by Mari Reiza
I took her to Kettner’s, which had been there for donkey’s years, a safe choice.
Lucy liked pisco sours and insisted on telling the clueless barman how to make it. We could hardly complain that he didn’t know, it was supposed to be a champagne bar. But she didn’t care. Something about Santiago saving her after Brazil refused her entry without a yellow fever certificate, for her honeymoon. ‘I’ve loved pisco sours since then,’ she insisted.
SHIT, she is married.
Well, so was I. Had she been single at her age, I would have thought there was something wrong with her, though she could just have been a clever girl. I was mentally preparing a few exotic travel stories myself to match Chile and pisco (isn’t pisco from Peru?). I had only ordered champagne. Maybe I could talk about how much I loved Paris.
‘Champagne comes from Épernay, right? I remember the beautiful art in the Pommery cellars in Reims.’
Touché. But after that first drink, I made a point of talking to her any day I could.
Lucy loved the sea.
She was from Bilbao and had spent twenty years in London. She swore like a dockman. ‘I love to disagree with people to remain independent,’ she claimed. She was convinced that she was not Basque at all, that her dad had been found under a bridge, and her real origins could be pinned back to anywhere between Izmir and Fez. ‘Some place where Phoenicians had met Greeks and fucked for a few centuries.’
‘Mesmerising.’
‘This belief in the unknown of my genetic determination,’ she used to say in her own brand of fantasy inextricably linked to reality, ‘opens ample possibilities to reinvent myself, and allows me to get rid of so many diseases.’ She claimed life, like theatre, was about magic. ‘That fragile magic that should not get switched off until you die.’
Needless to hide, I was drawn to her like a hungry fly and soon recognised that tingling feeling of common sense leaving my body. Men are so weak. At least some men. Maybe only me.
I envied how she could show enthusiasm for a shade of yellow and indignation for a texture of silk. I couldn’t believe that this woman was so alive, perhaps bleeding between her legs at that very instant, I would be watching her corralled in the PEN-ers’ cage, as the office screens flickered, and the water tank bubbled, and the rickety copier photocopied, and the coffee machine made infernal noises. It was a miracle, the miracle of life. And I was lost. I had no training for it anymore.
I soon started rejoicing that there was no rulebook prohibiting office relationships. ‘Nothing in our Bible,’ Alakrita confirmed and I could see she was curious. ‘Tobias is doing it,’ she said. ‘Peter is doing it.’
With you, I felt like telling her.
‘Even the most overanxious jerk in the whole of Enterprise, Trojan, is doing it,’
That was news to me.
The point was, there was finally a woman that seemed to be able to bring me back to life. Why stop myself now that Miriam was out of the way? I wouldn’t.
I soon introduced Lucy to Coffee Plantation, where we discussed topics as diverse as the savageries of literature, the absurdities of fashion, the smell of lemons and the shape of onions, and pretentious intellectual matters including love and loss.
The days that I didn’t have a glimpse of her I stressed that things would go badly.
And when I was away, I made up excuses to call her, work excuses, anything, and fretted that I thought of her infinitely more than she thought of me. I told her about Miriam. She told me about her husband, ‘He is so good to everybody that it is irritating.’
I imagined him as a well-heeled Eurotrash boho working in the City, making time pass growing stacks of money before he would retire to his domain in Provence. I made him ugly and hoped he was a wanker.
‘Where are your roots?’ she enquired one day, a polite way of asking why I was brown, but it was fine with me.
I had prepared the first-generation-out-of-India story. I explained that I was hoping to go back one day to help my country because it was a land of opportunity. I had seen it with my recent dates (or maybe I had dreamt it, there had been no dates!), that India remained mystical for women. I am not sure that they would have felt the same when they saw the people living under Howrah bridge.
Lucy was fresh air. She was an agent of change, a force come to discombobulate the system.
Peter had said about her that it turned him on how she was adversarial and antagonistic. He must have been so bored of everyone around him constantly being a butt-kisser. She had to be the one helping me put things into context.
