Orchid & the Wasp

by Caoilinn Hughes

  ‘These ethereal clients you keep mentioning … Of which putative business are they customers? I have no résumé, you understand, or way of knowing what your work is.’

  ‘Do you have a smartphone?’

  ‘Indeed, Ms Foess, I am one of the few proprietors of a smart-phone, but at this moment, I am conducting an interview. I don’t use my phone during meetings, as a rule.’

  ‘Of course, just, I was going to show you, but it’s as easy to explain–’

  ‘Oh, I’m relieved to hear it.’ A smirk finally arrives on Professor Sutton’s face, a little late.

  With a conspiracy of blood in her cheeks, Gael tries to remember the rehearsed bit of the interview, to recall her recitation in the shower that morning, right before she decided to wear the immobilizing skirt instead of trousers. In the lobby, all of the female candidates had been in skirt suits that led down in neat curves to one-size-cuts-all heels; their streaky shins were lined up like a platter of raw lamb cutlets.

  Gael explains that her business offers translation services from Russian to Executive English for Russian sites appearing in UK search results with senseless autotranslations. How she hired someone to develop online profiles and how she did free work for testimonials; how she went on to purchase VIP access to Russian online business networks so that she could directly target budget holders. As she’d never intended to carry out any implementation, from her first client on, she hired contractors and spent her own time refining the pitch, creating a list of targets and streamlining client management and business operations. By the end of her first year, she had eight contractors, one of whom managed the others, so that Gael only had to deal with one alias. By year two, contractors were up to thirteen; forty clients were on the books at any one time – mostly one-off contracts, but some on a monthly retainer – and her accountant deemed her sole tradership to be breaking even, given expenses (student loans and scholarships aren’t taxable income). She could write off the ‘workforce development fees’ of the MBA against future income. Gael settles into herself, now, and begins to enjoy the telling. It’s a history so neat and likely as to warrant memorization. There is a force behind her story – a capricious, yet inevitable progression.

  ‘Describe your leadership style and how you redress inadequate emotional intelligence,’ she had been bidden, all at once, without a moment’s basking in the climax of her financial acumen.

  ‘Leadership can be delegated,’ Gael says. Hearing the impatience in her voice, she thinks to relax her drawn brow. Her scalp shifts against her skull as if on unset glue. ‘Women are always told to develop their leadership skills, to build confidence in their people management, to get a mentor, be authoritative, assertive. I prefer to spend my time on business development and leave the emotional intelligence requirements and relations to my trustiest freelancer.’

  ‘Explain your exit strategy. Do you consider the business saleable and, if so, how would it be rated by Wall Street?’

  Gael’s jaw is beginning to ache from holding shut when she would rather say all sorts of things, steer Professor Sutton to the point. ‘Let’s see,’ she says. ‘It has no real assets, unless you count a cutesy thousand-rupee logo and a client list of SMEs, none of which are obliged to stick around beyond seven days post-invoice. It’s run by a walk-in-wardrobe-based uni student. It’s scalable to the nth degree, but it’d be a bad investment to grow to twice its size in its current form because it won’t appreciate in value – it’s not even an LLC. It’s ultimately composed of a sales pitch with no tangible, demonstrable product or assets to withstand due diligence, unless a backbone counts. In fact, you can boil it down to the one-line story behind the brand: the Russian equivalent of “Adversity is a good teacher,”’ Без мyки нет нayки, autotranslates to “Without torture no science”. That got me most of my clients. So how would Wall Street rate Translations Without Torture? Wall Street would pinch us on the cheek, say we need some fat on that backbone and slip us a quick grand for candy.’

  Gael faces Professor Sutton’s blank expression and sees in the momentary widening of her neck something being swallowed alive – a laugh or a yawn, Gael can’t tell. An African bullfrog comes to mind. The next question might as well be ribbit. But it isn’t.

  ‘What are your values?’

  Gael had seen Professor Sutton’s lips moving, but heard mostly her digestive tract aslurp. Shouldn’t it be the tyros who are hungry?

  ‘My attributes, you mean?’ Gael says.

  ‘I mean your values.’

  ‘In how I run my business?’

  ‘Your. Values.’

