Trilemma

by Jennifer Mortimer

  He jiggles the pedal and then backs out of the car with something in the palm of his hand.

  “Looks like this might have got stuck under the foot brake and maybe slipped sideways, jamming the pedal up,” he says, holding it out.

  “A spring?”

  Ben climbs into the car, presses the brake that now falls flat to the floor, and turns on the ignition. The brake holds firm. He puts the car into gear and drives slowly down the zag, testing the brake all the way.

  “She’s okay now.”

  I climb into the passenger’s seat.

  Wal rubs his chin. “I won’t tell the girls what a close shave you’ve had. Vivienne gets anxious about car accidents.”

  We wave good-bye and head on down the road.

  “Phew,” says Ben. “That was close.”

  “It wasn’t my lack of maintenance anyway,” I reply.

  “In future, remember not to let junk roll round in the car,” he says. “Any idea where it came from?”

  “Nothing that springs to mind,” and I giggle.

  Ben smiles and pats my knee. I reach out and run my hand up and down his warm, strong back and let my head rest briefly on his shoulder.

  When we get home, I set out some Stilton and crackers and open a bottle of wine.

  “Alison asked if I want to join them for Christmas,” I tell him.

  “I bet she’ll put on a great feast.”

  “Yep.”

  “And Christmas is the time you’re supposed to be with your family.”

  We finish eating in companionable silence.

  “Another glass of wine?” He holds up the bottle and smiles.

  I look across the table at the man I chose to give up when they offered me the job. I still haven’t written the report.

  The wolves are calling me to rejoin the fray, but their calls have grown faint. Instead I hear the sound of the birds’ distant cries as we teetered at the edge of the cliff, wondering whether we would live or die.

  “Why not.”

  We take the bottle up to the roof. The sky is dark now, and the ever-present breeze nips at my skin. Below us the lights of the city twinkle, like the stars above us.

  “Ahhh!” Ben gasps as he lowers himself into the warm depths of the Jacuzzi.

  “Do you enjoy this?” I say, reaching out.

  I float across his body. “And this?”

  Chapter 30

  Ben is still asleep when I wake, just before the alarm on my cell phone is due to sound. I lean across to switch it off so it won’t disturb him. His face looks peaceful in the gentle light that intrudes through the crack in the curtains. Jaw relaxed, eyes shut, brown hair coiling over the white pillowcase.

  I should get up. Yet still I lie, warm in the depths of my bed, my lover beside me. He sighs and rolls over. I snuggle against his back and reach my arm over him. His hand catches mine against his chest and he rolls toward me, and we make love again.

  When I finally slip out of bed, it is nearly nine o’clock and Helen will be wondering where I am. I send an e-mail to tell her I will be late. Can she get Tom to summarize the figures and write the report for Stewart Hobb?

  Ben is lying on his back propped up on the pillows. We haven’t talked about when we will meet again.

  He smiles as I hand him his coffee and climb back into bed. “Aren’t you going to be late?”

  “It’s okay. I’ve got Tom to write up my report. Paper?”

  “Thanks.” He takes the World section and I open the Business pages.

  I finish my coffee and we swap sections.

  “Have you decided to join them for Christmas?”

  I glance over at him, but he is looking down at the newspaper again. “I want to. It’s important I build some kind of relationship with my sisters. And, if I turn them down, they may not ask again.”

  I don’t want to lose them.

  I don’t want to lose Ben either. “When can you come back?”

  He drops the paper on the floor and picks up the advertisement insert. “Perhaps you could come and visit Em and me?”

  For a moment, I feel warmed by his invitation. But it’s not really feasible. Getting there takes hours. I don’t know when I’ll be able to spare the time.

  “It’s easier if you come here.”

  “It’s pretty bloody expensive, Lin. I can’t afford it.”

  “I don’t mind paying.”

  “Well, I do. Besides, with Fay going away it will be hard for me to leave.”

  “How old is Em now? Seventeen? Surely she could spend a weekend on her own.”

  Ben frowns. “She’s still only a kid. She gets afraid when she’s alone in the house.”

  “Perhaps she could have a friend over to stay? In America we did that all the time. Well, not me, but some kids did.”

  He is shaking his head. “Parents don’t like to leave teenagers to fend for themselves. You never know what might happen.”

  “Oh, come on, this is New Zealand! The safest little country in the world.”

  I can see by the way his face has set that he has no intention of leaving his little girl alone in his house, even with a friend to stay, whatever I say.

  Reality crashes back down on me. Why did I think Ben and I could have any kind of relationship? We’d never managed to meld our lives together before. And even though I’d come to the same goddamn country, we were still a long long way apart.

  Same old impossible situation. Today he will leave like he always leaves me, with no promise of any return.

  I flick to the end of the section, put it down, and get out of bed. “I’d better get ready.”

  When I emerge from the bathroom, Ben is in the kitchen making toast. I get dressed quickly and sit in front of the mirror. I hold my face between the palms of my hands and feel the heat of my skin, still flushed with anger. Then I paint on my corporate face, stroke by stroke, tint by tint.

