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The Better Woman

Page 19

by Ber Carroll


  I’m going to be a fish out of water here, thought Sarah as she drove up the sweeping driveway.

  ‘Ah, you must be Sarah.’ The woman who opened the door had a loud voice, a big bosom and a friendly smile. ‘I’m Patsy – Eric’s better half.’

  She ushered Sarah inside, took her coat and handed her a glass of mulled wine.

  ‘Laura, is everything ready on the table?’

  ‘Mark, get some music on.’

  ‘Eric, check on the turkey, would you?’

  Once her instructions were dispatched, she emitted a raucous laugh.

  ‘Eric might be the boss at work,’ she told Sarah, ‘but he’s got no clout in this house – I call the shots around here.’

  After Christmas Sarah was often invited over to the MacDonald household and eventually she came to know them so well that she would call unannounced. She felt at home there. It was as if there had always been an empty seat around their family table with her name on it.

  ‘Why do you hang out with them so much?’ asked Emma, perplexed by the unlikely friendship. ‘They’re nearly three times your age.’

  ‘Patsy’s like a mother – she fusses over what I eat, what I wear, my health – and Eric’s like a dad . . .’

  Emma smiled wryly. ‘Maybe I’ll leave Mum to her valium and ask the MacDonalds to take me in as well.’

  Sarah did nothing to hide the friendship at work, and it was a rude awakening when she overheard a conversation that was going on inside the smoking room.

  ‘Every time I turn around he’s there with her, showing her this, showing her that.’

  ‘That’s not all he shows her, I bet.’

  Sarah recognised the sniggers: Nick and Peter. Deeply upset, she returned to her workstation.

  Eric came around later that day and sat on her desk while he talked about the dip in the US dollar. Sarah tried to talk to him as normal. She felt as sorry for him as she did for herself that people would misinterpret their friendship.

  The following year Sarah got promoted and became a foreign exchange dealer. She had finessed her natural instinct for the market and the promotion was one hundred per cent merited.

  Nick and Peter were put out that she was now on the same level as them.

  ‘Anybody can get ahead if they’re sleeping with the boss,’ she heard Nick mutter under his breath.

  ‘What did you say?’

  He was too cowardly to repeat it out loud. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I’ve worked damned hard for this promotion,’ Sarah informed him in a stony voice. ‘If I ever hear you insinuate again that Eric is more than my friend, I’ll tell him – and I think you’re smart enough to know what that will mean for your future here.’

  With a grunt, Nick swung around in his seat and went back to work. Seething, Sarah continued to stare daggers at his back. It had been Denise, in New York, who had first set the standard. Then Eric. Sarah was very grateful to them both for helping her establish the direction she wanted her career to take. She was aiming for the very top. Nobody, least of all Nick, was going to stop her.

  She’d never felt more confident, more sure of herself and her place in the world. She still had dark moods, like everybody else, but they usually passed. If they lingered, she had coping strategies: running, keeping her thoughts positive, focusing on her achievements at work. She was often amazed by how effective her strategies were, by the way she could change her thought patterns and lift her moods. An ocean of tears could have been saved if she’d known all this at the time of the abortion and her grandmother’s death.

  Jodi: Moving On

  Chapter 23

  1990

  Jodi finished her degree with second-class honours. It wasn’t what she’d initially aimed for, but it wasn’t a bad result considering.

  ‘When’s your graduation ceremony?’ asked Shirley.

  ‘I’m not going, Mum.’

  ‘Oh, darling, why not?’

  ‘Because the sooner everyone forgets my face and name, the better for my career.’

  After the trial, Jodi had been the subject of much curiosity at the university. She had tried to ignore the stares and nudges and whispers, and now that her degree was finished she had no desire to extend her notoriety to the graduation ceremony.

  Shirley didn’t argue and Jodi returned the paperwork to the university, electing not to attend the ceremony.

  The dean phoned the house the next day, sounding very displeased.

  ‘Your form says that you’re not attending the graduation ceremony. May I ask why?’

