I set them all up, checked that the screen was working and that the computer was working and then sat down at the back. Marketing didn't normally sit in on Sales pitches, but because the Sales boys didn't have the usual three days to learn the materials, they'd insisted on it in case there were questions that needed answering.
There were a lot of questions about this pitch in general that were unanswered, but we had so little time to get everything done. Aside from Vladivostok, this was definitely the most tenuous pitch I'd been on; normally the time-frames from concept to contract were sort of arbitrarily set by management as a performance indicator, but in this one, they actually mattered. No signature meant no mine, and that was at a cost of millions to Frost.
A bad pitch came at a greater personal cost to me, though.
I was completely certain that if we didn't get a sale, Jason would make sure I didn’t have a job on Friday. And that meant on Saturday, I'd be homeless unless I could cough up the several hundred a night for the hotel casual rates. I could for a few nights, but not for long enough to find somewhere else to live. I'd always thought if something happened at work I could stay with Henry... but I couldn't now. Not anymore.
Well, I just had to make sure it didn't happen and that we made this sale.
While I was trying to convince myself to go back upstairs, my phone buzzed in my pocket. I assumed it was either Sarah or Bree so I took it out to glance at the screen. It was a hidden number, and since I didn't want a repeat of that situation where Jason had yelled at me for not answering my phone, I took it. “Hello, Min Lee speaking.”
“Min! You answered!” There was only one person on the planet who'd call me and speak Korean. “Why don't you ever call your poor mother?”
Fuck. This was the absolute last thing I could deal with today. “Hi, Mum,” I said in English. “Didn't Henry tell you how busy I am with work? Really busy, actually, I—”
“Too busy to call your own mother?” she interrupted me. “Henry wasn't too busy to visit me. You're too busy to even call.”
This was an argument that I couldn't win, so I didn't try. “How's Grandma?” I asked, knowing it would get her started on long hospital visit stories. I thought I'd succeeded, but she only spent a couple of minutes talking about Grandma before she got stuck right back into me again.
“You should visit, Min. Spend some time with your grandma in her winter years. She'd like to get to know you.”
She's heavily demented, Mum. She wouldn't even recognise me from photos. “I can't just take time off like that, I told you,” I said. “Look, maybe if something unexpected happened soon and I wasn't able to keep working at Frost, then—”
“You're pregnant?” she said, completely misunderstanding me. “That's fantastic! Well, it's a sin, but I'm sure He will forgive you because I know Henry will propose to you soon, I just know it. I tried to get Henry to tell me when he's going to do it while he was here, but he's very tight-lipped. That's a good quality in a man, you don't want someone who will broadcast your private affairs. But if you're going to have a baby then you should definitely get married soon, because—”
“Mum, I'm not pregnant,” I cut her off. I'm potentially about to be fired and homeless. Also I'm transgender, I like women and I will never be pregnant.
She ignored me as if I hadn't spoken at all. “I'm sure the two of you can live on Henry's salary. And doesn't the Australian government pay for maternity leave now? You can send that back to us, instead, if Henry's still working there. I'm sure your grandma and I will be able to manage on that, even if it's a lot less than you normally give us.” She sighed peacefully. “I'm so happy for you, Min. Henry is going to make such a wonderful husband and a great father, and someone like you needs all the support they can get with motherhood. Everyone at Church loved him, and we all can't wait for the wedding. It makes me so happy to know when I'm so far away from you that you have someone like him taking care of you.”
I had my lips pressed in a tight line as she kept gushing and gushing.
“And it's so lucky that Frost decided to hire you, even though you're much too shy and really antisocial. The salary means I can stay at home and take care of my mother in her dying years. She took such good care of me when I was a child, after all. I'm glad I don't have to abandon her just as she's leaving us.”
I closed my eyes. There was nothing I could say to that. If there was no more high salary, I wouldn't be able to send money back and Mum would have to work and either put Grandma in a home or get a nurse to look after her during the day. That stuff was expensive.
Fuck. I had to get this pitch signed.
“Anyway, it's lovely to talk to you. Don’t eat bruised fruit, okay? That's bad for babies. I'm going to send you a book about what to eat when you're pregnant. Call me as soon as it's confirmed, okay, I’m going to buy that book now, bye!”
She hung up, and I sat there for a second staring at the phone.
I had no idea if she actually thought I was pregnant, or if Henry had said something — recently he'd been talking a lot about family and children, after all — or if this was just her very subtle and manipulative way of pushing me along to get married and have babies.
I had no idea about anything, and I just felt like shit.
I'd also overstayed my lunch and should probably go back upstairs so I could continue getting picked on by Jason into the early hours of the afternoon. I tried to reassure myself that if I’d made it through two days of being victimised by him, I could make it through the couple of hours I had left of him today before he had to go get Sasha Burov from the airport.
Despite that, I struggled to leave the room.
There were several floors between the media suites and thirty-six, but I took the stairwell again so I wouldn’t bump into anyone anyway. It meant that by the time I got upstairs I was puffed and I needed to stand behind the door and wait until I'd caught my breath again. I listened to make sure no one was waiting for a lift and only came out when it was silent.
