Spinning Around

by Catherine Jinks

  ‘When the wall’s done outside, you can have a look, okay?’ said Nick, addressing Jonah with a smile. ‘When you got your clothes on. Can’t come outside with no clothes on.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I agreed. God, I was so exhausted. All I wanted to do was sit down and slowly absorb some of the stuff that had been thrown at me since lunchtime. But I couldn’t. I was flat out. I had to soak Jonah’s sheets, clean his cot, air his room, wash his hair, get him dressed and start his dinner, all the while blowing my nose and beating off Emily’s repeated suggestion that I help her with the cotton-wool chicks. ‘I can’t,’ I kept saying. ‘I can’t, Emily, I’ve got things to do. I’m busy.’

  Busy trying to keep my life from shattering into a million tiny fragments. Busy coming to terms with this latest betrayal.

  Or was it, in fact, the only one? Was it my husband fucking me over, or my best friend, or both? Talk about nowhere to turn. Talk about losing your faith in human nature. Talk about building your house on sand.

  Scrubbing shit off Jonah’s T-shirt with a nailbrush, I remember thinking to myself: Maybe Kerry was right. Maybe we should have checked the feng shui of this place before we bought it, after all.

  And then the bloody phone rang again.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Thursday

  Needless to say, I was on the phone for most of yesterday evening. First I called Ronnie, who had been ringing to find out if I would be free for her engagement party. I told her that I would be, and that Jim had been ‘er . . . one of the builders’; she was as shocked as I had been, when she heard about Miriam. Then I called Vicki, Caroline and Lisa, all of whom had either met Miriam or knew about her. Then I called Mrs Coutts, but no-one answered. Then Matt came home, and I blurted out the whole story while he finished the chocolate ice-cream. It was such big news that there was no restraint or awkwardness in our conversation. I had practically forgotten that he’d walked out in a sulk that morning; too much had happened since.

  ‘It’s got to be Giles,’ I said. ‘Giles’s influence. She’s always had this terrible problem with lousy men—obviously it’s happened again, but this time she’s got sucked in, somehow.’

  ‘What does he do?’ asked Matt. ‘He’s a forensic accountant or something, isn’t he?’

  ‘Is he? I thought he was a foreign exchange broker.’

  ‘Yeah? God.’ Matt snorted. ‘Either way, he’d know how to play the system.’

  ‘And so would Miriam. Can you imagine? Can you imagine how much she knows about ripping people off? And if she was working with him—if it was a foreign exchange scam . . .’

  ‘Didn’t they tell you?’

  ‘They didn’t want to. You can imagine. They probably don’t want to spread it around—bad for the bank’s reputation.’

  ‘Unbelievable,’ Matt sighed, shaking his head. ‘Unbelievable.’

  ‘Why would she do it?’ I was still trying to grasp the extent of Miriam’s betrayal. ‘She was always talking about the sort of people who commit fraud. They’re always gamblers, or trying to impress some woman, or slightly loopy—’

  ‘Maybe she was trying to impress some man,’ said Matt.

  ‘But she couldn’t be that stupid.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Carefully Matt scraped the bottom of the ice-cream bucket. ‘How do you know there isn’t something wrong with her, if she’s always had a terrible problem with lousy men?’

  ‘Oh, that’s not true!’

  ‘You just said it was. You said she’s always had a—’

  ‘Yes, but that doesn’t mean she has something wrong with her! That doesn’t mean it’s her fault !’

  Matt shrugged. ‘Well—I dunno,’ he remarked. ‘I could never tell what she was thinkin’.’

  Which was just as well, I decided. Miriam hadn’t been entirely convinced by Matt. She had never really trusted him.

  Trusted him. Jesus.

  ‘Maybe she’s been thinking like a criminal for too long,’ I suggested. ‘Maybe she tried to put herself in their shoes one too many times.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Maybe it’s a risk that goes with the job. She should have branched out and tried something else for a while. Maybe she became infected.’

  ‘Maybe she saw how many people got away with it,’ Matt observed. ‘Maybe she calculated her chances, and saw how good they were.’

  ‘Oh, Matt.’