  He carries in a plate of buttered toast dabbed with Marmite and places it beside me.

  “I don’t have time to eat that.”

  Ben stands behind me holding the plate. In the mirror I watch his smile slowly fade.

  “Right,” and he turns away and goes back to the living room.

  “I’ll be off then,” I say, taking up my laptop case. “Can you leave the key under the pot when you go?”

  Ben looks at me and I look back at him. I don’t move. Then he walks over, puts his arms around me and kisses me. I hold myself rigid.

  “Good-bye, Lin,” he says, and his hands slip away from my shoulders to let me walk out the door.

  And I walk down the path, get in my car, and drive to work.

  I don’t think about him. There’s no point. No point at all.

  Helen brings me my schedule for the day. My schedule is always full. I wonder for a moment if there is anything I can get Tom to do instead of me. He seemed happy to write the final summary for the Board. I shouldn’t have to do everything myself.

  “Did you have a nice weekend?” she asks.

  I glance at her and see nothing but friendly interest in her gaze. But I’m sure she’s probing, wondering why her workaholic boss got in late for once.

  “An old friend was visiting,” I reply. “We took a trip up to Hawke’s Bay.”

  “Oh, yes?” she says. “What did you think of Napier? All the Art Deco buildings are marvelous, don’t you think?”

  “We didn’t make it that far. But I’m spending Christmas there, so I’ll make sure to visit Napier.”

  She nods, relieved that I won’t miss out on some of the wonders of New Zealand.

  “It’s great you’re getting to see more of New Zealand, Lin. And that you’re taking a bit of time off. You know what they say about all work and no play?”

  “But I am a dull girl, Helen.”

  “Nah! You’re so clever and so energetic, no one would think of you as dull. And you’re always dressed in nice colors, and your hair is lovely.”

  I smile back at her and she nod
s again and leaves. I follow her out and go into my bathroom to check that my lipstick is still perfect.

  In the mirror the immaculate image fades under my gaze. Instead, I see the dull-brown little girl growing up in Mom’s house, the grind who always did well at school but was never invited to parties. Never got the cool guy as the boyfriend.

  When my cell phone rings, I see my home telephone number displayed. Even though I know there’s no point, my pulse starts racing.

  “Ben?”

  “Lin, I—” but the phone goes dead. Damn. Forgot to connect it to the charger last night.

  My anger has ebbed away, leaving me feeling foolish and anxious and regretful. I hurry back up to my office.

  Helen looks up from the phone and says, “I’ve got Mr. Smith on the line for you, Lin.”

  I point two fingers in the air and vanish inside, closing the door behind me, and call home from my desk.

  But the call switches to voice mail. “This is Lin Mere. I can’t answer your call right now so please leave a message after the tone. Beeeep.”

  Helen puts her head in the door. “He’s been on hold for a couple of minutes, and I think he’s getting annoyed.”

  “Give me a minute.”

  But when I call again the telephone rings and there is no answer.

  I sit at my desk and let out a long sigh, and then I pick up the phone again.

  “Okay, Helen, you can put Robert through now.”

  When I hang up the phone after being yelled at by Robert, the breath of the wolves tickles the back of my neck. I had promised I would give Hera my complete commitment and I had failed. I reach up and try to rub the coldness away. I had relaxed and spent a weekend without any thought for the job.

  And now I had to pay the price.

  Chapter 31

  “Tom,” I say calmly when he answers, my voice under control. “Why did you put all those red flags in the Board summary?”

  There is silence on the line. “Scott helped me write it. We’ve got a lot of issues, Lin.”

  “Issues, yes, but nothing we can’t solve. And I always provide the solutions as well as any problems in the report.”

  “But we don’t have any solutions.”

  “There are always solutions. Let’s have a meeting with the team and see what we can flush out.”

  I am still fuming when Helen puts her head around the door. “It’s the chairman,” she says.

  “Linnette,” Stewart Hobb says, “we are extremely concerned about the number of red flags in the report this month. And why was Heke writing the report?”

  “I asked Tom to prepare the summary. Obviously, I should have reviewed it before he sent the report out.”

  “If there’s a major problem with quality, then it’s important the Board gets to know about it.”

  “There isn’t a major problem with quality.”

  “That’s not an answer, and you know it. I am not happy about this, and I’m not happy that you are misleading us.”

  I hold the phone and curse silently. “I am sorry you feel that way, Stewart,” I say in a clipped voice. “I can assure you that we have practical work-arounds for all the issues listed in the report. On the up side, we’ve managed to get the council to agree to let us work on the esplanade between the hours of midnight and five a.m.”

  “That will cost more.”

  “Inevitably, but it is the best we’re likely to get. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to get the Government to budge on the launch date.”

  Hobb snorts. “I told you not to bother trying.”

  “We had to give it one last shot,” I reply.

  He hangs up. I sigh and then I start going through the issues for which we need to find solutions. My temper is very short today. The thin veneer is wearing through.

  Tom introduces the first issue on the list.

