by Bowes, K T
Hana picked out the faces who had begun as colleagues and ended up as friends. Missing Anka terribly then, she focussed on Gwynne. Closed and revealing nothing in, Hana realised she knew absolutely nothing about him, apart from the bits he had told her that day at the mall. There was an unkemptness about him, but he was attractive in a suave, arty way. Logan sat almost directly behind Gwynne, but reading him better, Hana could detect boredom in his twinkling grey eyes. He noticed her looking at him and smirked in that way he had; a slight movement of the lips showing cute dimples at the side of his mouth. Her mind wandered back to the previous evening, when they had disagreed about throwing an old petrol can away. “It’s got a hole in the bottom,” Logan had laughed at her.
Hana was reluctant to let it go. “I might need it,” she argued.
They tussled over it and Logan used a particularly successful distraction technique to get Hana to let go. She remembered the sensation of his lips on her neck and felt a blush creep up into her cheeks. She saw with embarrassment that he smiled across at her with a look in his grey eyes that suggested that his thoughts had gone along similar lines. He bit his bottom link and winked, a slow lazy movement. Hana admired his stunning physique from across the room as he sat with one cowboy boot resting on his other knee. The scar under his eye added to him somehow, conflicting with his bashful awkwardness and jarring the image of the high school English teacher. Hana smirked back and wrinkled her nose.
She caught sight of Peter North out of the corner of her eye and watched him yawn loudly and check his watch. She wasn’t the only one studying him however and as she looked back towards the front, caught the eye of Donald Watson, who glared at Pete and then across at her. Hana gulped and kept her eyes fixed on her hands to avoid trouble.
The meeting drew to a close. Angus had said little but looked uncomfortable as the final notice was read out, squirming in his chair with uncharacteristic distaste. Donald bounced to his feet and grasped the moment as he unleashed the latest diktat. “I would like to remind all staff that relationships between staff members is strictly forbidden. Board members would like it reiterated that such relationships are a distraction from the quality teaching and administration expected by our parents and students.” He puffed himself up to his thickset height of around five feet and nine inches before uttering a statement in his best Dalek monotone, “We are a Christian establishment. It will not be tolerated.” He sat down with a thud, a fine layer of dust guffing out of his chair cushion.
Angus grew more uncomfortable by the second as silence resonated its nothingness around the hushed audience. He stared at a point on the ceiling where the rain came in the previous winter and remained quiet. Hana concentrated on not worrying if she had gone red or not. It seemed to be an effective way of controlling the blood that ran unwittingly to her face during times of stress. She couldn’t look at Logan, but waited until everyone else got up to leave and then bolted to the office as fast as she could. Behind her retreating back she overheard the mutterings of other staff members around her.
“They can’t do that!”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“I’m going to the union about this!”
“There is no union stupid, it’s a private school!”
Hana sped to her desk and sat down with a thump. Her heart pounded and a mixture of embarrassment and severe disappointment consumed her. Her relationship with Logan was dead in the water. It hadn’t even made it to the relationship stage. As she struggled to control the well of emotions which threatened to overthrow her, Hana heard footsteps. Thinking it was Sheila returning, she hauled herself together mentally.
A gentle hand on her shoulder caused Hana to turn around. Peter North followed the squeeze with a pat which was a little hard, but full of compassion. It was so un-Pete-like, that Hana was truly unpicked and making a pathetic excuse, beat a hasty exit and ran to the toilets on the ground floor.
While Hana’s reaction was one of tears and hidden despair, others were not so quiet with their opinions. Sheila’s vast sense of overreaction was inflamed and she ranted and raved from the seconds following the staff briefing to home time - with gusto. “How am I supposed to not-have-a-relationship with my own husband, just because he happens to be teaching a class here? For goodness sake, this is ridiculous!”
