Dot Matrix

by Jack Binding

‘Okay … Yes.’

  ‘Superb. It’ll be tough. And you’ll have to cover your current role, too, until we get something more permanent.’

  ‘Salary increase?’

  ‘Trial run,’ Fisher says. ‘I’ll give you six months, and if you’ve proved yourself, we’ll look at bumping you up.’

  ‘But that’s—’

  ‘Take it or leave it. You do the work, then you get the reward. Not the other way round.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say.

  We shake hands, then Fisher waves me out as though she’s batting away a mosquito.

  Cuntley’s wife has my extension. She calls me fifteen times a day because he once told her I was his P.A. ‘Robert there?’ she snaps. Hard t at the end of Robert. Always.

  And when I say, ‘No, sorry,’ she hangs up with a huff.

  I’m working two jobs now for nothing but the woolly promise of a promotion in the future. It’s late, but I’m not quite alone. Cuntley’s on the phone, whispering in a baby voice to his actual P.A., Donna. He’s sleeping with her, of course. He showers his P.A.s with boozy lunches, Selfridges gift vouchers and promises of bonuses, and when he gets bored, he finds – or, more accurately, creates – an error in their work and fires them. I reckon Donna’s got about two months left before she’s hauled in to HR and handed her P45.

  Cuntley hangs up the phone and walks over to my desk. ‘Working late again?’

  ‘Yeah. Two jobs.’

  ‘You’re doing well here, I see. Your career’s gained a certain, ah, momentum.’

  ‘Uh-huh. I guess I’m going in the right direction.’

  ‘Shame about Baker. Don’t you think?’

  ‘Tragedy.’

  ‘I mean, it’s worked out well for you, though.’

  ‘Every cloud.’

  Cuntley leans into me, and I can smell sweat pooling in his underarms. ‘I know what you did.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Bob?’

  ‘I was only looking for a stapler. I thought to myself, Hawthorne’ll have one. He’s organised like that. So I took a look in your drawer and imagine my surprise when I find an EpiPen.’

  I open my drawer and rifle through the papers. The pen. How could I forget about the pen? Working two jobs and doing a sixty-hour week, I guess that’s how.

  ‘I’ve moved it,’ Cuntley says. ‘It’s safe. For the moment.’

  ‘I need it for my … allergies. Bee stings.’

  ‘Don’t bullshit me, Lawrence. I’m a salesman. Bullshit is my trade.’

  ‘What are you going to do with it?’

  ‘I’m going to hold it over you for the rest of your fucking life. I’m feeling a little tense right now.’

  He pulls up a chair.

  ‘Massage my shoulders.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard. Massage my shoulders. I’m a little knotty.’

  He removes his jacket. I start to press onto his fatty shoulders through his damp, end-of-day shirt.

  ‘Harder,’ he says. ‘Yeah, that’s nice. A little to the left … That’s the spot. Right there.’

  ‘Are you done yet?’

  ‘That was just the amuse-bouche,’ he says, brushing me off and putting his jacket back on. ‘I have a stack of expense forms I’d like you to work through for me.’

  He drops a wad of papers on my desk.

  ‘Six months’ worth. I’d get Donna to do them, but she’s otherwise occupied this evening.’

  He picks up his briefcase. ‘Ta-ta. Don’t work too hard, now.’

  My phone rings. ‘Robert there?’

  ‘Sorry, he’s just this second left.’

  Huff. Click.

  Alone again. I walk over to the dot matrix. It splutters to life. The head slides back. Paper feeds through.

  Poor old Larry, it reads.

  ‘Fuck you.’

  You want him out of the way?

  ‘Of course,’ I say. ‘But not dead. Not like Baker.’

  You want to take him down, though? Teach him a lesson?

  ‘Yes.’

  You know he’s sleeping with Donna?

  ‘Of course. Everyone knows he’s fucking around.’

  You want to know where he’s going right now?

  ‘Sure.’

  Brunswick Hotel. Room 223.

  ‘Lovely image, but I don’t see what it’s got to do with me.’

