Evie's Job

by Tess Mackenzie

Evie stopped, and looked at Rachel. Perhaps this was something serious. She thought, then said, “I haven’t heard anything.”

  Rachel kept looking at her, a little desperately.

  “Rachel, I promise, I haven’t heard. Why are there going to be redundancies?”

  “We’re going broke, I suppose.”

  “We’re not,” Evie said. “We can’t be.”

  “There’s less clients than there were a year ago.”

  Evie shrugged, since she hadn’t been there to remember, which Rachel knew perfectly well.

  “Well, you’re safe anyway,” Rachel said. “Obviously. You’ll be fine. I’d just hoped I would be too.”

  “Why am I safe?”

  “Because of Natalie.”

  Evie suddenly felt angry. She sat down behind her desk. “I’d better not be only because of that.”

  “You will be.”

  Evie glared at her.

  Rachel seemed worried. “I’ve got a mortgage, Evie…”

  “I know you do.”

  “I just bought a car.”

  “Rachel, I know. You told me.”

  “I’m just saying. I’m asking. If you hear anything, can you warn me? Please?”

  “I will. But I haven’t heard. And you’ll probably hear before me.”

  Rachel nodded and left the office, closing the door as she went. Evie sat there for a minute, trying to decide how seriously to take this, and what she ought to do. She switched on her computer, and opened a file, and tried to make herself read. She told herself it was only rumours, and nothing to worry about really. She told herself the firm couldn’t be in financial trouble or she would have noticed something at home. Natalie would have been more stressed, or worried, or something, and Evie would have had some clue. She told herself that, but then she thought about how busy she’d been, how busy they both were, and that perhaps she might not have noticed after all.

  In the end she stood up, and left her office, and said to Rachel as she went past, “I’m just going upstairs.”

  Upstairs, to the partner’s offices. Rachel understood. “Thank you,” she said, as Evie left, but Evie didn’t answer.

  Evie went to Natalie’s office, and said, “Is she in?” to Natalie’s assistant.

  “She’s in a meeting.”

  “Okay. Tell her I was here.” Evie turned to go, then stopped and said, “Who’s she meeting with? I thought she was doing trial prep this week?”

  Natalie’s assistant looked uncomfortable, and then said, quietly, “There’s a partner’s meeting.”

  Evie stood there for a moment, and took a slow breath, and had to decide what to do. She had to decide right then whether she was going to be a first-year associate, or be Natalie’s girlfriend. Suddenly, she couldn’t be both at the same time.

  “Okay,” Evie said, after a moment. “Could you tell her I was here, please?”

  “Of course.”

  “Ask her to call me?” Evie said, and went back downstairs.

  She walked past Rachel without saying a word, despite Rachel’s anxious stare. She walked past Rachel, and sat down at her desk, and didn’t say a thing to anyone. She tried to work, but couldn’t concentrate. She didn’t know what to do. An unscheduled partners meeting was a bad sign. It was an awful sign. It seemed exactly the kind of thing that happened to get the final approval for something drastic.

  Evie wanted to go and wait in Natalie’s office, but she knew it wouldn’t help. It wouldn’t change anything, and it wouldn’t make her look very good, either. Instead, she sat, and waited, even though she wasn’t doing anything useful. She sat at her desk, and lasted out an hour, hoping Natalie would phone. Natalie didn’t. The meeting must still been going on.

  Evie waited, forcing herself to stay in her office, and as it happened, she waited enough.

  The firings began before Natalie got back to her.

  *

  Rachel tapped on the glass wall of Evie’s office, then, when Evie glanced up, she turned deliberately and looked out into the central part of their floor, towards the open cubicles where the paralegals and assistants worked. Evie looked as well. It was Rachel’s way of discreetly drawing Evie’s attention to something she might want to know about, someone walking their way she might want to avoid, or something gossipy and exciting like an office romance melting down in front of everyone.

  Today it wasn’t gossip. Today it was definitely something Evie didn’t want to see.

  There were uniformed security guards there, outside security guards who Evie hadn’t seen before, not the usual ones from the lobby. There were other people with them too, people in normal office clothes carrying folders and lists. Evie thought she recognised someone from human resources.

  Worst of all, there were cardboard cartons.

  Evie knew what cardboard cartons meant. Everyone knew what cartons meant, even people, like Evie, who had never been through corporate layoffs before. The carton was to put your things in, so you could leave right away, because once you’d been fired you had to go as soon as possible, so you didn’t have any chances to steal files or in some other way harm the firm. Evie knew how it worked. Everyone knew how this worked. She knew, but it was still horrible to realize it was about to happen here.

  Evie stood up, and went to her office door, and opened it. There were a lot of security people out there, and a lot of cartons. The whole floor was in chaos. People were upset, some were angry. Somewhere, someone was crying. As Evie opened the door she heard someone else say, “What the fuck, not me.” She didn’t recognise the voice, and wasn’t sure who had spoken.

  Rachel came over and stood beside Evie, in the office doorway.

  “How many is it?” Evie said quietly. “Have you heard?”

  “Half,” Rachel said. She glanced at another assistant further down the row of offices, who’d probably just heard it from someone else.

