No Neat Endings

by Dominic Carew

  ‘What am I supposed to say at this point?’ I said, taking my phone back from Tom. ‘It’s like she’s decided before she’s even met me to hate me until I can convince her not to.’

  ‘A pre-emptive strike,’ said Jeb.

  ‘Right. So I sit there, thinking hard. I can hear the pipes in the walls and the rusted pipes along the ceiling trickle as I think about what the hell to say to this girl. Finally, I write, ‘Ella.’ I write, ‘I’m not the kind of guy you think I am.’ Of course, she promptly replies with, ‘I’ve heard that one before.’’

  ‘Touché.’

  ‘Indeed. Well I’m writing back to explain myself, yeah? Something along the lines that not all guys are the same, that ruptures between men and women are too often misunderstandings, when she sends what can only be described as a tirade.’

  ‘What’s it say?’

  ‘Here Jeb,’ I said, handing him my phone. ‘Read that,’ and he cleared his throat, looked at the message and read it out loud.

  ‘Sydney guys are fuckwits,’ he read. ‘I’m sorry. But they are. I don’t know why I even agreed to come on this date. No offence. But seriously. We’re so over your bullshit. Oh my God,’ he said, looking up at me then to Tom.

  ‘Keep going,’ said Tom. ‘Don’t stop.’

  ‘You come on charming,’ he continued, ‘like you’re actually looking for a life partner. You have the gall, even, to use words like ‘wholesome’ and ‘meaningful’. What the hell? The only wholesome thing about a Sydney guy is the Weet-Bix he eats in the morning. You say you’re different to the others, but I highly doubt that,’ and he covered his eyes with his palm. ‘I cannot believe this chick!’

  ‘What did you write back?’ Tom asked. ‘She’s really put it on you.’

  ‘All I can think to write is ‘Why do you doubt that?’ And she writes, like, immediately, as if she’s got it ready-written, ‘Because. Even on a date, you’re off in the toilets on Tinder!’’

  ‘Snap!’

  ‘She has you there, Jimbo.’

  ‘You’re just like the others, Jimmy.’

  ‘Shut up,’ I said, reaching across the table and shoving Tom. ‘I’m actually pissed off with her now. She’s come to the date with a go-nuclear-on-Jim attitude and frankly it rankles pretty hard. She’s clearly been fucked over before, maybe more than once, but is it fair to assume I’m that kind of guy? I quickly write, ‘Let’s have a drink,’ and I add, ‘Keep the helmet on for as long as you want.’ I want an opportunity to defend myself. But when I go back out there, past the bar and the waitress and the little tables topped with candles, I find that she’s upped and gone.’

  ‘For real?’

  ‘And the wine’s sitting there opened, our glasses poured and not one sip taken.’

  ‘But wait. You’re a fan of sauvignon blanc, right?’

  ‘That’s a good one.’

  ‘Tell me you messaged her and let her have an eyeful.’

  ‘I would have for sure. But when I opened Tinder again, she’d deleted me.’

  ‘The bitch!’

  ‘That’s one word that came to mind.’

  I took hold of my beer and polished it off and leaned back on my chair, nursing my empty schooner with the dreggy lines of foam sliding down the glass. Tom and Jeb were looking off into the middle distance of the pub, squinting their eyes in thought. The same look on their faces. In those same white shirts and slacks. It occurred to me I knew exactly what they were going to say. And I was right.

  ‘Did she leave any money for the wine?’

  ‘Or did she do a runner without paying?’

  I shook my head, disappointed. Not only about my ridicule, though that was a big part of it, but also not having someone wise to talk to. Tom and Jeb were great, but I knew they could only say what I could say. And in this case, that wasn’t a lot.

  ‘She did a runner,’ I said.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Fucking shit.’

  Yep. That pretty much summed it up. I raised my head and gazed up through the oak tree’s boughs to the evening sky ribboned with pink clouds, packed with gold and pale blues. I said, still looking up, ‘You guys think, though, that maybe she was onto something?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nah. Scrap that. Chicks deal out their fair of shit too.’

  They nodded at this, Tom with his mouth turned down and Jeb picking a fingernail.

  ‘This girl was one cracked number,’ said Jeb.

