If I lost my job, I would have nothing.
For a long while I just sat at my desk, staring at that bloody letter. It was so embarrassingly bad, so amateurish, that it looked to have Amanda’s stamp all over it. There were even spelling mistakes in it for God’s sake. But what if the unthinkable had happened and I had missed it, one day after Issy had slept badly the previous night, or when I’d been depressed about my marriage? What if it really had been me? It seemed unbelievable but maybe not impossible; everyone makes mistakes.
I was still staring at the letter half an hour later when Melanie dropped me in a coffee. I sipped it slowly, then stopped…then checked my Outlook calendar.
I walked over to my office door, closed it quietly, danced a silly jig around the room, and returned to my desk to compose an email that I was certain would restore my battered reputation and save my treasured job.
You see, I’d just noticed the date on the letter. It was exactly ten days into the two week holiday I’d taken to the USA with Tony and Isabel earlier in the year. We’d gone to visit Andrew, who was by this time living and studying in Texas. We’d also stopped off in Hawaii on the way home. It couldn’t have been me!
I outlined all the relevant details in a carefully phrased email. I addressed this to Edward, Amanda, the head of marketing and our local MD. Then I cc’ed it to our international managing director, the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, the Pope, Bono and the Secretary General of the United Nations; in fact anyone I could think of on Planet Earth who could potentially be interested. I would have cc’ed it to the man on the moon too, but I didn’t have his email address. I pressed send, breathed a sigh of relief and skipped out to lunch, looking forward to hearing all about Amanda’s response upon my return.
***
The following Tuesday, the last one before Christmas, I arrived at work to find another summons from Edward. What now? I thought.
This time, when I arrived in Edward’s office I found Melanie and Karen, a business analyst who had been working on one of our other marketing teams; but no Amanda.
‘Well girls, I have some news for you all,’ announced Edward in an important tone. ‘Due to the…difficulties of last week, senior management has decided on a restructure. Ellie and Melanie you will no longer be working with Amanda.’
Hip, hip hooray! Could it really be possible? Did they truly, actually sack her?
‘Amanda has been promoted to Senior Product Manager and now will have more staff to support her, as upon reflection management has decided that Lo-prez is too important a product to be managed by such a small team.’
Of course, how naïve of me to think even for a moment that they would actually get rid of her. I was beginning to think she was putting out for the MD.
‘However, we feel that your relationship - meaning Ellie and Melanie - with Amanda has deteriorated to the point where you can no longer work together and thus management has decided that you three will form the basis of a new team, promoting a brand new product which is a recent acquisition of ours. We are bringing in a new Senior Product Manager. Well actually he is already on staff but has been working in the UK for several years and has just requested a transfer back home. His name is Alex Andersen.’
So what was this new mystery product? A new cancer treatment, perhaps - that would be good, although unlikely. Maybe it was that cholesterol drug I’d heard mutterings about.
‘It is a new drug for erectile dysfunction, which goes under the trade name Erecta.’
Erectile dysfunction?
‘What is erectile dysfunction?’ asked Melanie.
‘It’s good news for Bruce you don’t know,’ I said.
‘It’s the technical term for impotence, Melanie.’ explained Edward.
‘Oh,’ said Melanie, pulling a strange puffer-fish expression, which I knew was her way of suppressing a laugh.
‘If you don’t mind me asking, Edward,’ I piped up, ‘aren’t there already a few of these products on the market?’
‘Well yes, but Erecta is distinguished by its more potent action, producing longer and a-hem, a-hem…harder erections.’ As he completed this sentence and surveyed the three expectant female faces surrounding his desk he coloured to a shade I would describe as fire engine red.
Hmmm, longer and harder erections - I briefly contemplated adapting the Olympic motto as branding: ‘Faster, Higher, Stronger, Longer and Harder’, but quickly dismissed the idea. Apart from the fact the IOC would charge a fortune for the rights some old guy would likely take it all too literally and give himself a heart attack, resulting in a nasty lawsuit.
‘Anyway,’ went on Edward, ‘head office have provided a dossier on this new product and I want you all to go away and learn everything about it from A to Z - that is, after you’ve transitioned your replacements so they can take over your old responsibilities. You will start properly in late January when Alex arrives. We have had to give him some time to organise the move back to Australia so he won’t be here for another four weeks. Oh and Ellie, you’ll of course have to complete our defence in response to the complaint against Lo-prez first.’
Yes, that’s right. I’d been handed the task of defending the indefensible: the dodgy letter to doctors. Typical of my dealings with Amanda - she swept through town like Lady Godiva on horseback, whilst I was the designated street sweeper, cleaning up all the horse poo left in her wake.
That finished, I ‘boned up’ on erectile dysfunction over the Christmas/New Year break, awaiting the arrival of my new superior. He had a rather intriguing name. Alliterative names are very evocative, I think. I wondered what he looked like. Andersen was spelt with an ‘e’ not an ‘o’, as in Hans Christian. This suggested some Scandinavian (probably Danish) blood. I briefly contemplated the possibility of a tall, Nordic-looking fellow, not unlike Tony. More likely he would resemble a garden gnome, but it didn’t really matter. He couldn’t possibly be worse than Amanda and that’s all I cared about.
