It was in these first few days of the graduate program that they had each been introduced to their mentor, an experienced solicitor tasked with guiding them through the minefield-maze of the legal profession. She had been assigned to support an associate named Ben, a man who seemed to consist entirely of well-cut suits and strictly enforced deadlines for everyone but himself. He delivered his correspondence through short, succinct statements volleyed at her across their partner desk, and pithy emails with no conjunctions. They met for the first time over lunch, his paisley silk tie draping gracefully into his reheated stroganoff as he outlined eagerly the many opportunities that awaited them. The rumour was that not long before Nell had started, he had blown apart a particularly tricky patent case with a chance discovery of new evidence, and had failed to reach such grand heights since. At the time it had earned him the fleeting coveted attention of Mr Williams, who had commended him for his dynamism and bestowed upon him the appellation Dynamic Ben. It was a momentary favouritism that, just like the nickname, Ben – now DB – had been courting ever since. Indeed, the only people who still referred to him as DB were Nell – by dint of his constant insistence – and DB himself.
Nell’s work mainly revolved around drafting instruction confirmation letters and contracts for DB, or sifting through the firm’s prehistoric paper files and online database for past precedents. File after file of convoluted, complicated waffle. Oh, but they’d sounded so interesting, those area titles, all those months ago – Mergers and Acquisitions! Competition and Consumer! Except that DB and Nell seemed to spend a majority of their time engaged in dispute resolution over minor contract disagreements, or else Compliance, which apart from Insolvency and Recoveries, everyone agreed was the worst.
Despite his proclaimed dynamism, DB rarely seemed to attract interesting cases. In lieu of this, he had developed a growing obsession with formatting, causing Nell to spend hours reworking documents to ensure they met his specific, changing demands while he feverishly watched a point just beyond her shoulder. Initially she had thought he was studiously overseeing her progress for opportunities to correct or coach her, but she soon realised he was in fact monitoring the elevator lobby for chance glimpses of Mr Williams. In the event of a successful sighting, he was prone to developing a sudden insatiable urge for coffee and would hurry towards the lobby in the hope of catching some one-on-one time with their boss. Usually he would return defeated, and slump behind his computer stabbing dejectedly at his keyboard while helping himself to the stash of mini Turkish Delights secreted in his middle drawer.
When not in pursuit of Mr Williams, DB fielded the occasional phone call from what Nell had originally assumed was a wife or girlfriend, but eventually realised was in fact his mother. They talked – bickered would be more precise – about what Nell worked out was a semi-regular Sunday dinner, and a recurrent point of contention was something called Woofer who had seemingly taken over DB’s childhood bedroom. And there were words too – using three syllables – barked triumphantly into the phone for no discernible reason. All in all, she could fit in the palm of her hand the things she was learning from DB.
Despite her grad year having officially ended and Nell now technically being a proper Williams & Williams junior staff member, she and DB continued to share a workspace. Williams & Williams prided themselves on adopting what they termed an ‘integrated approach’ across all their legal services, and one aspect of this was a mentor/mentee relationship that, it seemed to Nell, was expected to last in perpetuity. Williams & Williams had modern partner desks – more IKEA than ye olde worlde England – shared between mentor and mentee. The theory was that this would create a joint space in which learning would be transmitted freely and easily, a two-way exchange intended to bring experience and innovation together in an our-powers-combined legal virtuosity. Instead, it acted like some kind of sporting net over which they took turns lobbing reluctant requests and clarifications at each other, unless they had reached a point of contention, in which case DB tended to revert to his terse emails.
Far from the excitement Nell had imagined in those halcyon first days, for the most part it was a steady trudge of memos submitted with sluggish reliability, template contracts with only a few clauses added or deleted and the contact details changed, files reviewed to make sure they’d been costed correctly, and periodic mentor/mentee ‘catch-ups’ in the staff kitchen, during which she provided occasional interjections to DB’s regular monologues that demonstrated the general disjuncture between the lawyer in his head and the one that loafed about his desk each day. They disagreed frequently, arguing about the merit of the cases they worked.
‘They can’t all be foreigners, Nell,’ he’d reminded her one afternoon, and she’d had to google what this meant.
A foreigner, it appeared, had something to do with elaborate shelf companies and off-the-books Panama-style cover-ups, and she had disliked DB just a little more after this. She watched him now, stabbing away at his keyboard. Nell turned back to her own. She deleted the bit that read ‘hygienic regulation’ and in its place wrote ‘urinating on the play equipment’, then sent the file zinging through the greater world wide web towards DB’s inbox. He could deal with it himself.
*
Often Nell drifted into daydreams on the tram heading home each night, drawn-out imaginings in which she stumbled upon some magnificent piece of Socratic reasoning that shifted the very foundations of the legal establishment, sending it spiralling towards unprecedented civic and moral equity. She’d overshot her stop the first time she’d made the journey from the city centre to Seymour’s inner north home. Her home, she corrected herself, though it still sounded strange. That first time she’d wandered the streets for a while, the GPS on her mobile flailing to find itself, until she eventually recognised a park draped in a large Refugees are welcome here banner and found her way back to the little terrace house. Her explanation to Seymour was that she was plotting routes for future jogs, but she knew he saw through this. ‘When did you last jog?’ he’d asked, and she’d pretended not to hear.