  “Half?” Evie said. “Are you sure?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Oh fuck.”

  Other office doors were open, other people were watching. This must be costing the firm a fortune in lost productivity, Evie thought. There was something a little unpleasant about everyone standing there watching, morbidly fascinated, like staring at a car accident. Evie knew it was terrible, but couldn’t help herself. She watched anyway.

  The human resources people were out in the middle of the floor, with the paralegals and assistants, speaking to some people, and ignoring others. Evie watched, feeling a little detached, feeling untouched by what was happening in front of her. She was sympathetic, but not actually scared for herself, still assuming this was only happening to other people. She didn’t seem to be the only one making that assumption. Other partner-track associates, from the windowed offices around the outside walls, were obviously presuming the same thing. They were watching, resenting the loss of their support staff, but not actually worried for themselves. Nearby, two other first-year associates were complaining to one another that they wouldn’t be able to meet court dates with only half their staff. Then the human resources people came over and handed one of them an envelope, and a security guard appeared with cartons, and slowly the floor went quiet.

  Partner-track staff were being laid off as well.

  Phones rang and went unanswered. A photocopier was running somewhere, clattering away on a job that the person who’d started it might never come back for. The whole floor was still.

  Evie stood there, horrified. She couldn’t believe things were this bad. She felt sick. She felt afraid, like she was waiting to be sentenced in court, or for a jury’s verdict. She bit her lip and clenched her fists, and made herself stand there, watching. She made herself not flinch or look away or go back into her office and hide, like she desperately wanted to do.

  It was going to be a while. The human resources people were working clockwise from the elevator. They were being fairly quick with each person, but the whole process was inherently slow. Evie had most of three sides of the building
before they got to her, and she wasn’t she could wait that long.

  She made herself wait. She had no choice. She stood there, and waited, and breathed.

  After one wall had been done, it was clear that not everyone was being laid off. It seemed to be about half the people on the floor, as Rachel had said. Half of all the staff, regardless of position. Evie watched, trying to decide the criteria for being fired, trying to work out if she was safe. It would be based on billed hours, she thought, but with twists here and there to keep it nicely vague. They would be aiming to keep the top billers, and anyone with some useful edge, those who spoke Chinese, or who had important families, or contacts in the state government. They would be sacrificing anyone else, anyone who didn’t quite match up, anyone who wasn’t working that extra little bit. Those people would go.

  Evie watched, trying to see an obvious pattern in who was being fired, but to her disappointment, there wasn’t one. It didn’t surprise her at all. There had to be no obvious pattern, and she knew that perfectly well. There had to be no pattern, because this was a building full of suddenly-desperate lawyers. If there was anything that looked like a pattern, wrongful dismissal lawsuits would follow. She knew how this worked, because she’d vetted lists like this for clients several times over the past year. More often recently, as the recession had got worse. Making sure they could keep who they liked, and fire everyone else, and doing it in a way that got no-one got unexpectedly sued. She had vetted such lists, checking performance reviews and productivity metrics and other measures of usefulness, making spreadsheets to search for patterns to blind-check that no particular group, like recent parents, had been accidently singled-out. She’d done that in the abstract, about people she didn’t know, and now, suddenly it was happening to her too. Some other firm would have been brought in to check, the same way Evie had done. It was a little odd to think that she’d been screened, and never known.

  She hoped the decision-making was sound. She wouldn’t want to be fired by mistake, a kind of sacrificial slipping through the gaps that presumably happened sometimes. She hoped she would be all right, but she didn’t actually know. She had fewer billable hours than some people because she had to plus-one Natalie at work events. Natalie had always said that counted as work and not to worry, and Evie suddenly hoped that Natalie was right. She hoped Natalie had explained it to whoever was making these decisions. It would be awful to be fired for such a simple mistake.

  It was odd, Evie thought suddenly. A week ago she would have been angry at that thought, angry if someone had dared suggest that Natalie help her at all. Now, scared, she actually hoped that Natalie had. She wanted to keep her job. She wanted to keep it desperately.

  She watched, silently, making herself breathe. She didn’t know what else to do.

  *

  Evie stood beside Rachel, watching the human resources people work their way around their floor. She was glad Rachel was there. Standing beside someone else helped make it more bearable.

  Evie watched for a while, and suddenly realized there was a pattern after all. “They’re keeping all the assistants,” she said quietly to Rachel. “You’ll be fine.”

  Rachel nodded. She must have noticed too.

  The assistants, but not the paralegals, Evie saw, which made a kind of sense. The assistants were paid less and could do some of the same work.

  They watched a little longer, and then Rachel cleared her throat. “You’ll be fine too,” she said, hesitantly, probably trying to be supportive now she knew she was safe. “Your billing’s in the top half of first-years.”

  “Only just.”

  “You know judges.”

  “Through Natalie,” Evie said, glumly. All the judges she knew, anyone useful she knew, the firm already had access to through Natalie. Evie’s contacts weren’t worth very much, not when Natalie had all the same contacts.

  “It’s enough,” Rachel said quietly. “Even if they don’t want to keep you, they can’t actually lose you. They can’t let you go anywhere else.”