I had thought people probably wouldn’t be back from lunch yet, but when I walked out onto the Marketing floor, I discovered I was wrong. Most of the department was back from lunch, but they weren’t working yet. They were chatting, bunched together watching video clips on each other's computers, or finishing off their food.
I tried to sneak around the side where people looked the busiest and hoped no one would notice; no such luck.
“Hey! Mini!” someone called. I recognised the voice, it was the old lead from my last pitch. I pretended not to hear him, but he just shouted louder and made everyone look. To stop him from drawing so much attention to me, I turned and gave him a wave. However, as soon as I'd acknowledged him he made a ‘come here’ gesture. My heart pounded.
I hurriedly shook my head. “I have work to do.”
“Two seconds!” he shouted back.
Everyone was starting to watch us and I wanted them to stop so I just decided to do what he said.
Walking over to his desk pod, I felt eyes on me and as I passed people, they leant their heads together and whispered behind me, turned to smirk at their colleagues and someone smothered laughter. They think I’m a joke, I realised. I desperately wanted to go back to being invisible to them, someone whose name only came up when they wanted to talk graphics.
The snickering behind me was too much. It was too much to deal with, and so awful that I was numb.
“Dave,” someone said to the lead and passed him a stack of printouts. “Here, ask Mini about those.”
Dave looked down at them and then up at me. “So,” he said, and I expected every second for him to make some comment about what he’d heard Jason shout. “We’re about to send these back to our graphic artist for changes, could you take a quick look and tell me if anything stands out?” He pulled out a chair at his desk for me to sit in and held the printouts at me.
Cautiously, I took them and sat down. As soon as I’d done that, the rest of his team came over and crowded
around, probably to hear what I had to say. It was claustrophobic with all these men standing over me, but there was nothing I could do.
I tried to focus on the materials. It was difficult, but as I flipped through them, a couple of things looked off and I pointed to them and told Dave my suggested changes. Everyone nodded and when I was done, I handed the printouts back to him and went to stand up.
I couldn’t, because there were too many people around me and my chair wouldn't move at all from under the desk. My pulse started to race.
“Thanks,” Dave told me, “you’re a lifesaver. None of us have any idea about materials.” He looked like he wanted to say something else and mentally I begged him not to. It may or may not have shown on my face; he’d never been that perceptive anyway. None of them had. “So…” he began conversationally.
Panicking, I looked up at all the men above me, trying to figure out if I could just force my chair back and stand up.
“Is it true what Jason said?” he asked. “Are you…?”
I must have looked like a deer in headlights.
One of the other boys finished his sentence. “A tranny,” he said. Not cruelly; at least, not intentionally cruelly. When someone elbowed him and told him to shush, he said, “What! That’s the word for it, isn’t it? ‘Tranny’?”
“Transsexual,” one of his colleagues corrected him. “The word is ‘transsexual’, ‘tranny’ is really fucking rude, man, it’s like ‘faggot’, you don’t say that shit, at least not at work.”
The original guy shrugged. “I don’t know, I kind of like it,” he said. “Mini the Tranny, it has a ring to it. Sounds like a kid’s book or something.”
They were all talking to each other over my head while I sat there, paralysed and struggling to breathe. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t say anything. It was like a nightmare where the monsters were chasing me but I couldn’t run away.
“Mini,” someone clapped me on the shoulder. I jumped. “You never really liked being called that, did you? Well, I’ve got a new nickname for you. How about ‘Manny’?” The men around him laughed and I had a few more people clap me on the back.
“Does this mean you’ll come to strip clubs with us now?” someone asked me. “Or do we need to wait until after surgery? How do they do that, anyway? Do they get a donor dick off some guy in a motorcycle accident, or what? I’ve always wondered.”
“Dude, you need to learn to use Google, that's not how they do it,” someone called over the partition.
They weren’t going to stop; I couldn’t deal with this. “I need to work,” I rasped. When it was clear no one had heard me, I said it louder and forced my chair back directly into a few legs and feet so I could stand up. “I need to go back to work!”
I stood up, taller than most of them, and they all stopped talking and gaped at me. The guy who I’d nearly run over with my chair bent down to rub his thigh. “Jesus, Mini, you could have just asked me to move.”
They were all watching me, quiet. I hated having all these people staring at me, and a couple of them seemed offended that I’d ruined their fun, light-hearted conversation about my genitals. They just had no fucking idea. I turned and went back into Oslo, pulling the door shut behind me.
Jason was sitting at my desk, apparently waiting for me.
I glanced around the room; there was no one else in it. I stood in place because I wasn’t sure what he was going to do, but I felt apprehensive about it.
He didn’t say anything off the bat. He just tossed me the Employee ID tag that I used to get into the building and I caught it, confused. He nodded at it, and when I looked down, I saw someone had printed off that picture I’d painted of me as a guy, cut the face out and sticky-taped it over my photo on the ID.
While I was reeling from that, Jason said, “You know what the problem with that is, apart from the fact that no one in here is ever going to call you 'Mr Min Lee'?”