On she went, talking about it to anyone who would listen, including the liaison officer from Lincoln University which was embarrassing. She had a long distance and very heated discussion about it with her mother in fluent Swedish, which sounded incredibly beautiful even though the whole conversation was a rant. Pete was silent on the matter until one of the teacher aides suggested there might be a problem with him seeing Henrietta, because she visited the school occasionally. “Will that be allowed, or is that considered a ‘school relationship’?” The small woman with large breasts escaping from a tiny tee shirt used her fingers to make inverted commas in the air.
Fortunately she ducked in time, as Pete threw the glass paperweight he was fiddling with. “Bloody hell!” she shrieked as it hit the wall where her face had been seconds before.
“Shut up about it!” Pete yelled, an angry purple flush spreading up his neck and spreading through his wispy hair. “Just shut up!” The paperweight was resin and not glass fortunately, but the hole in the plasterboard was real enough to send him skittering out of the room in a mixture of temper and fear.
Hana was bereft of rational thought and wondered what Logan must be thinking, not to mention the rest of the staff on the payroll. It clearly didn’t mean married staff as Sheila seemed to believe, but unmarried, dating and well, fornicating staff obviously. Thanks again Anka, Hana thought bitterly to herself. It seemed like a ridiculously unfair turn of events, but one which had upended her life in one sentence.
She stayed out of public view for most of the day but couldn’t avoid collecting the post after lunch, along with the other fifty staff members. It was something of a crush with some staff reaching down to their pigeon holes and others reaching up and some poor souls lost in the middle, scrabbling around blindly in the tier of boxes at chest and knee height. The main topic of conversation seemed to be, “Sorry, terribly sorry, oh, sorry, didn’t see you there, sorry, ouch, sorry.”
The glass doors fronting onto the staff room made the room at rush hour look like a beehive. ‘C’ for Careers and ‘D’ for Du Rose were close together and Hana ended up reaching up for the office post just as Logan was sifting through his. Without her chair, Hana couldn’t see and walked her fingers blindly around in the shelf above her. The room was packed full of bodies and so no one noticed as Logan reached into the box and retrieved her post. Hana held her hand out woodenly to take it and he ran his fingers gently over hers, linking them before pulling her hand up and kissing the back of it. His brooding grey eyes locked on her face without wavering. Hana felt shivers run up her back. Then he was gone, pushing through the throng and out into the corridor. His departure coincided with the entry of Alan Dobbs and Donald Watson, a festival of grumpiness descending instantly on the bustling room.
From somewhere near the centre of the small space, there bubbled out cheering and clapping, rising from restrained tones to a full-out roar. Hana whipped round in time to see Gwynne, arms locked around the tiny Chinese lab assistant from the food technology department, giving her a smacker of a kiss right on the lips. Hana was perplexed. She hadn’t got round to giving him the congratulations card for his forthcoming wedding. Now it looked as though it wouldn’t be necessary.
“Maybe the Internet bride idea hasn’t worked out,” Hana mused out loud.
Paddy Chatfield from physics stood next to her and leaned across whilst clapping heartily. “Life in the old dog yet, I see. They were chatting on the school intranet, not the Internet. You know, that annoying little thing at the bottom of emails that lets you send messages. Awesome, really awesome. There’s hope for the rest of us.” He beamed at Hana like a serial killer. Intranet, not Internet. How did the schoo
l gossips always manage to get things so wrong?
Hana smiled politely and tried to leave the room, managing to squeeze between the gawking bodies as Dobbs and Watson pushed through to deal with the offending pair. Glancing backwards, she saw the triumphant look on Gwynne’s face, mixed with clear determination and defiance. Watson looked like he was going to bust a blood vessel and Dobbs like he already had.
Hana couldn’t wait for the day to be over but before she left, called in on Angus to let him know what advice his real estate friend had given her. She didn’t make it that far. Where parents or boys usually stood or sat in anticipation outside the principal’s office, there were lines of staff instead, mainly in couples all waiting their turn. Hana backtracked quickly before any of them noticed her and fled for the safety of home.