  ‘She’s probably bi-polar,’ offered Tom, and I didn’t even bother saying the exact same thought had crossed my mind. We had one more round. At eight o’clock they had to leave, off to their wives waiting at home with TV re-runs playing loud and dinner hot and yummy on the lounge. They shook my hand and told me I was living the dream, laughing the laugh of the newly married.

  I left the pub and walked the long way to my apartment, keen to avoid going home too early and shutting myself into my one-bedder, alone for another night. As I walked down Military Road and off it, along the close suburban streets lined with red-brick apartments worth far more money than they looked, I thought once more about Ella. She’d made a statement. Not just with her words, but by her actions. By wearing the helmet. But why? What is a helmet good for? Protecting the skull from injury. What was I? A threat of physical harm? What bullshit, man. It’s girls like Ella, I thought as I walked down the hill towards the bay, that fuck it up for everyone. Yes, she might’ve been done over by some guys in the past, but how did behaving the way she did help her cause, or women in general? I thought about the girls I might’ve done over myself, for a moment, and genuinely believed that whatever pain I’d caused was within a normal range. Nothing major. Nothing structural or debilitating. And the same could be said for my other friends, of that I was almost certain. ‘Ella’, I said aloud, ‘you goddamn fool.’

  The last light of dusk faded. In it, fifty metres from my place, I received two simultaneous texts. One from Jeb and one from Tom. They both said more or less the same thing. I won’t quote the texts here; they were vulgar, used the ‘c’ word, and made reference to a certain someone needing a hard dick where the sun doesn’t shine. Suffice it to say I laughed out loud on the street. I wrote back to each of them with a thumbs-up emoji and a little mirthful face crying tears. And then I went into my building. I walked up the stairs and into my flat where I turned on every light. To keep the darkness at bay.

  Last night’s leftovers sat on the kitchen bench. Glad-wrapped, but unrefrigerated. I inspected the food through the plastic film and decided it would have to do. Some flies had gathered in the corner of the room, buzzing and banging against the window pane, oblivious to the gap, the egress to freedom, only inches away. I unwrapped the plate and sat down to eat, flicking through Tinder, Bumble and Happn; all the different girls out there, single like me and probably cracked. I swiped right. I swiped left, chomping hungrily through my meal, while the flies banged their heads, and banged, against the ink-black glass.

  Resignation

  Miller was still waiting for his boss to meet with him. There was a café in the lobby where people from his office went for catch-ups and where clients sometimes gathered their thoughts before getting into the lifts. Miller’s boss had said they’d grab a coffee there on Tuesday. It was now Thursday, three weeks later.

  After sending the meeting request, the crux of which read, ‘I want to work part-time,’ Miller, at first, felt regret. How could he have been so impulsive? Part-time work belonged to mothers with young children and baby boomers fading into retirement. It did not befit twenty-six year old men with aeons of productivity before them. He looked at the mail in his sent folder and berated himself for an entire afternoon. But then, one night at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, he regained his inspiration completely.

  Graeme Ashford-Jones, twenty-eight, hipster, pathetically pimply, had just released Light, his debut, to critical acclaim. Miller had read it in one sitting. Miller had
read every Aussie debut released in the last decade usually in no more than a few sittings. There was appeal in reading works by people your own age, in your own place and time, especially if you were trying to write a novel yourself, which Miller was.

  At the festival, Jones read an extract from Light. How poor the delivery, how dead the words sounded when read aloud. Miller was thrilled. He’d hated the novel. The style, colloquially Australian, the characters, 2D Aussie heroes, the premise, coming of age in the country. The reading had been even worse. Miller knew he could do so much better than that. ‘I can do so much better than this,’ he caught himself saying as the crowd rose to its feet to clap and whistle.

  All he needed was time.

  Later that night, he left the festival and noticed Jones outside, on the street, with three women around him. That will be me, thought Miller. Only there’ll be more women. There’ll be men too. There’ll be people of all ages, proclivities and tastes, lining up to talk to me about my writing and how it makes them feel. If Jones can get a charmed reception for something as flimsy as Light, well then, my readers are in for a truly ecstatic experience. Love, hate, envy, humour, passion, fear, aloneness, whatever you wanted. Every page. With every passing beat of prose.