  The phone on your desk. The last inbound number. Call it back. Tell the woman at the end of the line where he is.

  ‘Tell his wife?’

  She’ll leave him. She’ll take the kids. He will be too preoccupied with salvaging what’s left of his life to blackmail you.

  ‘I guess.’

  Call his wife.

  ‘Seventy-three times,’ says Alvarez. ‘She stabbed him seventy-three times.’

  ‘Yeah, I read the papers.’

  Cuntley’s face is everywhere. So is his wife’s.

  ‘They’re calling his wife The Butcher of Brunswick. Named after the hotel, you know?’

  ‘I know.’

  Stop, Alvarez. Please stop.

  ‘And after she finished with him, she blinded his lover – you know that new P.A., Donna? Irish, right?’

  ‘Welsh, I think.’

  ‘Whatever. Anyway, then she slit her own throat. I mean, man, what sort of fucked-up crazy do you have to be to cut your own throat.’

  ‘Plus side, if you want to spend a night in a five-star hotel in London, I now know a pretty cheap one.’

  ‘Shit man. I’m there already. Got a Groupon for the Brunswick this morning. Taking my wife for her birthday.’

  ‘Lucky lady.’

  ‘No one’s gonna remember the murder by then and I’ll look like a fucking king.’

  ‘King Alvarez?’

  ‘Yeah man, King Alvarez. I like that.’

  ‘Listen, Alvarez, that printer. It’s still there—’

  ‘Ain’t nothin’ to do with me.’

  ‘I understand, but if you could—’

  My phone rings.

  Fisher.

  ‘I’ve gotta get this,’ I mouth to Alvarez.

  ‘Hawthorne. My office. Now.’

  Promoted again.

  People come to me – subordinates, I guess you could call them – with pieces of paper to sign. Budgets, payments, expense forms. And I question everything. If I fuck up now, I’m out.

  And though I have the dot matrix to thank, whenever I shut my eyes, I have visions of Baker jerking and dying on the floor and the bloody deluxe suite at the Brunswick Hotel (the tabloids weren’t shy about the colour pictures on the front page). I think the dot matrix knew how it would play out. It needed death. Craved it.

  And poor Donna. She didn’t deserve that.

  ‘Night Larry,’ some kid with boyband hair says as he walks out. I don’t even know his name. Why the fuck is he being so casual?

  But we’re alone now. Just me and … it.

  The second the door shuts, it comes to life. But I don’t care what it’s got to say this time – three deaths. On its instruction. The blood on my hands. Baker, well, I can still say that was euthanasia … And Cuntley kind of had it coming. My conscience doesn’t lie so heavy with those two, but it’s the innocents … Baker’s wife. Donna. And I liked Donna, you know? She smiled at me, called me Sir.

  The printer won’t stop. Reams of paper feed through. It judders and screams.

  FISHER WILL FIRE YOU

  ‘Bullshit.’

  It stops, as though it’s thinking, then it starts up again.

  SHE HAS A FILE ON YOU

  EVIDENCE

  THE LOCKED CABINET IN HER OFFICE

  CODE: 1-2-5-8

  I walk to Fisher’s office. The motion-sensor light flicks on as I open the door. A filing cabinet sits in the corner, a padlock guarding its contents from prying eyes.

  1-2-5-8

  It’s like a window into Fisher’s black heart. Files on her staff, ordered by surname. Baker, it seems, had something on Fish
er. Evidence of insider trading that would’ve landed her in jail. Baker was untouchable.

  There was little on Cuntley other than short notes on his affairs.

  I am there.

  Hawthorne.

  Fisher’s been reading my private emails. Tracking my internet history. Logging the times my card has been swiped in and out of the office. Totting up the hours I’ve been working. Calculating my worth.

  A second page, with a handwritten note from Fisher.

  While Hawthorne is a competent employee, he is not Senior Mgmt material. However, owing to the recent headcount freeze by HR (trying to bolster the company share price by reducing fixed costs), replacements for both Baker and Conley have not been approved. Hawthorne will suffice as a temporary replacement for both and he will make a convenient scapegoat when Baker and Conley’s mistakes come to light.