January 30th was D-day. By this time Melanie and I had become firm friends with Karen, a gorgeous Chinese-Australian girl in her late twenties. She is impossibly elegant in her clothes and manner, but after scratching that immaculate surface Melanie and I discovered that she is also great fun, with a wicked sense of humour. Whilst we were all a bit dubious about our new product responsibility, it did provide us with endless fodder for ribald jokes and smutty innuendo and that’s always a good thing. We mightily enjoyed that first month together and were not keen for another spoilsport boss to come along and wreck the party.
Edward called Melanie and Karen into my office first thing to meet Alex. Well he certainly didn’t look Nordic. As a matter of fact he was dark-skinned, not black but really quite dark, suggesting some exotic parentage - South American? He was not especially tall, an inch or so under six feet, and lean and fit looking - a runner’s build. I would have estimated him to be about my age but more likely a year or two younger. He had pleasant, even features and straight black hair that flopped over one eye when he leaned forward to shake our hands. Overall you would have described him as a nice looking young man, if not for those eyes of his - they were green like a cat’s and a shade or two lighter than his skin tone. The whole effect was…well Melanie summed it up best.
After our introductions, Edward ushered Alex out of my office to take him down to Human Resources.
We were silent for a few seconds before she said, ‘Okay well I suppose it would be polite to put my tongue back in now.’
And with that we fell about laughing like a bunch of silly school girls. I suspect he might have heard us, but I also suspect that Alex Andersen had heard it all before.
10
The mysterious stranger
Being of a naturally scientific bent, I like to look at the world in a scientific way and sometimes this involves devising formulae to explain natural phenomena. One formula that my
brother David (who has his own wicked streak) and I devised - and be prepared as it’s horribly politically incorrect - is as follows:
The average size of a woman’s arse in centimetres = m x n
Where m = unknown coefficient and n = distance of woman’s residence in kilometres from the central business district (CBD) of the nearest large city.
Now this is not a perfect formula. For a start if you happen to live a long way from the CBD and have a very petite backside you are probably feeling quite offended right now, but remember we are talking averages here. There will always be some people who don’t fit the norm - in statistical terms these are called outliers. I was an outlier myself when I was pregnant with Issy, as I was actually living quite close to the CBD at the time and my arse was HUGE. Also it doesn’t work well for immediately north and south of my home city, as these are Sydney beach suburbs and having to spend six months of the year in a bikini does provide residents with strong incentive to keep their backsides reasonably trim. However, if you go west of Sydney, the formula is almost foolproof. I’m sure you can see the internal logic. All the hip and trendy young things live close to the city where all the action is, whereas out in the ’burbs, and even worse in the country, there is little else to do but eat. The place I expect this formula works best in is New York City, as, as far as I’m aware, no-one has a bottom in Manhattan but move away from the city centre and well, different story.
David and I never got around to figuring out the exact numerical value of m so if there are any budding mathematicians out there looking for a PhD topic, be our guest.
Anyway, in case you flunked maths at school, I have a much simpler formula - devised by me and Melanie - that even you dunces will be able to understand:
Marketing position + good looking man = wanker
Now once again, this formula is not foolproof. In fact it’s only correct about eighty-five percent of the time. However, statistically the odds were heavily stacked against Alex Andersen.
He surprised us both by proving to be an outlier.
Yes, it’s a curiously inadequate word, but Alex turned out to be nice. Actually he was quite like Edward really, although infinitely hotter to look at. He was courteous and friendly and acknowledged another’s good work publicly, and didn’t try and claim other people’s ideas as his own, and took responsibility for any mistakes that were made, sometimes even when they weren’t his fault. He was the anti-Amanda. After guarding our flanks for so long it took us a while to get used to our new situation.
Since we’re on a science theme, some interesting behaviour followed the appointment of Alex to lead our Erecta team, apart from a huge sigh of relief that we were finally rid of Amanda, that is. If an anthropologist had been observing us they might have recorded this as an intriguing example of human primate mating rituals. With the arrival of a handsome new buck male in our previously all-female colony, we began taking more care with our grooming. This didn’t quite extend to us sitting around the tearoom combing through each other’s hair for fleas; it was a bit more subtle than that. In my case I started getting up ten minutes earlier so I could actually blow dry my hair properly, rather than crossing my fingers and leaving it to air dry during the journey between home, preschool and work. This gave me time to put mascara on at home too, rather than squinting to apply it in the rear-view mirror while stopped at red lights. Melanie toned down the worst excesses of her clothing and began wearing more appropriate nail polish colours and Karen - well she always looked perfect, but I’m sure she did start using more lip gloss and blusher. It was not as if any of us had ambitions. Melanie and Karen were happily partnered, I less so, but there was something about having Alex around that made you want to try harder.
