Insecure

by Ainslie Paton

  Em ignored it. Not all the women did, but she was married with a toddler and she was a professional. Unlike Jacinta had been Friday night. Oh God. There was less than nothing separating her from Tom. She’d been as predatory as Tom was with just about any woman under fifty with knees. More, because she did sleep with Mace.

  Over and over again.

  “You did well at lunch today,” Em said, keeping her eyes on Tom’s face.

  “Always knew I liked you.” Once Tom had tried to hide his flirtations, but the more power he’d accumulated as the head of products and markets, the less he bothered. It bothered Jacinta greatly. She was fond of Tom, but she had no influence over him and nothing she’d done to persuade him not be such a letch had ever stuck. He was one sexual harassment suit off ruining his marriage. But as of the weekend, who was she to criticise him.

  “No, you were good.”

  Tom did a top to toe sweep of Em. “I was born good.”

  No, Tom was born a playboy. Bryan had been born good. And yet it was Tom who was the corporate prince and Bryan, who’d wanted to be a good husband and a great father, had been ousted. None of that history, irony, reality had been part of her thoughts Friday when she’d hit on Mace.

  Jacinta gestured for Em to take a seat opposite her. “Tom, we need to get on with this.”

  “I’m not finished with you. There’s something going on.”

  “Out.”

  He held up his hands, backing out, his eyes on Em’s crossed legs while he pantomimed call me.

  Em sighed and said in a quiet voice. “I know he’s your brother, but I still want to strangle him.”

  “You know he’d run for the hills if anyone took him up.” Though of course she didn’t know that at all and Tom being a Wentworth had natural impunity, an impunity she knew extended to her, which made what she did to Mace all the more odious. She felt slightly sick to realise it.

  “I’ll have HR talk to him again.”

  “That just makes him worse. He gets all woe is me, nobody understands me.”

  “You’re right.” She considered her media chief. This interview she was about to do should be given by Malcolm, but after the tongue lashing she’d received Jacinta knew Em would be reluctant to approach him and hell, even journalists preferred not to talk to him.

  “Next family function I’ll knee Tom in the balls for you. That might slow him up.” That was both lame and inappropriate, but it was all she had. The problem of Tom wasn’t a crisis for today. Just like the problem of Mace had no business being in her thoughts.

  Em shook her head. “Your family. When I took this job they said working for a listed family company would be a nightmare.”

  Jacinta laughed. “Do we pay you enough to say that?”

  An hour later, interview complete, the next day’s media and public events schedule massaged, Em said goodnight and Jacinta was able to start her day from the top. She cleared phone messages and sent out follow up instructions, she read pending reports and finalised a regulatory presentation. At 9pm she started on her email inbox. Mel had helped to keep it clear, but it was still a mountain of content to digest, do or dump.

  At 10pm she made coffee and scarfed a stale sandwich. At 10.30pm she had one last obscure report from the investor relations group to review, something about related company dealings. Her brain was fried and this would no doubt be a torturous read. She could easily leave it till tomorrow. She had a hankering to go home and soak in the bath. But she had back-to-back meetings for the next two days. She opened the report. It was midnight before she closed it, heartsick but resolved.

  Investor relations had found a way to link Wentworth and the marathon bomber, Roger Kincaid. It was tangled but it was there. She left her desk to walk around her office, then down the deserted corridor of the executive floor. It was the equivalent to think music and she needed to think—desperately hard.

  It was a miracle the media hadn’t gotten on to this. When the major newspapers employed senior rounds journalists this would have been uncovered by now. This was both a lucky break and a curse. The report on her desktop hadn’t been copied to Em or anyone other than herself and Angelo Bardetta, the head of investor relations. Angelo was in the hospital having his gall bladder removed. She doubted he’d read it.

  She went back to her desk. She printed the report and read it again, hoping the conclusion would be different. Hoping she’d missed a qualifying fact, some mitigating circumstance that didn’t lay moral blame at Wentworth’s feet, which meant at hers, at Malcolm’s and the board’s.