  He will be gone by Christmas, by which time I will most likely have approval to fill the two vacant positions with people who have the desired skill set.

  And in blue biro and block capitals:

  DO NOT INCREASE HAWTHORNE’S PAY

  The paper creases between my tensing fingers. I take a deep breath and rearrange Fisher’s filing cabinet as it was when I first opened it.

  I walk back to the dox matrix.

  ‘What am I supposed to do?’

  Silence.

  ‘Tell me. Dammit!’

  I bring my fist down onto the printer, a light flashes green, the solution feeds through.

  Cuntley, lazy and arrogant as ever, had stored the EpiPen in his desk drawer. All I had to do was plant it in Fisher’s office and anonymously tip off the cops. And they had the motive – Baker’s hold over her for the insider trading. She was escorted out in handcuffs as the company looked on, gawping and gossiping.

  And so the board had no choice: Lawrence Hawthorne, Director.

  Director.

  I’m annotating a company-wide email to my Leighton, trying to put a spin on the Fisher incident, when I catch Alvarez lumbering past and wave him in.

  ‘Larry?’

  ‘The name on the office door – I need it changed to mine.’

  ‘Can do.’

  ‘I want it done by tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Whatever you say, boss.’

  ‘And Alvarez?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Get rid of that ancient fucking printer.’

  I’m wearing an Alexander McQueen suit. My tie is from the Dries Van Noten rack at Liberty. I can’t remember the make of my shoes but they cost more than I used to make in a month.

  I attend a few meetings and realise that the main part of my new role is denying pay rises and berating subordinates.

  I fire the casual boyband kid.

  As a sweetener to my promotion, I am gifted a space in the multi-storey car park attached to the building. So I buy myself a car – a red Maserati. It’s quicker to take the tube, even with the horsepower I’m now packing, but I can’t be seen roughing it with the plebs.

  My little empire. This is where the future starts. This is my time. I work late – it’s for appearances, really – but it’s nearing 8pm and I have a date with Brenda from compliance. Dinner at mine. I’ll drive home, take a shower, fry a couple of steaks and then (almost certainly) fuck a woman who, two months ago, wouldn’t even lower herself to make eye contact with me in the corridor.

  Who knows, maybe we’ll get married and have kids. Buy a house that backs on to a fucking deer sanctuary.

  I skip to the car park, thinking of how I used to peer at Brenda from behind the monitors on my old desk, lingering at the black bra underneath her white shirt, imagining unhooking the clasp.

  I pull on my driving gloves (Mulberry) and fish the car keys from my pocket, then feel a jab in my spine. The jab swells to an overwhelming pain.

  ‘I’m sorry, man,’ a voice whispers from behind. ‘The old printer – the dot matrix, you know? – told me if I got you out of the way, I’d be in line for a promotion. Just turned on by itself like it was sending a message from God.’

  ‘Evil,’ I try to say, but I merely let out a limp splutter as he pushes the knife in deeper. There’s a snap and a sharp shock shoots up my back. I crumple to the floor.

  Alvarez towers over me. He bends down and takes my wallet out of my jacket pocket. ‘Gotta make it look like a robbery, you see.’

  ‘You’ll get caught,’ I gasp. I can feel my lungs slowing.

  ‘Nah, cameras are out. Printer told me.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘And listen, friend, the reason I knifed your spine is that I don’t want you to suffer too bad. Just relax and drift away. You always been good to me, but I’ve got a wife and family to support.’

  Alvarez shuffles away. I lie beside a row of dirty hubcaps, the tang of petrol stinging my throat.

  About the Author

  Reviews are the lifeblood of ebook publishing, so if you liked this story, please take a minute to review it on either Amazon or Goodreads.

  www.jackjbinding.com

  jack@jackjbinding.com

  Also by Jack Binding

  Pills: 18 Short Stories

  * * *

  Individual Kindle Short Stories:

  * * *

  Property

  Twenty-Seven

  Perfect Anastasia