  ‘Because all the graduates will be pointing me out to their relatives – that’s the girl who stabbed her stepfather.’

  ‘That’s not a worthy reason –’

  ‘Yes, it is, Professor,’ Jodi cut him off. ‘The ceremony will be full of business mums and dads – bankers, accountants, economists, potential employers. I don’t want to remind them that Jodi Tyler is on the job market. I don’t want to prompt them to warn their recruitment departments about me. “Whatever you do, don’t hire that girl, she’s dangerous, she could go on a stabbing frenzy in the office some day . . . ”’

  ‘You’re being ridiculous,’ he snapped. ‘This graduation ceremony marks a momentous occasion for you and the faculty. It’s a testament to how we worked together. It sets an example for every other struggling student.’

  ‘I’m not interested in setting an example! I just want the best possible start to my career – which is to be as anonymous as possible.’

  ‘Now you’re being selfish . . .’

  Jodi flared up. ‘No, I’m not!’

  Suddenly he was angry too. ‘For goodness sake, Jodi, grow up.’

  ‘I am grown up – and I don’t have to listen to you patronising me.’

  She crashed down the phone and fled to her room.

  Grandma, who had overheard the yelling, made to go after her but changed her mind.

  They’ll sort it out themselves, she thought.

  Grandma was wrong: they didn’t sort it out, even though Jodi tried to. A few weeks after their argument, she was offered a job in ComBank. It presented the perfect opportunity to phone the dean’s office, to tell him the news, to make amends.

  ‘The dean is overseas,’ said the secretary.

  ‘When will he be back?’

  ‘We don’t know.’ The secretary lowered her voice. ‘You never know how long family problems take to resolve, do you?’

  Jodi hung up with an odd mix of emotions: curiosity about the professor’s ‘family problems’, regret that she had waited so long to phone him and, the most acute of the emotions, loneliness. One way or another, Professor Phelps had been a constant in her life for four years, a formidable ally, helping her through the trial and her degree. She missed him.

  Jodi’s new job consisted of processing changes of address in the unit trust department. It was soulless work, data entry peppered with a few phone calls.

  Think of this as a stepping stone, she told herself over and over.

  The notifications of address change came in the mail and Jodi was one of four administrators who processed the data onto the system. Jodi’s colleagues were pleasant in a remote, disinterested kind of way. They talked about weekend plans and the weather. They never asked Jodi anything about her personal life. They were too self-absorbed to follow world or even local news, and didn’t have a clue that three years previously their new colleague had been on the front page of every newspaper in the country.

  They were just as insular when it came to their work, tapping away on their keyboards and muttering under their breath if there was anything slightly out of the usual with a customer’s request.

  The supervisor, a hefty woman called Mary, was consulted on every minor deviation from the norm. She would give instructions on how to proceed, a sigh in her voice.

  ‘Phone the customer.’

  ‘Enter a file note.’

  ‘Ask for further evidence.’

  Mary gave the sa
me advice over and over but none of the administrators took the initiative to retain it. Jodi saw an opportunity to make her mark. Initially this meant bothering Mary with even more questions. At five o’clock, when the others had scarpered from their desks to make their train or bus home, Jodi would type up her notes. It took three weeks to put the standard operating procedure together, but she felt a great sense of achievement when it was done.

  She put the final copy on Mary’s desk.

  Please, Mary, give me a promotion – before I go insane.

  The next morning, when Jodi was opening the mail, she saw Mary approach. She didn’t look particularly happy. She reached Jodi’s side and put her hands on her ample hips.

  ‘Are you trying to put me out of a job?’

  Then, to Jodi’s relief, her broad face broke into a smile.

  After that, Jodi’s promotion was swift; in less than a month she was moved to the application processing area which was also under Mary’s supervision. In her new role she was responsible for handling applications to join the unit trust fund. This involved setting up new clients in the unit holder registry system and creating a purchase of units. She had to prepare a deposit slip for the cheques that came in with the application forms. Sometimes she liaised with other areas, like the funding department where the price for each unit was set. This was how she met Andrew Ferguson, a fund accountant from the UK.