  “The customer-care package doesn’t match the sales process the consultants defined,” he says. “So it looks like there will be more modifications, which will push out the time frames and hit the budget.”

  “Why don’t we model the processes around what the packages can support?” I suggest.

  “But those won’t be the best processes.”

  “Best is a luxury we can’t afford.”

  Tom’s lips thin and he looks down at his papers.

  “Next?”

  Peake introduces the next issue. “Ian wants the customer operations staff to start in the New Year. We didn’t budget those costs until March.”

  “But March is when we’re supposed to go live,” says Ian.

  “So that’s when we need salespeople.”

  “They need to be trained first.”

  “How long does it take to train people?”

  “More than a couple of days for God’s sake!”

  “Surely, less than a couple of months!”

  “Ian,” I say. “We can’t take on any new staff until February. And we can only take on half the number you’re asking for.”

  “We can’t give our customers the best possible service unless we have the full team and spend the full eight weeks on training them on all the processes.”

  “We can’t afford the extra staff and training to give our customers the best possible service. We can only afford a core team, enough for very good service, which we’ll get by training them to think about the customer and use their initiative to solve problems, rather than be trained in every possible scenario.”

  “We wanted the best!”

  Get real! “Sometimes very good is good enough.”

  The next issue is the testing of our billing processes.

  Peake gives another smile. “We don’t have time to run the full suite of tests,” he says. “We need to call in some assistance.”

  Fred is looking at his hands again. I know by now this means he disagrees but doesn’t want to say so. He is such a very nice man.

  “Fred?”

  “It’s not the lack of people working on the system, it’s the sheer amount of testing we should do. It’s like pregnancy—you can make two women pregnant, but it will still take nine months to get a baby. More people will just get in the way.”

  Peake casts a cool eye at Fred, who flushes and looks down.

  “We would run the risk of sending out incorrect bills,” says Tom, his face darkening and his mouth tightening as it does when he is angry and frustrated.

  “So what? Why would it be so bad if we don’t send out any bills for the first month? It’s not as if we will have many customers to bill to start with. We could calculate them and type them up by hand, for God’s sake.”

  “You can’t do that.” Tom says.

  “It’s what they did in the old days,” I reply.

  Fred assures Tom he expects the bills will be correct. “Manual methods will be our fallback if there are any major problems with the bill run,” he says.

  “But—” says Tom.

  “But nothing,” I reply. “These are the tests we must complete before launch and these are the ones we complete if we can. We launch even if we don’t finish those tests.”

  After the other managers leave, Peake says he wants a quick word. He smiles widely as he stretches out his legs under my desk.

  “We can’t go on like this,” he says. “I’ve organized a review.”

  “A review of what exactly?”

  How can anyone review anything at all at the moment when everything is moving so fast that we have been giving verbal updates instead of written reports?

  “I thought an assessment of Hera’s maturity.”

  I’m angry with him, but I don’t show it, yet. We’re flat out launching a smart new business in the record-breaking time of six months, but we’re going to be measured on how well documented our processes are and how consistently we follow them?

  “Hera is a very new company,” I say. “It’s too early to expect us to be mature.”

  He flashes another smile. “Never too early to start improving,” he repl
ies. “We don’t want to be considered immature.”

  “The opposite of mature isn’t necessarily immature. We need to be young, fresh, agile, innovative.”

  “I’ve cleared it with Stewart.”

  “Cancel it,” I say, my composure cracking.

  Peake’s face stills.

  “I’m not suffering another infestation of consultants. The distraction could be fatal. We’re too busy right now.”

  His smile returns. “I’ll tell Stewart you’re refusing to accept a review.”

  I paste my inscrutable face back together. “I will reconsider your proposal after the launch.”

  After he is gone, I stand up and rub my neck and gaze out the window. Wellington’s waterfront glistens in the sun. White sails scud across the water and pink bodies lie in the park by the lagoon at the edge of the sea. I wish I were out there.

  The job no longer makes me feel as thrilled as the night when Robert told me it was mine. The challenges keep mounting, and I don’t get to feel proud when I find solutions to tough problems. There’s no one to say, “Well done, Lin.” The Board couldn’t give a rap about how their chief executive feels. I’m not supposed to have feelings, just objectives and measurements and an eye to my bonus.

  But I do have feelings.

  The days pass and Ben doesn’t call.

  Chapter 32

  It’s eight o’clock in the evening and I am still in the office reviewing every last cost line when my cell phone rings.

  “Lin? It’s me.”

  “Sally. What’s up?”

  “You’ve got a visitor.”

  My heart leaps in hope. “Ben?”

  “His sister, apparently. She’s been beaten up. I’ve patched her face, but she really should go to Accident & Emergency for a proper check. And she should be talking to the police too. But she refuses to budge.”

  “I’ll be home in fifteen minutes.”

  Cheryl’s face is a mess. I would not have recognized the pretty woman I met several years before. She has the same large, soulful blue eyes as Ben, but now one eye is swollen shut and her lip is split. Her beautiful chestnut hair is greasy, tied back into a rough ponytail, and she is dressed in a shapeless, gray pullover and tracksuit pants.