  So far Miller had written ten thousand words. At night, mainly. After work. His mind, at the start of every session, too full of flotsam to write his words freely. He’d sit before his laptop at nine, ten, often later, and force himself from one mode to another. Sometimes this took hours. A pouring off of the day’s residue that washed at the sides of his mind. By the time he’d done so, cleansed his head of all that scum, it was usually early morning. Exhaustion. If he were to give his work-in-progress a title now, that would be it. No stranger to it. He’d always worked hard: the kind of boy, and now young man, driven by fear of mediocrity. As for his novel, it was about…what? He didn’t know.

  Prior to running H.G. Yates, a consulting firm in Sydney, Mark Hammond, Hammer to the staff, had been a navy admiral. Big, straight-backed, bald. He did not, as far as anyone knew, have a humorous bone in his body. Rumours that his voice box, the laughing part, had been damaged at sea had done the rounds for years. No one knew how much of them were true. To Miller, they sounded right enough.

  Today, Hammer first appeared to Miller as a hand holding a brief case. He’d run for the lift and jammed his fist through the gap in time to arrest it. For a moment, the doors didn’t move, reducing Miller’s boss, all six and a half feet of him, to a fist clenched around a leather handle.

  ‘My apologies,’ he said to the packed lift, without a trace of irony. ‘Would’ve been nasty if I’d lost my arm.’

  Polite murmurs. Shuffling limbs. The smell of coffee’d breaths. Miller’s boss looked directly at him, for maybe a second, then slotted among the throng.

  H.G. Yates occupied sixteen to nineteen of the Deutsche Bank building on Phillip Street. Every level had been designed, or so it felt, to maximise desk numbers. Rows of work stations scored the floors, partitioned by furry walls for pinning paper. And photographs of cats. Open-plan encouraged collaboration and yet, at least qua writer, Miller found the presence of others draining. Also, in a way, humiliating. I am a number, he’d often think, in a wall of pigeon holes. The air was stuffy. The thermostats were always skewed. The windows let in too much light. You couldn’t hide in it. You couldn’t think about anything but the spreadsheets before you. It was, he’d learned, a prison for his mind.

  After getting out of the lift, hanging his jacket on the back of his chair and sitting down, Miller pulled out his phone and started writing in the notes section, which he sometimes used for jotting ideas about his novel. ‘Protagonist,’ he wrote, ‘needs more anger. Also, more at stake. Consider violent scene, coarse language, loss of control…’

  ‘Miller!’

  He slouched in his chair in the hope that his colleague, Jade, would leave him be. But she stood up and walked over to him.

  ‘Miller, Miller, Miller. How are you? Seen Hammer yet?’

  ‘Haven’t,’ said Miller, ‘gotten around to it.’

  ‘More like he’s ignoring you. Does he even know who you are?’

  Miller thought about that. The idea had crossed his mind before, in the days after sending the meeting request, for example, and just now, this morning, in the lift.

  ‘Course he knows who I am.’

  ‘Don’t count on it,’ said Jade, vacantly scanning the papers affixed to Miller’s wall. ‘There are, like, five different Millers in this company, dude.’

  Miller knew of two others, Adrian Miller in accounts and Jerry, the acne-scarred IT guy with bad breath who helped people when their computers froze. He supposed they were the only other Millers, Jade being prone to overstatement, though who really knew? Maybe there were five. Bah! It didn’t matter. What did matter right now was that he’d been foolish enough to share with Jade his plans for part-time work, on the one hand, and the fact of his trying to write a novel, on the other.

  ‘How’s it going, anyway?’ she asked, nodding at his phone. ‘You still haven’t explained what it’s about, by the way. I know it’s not a mystery, so why so mysterious?’

  Miller did his usual trick when someone was annoying him. Pictured their death. In this case, a sudden blow to the head from a fallen light fitting. Jade’s face, red from the gym work she did at lunch times, the running to and from the office, the taking-the-stairs from floor to floor, went an eerie white. One eye rolled back, the other to the side, like a plastic doll’s. Then she crumpled to the floor.

  ‘It’s really not possible to say.’