  But there it was. Roger Kincaid, the marathon bomber, lost his job when Wentworth’s industrial finance division denied continued lending to his employer, forcing it to send manufacturing offshore and retrench hundreds of people. He became bankrupt because he couldn’t pay off his Wentworth car loan or his two maxed out Wentworth credit cards. Then he lost his house, because a finance company Wentworth was major shareholder of foreclosed on him because Wentworth issued an instruction to tighten lending practices.

  The rest was public. Kincaid was unable to get another job. His wife left him, taking their two sons. He got depressed. He got angry. He was hospitalised, treated and released, and at some point in the last week, he snapped and decided to take his revenge by bombing the marathon, whose largest sponsor was Wentworth Finance.

  13: Crack

  Dillon cracked him over the back of the head and Mace knew he deserved it. He wasn’t paying attention. He was too busy watching the foyer area around Tower A where Jacinta worked. He didn’t expect to see her, but still he looked, hoping he might catch a glimpse of her wearing her corporate armour.

  He squinted at Dillon. “Sorry. I’m listening.” Since Dillon had made the trek, the least he could do was focus. His office was five blocks away, but as he was a senior director it was easier for him to nick out without being called on it than it was for Mace, so they always met outside Wentworth Towers.

  Dillon sipped a takeaway coffee. “He gave us hard deadlines. And when I say hard, I mean killer. We won’t be able to do this in a couple of nights.”

  Mace studied the notes Dillon had handed him. The was a fuck-load of work to do to meet Jay’s requirements, and Dillon was right, between work and Buster there wasn’t enough time.

  “I’ll take sick leave. Two days, three at the outside, plus the nights. I can get it done.”

  “Do you have any left?”

  Mace shook his head. He’d used up this year’s quota of sick leave already on various stages of the program, so he’d lose pay and he’d have Nolan on his back about it. “I’ll need Dr Dark.”

  Dr Dark’s alter ego, Dillon Lightman, punted his empty cup into the bin. “The good doctor will forge a sterling certificate to your erstwhile employer telling them you have a bad case of... Wait a minute, who was the chick? Wasn’t that redhead from HR who had the hots for you? Get her to fudge it for you.”

  “Wasn’t the redhead.”

  “But it was someone from work.”

  No way Mace was getting into this. “Now who’s distracted?”

  “Not me, dude. This is on point. Can’t remember the last time you spent all weekend with a woman.”

  Mace groaned and stifled another desire to look towards the tower. “I didn’t exactly have a choice.”

  “You’re complaining?”

  “No.”

  “Dude, I need details.”

  “Get me a certificate. Make it for three days. Say I’ve got...” He looked to the top of Tower A; the sun glinted off the executive floor. “Tick paralysis, foot and mouth disease. I don’t care.”

  “Not those kind of details.” Dillon loosened his tie. “If I made it out for foot and mouth would that dweeb Nolan even look at it?”

  Mace raised a hand, making as if to slap Dillon’s head.

  Dillon took a step backwards. “I’ll make it out for mad cow disease.”

  Last time Mace needed Dr Dark, Dillon made the certificate out for blepharitis
and when Nolan googled it and discovered it was a severe case of dry eye, he’d issued a warning and docked Mace’s pay.

  They couldn’t keep doing this, the sneaking out, the moonlighting. But until they got alternate funding it was the only way. Neither of them had assets or the kind of connections to allow them to do a family and friends round of fund raising, so occasionally cheating their employers was the only way around it.

  “Mace, we’ve got this. There is absolutely no reason we won’t get the funding. We get the funding, we both quit, work full-time on this. Inside twelve months we’ll be in Silicon Valley. We’ll both be billionaires before we’re thirty-five.”

  Mace rubbed the back of his neck. There was a headache building there. That was the dream. They’d hatched it years ago, a vague plan to be rich and famous. Now there was nothing vague about it. It was candy coated. He looked up at the top of Tower A again. This was their shot, but this part of it relied almost entirely on his work. He had to get it right. There was no room for a do-over.