Nice - it’s such a loaded term. I share a common female distaste for the sensitive new age guy type. As a matter of fact, if they are too sensitive I get a bit suspicious that beneath that SNAG-like exterior there may actually lay a raving misogynist - a wolf in sheep’s clothing as it were - terribly prejudiced, I know, but there you go. No, I could never detect anything cultivated about Alex’s manner and in spite of (or more likely because of) his pretty boy looks he was quite blokey in his way: a beer-drinking, sports-loving guy. So whilst all the girls wanted to sleep with him, all the men wanted to have a drink with him down at the pub. The entire sales and marketing team appeared affected by a collective crush.
Still, there was a certain distance about his friendliness, as though he was keeping everyone at arm’s length. He would joke and chat with you well enough, but he was not a person to divulge much about his personal life and I often wondered if he was not secretly summing us all up and finding a few of us wanting. In my more fanciful moments I used to like to imagine he was perhaps an alien who’d been beamed down to spy on us silly humans (and if he was looking to observe the whole gamut of human frailties he couldn’t have picked more fertile ground); certainly his eyes had an other-worldly quality. Although, to be fair I had come across his type before. In my assessment there are two types of people in the typical office setting: those who like to tell anyone and everyone about their private lives and those who like to keep it all to themselves. There was actually a woman in my former department who went off one weekend and got married to her long-term partner without telling a soul - imagine! I used to think I belonged squarely in the former category - a real blabbermouth - but recently had become uncharacteristically reticent to talk about the state of my marriage.
So, with the possible exception of Edward, with whom he seemed to have struck up a bit of a friendship, we knew little about the real Alex. The guys sometimes used to head out for a drink after work on Fridays. Melanie and I were also invited, but, being mums, didn’t have the luxury of swinging by the pub after work; we had to make the mad dash to childcare before it closed.
All Melanie and I could surmise from our snooping was that there was a girl on the scene. There was a gorgeous photo of them, obviously taken on a skiing holiday, on his desk. She was a slender, fair-skinned brunette, beautiful as you’d expect, and they looked lovely together, like they really belonged. I was so envious of the love that was apparent in that photo. Apart from that, all we knew was that they lived in Balmain and presumed his girlfriend was called Sophie, as I’d once overheard Alex mention her name to Edward.
Melanie was dying to ask Alex for more details, but I warned her it was a no-go area and it would be inappropriate to start prying into the personal life of her boss. With the vibe he gave off I had a strong feeling that it wouldn’t be viewed favourably at all.
After a couple of months, however, there was a question I felt confident enough to ask him.
‘Alex, would you mind if I asked you a personal question?’ I said one day.
‘That depends what it is, I suppose.’
‘It’s only about your name. With a surname like Andersen I was expecting you to look quite different.’
‘You mean, why am I so dark?’
‘Well, yes, but more than that. You have quite unusual colouring.’
‘Well my father - he’s passed away now - was Danish, but my mum is Anglo-Indian. They met overseas but moved here before I was born.’
‘Oh, Indian - I should have picked it. My brother is married to an Indian girl. I was thinking maybe Mexican or South American or something. Sorry to hear about your dad.’
‘Oh, it was quite a while ago now. But while we’re on the topic of names I see your real name is Eleanor. Why don’t you ever use it?’
‘I just never liked it.’
‘Why? It’s a lovely name. I knew a French girl called Eleanor once and I remember thinking what a beautiful name she had.’
‘Well it sounds nice enough when you say it with a French accent or even your accent [Alex had spent so long away that, at least to the unpractised ear, he sounded more British than Australian], but with the Australian strine - Ell-en-oor - it sounds dreadful
.’
‘Well you’d better watch out. If you start misbehaving I might have to start calling you Ell-en-oor,’ he said, giving me a sly smile.
I left his room feeling all hot and prickly; that is, until common sense took over. For goodness sake Ellie get a grip, I thought, can’t a good looking guy have a normal conversation with you these days without you getting your cheap thrills?
That didn’t stop me wondering who the French Eleanor was. Was she a former lover? If so, she was probably a very lucky girl. He was certainly a mysterious one, our Alex.
***
And what of my new professional responsibility: Erecta? I’ll let Emma have the last word on that.
I arrived at Mum’s place one day after work to pick up Isabel and found that Emma was at home, sick. In fact she was lying on the leather lounge in her candy-striped pyjamas with her head resting on a pillow on Daniel’s lap. She had a red nose and bleary eyes and was definitely not looking her best, but if her devoted had noticed he didn’t seem to care. I observed she was drinking some noxious green potion I’d seen brewing in the kitchen. It resembled the contents of my green waste recycling bin mixed with old bath water.
Knowing her propensity for alternative medicine I asked, ‘What is that you’re drinking?’
‘It’s tea for cold and fevers - got echinacea and some other stuff. My naturopath gave it to me.’
‘I bet it cost you a fortune too. Why don’t you just head down to the chemist and get some Codral like the rest of us mortals.’
‘Yuck, I’m not taking any drugs.’
‘They’d probably be a lot more effective. You look terrible.’
‘I don’t, do I?’ she said, turning to Daniel for reassurance.
‘No you just look sick. You always look beautiful to me,’ he said before kissing her hard and long on the mouth - a most inappropriate gesture for a Tuesday afternoon.
Happily Ever After? Page 13