‘Miriam, my heart’s ache. Alakrita, my dick’s desire. Enterprise, my life’s concern. And Lucy, Lucy my heart’s passion.’ Being in love again was a delicious disorder and for any Reader entering this story now, both Enterprise and I had already taken a different direction. It was snatches of light.
Most Enterprisers widely disliked and constantly resented Lucy, though, of course.
A subset of them would have also liked to fuck her. I could put my hand on the fire about that, not so much because they hated her but because they hated themselves too.
Trojan abhorred Lucy, despite having said to Peter that he loved her. The way she called a spade a spade and challenged him constantly enraged him. She got close to people and touched them, which made him sweat with panic. He had at first enquired about what Lucy wanted from Enterprise, and she had replied matter-of-factly, ‘A job,’ and smiled. ‘Are you not here for the pay?’ she had added. Of course she knew that we could not let ourselves believe such a thing without our world tumbling to the ground. But she liked to push people and provoke anyone who took themselves too seriously, and there were plenty of such creatures for her to play with at Enterprise.
She had asked Alakrita, five minutes into their first meeting, if she was married. Alakrita said to me later how she had felt like using Lucy’s pretty face as an ashtray. Next, Lucy had told Alakrita that Peter had promised he would look after her, making her just about manage a faint smile whilst her spleen ripped. They had definitely despised each other from the start, Alakrita constantly complaining of Lucy’s need to live life wittily. She would have herself loved to be able to do exactly that but couldn’t even think of vegetable names half the time, let alone funny remarks, unless they were extremely vicious. Alakrita, my dick’s desire. Lucy, my heart’s passion.
Lucy also loved to tease Clara, the nun, and deliberately shared with her how she thought Mike was gay. Clara almost cried. And Mike was himself terrified of Lucy, who had insisted that he asked things nicely. ‘If you do not want a nasty lawsuit to stop your stellar career,’ she had threatened him with a wink. He was not used to being cornered like that. It had put him on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
And Matt, he had been seen coming out of an office with his tail between his legs after giving Lucy her first review feedback. He had gone in with a bottle of champagne and come out with it still firmly in his grip, because she had refused to take it (‘You can put it up your own hole,’ or something like that she had apparently said), and requested never to review her ever again. She could be hell.
Tobias didn’t like Lucy either. He resented that anyone could achieve career-wise and have a life at the same time. ‘Live or shine,’ he had told her from the beginning and she kept fighting him. He respected Lucy because she had chosen to take a PEN-er job below her capabilities to enjoy life, but he would go to any level of complication to make sure that she failed to get anywhere professionally at Enterprise. That to him was justice. ‘You can’t have your cake and eat it too!’ He saw the limits of Lucy’s achievements as the price she paid for freedom, and his own success as the compensation for being punished with the necessity to achieve. It was like those Irish convent nuns convinced that pleasure in punishing young girls for sexual intercourse was the reward for their own abstinence. Lucy had to be professionally humiliated for Tobias’s own sacrifice to have any meaning.
Gert was herself horrified by how much fun Lucy had. H
er plan to relieve her own misery of looking after T&T and Peter onto another unfortunate soul had backfired. ‘She is even influencing other PEN-ers to have a beer on Fridays, which is unheard of!’ That really worried her. And the more Gert enjoyed post-coital chats about the moral future of Enterprise with Trojan, the less she could stand how Lucy debased her work at Enterprise to an exchange of services for money. It disgusted her, who, on the other hand, gave herself kind-heartedly to the cause.
PEN-ers all around felt destabilised by Lucy’s arrival too. She said and did things that they would have never dared to. Some of them, like Bianca and Zainab, were amused. Felicity thought that it was completely against the English strength of character to air things in public in Lucy’s way. Cate did not understand half of what was going on half of the time, and kept looking more and more at her pretty shiny shoes. She was thinking about what game level Tobias had got to, perhaps; maybe she was pregnant again. ‘Who would be the father?’ we gossiped in and out of ours and borrowed offices. ‘Could Tobias have found the time for engendering between the game level where he was fighting the intergalactic idea destroyers and that where he needed to create the next rainbow mover?’