Today, Nell watched the streets stumble into dusk, the light falling in dappled intervals along the seemingly never-ending passage of Sydney Road. It was still warm for April, and though she knew that this more than likely heralded the inching ever closer of the catastrophic climactic tipping point, it was quite pleasant nonetheless. Seymour would probably have something to say about this. Seymour had something to say about everything. He was very particular about things like environmental justice and what should and shouldn’t go in the recycling, though without Patrick to inform him, his arguments had become overwhelmingly more symbolic than factual. The night before he had been halfway through a lecture on why she shouldn’t put her meat scraps in the worm farm when he’d stopped mid-sentence, confusion plastering his face and said, ‘Just because, okay? I’m your older brother and please just do as I say because your questions are insufferable.’
It was only now that Patrick was gone that Nell realised that much of what she had previously thought of as her brother’s wide-ranging intellectualism was simply the repackaging of Patrick’s thoughts coupled with Seymour’s own innate sense of self-righteousness. Without Patrick, Seymour was like a rudderless boat on the sea of opinions, forging ahead blindly with neither logic nor reasoning to guide him. A man on a stump with not much to say. In the weeks since she’d moved in, settling her belongings into what had previously been Patrick’s study, she had already been on the receiving end of loosely structured orations on the harmful impacts of too much screen time and why her first order of business should be to petition her workplace for standing desks. Both, though passionate and articulate, generally revolved around the theme that she should do these things because he told her to, and his near decade’s seniority over her seemed less apparent as the days wore on. And because she loved her brother, who was so clearly falling apart at the seams, she tried not to argue these points. Instead, as she l
ay awake each night in a room that still smelt of Patrick, she pondered the myriad ways her brother reeled and unravelled before her. Sometimes, as she heard the soft murmurs on the other side of their shared wall that were either tears or YouTube, she wanted to rap lightly against the plaster and call to him through the anonymity of the partition: It’s okay, this wasn’t my plan either. I thought by now I’d have saved if not the whole world then at least a portion of it. That my superior legal skills would have brought justice and equity to all, when instead I spend much of my time deep in discussion with my mentor about whether narrow margins are appropriate for external communications and briefing him on the minutiae of legal precedents for contractual disagreements that would put Mr Westminster himself to sleep. And who would have thought I’d be voted out of yet another share house? Inexplicably, another, and forced into your spare room?
These days, when he was not at the gallery, Seymour oscillated between exuberant, near manic activity and hours spent in the Seymour-shaped groove on the couch. The other week she had returned home to find him hovering over the kitchen counter, striped apron and mountains of white powder piled before him like a gluten-hungry Tony Montana. He was making bread, he had informed her, his eyes electric behind the fine dusting of flour across his nose and brow, Adele playing over the sound system. They had both smelt it then, the charcoal-scented tang, and Seymour’s face had fallen as he dove for the oven. Thick acrid smoke filled the room. The siblings stood mute, their eyes on the ruined loaves as Adele sang out her heartbreak in the background, duetted by the screech of the smoke alarm. Eventually, Seymour had shrugged acceptingly then turned back to his flour mounds.
This evening she found him sprawled across the couch in what she had taken to thinking of as his ‘house clothes’: a combination of faded grey tracksuit pants and a Woodstock-style cotton shirt. With his shaggy blond hair and three-day growth he looked like an anglicised later years Jesus caught in a mid-life slump. He looked up briefly, his blue eyes meeting her own before oscillating back to the television. She glanced at the screen. He had somehow managed to find a station almost solely devoted to Friends reruns. He and Patrick used to watch Friends together, he’d told her one night, and she’d gently suggested he consider washing the ice-cream stains from his crotch.
By day, his transformation was remarkable, washed and dressed in the vintage suits he wore to the gallery, where he charmed and chattered with his usual breezy touch. The gallery had been the love child of he and Patrick, a lifelong ambition harboured from behind the desk of other galleries until Patrick one day suggested he take the plunge and go out on his own, which had, just quietly, involved plunging somewhat substantially into their mother’s share of the Family Money. He had wanted to call it Gallery Oh!, after the sound he hoped punters would make on surveying its art, however Patrick had pointed out that this sounded more like a strip club – somewhere white-collar workers and retired high court judges went to relax in discrete, glittery style. Instead, they had settled on PS, a seemingly romantic entanglement of their initials, until the graffiti started declaring it Gallery Piss. At that, he had simply removed the sign and since then it was known affectionately as Seymour’s.
Leaving him to his viewing, Nell peered into the fridge, poking at a few plastic containers.
‘Is this porridge or risotto?’
Seymour offered an ambivalent shrug. Patrick had been the cook, she’d since discovered, and not much had rubbed off during the course of their decade-long relationship.
‘Little Shop of Horrors is opening soon,’ she called out, shoving a container into the microwave.