  ‘That’s what you said last time I asked. Is there a girl in it? Is there a boy? Do they fall in love? Oh, I know. You should make it like The Girl on the Train. Have you read it? It’s totally awesome. You could make so much money if you wrote that. Not that exactly, but basically the sequel.’

  ‘I haven’t read it,’ said Miller, which was a lie.

  ‘You have to read it.’

  ‘Thank you Jade. I’ll be sure to.’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Miller,’ said Jade, who, for all her faults, came equipped with a built-in shit detector. ‘Lighten up.’

  At this, she turned around and sauntered off to another cubicle. More there to be gained by mindless small talk, Miller assumed. In truth, he held nothing against Jade. She wasn’t a bad person. She was bored, like everyone else at H.G. Yates and P.R. Saunders, G.G. Binks, F.T.S. Habbard, and every other firm and bank and agency in this and every other city in the world. She was bored and young and no doubt had dreams of her own. What dreams? Miller thought. He’d never asked. No. He had nothing against Jade. She was kind and talkative. She was open. Unlike Miller, who recoiled from social interaction, preferring the safety of a book to the pitfalls of real people. God damn his stinking heart.

  Another week passed, and still no word from Hammer. Miller, more frustrated with his life than ever, had decided he’d not wait any longer. If his boss wasn’t going to come to him, tap on his cubicle wall and take him down to the café for their chat, well then, he would go to his boss, knock on his office door, clear his throat politely, et cetera. He would do all this today without wasting any more time, he absolutely would, just as soon as the monthly staff meeting on level nineteen was over.

  Employees of H.G. Yates not tied up on calls, or in meetings with clients, or, fortuitously, stuck in a traffic jam, in a broken down lift, in a bank robbery, in emergency brain surgery, piled into the seminar room. It was full of sky from the floor-to-ceiling window giving onto the harbour. Miller took one of the last seats. As he sat there waiting, he imagined an earthquake tearing down the building, a sink hole opening up. It unnerved him that he found these pleasant thoughts to have. He pulled out his phone and wrote, ‘Protagonist suicidal??’

  ‘Thank you for coming to the monthly staff meeting,’ Sophie, the HR rep, shrieked from the front of the room. A scrum of heads, neatly cropped and cleaned, sat fixed on suited shoulders. �
�First up we have a message from the head of finance, Greg Bishop. Then we’re handing out achievement awards to the hardest workers. Fingers crossed!’

  It struck Miller that Sophie’s energy derived from an inner loathing. She got about the place like a cheerleader, often out of breath and smiling through clenched teeth. It was as though she was afraid to be herself. As if her natural, idle state would reveal how miserable she was. Then again, this might have been Miller’s projection of his own shortcomings, struggles and inner tensions. He wrote, ‘Protagonist confused.’

  ‘As you all know,’ Greg Bishop began, having replaced Sophie at the front of the room, ‘it’s been a cracking year for H.G. Yates with revenues up and pipeline work ahead.’

  ‘Protag, definitely suicidal. Can’t fathom pressing on.’

  ‘Everyone deserves a big pat on the back. And a glass of champagne at next month’s drinks.’

  The crowd murmured its assent. Like robots, Miller thought, and as he did it dawned on him that his biggest problem was the novel’s opening. The only problem, really, as he’d written nothing else. He was happy with the style. The language was punchy, he believed, with just a hint of irony tracing the voice. But the story, as it stood, didn’t know its own direction and the protagonist – you only needed to glance at Miller’s notes to see this – lacked roundedness. Heck. Who was he kidding? The protagonist performed a string of ink on a white page. There was no shape. And wasn’t that the point of fiction? Good, literary fiction at least? To bring to mind in stark relief the lines, the dimensions, of character? Miller felt pangs of despair grab at his guts like metal fingers. Did he actually believe he had a scintilla of what it took to write a novel? Graeme Ashford-Jones aside. Let’s face it, he thought. I started writing five years ago and what have I to show for it? Ten thousand words of garbage. A wad of ill-conceived and unfinished short stories about nothing-of-much-relevance. Surely there were better ways to spend his nights after work. For example, he hadn’t had sex in a year. Then again, if he could just get more time, more hours a day to write, the edges of his talent would sharpen. Wouldn’t they?