That evening she was plagued by a series of phone calls. When she picked up, there was the sound of someone disconnecting at the other end. It happened four times and on the last, she heard people in the background, laughing and talking. After a pause, a voice came through the tired grey analogue handset, “You need to give back what isn’t yours. This is only going to get worse.”
The click of disconnection came again. It was eerie and Hana’s heartrate increased. She rushed to the front windows to look out into the street. The road was empty, streetlights flicking on as dusk gave way to the darkness of night. Wrenching at the cords holding the blinds up, Hana dropped them down to screen her from the road. The blinds hadn’t been down for many years and as they fell, released a cloud of dust into the room. It occupied Hana with a major cleaning job, involving not just dusters but the vacuum also. It was late when she finished, too late to ring Bodie.
So she settled down for the night after checking all the doors and windows but didn’t sleep well. At every little sound, her brain woke her with a start, leaving her shaking and afraid. The night felt unreal and when she dozed, it was shallow and without rest. When she rose for work in the morning, Hana felt the nasty sickness to her stomach that came with lack of sleep.
It was with unease and great trepidation that she made the journey down to work. For the first time in a long time, her job didn’t seem as vital to her existence as it had. The school was her life blood after Vik; going through the motions of living kept her sane and functioning. All at once it seemed to be the thing standing between her and the blossoming sense of aliveness taking shape in her world. Hana needed to decide if it was truly worth the effort of hanging onto it. She needed to talk with Logan, but not at work. He always came to her. Maybe she needed to go and find him.
The lab assistant’s car was in the Chapel car park and Hana spotted Gwynne’s truck poking out from behind the end wall of the gym. It appeared as though all was well. They plainly hadn’t been sacked. Once inside the building, the atmosphere was tense and electrified. A storm was brewing. Staff were curt to one another and making her way through the staff room, Hana was struck by the lack of laughter and joviality usually present. The mood continued with its air of pregnancy, patience was in short supply and a record number of green detention slips found their way onto the desk of the ever-affable deans’ secretary. She processed them with her usual speed and efficiency and a great deal of surprise at their number.
Even the boys seemed unduly subdued at interval, spinning rugby balls at each other half-heartedly and then leaving them where they lay, uncaught and redundant in the grass. Hana busied herself with general tasks, engrossed in trying to sort out an invoice from a company claiming to have sold the school a complicated drill bit last year. She didn’t realise someone else had entered the room as she sat with her back to the student centre door, but was alerted by the click as the lock snapped shut.
Hana spun round, startled by the quiet proximity of Logan. He pulled her to her feet and wedged them both down the side of an elderly filing cabinet, so they could be unobserved from the windows. Then he pressed warm lips to hers. Hana was horrified and protested, “We’ll be sacked!”
Logan placed an index finger on her lips to silence her. “Will you come home with me at the weekend, to meet my parents?”
Hana was momentarily taken aback and didn’t answer. For a second she had horrors, thinking of a Māori version of Deepak and Indra and then she felt quite overcome with gratitude and relief. Logan intended to pursue their relationship despite the threat of losing his job. Hana bit her lip and then smiled. She resembled an excited child, sparkling green eyes filled with mischief. “Yes please. But we have to keep it a secret for now. I don’t really care about my job anymore, but I don’t want you to lose yours. Not over me anyway.”
Logan rested his hand on the wall above Hana’s head, screening her with his arm. He leaned down and touched his lips to hers. His grey eyes were serious. “You have no idea how much I’d give up for you.” His voice sounded hushed and sultry. Hana’s eyes danced.
“Probably not your job though.”
Logan’s lips felt soft. “Definitely my job.”
“But what about...”
“Sshh.” Logan placed his scarred index finger over her lips. “I’m not giving this up now.”
“I should have called you last night, to sort this out,” Hana gushed and he shook his head.
“I went out of town on the bike. You wouldn’t have got me.” He rained soft kisses on Hana’s face and began to work his way along her jaw line to her sensitive neck. He ran his fingers gently up underneath the back of her long hair. It rebelled, breaking free from its clips and cascading down to caress Logan’s hand. Hana felt her stomach clunk down into her shoes and she abandoned her usual reserve and kissed him back, drinking in the proximity of her skin on his and the scent of his aftershave. Logan’s other hand pressed into the small of Hana’s back and she heard herself give a tiny moan.