  ‘Well, think about it. You just told me she was really gettin’ into the designer labels. Out to dinner all the time. And she had that megabucks mortgage.’

  ‘She got a discount on that from the bank.’

  ‘Whatever. It still would have been big. And she didn’t make that much, did she? It wasn’t like she was a top honcho.’

  ‘No,’ I admitted.

  ‘And this Giles was hot shit. Needed a lot of keepin’ up with, didn’t he? New cars. Mountain bikes. Club Med.’

  ‘And his last girlfriend was a model.’

  ‘And his last girlfriend was a model. That’s what I mean. Maybe Miriam was trying to keep up.’

  ‘But he didn’t seem like a crook. An arsehole, but not a crook. I mean, he was so smart.’

  ‘He can’t have been that smart, or he wouldn’t have got into debt.’

  ‘But he must have been, Matt. Miriam said he was. You know what she’s like. She wouldn’t have gone out with a drongo.’

  ‘How do you know? How do you know what goes on behind closed doors?’

  That shut me up. It turned my thoughts down channels that promptly silenced me. We went to bed soon afterwards, and I slept well because I had dosed myself up with anti-histamines and cough medicines. I was drugged, in other words. Very relaxing.

  I don’t know why people have to use marijuana and heroin when they’re stressed out. An anti-histamine and a swig of cough medicine works just as well. In fact I was almost grateful for my cold, because it allowed me to take all that medication, and not lie awake for hours fretting about Miriam and Matt and Jim McRae. (Had I made a big mistake, hiring Jim?)

  In the morning, however, my gratitude promptly faded when I had to get out of bed. This was definitely The Worst Day. My virus had a stranglehold on my immune system, which was only just beginning to fight back. This was the day on which I was scheduled to hit rock bottom, before the inevitable long, slow haul back to good health. I knew it. I could feel it. My nose was taking on a reddened, slightly minced appearance, and my cough sounded as if it was coming out of a moose.

  But I was due at work. I couldn’t miss work. I had a conciliation conference booked for nine-thirty.

  And of course it was raining. And of course I nearly walked off without my purse because Jonah was so upset by the fact that Maisy, his favourite show, had suddenly disappeared off the morning television line-up. Channel 2 had put on Oakeydoke instead, and even I could see that it wasn’t an adequate substitute. But as I tried to explain to Jonah, there really wasn’t anything we could do about it.

  ‘It’ll come back,’ I assured him, as he sobbed into my chest. Poor darling, he takes things so very much to heart. ‘And next time we go to the library, we’ll look for a Maisy video. How about that?’

  ‘Or a Maisy book,’ Emily suggested.

  ‘Yes! That’s a good idea!’ Gorgeous Emily. She was patting him clumsily on the back. What a blessing that child is. ‘Cheer up, sweetie—look, it’s Thomas on now. Thomas the tank engine. Oh no! Look! He’s run off the rails! I think he might be broken!’

  ‘I don’t like Thomas.’

  ‘Yes, you do, bloke. You love Thomas.’ Matt began to loosen Jonah’s stranglehold, peeling the soft little arms off my neck. He shot me a look which said, as clearly as if he had spoken: Quick! Get out while you can! ‘What if I make you guys some pancakes, eh?’ he offered. ‘What about that? Yummee.’

  I managed to get away eventually, but I had to run for the train—through the rain, with a streaming cold. By the time I had flung myself into a steam-filled carriage, I was gasping
for breath and coughing like a plague victim. I’m sure everyone was sullenly thinking: What a bitch. She’s going to infect us all.

  But at least it meant that they moved away from me, and I got a bit of space. And a seat, too! So it wasn’t all bad, this morning. There was a small silver lining on the thundercloud sitting directly over my head.

  I was in good time for the conference, which was scheduled to be a shuttle negotiation. A shuttle negotiation is always a lot of work for a Complaints Officer. Basically, the complainant’s team sits in one room, the respondent’s team sits in another, and I have to scuttle back and forth between them, bearing offers and counter-offers. Shuttle negotiations aren’t common. They generally occur when the comparable negotiating capacity of each party is heavily weighted on the side of the respondent— or when the complainant just isn’t strong enough to confront his or her nemesis face to face. In this instance, we had a big age gap (twenty-odd years). We also had a business owner versus a humble waitress. And we had a very articulate, very bright and sharp-witted man versus a young girl who was rather inarticulate, rather naive, and not terribly well educated.