Mandy liked to discuss suffragette matters with Lucy. ‘We all set ourselves targets,’ Lucy would say, ‘the target to achieve something recognisable, to be financially independent of a man, to have a career. Is that not why we went to university?’ Mandy would nod, agreeing. ‘But then we find that some of these targets are mutually exclusive. Would I like to come back home as the breadwinner to find my house-husband wearing an apron cleaning the dishes, on the phone to your husband discussing a recipe for chicken soup?’ Mandy would seem lost, as if she did not know the answer. ‘It would not really turn me on,’ Lucy would add in a scornful tone. Who exactly was she laughing at?
Next, Mandy would point out that the suffragettes fought for so much, ‘How could we give in?’
‘What rights exactly do we have?’ Lucy would jump at her throat. ‘The right to compete like a man in a man’s world with our hands tied behind our back in woman chores?’ Mandy would look lost again. ‘It would be nice to get equal gratitude in our own woman’s world,’ Mandy would nod at Lucy. ‘Do I want to become a CEO whilst a Filipino puffs fake domesticity into my house and fails to raise my children like a mother, whilst my Filipino’s sister takes care of her sister’s house and children and of their mother thousands of miles away? Is that a better world?’ Sometimes Lucy went above all our heads and Mandy took the brunt of it, and she could not work out what Lucy stood for or wanted or what would please her. ‘Just because someone somewhere decided that a CEO is a worthwhile job because it banks a few million a year and a housewife’s doesn’t, because all it apparently entails is to overstress about the colour of the cushions?’ At that point Rich would put his earphones on.
‘Dear CEO, where is the glamour in meeting the needs of employees, customers, investors and the law?’ Lucy would question, hardly stopping her thread. It would be a rhetorical question. ‘Isn’t that what housewives do at home every fucking day?’ she would respond herself. And then she would stand up for effect. ‘Let me tell you,’ she would say pointing directly at Mandy, ‘raising a family is not just domesticity, it is not a collection of products and processes, it’s an art which most CEOs would not manage even if they practised it for the next hundred bloody years!’
Lucy would sit delighted to the tune of nearby Fathers slamming their office doors closed, in fear of her raging fire.
‘But that is what happens when you are too available and people can count on you to distribute gracious largesse,’ she continued whilst seated, as she little cared for what Fathers thought, ‘that they are very grateful but assume that your job is not very important, for the mere fact that you are available. Whilst a CEO is a knight, fighting for great things. Isn’t a family a great thing too? But you wouldn’t want to interfere with the CEO’s crusade buying things, doing good works, killing bad people, and most importantly making money. Because money is the glamour that casts the dazzling light…’
Lucy could be icy-cold and devastate with precision.
‘What happened to reason?’ she loved to say. ‘Wasn’t that the standard of all conduct? NO. It’s the value of money. Cash is king. Happiness, love and the meaning of life redefined by the value of money. But pretending that the greatest contribution to our world is created by people sitting in air-conditioning skyscrapers manipulating information is utter bollocks,’ she added rolling the ‘cks’ on her tongue.
I sadly had to agree, having been myself in a skyscraper job for a few years, that there was probably more value from a pianist in a local brothel.
‘For example, spending a lot of money buying certain advice,’ she would deduce getting to the heart of the matter, to tease us about our beloved firm, ‘conveys this impression that it is very valuable and real, and that we are so worthy and our job deserves to eclipse our life.’ Well, did it not? We were all so proud of our role at Enterprise. ‘But it’s Fantasyland,’ she continued, ‘and you should remember, Mandy, in the back of your mind, that Minnie and Mickey are rodents in real life, and they spend much of their time fucking and eating cheese if they can get it.’ Mandy looked as lost as ever.