  ‘I can tell you my personal net worth … but–’ Gael watches her audience’s lips more carefully this time, but they don’t latch. Her eyes flit minutely, as a multitude of sentences occur to her all at once like ropes swinging and she calculates which one to take, knowing she’ll have to climb it, hand-over-hand. ‘My values? That’s an unanswerable question. It’s only answerable with a library of disclaimers. I could say something inane, something innocuous like, I could say, “I value courage, progress, advancement,” but that’s so reductive and simplistic. I don’t value the courage of suicide bombers or the advancement of deserts. So the statement, to mean what I want to say, would be legalese. My values? I can say I respect fearless pursuit of one’s goals, I respect vision, imagination in what those goals are, humour and resilience in attaining them, but, that question, I didn’t come all this way to–’ She stops herself, just. ‘I didn’t come all this way without values, obviously.’ Of course, this question was designed to put her under pressure, to reveal how she deals with an intractable problem. Another rope. A big fat fibrous lie. ‘I value meritocracy.’

  ‘As do we,’ Professor Sutton says, with as much luxury as can be parcelled into three monosyllables.

  The word had sounded so restorative just then. So self-possessing. Meritocracy. It had sounded of a closing cadence she might well have sung. What they wanted to hear, no? Why, then, was she being motioned to the exit? Why had she not been told: we’ll be in touch? She had to swivel round to understand what was meant by it. She’d never seen a door slammed open.

  Blisters were forming on her arches, she could feel, as she took each deliberate stair. The arches were falling, despite the insoles she’d borrowed from someone-or-other’s cabinet once upon a time for a few millimetres of advantage.

  She concentrated on the pain of each step – on not lessening it by altering her gait – as she clacked along the tiled corridor, all along the puerile speculation of the claimants, the conservatives, the semi-conscious acronyms, the unvaccinated neo-liberal multinational monominded corruption of cunts.

  The building is on the outer ring of Regent’s Park. Four times Gael paces back and forth along its railing. In spite of the cream Corinthian columns, the pointed cupolas, halfway between turrets and mosque domes, this grand establishment is made of lime, sand and water. Mere clay. Its stately gardens are deciduous. The keenest of each generation has to step in to releaf the weeping willows with their parents’ monies, swap out the old muck for a new grade of soil, consolidate the pillars where expedient. Corinth, it should be remembered, succumbed to a quake.

  No amount of brisk walking will hurry this spring into summer. Gael wraps her coat around her. She carries on through the park’s inner circle by a boating lake that was once deep enough for boats, until an ice cover collapsed a century and a half ago and forty people drowned and then, as might be expected, the lake was drained. Like most things, once sucked dry, it never returned to its former wealth. Its depth was lowered to the height of a cot before it was reopened to the public.

  Gael continues walking the three kilometres to King’s Cross station so she can take the direct line to her Finsbury Park layover home and not have to get on and off and on again. These stoppages. She doesn’t look left or right at crossings, or see where the skin of her heels has come off.

  Her lower body is numb by the time she gets home and all se
nsations seem to have collected in her neck. They aren’t good sensations and they won’t redistribute of their own accord. She’ll strap her feet in bindings and go for a very very long run, all afternoon, she’s thinking – she recently found a route along the canals that’s not too rapey – and she’ll listen to Thomas Adès, or Sofia Gubaidulina (she’s been searching for new composers to tempt Sive out of her ridiculous retirement). Perhaps she’ll take her CamelBak and Oyster card and run as far as Gravesend. Make a marathon of it, if not a morality tale. You can learn a lot about a subject in four hours’ running. The sub-prime mortgage cockup, say. Beginner’s Japanese. Card counting. Genghis Khan. The meaning of quality spread differential, which sounds like margarine, but it isn’t. There’s the danger she’ll not get as far as she’d like, given her blisters. She’s decided it’s thirty kilometres or nothing by the time she reaches her gate. But there, by the hedged driveway, she comes to a halt.

  Some guy is crouched at her front door, peering through the glass panels. He squats down low as a break-dancer, lifts the letterbox flap and pokes his finger through the bristle. Gael can almost hear how the metal would creak in the hallway; can almost see the way it would look from inside. An envelope of eyes.