  Dillon had pushed his shades to the top of his head. He stopped a call on his phone and sent it to message bank. “Dude?”

  “I’ve got it.”

  “Shit, what a time for you to get all dick-whipped. If you’re thinking about the chick, she can wait. This won’t.”

  “I’m not thinking about that.” And there was no reason to. Jacinta made it crystal she didn’t have time for him and she’d be the one to call the shots on if, and when, they got together again. He didn’t like it this morning after beating her door up to get back to her but Dillon had a point, and she wasn’t the only one who was busy building a career.

  “You’re thinking about it.” Dillon’s phone rang again, the Mission Impossible soundtrack.

  “I’ll stop, okay. It was a weekend.”

  “Exactly, dude. This is the rest of our lives.” He answered and started a complicated conversation about ad rates and click throughs.

  Mace left him and went back to his desk. He kept his head down and stayed out of Nolan’s sightline for the rest of the day, and he was first to log off and hit the lift well at five. That’d be noticed too. Fuck it. He needed to get to Buster. An hour and a half later he was unpacking her shopping: seedless mandarins, tissues, Woman’s Day, stocking socks, jelly snakes, elderflower cordial.

  “You look nice today.” Many of the residents of St Ags never bothered to ditch a dressing gown. Buster always managed to, always made an effort to dress nicely, wear a scarf around her neck or a piece of jewellery. She always wore shoes, not slippers, and every week the travelling hairdresser visited to do her hair. Today she wore caramel pants and a white blouse with a freshwater pearl necklace and matching earrings Mace had bought her with his first decent pay cheque. She had to have had help with the earrings.

  “And you smell nice.” She wore Ma griffe. She always did. He bought her a bottle every birthday. It wasn’t easy to find, he had to haunt beauty product websites. He’d tried to get her interested in other perfumes, Chanel or Joy, but the lemony, gardenia scent was the perfume of her youth and she was as loyal to it as she was to everything that touched her life.

  When her meal arrived he helped her eat it. Then collected her washing and tidied her room. He made sure her music player was charged and her radio was tuned properly to her favourite station, no static. She asked him to untangle some glass beads that’d knotted up so he did that while they waited for the tea trolley to come around.

  He told her about the gas explosion and how he’d been at a friend’s house when the marathon bomber struck. She got twinkly eyed at the word friend, because she knew he didn’t mean Dillon.

  “A woman from work, but it’s nothing serious.”

  He’d never kept secrets from Buster, but there was stuff he didn’t tell her. And she could often tell from looking at him. She knew he didn’t do girlfriends; she was smart enough to have figured he slept around like one of the characters in the books she liked to read. She never judged, but she wanted something more, something better for him, you could see it in her eyes.

  She leaned into his shoulder. “It’s a start.”

  “I’m not sure I have time for it.”

  She whispered, “Make time,” but he heard her as she’d sounded when she was well, when she was pushing him to take chances.

  “We have the opportunity to present to an investor. If he likes our work, he might fund us. I could quit work. That’s more important.”

  “No.” Buster shook her head and it was real disagreement, not the tremble from the Parkinson’s.

  “We’ll get one shot, it won’t come again.”

  She leant her head on his shoulder and he gave her a hug. “Later, I can do the romance thing later.”

  “Won’t come when you want it to.”

  He’d figured that. It didn’t come for his mother or for Buster. Dillon usually had a girlfriend, but they were interchangeable busty blondes, never on the scene longer than a year.

  “You know what, it’s not my call. The woman, Jacinta...”

  Buster smiled, thrilled the woman had a name.

  “She’s a bigwig at work. She doesn’t have time for me.”

  Her mouth opened in surprise.

  “Told me exactly that.” He laughed. “Don’t call her, she’ll call me.” That made Buster cough, which was what happened when she tried to giggle.

  The tea trolley arrived and he got her a cup of tea, a coffee for himself.

  “She paints these amazing pictures.” He bumped her shoulder gently. “Not like your glittery ones, or the ones with the numbers. They’re...I don’t know how to describe them, but they’re memorable.”