  I believe that she was doubly confused because this was yet another case of a relationship gone sour on the job. Her boss had overwhelmed her with a flattering and (I would have to say) somewhat obsessive attention, to the point where she had spent one or two nights with him. Then she had begun to regret her involvement. No doubt his groping her at work, and presenting her with various trampy garments to wear in the restaurant, had had something to do with her decision to end the intimate phase of their association. Unfortunately, however, her boss wouldn’t leave her alone. He had continued to grope her. He had continued to push her up against kitchen or backstairs walls. He had left salacious drawings in her order-book, written indecent comments about her on the door of the staff toilet, and commented loudly on her personal appearance to some of the restaurant’s male patrons. In the end she had been forced to quit.

  She had kept two of his lewd drawings, happily; copies of them were tucked away in my file. Photographs had also been taken of the toilet door. And we had one or two witnesses, though not as many as I had anticipated because the patrons singled out as the respondent’s confidantes were mostly his friends, who weren’t easily pinned down. As for the groping, that had almost invariably taken place when no-one else had been around to witness it. The respondent, as I have said, was a very sharp-witted man.

  Not sharp-witted enough, though. Despite the highpowered lawyer he had hired, a settlement was reached. The complainant was satisfied. I don’t think that the respondent was satisfied, exactly, but he was persuaded to see reason. He was persuaded that the costs associated with a public hearing would be far more detrimental to his business than the payment deemed acceptable to his former employee. It was his position all along that the matter was a personal one—that it was a domestic dispute in which the government had no right to interfere. He was also convinced that the complainant had set out to ‘screw him over’, quite deliberately, and that we had all been fooled by the innocent appearance which ‘that little slut’ could assume at will.

  I could see why she was afraid of him. In fact it was one of those rare occasions when I could actually sense the threat of stalking—or perhaps even violence—in the air. I almost wondered if he would have attacked her physically if she had been in the room with him.

  I rather feared for her safety, to be honest. If I had been in her shoes, I would have taken out an apprehended violence order. Obviously he perceived that she had ‘won’ the case by extracting money from him, and he wasn’t the kind of person who would take kindly to ‘losing’, especially to a nineteen-year-old girl.

  What a monumental prick, is all I can say.

  We broke for lunch. It was agreed that the conference would resume at two o’clock, so I had plenty of time in which to check my messages. One was from Ms F. One was from Amelia, my co-worker. One was from Ronnie—no doubt she had obtained Briony’s address for the good people of the Pacific Commercial Bank Ltd. One was from a complainant called Mr P. (Interesting case, that one: a man being sexually harassed by his male co-worker, who would goose him, grab his testicles, and simulate masturbation when he walked past. Mr P., being an admitted homosexual, was an easy target for someone like Mr H., who strenuously denies that he himself has homosexual leanings. His actions, he insists, were purely the result of malice and bigotry.

  (Makes you wonder, though, doesn’t it?)

  The final message had been left by Jim McRae, at 12.05 p.m. I rang him at once. When he answered, I could tell that he was in a public place—a shopping centre, perhaps, to judge from the distant sound of piped music. He had to raise his voice to make himself heard.

  ‘I’ve got some information!’ he said, in a kind of muted bellow.

  ‘Good news?’ I asked.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Is it good news, or bad? ’

  ‘That depends on what you make of it!’ There was a noisy pause. ‘Nothing conclusive,’ he finally said. ‘You’re in Castlereagh, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ I gave him the address.

  ‘Well I’m at the Town Hall, under cover, and it’s a zoo. I can call you back later this afternoon, and you can risk having the conversation recorded, or I could meet you somewhere for lunch. Twenty minutes, tops.’

  ‘What do you mean, I’d risk being recorded?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘What do you mean, I’d risk being recorded? ’

  ‘For training purposes. In the interests of customer service.’

  ‘Oh, we don’t do that here. Do we?’