“Who’s locked the bloody door?” The door handle was rattled with violence and then came the forcing of a key into the lock. It clattered around, metal on metal. Logan stepped away from Hana casually, greeted by an unusually hassled Pete North. Pete stopped and stared at them both, Logan stood with his hands in his pockets and Hana wedged between the filing cabinet and the wall.
Logan drew an envelope from his jacket pocket and lobbed it onto Hana’s desk. He sauntered towards the door but halted as he reached it. Winking at Hana, he turned towards Pete and said, “It is what you think.” Then he slipped out of the office and off to his next class.
Pete stared at Hana before hurling himself into his chair and shuffling through some physical education unit standard assessments, which his class had done a number of weeks ago and he still hadn’t marked. “I knew you two were going out,” he grumbled. “It’s obvious to everyone.”
The envelope contained $500 in cash for the golf clubs and other garage stuff. Hana was impressed. “He sorted that out amazingly quickly,” Hana said as she sifted through the notes. She was relieved. A garage sale wasn’t her thing any way.
“Oh yeah, he sorts things quickly all right!” Pete’s comment sounded jaded, an edge of jealousy making Hana shoot a look at his bowed head. He sifted through his paperwork and then used the corner of a bulletin to wipe his nose.
Hana cringed and sat down, settling into her work with a new energy. Worry kicked in shortly afterwards as she stressed about going away for the whole weekend. What if Bodie called in? What if Izzie suddenly needed her? Who was going to feed Tiger? For every objection, a solution easily presented itself. She could tell Bodie and Izzie she was going away for the weekend. Andrea next door could feed Tiger. Then other questions began to plague her. What if they were expected to share a room together? They hadn’t even discussed such issues.
Like she always did, Hana spent the afternoon second guessing her decision. She ran through what she would say in each circumstance and then re-ran the tape with a different series of answers, arguing with herself in her head until she put herself in a complete tail spin. She missed Anka’s common sense and practical nature and Hana felt the wound of broken friendsh
ip keenly. “Oh, Hana, just go!” she imagined Anka saying and a new voice broke into her turmoil, telling her she would deal with problems as they arose and not anticipate them before they happened. It made sense and gave her peace.
For the rest of the afternoon Hana worked happily, like a woman who felt cherished for once, even managing to ignore Pete’s snoring. He slept face down and one of the assessment papers stuck itself to the dribble leaking from one side of his face.
A telephone call was to destroy her cautious happiness. With a few simple words her peace was shattered. “Sorry, can you say that again?” Hana felt dim as she asked Darrell to repeat himself for the third time.
“Yeah, look, I’m really sorry. I don’t quite know how it happened.”
“Someone’s nicked my car out of your compound? But you were only fixing a couple of dents and fitting a new bumper.”
Darrell’s voice held an uncharacteristic wobble as he talked through the problem with Hana. “Yeah, I know. The Serena’s bumper arrived, but we had a few jobs on. You didn’t seem in any rush...” Note to self not to be so complacent in the future. Darrell sighed, his breath wheezing down the phone. “I scheduled the repairs for this afternoon. My trainee technician wandered around the compound for ages. I thought he was being dumb and charged outside, but I couldn’t find it either!”
Unfortunately, they couldn’t tell when the vehicle disappeared because until the part arrived, it sat in the car park ignored. “I called the cops,” Darrell’s tone became defensive. “They walked around the garage and property, but they can’t file a stolen report until you call them yourself.” Hence the awkward phone call.
Hana was devastated. Darrell, her usually reliable mechanic of many years, was embarrassed. Vik’s gift to her, the Serena they had travelled in, picnicked in and once, in a fit of jaunty madness on an overnight trip, camped in; was gone. Doug, the original owner of the garage and father of Darrell was probably turning in his grave.