understand it. Now she’s pressing down on the wound with something out of my car. A sport sock. I clench my jaw and try not to faint.
My leg is hurting so badly I wonder if maybe I’ll have no option but to see a doctor. She couldn’t have made the experience more painful if she’d tried to. Even now she’s applying more pressure than necessary. I shove her hand away and tenderly press the sock back against my thigh.
“How’s that?” she says.
I look at her, properly now, and I forget my pain. She’s about the same age as me and almost the same height — which makes her tall. She’s the strangest-looking woman I’ve ever laid eyes on. But in a good way. Exotic. Her skin is pale. It’s the skin of someone twenty years younger. Red hair, green eyes, high angular cheekbones. She probably has a great smile but she’s not about to grace me with that.
Something shifts inside me. I’ve never wanted to violate someone so badly in my entire life and she’s not even wearing a school uniform. She wears an assertive entitled expression, though, which is probably the cumulative result of having men fall all over her wherever she goes.