  “Oh,” Evie said, surprised. “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “I just mean you’ll probably be all right,” Rachel said.

  Evie nodded.

  “Even if your billing isn’t…”

  “Could we not?” Evie said.

  “Of course, I…”

  “Um, shut up,” Evie said.

  Rachel looked at her, a little startled.

  “Sorry, but shut up just for now. Please.”

  Rachel nodded, and smiled, and squeezed Evie’s arm.

  The human resources team reached Evie’s wall and began making their way down it. Evie could see more clearly what was happening now. The system was quite simple. The human resources people were walking straight past anyone who was staying, ignoring them, doing them the kindness of not even saying hello and causing unnecessary worry. They would stop at an office and hand the occupant a letter and say a few quiet words, probably reassurance there’d be severance pay and help with rehiring. The security guards were right behind the human resources people, stepping into offices past their former occupants, closing files and logging off computers even while the human resources people delivered the bad news. Once people were away from their files, away from the computer, and unable to do much harm, they were given a few minutes to get themselves together, to shout or cry or warn someone at home they had bad news. Then, a pair of guards with a trolley stacked with file cartons came past and asked how many they needed. There were a lot of security people, Evie thought, maybe more than there were usually people working on this floor. Enough to be in every office, Evie supposed, and watching every laid-off staff member. Enough to make sure everyone stayed calm, and nothing got out of control. It was cold-blooded but efficient. Horribly, heartlessly efficient. Evie couldn’t think of a worse way to do it, but she couldn’t think of a better way, either. It was quick, she supposed, and it spared those who were leaving a long drawn-out departure, and spared those who were waiting to learn their fate a long delay too.

  Evie watched, and began to feel a little better. She could see more clearly who had survived now. People who she knew billed less than her were still in their offices. People who billed less, in less profitable departments. If they were staying, she ought to be staying too.

  She was going to be fine, she told herself. She told herself that over and over.

  The human resources people reached Evie’s office, and she had one awful moment when the human resources manager looked at her list, and at Evie’s office door, but then went on without a word.

  Evie took a breath. She hadn’t breathed in a minute or more. Her chest suddenly hurt. Her knees were shaking, and her fingernails were pressed so deep into her palm that she might be drawing blood. Rachel looked at her, and Evie looked back, and neither of them said a word. There was nothing to say. They were both lucky, and other people weren’t. They were standing in a room full of people who’d just lost most of what mattered in their lives, and there was nothing either of them could do about it.

  Evie’s neighbour, Nigel, had been let go. Evie tried not to watch as he took a carton from a security guard and went back into his office.

  Evie’s phone rang. Rachel looked at it, and then said quietly, “It’s Natalie.”

  Slowly, Evie shook her head.

  Rachel picked the phone up, and said, “I’m sorry, she isn’t available right now.” She listened, then said, “I don’t…” and “I’m sorry, but I don’t think…” and then, “Yes, I’ll tell her.”

  She put the phone down, and looked over at Evie, and said, “Natalie’s on the way down.”

  “Shit,” Evie said. She thought for a moment, then went back to her desk and picked up the phone. She called Natalie’s mobile. It rung and went to voicemail. She hung up and tried again, and this time Natalie answered.

  “Don’t come down,” Evie said.

  “Are you okay?” Natalie said.

  “Don’t come down.”

  “Why not?�
�� Natalie said. “Is everything all right?”

  “I’m fine, but don’t come down.”

  “Evie…”

  “Don’t come down. Please. It’s a fucking massacre down here, and I don’t want people looking at you and thinking that’s somehow why I’m still here.”

  “It isn’t why.”

  “Okay,” Evie said. “But can we talk about it later?” She wasn’t completely sure she believed Natalie, and she wasn’t sure she cared very much any more, either.

  “I promise you,” Natalie said. “That isn’t why you weren’t let go.”

  “Yep,” Evie said. “But later?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yep. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

  “All right. We’re just on a five-minute break. I have to go back in.”

  “I guessed.”

  “It’ll be all day,” Natalie said. “I might be late home.”

  “That’s fine,” Evie said. “I’ll see you when you do.”

  “I love you.”

  “I you,” Evie said, not wanting to be overheard. She put the phone down and went back to the office doorway, and just stood there, watching.

  Rachel stood with her. The other survivors around the floor were doing the same. No-one seemed to know quite where to look, or what to say to those who were leaving.

  Nigel from next door came out of his office, and went past with his carton.

  “Nigel,” Evie said. “I’m so sorry…”

  “Well, good for you,” he said.

  Evie looked at him. He sounded angry.

  “Come on Evie,” Nigel said. “We all know why you’re still here.”

  He spoke loudly enough that people heard, and stopped what they were doing to listen. Loudly enough that his voice carried, and the floor went quiet, and suddenly he and Evie were the centre of everyone’s attention.

  Evie didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know how cruel she ought to be. She had to say something, she thought. If she didn’t, if she didn’t stop this now, she’d never be anything but the one who survived today because of Natalie. The one who’d slept her way into her job. She had to defend herself, but she didn’t know if she should. She didn’t know whether, on what might be the worst day of Nigel’s life, she should make it even more terrible.