  ‘How do you set the price?’ she asked him one day.

  ‘Easy,’ he replied and opened a spreadsheet on his screen. ‘First, we value all of the assets. Then we add on the known income receivable. And divide by the number of units. Basic maths, really.’

  Jodi was fascinated. ‘How do you value the assets?’

  ‘We upload the share prices from the night before.’

  ‘What happens if you make a mistake and work it out wrong?’

  ‘We check everything very carefully.’ Andrew regarded her from behind his silver-framed glasses. ‘Look, if you’re that interested, we can go for a drink after work and I can bore you with all the details . . .’

  Jodi was on the verge of turning him down, but she stopped. Andrew was quite good-looking with his boyish face, gentle brown eyes and dimples at the corners of his mouth.

  ‘Okay,’ she shrugged, as if it was no big deal.

  ‘Dates are more about the preparation than the actual event,’ Alison had once said. ‘It’s so much fun picking what to wear and doing your hair.’ Which in Alison’s case meant changing her tresses to a bright orange or, one time, electric blue. ‘Then there’s all the anticipation mixed in with the nervousness. No wonder it’s often an anticlimax when you actually meet the guy.’

  My very first date at the ripe old age of twenty-two, Jodi thought as she touched up her make-up in the office toilet. Well, better late than never, I guess.

  Her white shirt and pinstriped skirt looked very ordinary and the last thing she would have chosen to wear had there been more notice. She opened an extra button on the shirt, revealing some of her year-round tan.

  Andrew was waiting in the foyer. Jodi had only ever seen him sitting down and was surprised at how tall he was. His light brown hair was spiked, as if he’d run some water through it, and his jacket was slung over his shoulder.

  ‘Well, you know this city a lot better than I do,’ he grinned. ‘Where can we go to have a nice chat about fund accounting?’

  Jodi laughed. ‘Let’s try the Hilton.’

  Outside, a gusty wind whipped down George Street and Jodi pulled the lapels of her jacket together.

  ‘Gosh, it’s cold,’ she said with a grimace.

  ‘Cold?’ He looked amused. ‘This is positively balmy next to London.’

  The Hilton was only a block away and they were soon descending the marble steps into the bar.

  ‘What would you like to drink, Jodi?’

  ‘Well, I’m the one who wants to pick your brain, so maybe I should get this,’ she replied.

  ‘You can get the next one.’

  ‘Oh.’ She felt tremendously pleased that it wasn’t going to be just a quick drink. ‘I’ll have a beer, please.’

  She found two spare stools while he was at the bar. She didn’t take off her jacket. Despite what he’d said, it was cold. He came back with the drinks and his knee brushed against hers as he slid onto the stool.

  ‘Cheers.’ He raised his glass of lager and took a sip. ‘Now, what do you want to know?’

  Jodi asked him about his family, his life back home and what he liked to do in his spare time. She asked him about his travels, his friends and what kind of music he listened to. In fact, she asked him about everything but fund accounting.

  On the steps of the Hilton Hotel, on their way out, Andrew’s hand cupped the underside of her chin and tilted her face upwards. His lips were warm and tender. Jodi returned his kiss with a passion she didn’t know she was capable of. He gathered her closer, kissed her harder. Carried away in the moment, they temporarily forgot where they were.

  ‘Move along from the steps now,’ the bouncer said gruffly, trying to hide a smile.

  Up on the street, the cold wind brought a gush of reality.

  He wouldn’t want to kiss me if he knew the truth.

  Andrew, feeling the cold this time round, put on his jacket.

  ‘How do you get home?’ he asked.

  ‘Bus.’

  ‘Come on, I’ll walk you.’

  Her hand felt warm in his grasp as they walked down the street. Leaves and the odd piece of litter blew against them. Jodi’s hair streaked across her eyes and, after many futile attempts to tuck it back behind her ears, she let it be. She walked slowly, not wanting the night to end or reality to intrude again.