  ‘Hey, perv?’ She approaches fast, key-fisted, ready to cut. ‘I can make it so that you fit.’

  He springs up. ‘Whassat, luv?’ Squinty. High, patchy eyebrows. He’s too calm. Gael glances down the drive and spots a van parked opposite. ‘You miss Aar-pah … Schiarda?’ he says. ‘Got a delifree for Miss Aar-pah. Was abaat ta leave. No one answerin. Fought you forgot. Got a few fings ow-ur aye keeya.’

  ‘Ow-ur aye keeya?’ Gael echoes him, dropping the keys from between her knuckles to select the gold front door one. She gives him a stumped look and employs her Japanese: ‘Nihon go ha na shi ma sen, sorry.’ She turns her back.

  There’s a brief pause. ‘You kiddin?’

  Gael opens the front door.

  ‘EYE-KEE-YA,’ he says, ‘EYE-KEE-YA,’ leaning forward like he’s singing the chorus. ‘DELI-FREE. A thin silver chain slips from the collar of his vest and reveals the word: ‘WORD.’ Gael can hear the sales pitch: ‘Meh-a, innit?’

  Gael says, ‘Oh, IKEA,’ and bumps the door back open with her hip. She kicks vehemently at a cat who’s trying to slip in. ‘Yeah, fine. Harper never said. I’ll leave the door off the latch. But if you let that motherfucking cat in, it’s caterole supper and I don’t give an SPCA who squeals.’

  ‘Right, miss.’ He shakes his head. ‘Yor scary.’

  There’s a whole flat full of furniture in the boxes they haul up the three flights of stairs. A cupboard, dining table, chairs, bedside cabinets, an office desk, a chest of drawers, rugs. All sorts of kitchen tackle. Before they leave, Gael doesn’t disguise her taking in of his unexpectedly fresh white musk while she signs his sheets. His skin is as buffed as young leather. He’s wearing a ribbed grey vest and jeans. He’s a foot taller than her, while she’s still in heels. She looks up at him, with a stern expression, then down again. She mutters over the third and final signature, ‘I bet all the girls let you make the bed.’

  They’re both breathing hard. Gael had insisted on lifting boxes. The other bloke’s back in the van already. She feels this one take stock of her. Her photo-free, plant-free, relic-free flat. He slides the pen from her grip and goes to the kitchen counter. He rips a sheet from a roll of paper towels and writes his number. He struts back. Passes it into her hand, by her thigh and, like an actor delivering his only line, says:

  ‘Case tha pussy-cah sneak in lay-ah.’

  He puts the pen between his teeth, walks backward to the door, squinting, and smacks the top of the door frame with both peach-clean hands.

  When Gael hears the front door shut, she strips off her rigid, clammy clothes, kicks her shoes so hard across the living room that one heel lances the wall plaster like a dud dart, then she tears open every piece of packaging in sight. Tying her hair back with an elastic band that had held two desk legs together, she spreads a manual on the floor with her knee and stuffs the plastic sachet of nails into her bra as a slipshod implant. She builds the furniture into being. Its stability is tenuous, but one can only work with what’s been given. Each nail gets hammered irremovably in. She doesn’t pause to put on music or to draw curtains or to drink a glass of wine or water or to piss. Not for five hours does she remember that she has a body. Not until Harper, who obsessively controls her disorder with medication, gets home at nine to find all her furniture fully assembled and loses her actual shit.

  Harper had introduced herself as a Las Vegan, riding on the cashmere coattails of her folks who didn’t know she’d switched from architecture to comparative lit (and her dad’s idea of a good book was the Book of Mormon), ‘but London’s a long-haul flight from Rack City, so they’ll just have to do like the locals and deal.’

  She’d said all this to the sixteen-strong class during icebreaker intros to a course called Descent to the Underworld, which the tutor hadn’t shown up for and which Gael had decided to teach.

  Gael was trying out a literature course, partly because she wanted to know what Readers – that boredom-resistant species – had over everyone else evolutionarily (she suspected there was something), partly because it was an assignment-only course (no exams) and because she’d found a contractor online from Sri Lanka called Sangeeta who was halfway through a PhD in late medieval writings about the body and was willing to work on single-use essays for a nominal hourly rate. (Having an escrow account made the whole thing fair trade.)