  ‘I was told that you did when I was put on hold, earlier. A little robot said so.’

  ‘Really?’ I couldn’t believe it. We weren’t a telecommunications provider, for God’s sake. We were dealing with very sensitive material. ‘Well—well, maybe I should meet you. Where are you now?’

  ‘Town Hall.’

  ‘Oh. That’s right. Okay, um—can you come over here?’

  ‘To your office?’

  ‘No, I mean to the café next door. There’s a café downstairs in the building next to ours. It’s called “Al Fresco”, for some reason.’

  ‘Al Fresco. Yeah, I’ve been there. It’s got that collection of old coffee-makers in the window.’

  ‘That’s the one. In . . . ten minutes, say?’

  ‘Ten minutes.’

  He signed off. I leapt to my feet at once, gathering up my purse, my umbrella and the office mobile. As I did so, I knocked against a teetering stack of files, which immediately tumbled to the floor. I was on my knees retrieving them, a dangling hairslide bumping against the side of my neck, when there was a tap at the door.

  Without waiting for an invitation, the Commissioner stuck her head into the office.

  ‘Oh! Helen.’ She looked slightly surprised to see me grovelling at her feet, for some reason. God knows, she must be used to it by now. Pretty much everyone grovels to the Commissioner. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Oh yes!’ A careless little laugh. ‘Just picking up some files!’ It hardly needed saying. I probably wouldn’t have bothered, with anyone else. But I doubt that the Commissioner had picked anything up off the floor for years. At work she has a secretary to do it for her, and at home she has a nanny. That’s what I tell myself, when I start to feel envious of her flawless make-up, her exquisite clothes, her gleaming office, her long business lunches and her perfect attendance record. Diane has money to burn, so she can afford support staff. The kind of support staff that I could do with.

  ‘Just wanted to say, good job on that genital warts case,’ she smiled. ‘I forgot to tell you, but I was very impressed with the settlement.’

  ‘Oh. Thanks. Thanks very much.’

  ‘I’m thinking that you might like to write it up for the annual report,’ she added. ‘Would you?’

  ‘Sure. Absolutely.’

  ‘Fine. Excellent.’ She bestowed on me a ca
refully graded smile, then disappeared as abruptly as she had materialised. You might think: Why didn’t she help you with all that mess? If so, you obviously don’t know much about organisational power structures.

  It didn’t take me long to straighten things up, anyway. Within minutes I had tidied my desk, fixed my hair and struggled out into the miserable weather. God, it was a foul day. When I walked through the building’s front door, I was hit in the face by a wet slap, as an erratic easterly lashed heavy rain through the canyons of the central business district. The pavements were seething with damp and sullen office workers. Cars swished through puddles on the road, throwing up sprays of dirty water that spattered the ankles of nearby pedestrians. Smelly buses roared and shuddered. Brakes squealed. Walk-signs chattered like machine guns.

  But I didn’t have far to go, thank God. About four metres. Then I turned into the wide, glossy entrance of the Building Next Door, which is one of those Shangri-La shopping complexes wedged under a fancy-pants office block. Lots of brass and marble. Glass elevator. Small tropical jungle, sculptural water feature, and artistic, suspended light fittings about two storeys high. The shops are all really classy (the sort that Miriam’s probably been patronising): a gallery, a perfumery, a jeweller’s that isn’t a chain store, a clothes shop containing about twenty-five garments and no mannequins.

  Al Fresco is a café with Attitude, sitting right on the street. Matt and I have eaten lunch there sometimes, though not often, because (a) it’s pretty expensive; and (b) it’s a little too postmodern. You know—the sort of place where the coffee’s been elevated to a religion. And the salt cellars look like components from some kind of NASA filtration device. And the cook can’t produce anything as simple as a chip or a sausage without larding it heavily with ironic references. Take the prawn cocktail, for instance. Last time I ate there with Matt, there was prawn cocktail on the menu. I couldn’t believe it. Prawn cocktail! With iceberg lettuce! Al Fresco isn’t the kind of place that usually serves iceberg lettuce. You’d be more likely to find a jar of Vegemite on the premises. I pointed it out to Matt in astonishment.