by Nell Stevens
I am worried about the food situation. Although I know I have enough to stay alive, it’s far from ideal, and I’m concerned that hunger will affect my ability to work properly. In Stanley, I’m too embarrassed to admit to my predicament, and insist whenever anyone asks that I have more than enough food to get me through my Bleaker stint. Somewhere in my mind, too, is the idea that this is supposed to be a challenge, that I wanted to get as far from my comfort zone as I possibly could, and the difficulty of feeding myself for the weeks ahead is part of the point of the trip.
I am surrounded by little heaps of sachets of powdered soup, instant porridge, granola bars, and boxes of Ferrero Rocher chocolates, which are a convenient combination of indulgent, lightweight, and calorific. I calculate the total calories of everything I can afford to bring, and then divide it by the number of days—forty-one– that I will spend on the island. It works out that I will eat 1,085 calories per day. This, I tell myself, is definitely enough to survive.
Maura pokes her head round the door. “They’ve announced the times for tomorrow’s flights on the radio,” she says. “You’re leaving at nine.” She notices, then, the pile of food on the floor. She looks horrified. “That’s not everything you’re taking with you, is it?”
“Oh, no,” I say, smiling, attempting nonchalance. “No—the rest is already packed.”
“The Personal Assistant”
“So that’s a lesson about humanity for you,” said David, looking up from his food. “For every visionary who builds a skyscraper, there are ten suicidal wankers waiting to jump off it.” He gestured at Emily with his chopsticks as though she should be taking notes.
Emily stared at what remained of the steamed garoupa in front of him. It had been served whole, and he had prodded meat away from the spine in chunks. The plate was a mess of skin and scales and discarded flesh; only the head of the fish remained intact. Its mouth gaped, as though it were aghast at what had happened.
“Just make sure you don’t call the suicides ‘wankers’ in the report,” she said.
“Ha!” said David, more loudly than the joke deserved. He jabbed his chopsticks into the air again. A flake of fish flew off and landed on the cuff of Emily’s blouse. She flicked it onto the tabletop, but it left behind a spreading stain on her sleeve.
“I’ll have you go through and edit it out,” he said. “But between you and me, Emily Blaine, wankers they are.”
“Do you want to go over the schedule for tomorrow, or can it wait until the morning?”
“Morning.” He leaned across and poured more wine into her glass. As she sipped at it, he sought out her eyes and held her gaze. “Everything OK, Em?”
“Fine.” Emily looked away at the restaurant, where waiters were hovering beside tanks of live fish.
“I’m glad you’re here,” David said. “The brains of the operation.”
“Damn straight,” she said. “You’re just window dressing.”
He blew her a kiss across the table.
When they had finished eating, David signed the bill and gave Emily the receipt to charge to expenses. They wandered out onto Gloucester Road.
David asked, “Are you coming back to the hotel?”
“Yes,” she said. “Where else would I be going?”
“I thought you might have plans.”
She patted the binder that was jutting out of her handbag. It contained agendas for his meetings the following day; the numbers of drivers and the venues of the appointments; the names of VIPs and bullet-pointed information about each of them so that David wouldn’t embarrass himself during introductions.
“The only plans I have are yours, David.”
He put his hand on the small of her back and threw an arm out to hail a cab.
“That’s why I love you,” he said.
She laughed, then worried she had over-reacted. She knew that she was half a glass of wine away from saying, “I love you, too,” though it wasn’t true. It wasn’t true, but she would have said it anyway.
—
It was the penultimate evening of their four-day trip to Hong Kong. David was the director of a research initiative investigating the socioeconomic, geographical and psychosocial determinants of suicide for what was called the “philanthropic arm” of an international bank; there was going to be a report, and a chapter on high-density, high-rise Asian cities. Socioeconomic, geographical and psychosocial determinants of suicide. Emily typed the words at least ten times each day; sometimes as she tried to fall asleep they would swim around her head. When she blinked, she saw them. Two months ago, when she had first started her job as David’s assistant, they had seemed foreign and intimidating. Now, they rolled off her tongue as easily as her name, or David’s.
In the taxi on the way back to the hotel, it seemed to Emily that Hong Kong was made up entirely of light: the headlights and tail lights of traffic, adverts sliding up and down the sides of buildings, the bright shop windows making everything in them look gold-plated. The hotel lobby: chandeliers dripping from the ceiling reflected everywhere in mirrors; the lift: illuminated numbers flashing and vanishing as she and David ascended, standing, she thought, a fraction closer to each other than other people might have stood.
She felt pressure building in her ears as they neared David’s floor. Without saying a word, he reached out and tugged at the sash that tied the waist of her blouse. It came undone and sank to her feet. Emily stared forward as cool air seeped under her newly loosened shirt. When the lift opened at the thirty-fifth floor, she waited, not moving, as David stepped out. The doors slid shut behind him. She crouched to grab the sash and tucked it into her bag. She pressed two fingers against her neck as though she were sick and felt her heart, reliable, implacable, beating.