  “You like her.”

  He nodded. “But don’t start getting it into your head it’s going to be anything.”

  “I don’t want you to be alone.”

  “I’m okay. I’ve got work, Ipseity and Dillon. And you. That’s more than enough.”

  She shook her head side to side, an exaggerated motion; disapproval. He’d always been a loner and she thought it was a failing of hers that he wasn’t more social.

  “I’m going to take a couple of sick days to work on Ipseity so I won’t be at work. If you need anything get them to ring me at home or on the mobile.”

  “Don’t come tomorrow. I’ll be right.”

  He lifted the pearls over her head, then took her earrings off and packed them away. He knelt to take her shoes and stocking socks off, getting her half ready for bed. The nursing staff would do the rest. “I’ll do your foot massage tomorrow, okay.”

  She put shaky fingers to his hair. It’d had taken her a long while to accept his assistance with such personal things and she still wasn’t comfortable with him seeing her this way. She was the one who made the decision to move to the nursing home, and while it was easier, safer because there was twenty-four hour care on tap, they both hated it. Buster, because it was the end of her independence, and Mace because she wasn’t ever coming home for more than a weekend. He stood and kissed her cheek and put the TV remote near her hand.

  Forty minutes later he was home and back at work. He worked through the rest of the night, eating fruit and nuts, drinking plunger pot after pot of coffee. Around 4am he slept. He got up at eight, sent a message to Nolan to tell him he was sick and not coming in and went for a run, pounding the streets for an hour. Next thing he knew it was time to go back to St Ags. He seriously considered not going. One night, he could skip one night, but after the mucked up weekend he felt guilty.

  Buster rolled her eyes when he walked in. He was still wearing the shorts and torn tee he’d run in that morning. He hadn’t shaved or showered, since—yeah well. The useful thing about wearing his hair cropped close was it always looked the same.

  He gave her a show; putting his arms up and turning around like a fashion model. “You don’t like the look?” She’d been so scared he’d cover his body in tattoos and he might’ve except he respected her for making his life stable after the
drama that was his mother, after the bus.

  She sneezed. They both laughed.

  He helped her with the roast dinner and then massaged her feet and calves. She touched his hair. “Don’t come tomorrow.”

  “I need to do your washing and bring it back.”

  “I can manage.”

  It was tempting. He kissed her forehead. “We’ll see.”

  He drove home via the local pizza shop. He needed the carbs, calories and the speed. Waiting, he thought of Jacinta, how she’d been surprised he didn’t look like Nolan and the majority of the IT team who were all allergic to exercise and vegetables.

  He demolished the pizza at his desk and worked through till 2am. Then he showered and tried to sleep, but he was wired: kept seeing code, seeing possibilities, second-guessing himself. He got up an hour later, made coffee and started work again.

  He sent Dillon a progress report at lunchtime, then worked the bag hanging in the yard. If he didn’t see Buster he could catch some sleep and then work through the night again. He phoned her room and she answered. He could hear her TV and her soft whisper, urging him not to come. He slept instead, then repeated the pattern. Work, coffee, exercise, sleep. At the end of the three days he felt snookered and woolly-headed. But he was done. They’d meet Jay’s deadline.

  He fell asleep in Buster’s big armchair in her room and the night nurse woke him. He’d forgotten to phone in sick for two days. Doctor Dark was going to need to come up with an illness that’d rendered him comatose. He’d forgotten Buster’s washing. He looked like a wild man, probably smelled like one too. She asked him to bring more of the eucalyptus tissues she liked and some Vick’s Vapour Rub. He wrote it on his arm like a tattoo so he wouldn’t forget.

  He slunk into work the next day feeling guilty and oddly hung-over, but looking none the worse. It took five minutes for Nolan to appear at his desk.

  “What happened to you?”

  He hadn’t figured out his cover story.

  “Never mind. The register locator server collapsed. It’s being attacked by spam bots or a virus I don’t know. I need you on that project now. You’re teaming with Indira and Ravi. None of you leave the building till it’s finished.”