Lucy knew that she could get lynched for talking heresy against Enterprise in this way but it didn’t deter her.
‘Is our duty in life to make money?’ she asked constantly. ‘It is difficult to look up to a woman who says that the longest she has ever taken off work is three weeks when her son was born. Is that wise?’
I was sure Alakrita thought that was the wisest thing ever, other than not having children.
‘To think that this is the most a big change in our life deserves? What our closest human being deserves? What we ourselves deserve? Are we not allowed to experience our own life? Is that not the whole point of being alive? LIVING!’ And then after a big breath, she would add, ‘Because I am much happier in my kitchen with my granny’s apron cooking arroz negro, my kid sitting at the table doing her homework whilst we listen to radio Monte Carlo, than slouching in endless meetings with powerful jerks. But endless, useless meetings pay, they pay big time. Feeding and teaching the next generation of life doesn't. It's FUCKING CRAZY!’
By this stage, Mandy would be pleading to end the hell she had started. But Lucy could never be rushed, it would all happen only on Lucy’s timetable.
‘And, Mandy, let's face it, neither you nor I are going to change things,’ she persevered, ‘and by proving that we can sit on that board rather than being at home, what are we achieving exactly? Is that board job the only way to prove to our husband that we are not an idiot? Or do we need that job to prove it to ourselves? But we have just made life harder, or haven't we? Because we are sitting on that board, and trying to teach life to our children, and doing both badly, and getting paid less than men anyway.’
Once she sat down to mark her end, everyone would sigh in relief.
It was clear early on, especially to Lucy herself, that she personified everything that Enterprise hated, and she accentuated her style as soon as she had recognised it.
She was a master at faking ambiguity to lead you to misinterpretation. And I soon understood, in reality, that she was desperately looking for someone who could see through her ploys and rise to the challenge. But she was so caustic and convoluted in her mocking that you often did not know for sure who she was mocking; although I concluded after close inspection that she was mocking herself mostly, letting people see her frailties.
Of course, we did not want to pretend that we had any interest in what Lucy had done before she arrived at Enterprise, but she certainly didn’t sound like a virgin when she questioned anything and everything. What had Peter been on when he hired her? Too much complexity for a simple fuck, surely; Peter was a practical man. There must have been, for him, some perverse pleasure in turning her. Turning Lucy must have been a desire in Peter which, when purely felt, became its own
reason. And I sensed its danger.
But I also strongly believed that nothing in life was incidental, that Lucy was an accident come to save me.
11
Vittal Choudhary to Nuria Friedman, December 2020
My dear Nuria,
I enclose with this letter the second chapter of my soul-searching journey.
It is amazing how much can be achieved with five hours a day when there are no office politics, one enjoys what he is doing and has no people around arse-licking or trying to embroil him, or generally making a nuisance of themselves. Although, I am aware that, in monetary terms, things completed in this way often earn one next to nothing compared to politicking and arse-licking. Unfortunately, such is the way of the world. You will, dear Nuria, pardon my frankness and crude words, I am sure.
I hope that this second chunk of work reassures you that I am not chickening out. My aim was never concealment. I do not want to be another fake success with parties which are work meetings, friendships which are professional liaisons, people who say one thing to me and of me but think another, and who never do what they want but what they think will ingratiate them with me. Those times are over. I am not really writing for anybody nor am I searching to accommodate anyone other than you and myself.
It is only that the episodes I am writing about were personally very distressing to me. Sometimes they are difficult to remember, even to imagine, all the greater to relate. Nevertheless, it is helping me to re-live these moments through a different lens. It was such a busy time at Enterprise and my mind was obscured. I feel that I did not have the capacity to evaluate, to live and grieve through it all. And little by little, the initial panic has given way to partial composure from increased understanding, and from linking those stories and words, and people, to new points of reference from then and from now, giving them a new face and a new purpose, a new life, like Shanzhai. Have you noticed how many people want to identify themselves with a character in a novel because it offers them some kind of rebirth?