  ‘That bus says Dee Why,’ said Andrew, his pace quickening.

  ‘Oh.’

  The buses were usually a half-hour apart. How unlucky that there was one about to leave!

  Andrew bounded onto the bus.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she giggled. ‘You live in the opposite direction, you big idiot.’

  He handed the driver the fare. ‘Thought I’d come along for the ride.’

  They sat down the back, his arm resting across her shoulders. The bus rattled its way down Military Road and over Spit Bridge. Jodi gave Andrew, who’d never been north of the city, some orientation.

  ‘This bridge opens up to let the yachts through. The road traffic has to stop and wait.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind living here,’ he said, eyeing the houses on the harbourside, ‘and causing a traffic jam with my yacht.’

  ‘All you need is a few million,’ Jodi quipped.

  He squeezed her shoulder. ‘Well, we do work in investment banking – another few years and who knows?’

  The bus chugged up the hill and after that it was an easy run to Dee Why.

  ‘This is my stop coming up,’ she said, making a sad face.

  Andrew leaned down to kiss her and once again Jodi forgot where she was. In the distance were the grinding brakes of the bus, the lurching stop, the bang of the doors as they opened.

  Finally she pulled away. ‘I’d better go.’ She stood up, feeling decidedly starry-eyed. ‘Enjoy the ride back to the city.’

  He winked. ‘I will.’

  Jodi was apprehensive about going to work the next day.

  What if he ignores me? Acts like nothing happened?

  She walked into the office, settled at her desk and logged onto her computer. Andrew’s desk was at the other end of the floor. She didn’t need to see him until she required the unit price for the day. She could drag that out for another hour.

  ‘Good morning.’

  She jumped at the sound of his voice. A blush invaded her face. Luckily, her colleagues weren’t watching.

  ‘Hello, Andrew.’

  She noticed that his face was a little red too.

  ‘Jodi . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Will you go out with me again?’

  ‘Okay. Yes.’
She nodded, her head bobbing like a fool.

  ‘Friday night?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Same place?’

  ‘Let’s try the other end of town: the Rocks.’

  He made a move to return to his desk.

  ‘Andrew . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do you have the unit price for today?’

  This time Jodi could fully enjoy the anticipation of the date. For three days she deliberated about what to wear before she decided nothing in her wardrobe was good enough and dragged Alison out on a last-minute lunchtime shopping spree.

  ‘Gosh, you must be keen on him,’ Alison remarked when they met up outside her office. Now that she was part of the work force, her hair was toned down and her nose ring an accessory she wore only at weekends. ‘This is so not like you.’

  ‘I know,’ Jodi hurried her across the road to a busy shopping mall, ‘but I was dressed in my absolute worst the last time we went out – this time I want him to see me at my best.’

  With only an hour at their disposal, they raced in and out of chain stores and boutiques. Eventually Jodi settled on a pair of bootleg jeans and a low-cut white top.

  ‘Phone me tomorrow,’ Alison instructed before rushing back to work.

  Jodi went back to her desk and pretended to work. In her head she played out their date: meeting at the Orient Hotel, laughing and talking over drinks, and finally the walk to the bus. Funny that it was the end of the night she was most looking forward to, when they were alone, holding hands, kissing. Maybe he’d get on the bus again.

  She got changed at work. In the harsh lights of the bathroom she thought the white top didn’t look half as flattering as it had in the shop. Her hands shook as she applied her mascara. A black blob smeared her eyebrow and she wiped it off with some tissue.

  The walk down George Street calmed her. She arrived at the Orient, scanned the crowd and realised he wasn’t there.

  A stool freed up at the bar and she put her jacket on it. She ordered a drink and had taken a few sips when she saw Andrew weaving through the crowd. She waved, beamed a happy smile at him. He made for her direction, but didn’t return her smile.

  ‘Hi.’ She greeted him with a kiss and, when his response was lukewarm, wondered if she had been too forward. She gestured to her drink. ‘What would you like?’

 

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