The phone was ringing in her room as she entered it. She kicked off her shoes into the dark in front of her and then tripped over them as she moved to answer the call.
“David?”
“Em, can you do me a favour?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Are you in bed?”
She wondered whether he wanted her to say yes.
“I literally just got in the door.”
She hadn’t had time to turn the lights on. The room was illuminated by the city outside her window.
“I want to go to dinner tomorrow night.”
“OK.”
“So, can you book a table somewhere?”
“Of course.” There was a silence. “This couldn’t wait until the morning?”
She wondered then what David was doing. He was thirty feet beneath her, in a room more or less identical to hers. She walked towards the window. Behind her the phone cord stretched out like a leash. She pulled back the gauze curtain and looked out.
“I just thought I might as well tell you now.”
“OK.”
“Aren’t you going to ask where, and when, and that sort of thing?”
“Yes,” she said. She let her head fall forward so that her forehead pressed against the glass. Two parallel streaks of condensation plumed out beneath her nose. “What time?”
“Eight.”
“Did you have anywhere specific in mind?”
“Yes. There’s a place at the top of the ICC in Kowloon. Highest building in the city; highest restaurant in the world.” He sounded as though he had rehearsed the line, or was reading it from a page in a guidebook. “That’s what I have in mind.”
In a tower block across the street, two people were having sex. They were framed in their window. Emily peeled her forehead back from the glass and wiped the smudge of her own breath away. The couple were in a room about parallel with David’s. The woman was perched on the windowsill, her legs splayed apart; she was holding her own ankles. The skin of her back was white where it was stuck against the windowpane. The man’s hips jerked backwards and forwards against her. She barely moved. She was looking away from him, to the side, at one of her own feet.
“Table for two,” David said.
Emily wondered whether he was standing at his window, seeing the same thing. She wondered whether he had seen the couple, and then decided to call her.
“I’ll book it,” she said. “I’ll book a car.”
“That’s why I love you,” David said.
“Anything else?”
There was another pause. He sighed and the receiver crackled.
“Nope.”
“Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Em.”
She waited for him to hang up and then let the hand holding the phone fall to her side. She watched the couple across the street: the man’s awkward lurching and the woman’s squashed back. Below in the road, moving dots were people walking about. In one of the blocks to her left, a boy was sitting on a little balcony, his legs hanging through the railings beneath him, his hair blown about by the wind. She felt dizzy. The hotel was swaying again, as though it were contemplating throwing her and everyone else out. They would plummet like David’s suicidal wankers, face first towards the pavement.
—
Nobody had seemed to know what to do with her when she arrived on her first day as David’s new assistant. She stood in the lobby, too nervous to sit down, while the receptionist phoned someone.
“Emily Blaine is here. The new Carla. Who’s supposed to be sorting her out?”
Emily walked along a line of photographs of people in the organization. They were black-and-white pictures; the heads floated on the wall in silver frames. She moved along the row until she came to David’s portrait, which showed him standing at a podium in front of a large bar chart. He was grinning and biting a pen, one hand raised to make a point. The label on the frame read, “David Eliot, Director, Global Suicide Research Strand.” She heard a click behind her and turned to see that David himself was there, cracking his knuckles and baring his teeth in a grin.
They had met before, once, at her interview, and she had been surprised then that he looked so young. Afterwards she had googled him and found the dates of his graduation from Cambridge; from those she had calculated that he was only two years older than her. Their lives, juxtaposed, made her feel miserable: he was directing his own research project for an international philanthropic organization; she was applying for any job that didn’t require a first-class degree, or a master’s, or two years of relevant experience. He was earning a six-figure salary; she had spent the three years since graduating from Birmingham University on an agricultural collective in Devon. She had decided that she disliked him, and she disliked the organization. For a charity, it was too slick, too corporate, too full of glossy photographs. Shouldn’t they have spent that money curing cancer and feeding hungry children?
After her interview, she and her flatmate had made a drunken list of all the ways she could earn money that didn’t involve being David Eliot’s assistant. “Run a coffee stand outside a Tube station,” they had written. “Sous-chef. Bus driver. Politician. Prostitute.”
And then he had called her in person the next morning: “Emily, do us the honour of joining the team,” and she had said yes, of course, thrilled, yes.
“Emily Blaine,” said David.
“Hi,” she said, “hi.”
He shook her hand so tightly her knuckles ground together. It took a fraction longer than she expected for him to release the grip.
“Emily Blaine,” he said again.
She had the impression, for a second, that he had fallen in love with her. He was searching her eyes as though he and she were very old friends, and had just been reunited.
“That’s me,” she said. She realized she had folded her lips inwards in an awkward smile, and tried to correct it.
He continued to scrutinize her; she wondered whether she had something on her face. She rubbed under her eyes, then pulled her sleeves down over her hands. His gaze flicked to her chest and then up again. She did the same, to check that all the buttons of her blouse were done up.