She’d seen an advertisement for the stage show on the tram. The movie had been a staple of their childhood, so much so that Seymour had used it as inspiration for his sobriquet long ago when he’d turned against his birth name. She looked expectantly at her brother.
‘Patrick loves Little Shop of Horrors,’ he said softly.
She sighed inwardly. Patrick, it seemed, loved pretty much everything that involved getting up off the couch and showering. The Patrick-sized hole in the house was obvious, not just from the faint outlines on the walls and carpets where long-standing furniture no longer stood, but in the tilt and swing of Seymour’s moods.
Patrick had been sent overseas to cover the war and who knew when he would return. Their mother had asked which war and Seymour, adrift without Patrick to feed him information of current affairs, had simply replied, ‘All of them.’ To Nell, it looked like a break-up, but a break-up it apparently was not, and he’d chastised her once for even suggesting this. It was simply that it was easier on them both to limit contact, what with the unpredictability of foreign internet and all, and it made sense to put Patrick’s belongings in storage so that Seymour could offer the spare room to Nell, who everyone knew did not thrive in share houses. And the fact Patrick had spent most of his career reporting on the arts had no bearing on his ability to report the real stories from the sidelines of war. If one needed to label it – which Seymour felt they really did not – it was simply a break, with no ‘up’ involved, though to Nell there clearly appeared to be one hell of a ‘down’ taking place. So off to war Patrick went, lugging behind him all of his clothing, a heavy oak desk and assorted other antique furnishings. Indeed, the only thing of Patrick’s remaining was a collection of dark hairs in the sinkhole that remained coiled in the spokes like a little memorial to a waylaid saint. Grabbing the mystery meal from the microwave, Nell squeezed into the gap between Seymour’s socked feet and the couch arm.
‘Porridge,’ she reported, her mouth full and disappointed.
‘Porridge is an ideal breakfast,’ Seymour murmured, eyes glued to the screen. ‘It’s low GI or a super food or something like that. Cleans you out, I think. I don’t remember. Something to do with your duodenum. Bon appétit.’
Credits started rolling and he began to flick through the stations, slow and methodical, before resting on the national broadcaster.
‘Isn’t Mum meant to be on tonight?’ Nell asked.
‘They bumped her at the last minute. Prudence was available instead. Mum rang earlier. She’s livid.’
Their mother had, in the eighties, authored what was now considered a foundational work of feminist critique of the traditional Australian canon. Bush of the Bush: Putting Women in their Place had been phenomenally successful in a way that none of her subsequent books had managed. As part of the failing publicity for her most recent book, Out of Focus: Women in the Public Archive, a friend had wrangled her a spot on a national current affairs show, though this too, it seemed, had fallen through. This would not have been received well: for someone who critiqued for a profession, their mother was perhaps one of the least capable of receiving criticism. The opening music began and the siblings watched on, treasonous in their mother’s absence. Prudence, their mother’s academic rival and real-world arch nemesis, was, as always, impeccable. At one point Seymour’s face lit up.
‘Prudence is once more dressed in the heady red shades of inner east suburban solidarity,’ he observed wryly.
‘Pardon?’ Nell was confused.
‘Patrick would have laughed,’ Seymour muttered to himself, and they went back to watching in silence.
Ten minutes later Nell lay coiled around her laptop, the doona cocooning her into the bed as she stared glumly at the screen. In fairness to the world in general it was never a good idea to google oneself, yet self-google she had. Did you mean Ned Swansea? the browser asked earnestly. She scrolled through a couple of pages, finding only foreign doppelgangers, and then eventually links to Seymour. There he was, perfect teeth and soulful eyes, wearing a stupid trilby on a ridiculous angle that she had since seen him twice bin then rescue after proclaiming it a poltergeist of Patrick’s incessant desire to transform him.
‘Nobody actually wears trilbies,’ he’d muttered into the open lid of the bin before letting it snap shut. ‘Only embarras
sing wannabes and elderly men with names like Lorenzo or Alf.’
Moments later he’d nudged the bin back open with an embarrassed foot and swiped the trilby out.
‘I’ll take it to the op shop later,’ he snapped, though Nell suspected it had joined the secret pile of Patrick-scented mementos he’d started hoarding in the back of his wardrobe. Nell closed her laptop and lay back in the darkness waiting for sleep to arrive.
*
The next morning passed slowly as Nell spent it reworking the Miller letter DB had sent back to her with comments. Hygienic regulation, she noted, was back. She took an early lunch, placing an order at a café down the street, then waited by the window. The foot traffic at this end of Collins Street was a teeming sea of neutral tones set against the languid sky. Suits of black, grey and brown weaved and zigzagged, as office workers wasted their breaks with tedious errands and personal tasks as their lunches sat on their desks awaiting their return. Heads were cast downwards against the rain and already brisk gaits quickened, leaping and dodging over and around the fast-forming puddles. Inside the café, fine-suited professionals scrolled through their phones, shooting off urgent emails and knocking over hasty phone calls. She waited for her order, listening to the conversations taking place around her.
The Book of Ordinary People Page 6