  Gael had passed the tutorial room an hour before class to find a memo taped up, declaring the afternoon’s 6AACTL65 Descent to the Underworld seminar cancelled, ‘due to personal circumstances, with apologies for the short notice.’ It was the first day of the semester, the first day of Year Three and a crying shame to let a class go untaught – an underworld un-descended into. Gael pocketed the memo and returned when the students were seated. She found Harper loitering by the door, yell-whispering into her BlackBerry: ‘Get a friggin autopsy already. I’m coming home when he punches through the coffin lid, Mom. So you can take your airline tickets–’ If one could print one’s inner turmoil on a T-shirt, Harper would have it in six shades of purple. She lent instant colour to the circle of grey-skinned lethargics. Gael gave her a discreet nod and ushered her in. Closing the door behind them, Gael took a seat at the head of the table.

  ‘I’ve just received a message from Dr Wilkins asking me to sub in for today’s seminar. She sends her apologies. Personal circumstances. As her PhD supervisee, she’s asked me to lead our opening seminar on Greek folk laments translated by David Ricks, which I trust you’ve all read carefully, ultimately to understand how ancient generations of poets considered the afterlife. But first, put your laptops and phones away and we’ll do a round of intros. Your name, birthplace, major, favourite opening line and what you’d say to Ovid if you met him in a pub. Let’s go anti-clockwise, like the shadow of a north-facing obelisk.’

  Inertia is most people’s default state of motion. Their only mode of progress, if you can call it that. They are startled – grateful, even – to encounter a force that might change their assumed trajectory. What is this sudden expectation up to which one must live? Steadily, they inflate. They’d do the work for the rest of the class. Gael could have sat back, prospecting, if it weren’t for Harper. She was her own force pair; at once the action and the equal and opposite reaction. The human experience was a conundrum for the elucidation of which she sure as heck wouldn’t look to other people. To books, perhaps, or to the medicine cabinet. When asked to introduce herself, Harper had said: ‘I’d prefer not to,’ then stared expectantly at Gael, who knit her brow and gestured to the next student along. ‘Like Bartleby? The scrivener?’ Harper looked around the circle of scalps disbelievingly. ‘Melville?’

  ‘Very good,’ Gael said, deaf to the joke as the rest of the under-read class.

  ‘England’s such a letdown i
f you grew up on Dickens,’ Harper said.

  No one even took offence, for how genuinely she meant it. Harper was to Gael what Gael was to everyone else.

  (The next day, in the most well-meaning voice she could muster, Gael told Dr Wilkins she’d led the class as a favour. Mortified, Dr Wilkins warned Gael she could be charged with impersonation and be expelled and how could she possibly. But what are a group of fee-paying students to do when a tutor cancels class at the last moment, when they’ve already paid for their train tickets and textbooks? Gael passed for attendance without joining a single other seminar and graded well above average on her coursework. Sangeeta was a dab hand at Dante.)

  When they bumped into each other in a café a few weeks later, Harper took off her headphones. ‘The underworld’s been dull without you. It’s like we’re tryna get to Hades but the ferryman went AWOL.’ She was listening to a Café Sounds soundtrack, in a café, which Baudrillard would be proud of, she said. Gael said no one should be proud of that. Harper said she didn’t come to a café to hear public mastication (glowering at the guy next to her who was sloppily fellating a sausage roll). ‘That’s super anti-social.’ Harper turned back to Gael. ‘Meat eaters. Someone’s gotta give em beef.’ Half an hour later, Harper had invited Gael to move into a one-bedroom flat she was in the process of buying on behalf of her property tycoon dad. ‘It’s got a walk-in wardrobe that’d make for super cheap rent, if you’re chill with having a roommate who could trump Freud’s Dora with an ace of spades and bury her with it.’

  ‘If you’re saying you’re nuts, I’ve a brother with a delusional disorder. He thinks he’s got epilepsy. Takes placebo drugs in careful doses and won’t step foot in a nightclub.’