“All right,” David said, eventually, as though it had been she who was holding them up. “Let’s get to it. You’ll have Carla’s old desk.”
Carla’s desk, when they reached it, looked to Emily as though Carla had not intended to leave for good. There was a notepad open on a page half-filled with notes and doodles of houses. She sat down and tried to imagine that it would soon look routine to her: the phone, the computer monitor, the tray of stationery, the view of Bloomsbury outside the window. She could make out the bulging green roof of the British Museum.
“Where’s Carla now?” she asked.
She couldn’t tell whether or not David’s expression showed irritation.
“She moved to Hong Kong,” he said.
When she opened the drawers, she found an open box of granola bars; a single red woollen glove; a packet of pills to relieve the burning, pain and urgency of urinary tract infections; and a card that said “Bon Voyage!” The card was filled with messages from people in the office. Emily read it on her lap as she pretended to study a health-and-safety leaflet. “It won’t be the same without you,” someone had written. “Our loss is Hong Kong’s gain!” She checked every single name that was signed on the card; David’s was not there.
Being David’s assistant required the repetition of a few simple tasks. She booked flights, hotels, meetings, meeting rooms and dinners. She had a company BlackBerry and a company laptop. She was given access to his email account and was to handle all his messages except those that automatically filtered into a folder called “Personal etc.” She should respond to routine or low-priority messages herself, and sign off as David. Anything that was high-priority she should mark with a red flag and find out in their daily meeting what response he wanted her to make.
“You’ll get the hang of it,” he said. “Basically, ‘Can you speak to my university group’ and ‘Can you meet on Tuesday’ equals low-priority. ‘What has happened to that £500,000 that’s unaccounted for in the budget?,’ ‘Should we cancel this project?,’ ‘Should we fire Emily Blaine?’ equals high-priority.”
“Got it.”
“I’m joking. About the firing thing.”
“Right.”
“You’re allowed to smile, you know.”
“Sure.”
He gave her his signature and told her to practise forging it so that she didn’t have to bother him with paperwork that needed his sign-off. He had a meeting, he said, but it wouldn’t take long. She spent half an hour signing his name over and over again on the bottom of the page of Carla’s doodles. “David Eliot. David Eliot. David Eliot.” She wrote it so many times that her brain switched off, and when she came back to herself, unsure whether seconds or minutes had passed, she had begun to write her own name instead. “David Eliot David Eliot Emily Blaine David Emily Eliot Carla Carla.” She tore the page off the pad, folded it in half and slid it into the drawer with Carla’s UTI pills.
She found a folder on her computer called “Carla admin”; it contained details of Carla’s contract. Carla, she discovered, had earned several thousand more than she did. She raced through the dry, legal language of the terms of employment, heart thudding, as though she were reading a thriller; she felt that she was looking for something without knowing what it was.
A hand fell on her shoulder and her finger clicked to close the window instantly. David was there.
“Everything A-OK, Emily Blaine?” he said. He half-smiled in a way that made her think that he could tell what she had been doing. He was standing very close, stroking her jacket, which was draped over the back of her chair.
She wondered if she had turned pink. She felt sweat prickle on the nape of her neck, under her blouse. She closed a couple more open windows on the screen: a spreadsheet and an email, to make it look as though she had been in the general process of shutting things down.
“Fine,” she said.
He fiddled with the collar of the jacket, and found the price tag still attached. He tugged at it.
“What’s this still doing on?”
She knew she was blushing; she could feel the skin of her face heating up.
“Thinking of taking it back?” said David. “Are you considering running away from us back to the farm?”
“No,” she said. “No, I just forgot about it.”
He reached over her and took a pair of scissors out of the box of stationery on her desk. She didn’t turn but heard the sound of the snip behind her. The label hissed against the floor as it landed.
When she got home her flatmate was just leaving the house.
“How was it?”
“Boring,” said Emily. “Nothing special.”
“The guy’s still a dick?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Bit of a dick.”
She sat on the back step and smoked three cigarettes in a row. She looked out at the grass verge that circled Stoke Newington’s East Reservoir. She felt contorted and tired; for some reason her limbs ached. She blew smoke out in front of her. Then she went in, opened her new work laptop, and read every single email in David’s “Personal etc.” folder.
It was three a.m. when she finished, and by then she felt that she had become an expert, a leading authority on David Eliot. She knew about his relationship with his mother, and the affair his sister’s husband was having and how his brother felt about keeping it secret from her. She knew his friend George was getting married and having a stag do that might be in Amsterdam but might be in Vegas. She knew that David signed emails to his family “Davey xx” and to his friends, “Dave,” that he worried about his father cutting him out of his will, that he bought wildlife documentaries and books of first-hand accounts of combat in Iraq from Amazon, and bid on vintage computer games on eBay. And she knew that at 2:17 a.m. on the previous day, he had received a message entitled “Delete this!” from Carla L. Blakey. It contained a single line: “Stop it. Just stop it. Don’t respond to this.”