I shook my head, because there were a lot of problems with that.
“The problem is that someone had to get in here, open your drawer and spend several minutes actually doing that. And do you know how they did it?”
I swallowed.
“Because you didn’t lock the fucking door when you left, Mini.”
I flushed. Fuck, had I really done something that stupid…? All I could remember when I left was just being so worried about what people were going to say about me once I was out of this room that I... I must have forgotten.
“I’m sorry,” I stammered, “I’ve just got a lot on my mind.”
He stood up from my chair and went to leave Oslo. I was still standing by the door, and he stopped next to me on the way out. He looked tired and angry. “Mini, every single person on this project is stressed out. None of us are sleeping. We all have a lot on our minds. You’re the only seasoned rep who’s fucking up, though, did you notice?”
I just looked at the ground.
He wasn’t done. “When you crash and burn on team projects, Mini, people crash and burn with you. I told you yesterday: if that tranny shit is what’s distracting you, leave it at home, okay? Pull yourself together, I’m fucking sick of this. You’ve already made me look like a total idiot in front of Diane, and I spent years trying to get her respect.” He shook his head in disgust, and then left.
I stood there for a moment after he’d gone, looking down at my ID with the painting taped to it.
I was losing the plot. But how was I supposed to ‘leave it at home’ when it was here, haunting me, every second of every day? How could I leave that conversation with the Marketing boys I'd just had out there at home? How could I leave Jason shouting at me in the toilets over what he’d heard at home? How could I leave seeing myself in a dress in every reflective surface at home?
I swallowed. I’d fucking ‘pull myself together’ in a heartbeat if I could, you asshole. If I had the option, I’d just do it. But I didn’t have the option, did I?
I felt like everything was slipping through my fingers. Everything I'd worked so hard at my whole life: I'd worked myself half to death at high school and uni, all to get this amazing, high-flying job, and then I'd slogged my guts out at this job, too. And now it was slipping away from me. No matter how I tried, I felt like I couldn't hold onto it and it was getting further and further away, and it was so unfair, so fucking unfair, because it was over something I couldn't control.
A lump formed in my throat. I didn't ask for this, Jason, I thought. I didn't ask for this. I don't want this. It just is, and I just am, and I can't help it. I don't want to look in the mirror and feel wrong and bad and depressed about what I see. I don't want to lie in bed wishing things were different and wishing I just knew what's right and how I'm supposed to be... I just do. That's how it is for me. And I can't control it or turn it off when I feel like it, or don't you fucking think I would have already fucking done it, Jason? Don't you fucking think I would have already done it?
I was tearing up, and I couldn't do that here. I didn't want Jason or Ian or Carlos or any of the Sales boys to see me like this.
I left Oslo—stopping long enough to lock it this time—and made a break for the Women's toilets. I didn't care who saw me run or what they thought. I was already a fucking laughing stock, it couldn't get any worse.
Once I was in there I went right to the far wall and leant there, looking upwards and trying not to blink so my tears wouldn't spill down my cheeks. In the end it was a lost cause. Like everything else, I couldn't stop them.
Hunched against the wall, with my arms tightly folded across my stomach, I just stood there and wept for all my wasted effort, all my hard work and the giant mess me and my 'perfect' life had become in a short two months. It just wasn’t fair.
Sarah found me.
I didn't know how long I'd been in there when she did. She walked over to the hand basin near where I was standing and leant against it, reaching out and putting a comforting hand on my arm.
We stood there for a few minutes. Eventual
ly, she said, “You know it'll all be over soon, right?”
“Not soon enough.” I was sniffing, and she went and grabbed me some toilet paper out of one of the stalls so I could blow my nose.
While I did that, she rubbed my arm. “Okay, though, I have a dilemma. Men normally like to be left alone when they're sad and women normally like hugs so I'm not sure how to comfort you?”
I laughed bleakly. “Are those the only two choices I've got?”
She shrugged. We stood there for a minute while I tried desperately to stop crying over all of this. “You've got to report him, Min.”
I closed my eyes and shook my head. The last thing I needed was Diane to find out we’d spoke to Sean and for her to get angry with us, too.
Sarah guessed what I was thinking. “I am so over this mortal-enemy thing Diane and Sean have got going. It's not our fault they can't play nice. Why are they making it our problem? Come on,” she said, and then took my arm. “Let's go find Sean, I don't even care what he has or hasn’t said or done anymore. Anything is better than this.”
When she started to drag me out of the bathroom, I got as far as the door before I panicked. I dug my heels into the tiles as my heart pounded. “I can't,” I told Sarah, “I can't, I can't go out there and I can’t talk to Sean, please…”
She let go of me as soon as I protested, but she looked worried. “Min, in like an hour I have to go get ready to meet Burov tonight and I am literally going to be sitting there stressing about you unless I know this is taken care of. And even if Sean was somehow the cause of the Vladivostok pitch flopping and he and Jason are involved, he's still required to obey the law and do something about Jason and the crap work environment he creates.” She paused. “Plus he's less scary than Diane and she's the other alternative.”
Under My Skin Page 62