by Anna Roberts
"This is us," he says. The door opens, but too late. The barely imperceptible poot is now all too perceptible.
His office is enormous. The giant glass windows look out over Seattle, at the Space Needle, Puget Sound and other stuff I'll look up on Wikipedia when I have the time. The walls are white and the floor is carpeted in pale grey. It's as bland as Crispian Neigh isn't, with his loud shirt and flamboyant hat. The only other colourful thing in the room is a collection of tiny, square, pastel coloured paintings, all arranged in a larger square. They are of little glyphs, like wingdings or weather symbols - I see a cloud, a rainbow, a sun, but then there's an apple and a star. They're oddly childish, and surprisingly well described, leading to me to wonder if they're a plot point.
"Chekhov’s Gun?" I murmur.
He's behind me, staring over my shoulder at the paintings. His nearness is tantalising; when he speaks I can smell his chewing gum - cinnamon. "No," he says. "Q.T. Marx."
"Do you know anything about art, Miss Squeal?" he asks. His voice is precise, clipped on the t-s and oh so slightly adenoidal. I am conscious of him as a persuasive and forceful man who will not be interested in me if I admit that I don't even know who Q.T. Marx is. I blush, and feel perspiration run down the nape of my neck, a tepid trickle of shame and inadequacy.
Why would you even want him to be interested in you? whispers an italicised voice inside my head. You don't even know how to masturbate.
My blush deepens to crimson and I want to die - I didn't even know my subconscious knew that word.
"Please, take a seat," says Neigh, gesturing with a courtly sweep to a long, l-shaped white couch that I had previously neglected to describe. "I was expecting a Miss Hannigan."
"She couldn't...come," I stammer. "She's sick. So there's only me."
He removes his fedora and quirks an eyebrow. "Yeah. I can see that," he says, curling a lip in an impressive display of facial gymnastics. "Do you cut your own hair?"
I barely suppress a tiny whimper. His eyes are boring into me, as if he can see my thoughts, see through my clothes and...oh my. The thought of him seeing through my clothes is...oh...distracting. And strangely...alluring. Exciting...dot...dot...dot...
I catch my breath and take the list of questions out of my satchel. "Um...so I'm supposed to, like, ask you stuff."
His lips curl in a sardonic smile. "That's generally the idea of an interview, Miss Squeal." He leans back in his chair and assesses me with a scrutinising look, a look that rummages up my sweater and under my skirt and into my...oh my. I'm flushing again - I can feel it. "So..." he says. "Fire away."
I switch on Kate's mini-disc recorder and look at the list of questions. It may as well be written in Chinese for all the sense it makes to me. I realise I am desperately out of my depth. I'm not pretty, or confident enough.
Or smart enough to ask a simple question.
What?
Nothing. Carry on.
I shake off the annoying italicised inner voice and try to compose myself. "What is it that you do, exactly?" I ask.
Neigh frowns slightly, but his expression is otherwise unreadable. Inscrutable. Impassive. Yes...impassive. "I'm an internet entrepreneur?" he says, raising his voice at the end of the sentence, as if only the stupidest person in the world could be expected not to know that.
But he's right. He's absolutely right. "I'm sorry," I whisper, unable to keep the cracking squeak out of my voice. I am overwhelmed with my own inadequacy. "I'm stupid." It comes out in a whine but I can't stop and before I know it I'm squeaking "Stupid, stupid, stupid!" in front of this incredibly rich and powerful man.
"Oh God," he says, getting up from his chair. He takes hold of my hands and I am immediately seized with a strange, icy calm. "There," he murmurs. "Just breathe. Slow and steady. It's okay...hey, what did you say your first name was?"
"Hanna. Hannelore."
"I think I'll just call you Hanna, if that's okay with you."
I nod. "I'm sorry," I say, my voice like ashes. "I don't know what came over me."
"It's okay," he says, softly. His hands are cool and gentle. There are tiny thin crescents of orange under his fingernails and I find them oddly touching, a moving sign of human frailty. "You have absolutely no self-esteem whatsoever, do you?"
I shake my head and swallow hard.
"Bingo," he mutters. He gets up from the couch. "You want a soda or something? - don't worry, I'll make yours a diet."
He brings me a sugar-free energy drink, which is more than his blonde lackey downstairs ever did. He takes the list of questions from me and puts on a pair of chunky, red framed designer glasses. "Let's see," he says, scanning the list. "Okay - you can tell Miss Hannigan that there's no way question eleven is any of her goddamn business."
Question eleven? Oh. Yeah. That one.
"So, are you gay, Mr. Neigh?" The words just fly out of my mouth before I can stop them. He's right - it's nobody's business, but somehow I have to know.
He removes the glasses and I have no idea how one person can be so poised, so stylish. It's like he's observed countless panels of comic books in order how to convey expressions through motion alone.
That or he's a secret mime. Oh God. I hope not.
"No," he smoulders. "I'm not gay, Miss Squeal." He leans close. "Although I am...unusual."
"Oh," I wibble. "Are you...are you trying to seduce me, Mr. Neigh?"
He straightens up. "No. Just foreshadowing." He glances at the list again. "Okay, so how about I just go through these questions and e-mail you the answers? Actually we could have done the whole interview online anyway - I don't know why we didn't. She could have just Skyped from her sickbed."
I shrug. I don't understand either.
"So what's your e-mail address?"
I stare blankly at him. "I don't...um...I...I read a lot of nineteenth century literature."
"Good for you," he says. "But it's 2012. Do you mean to tell me you don't have an e-mail address?"
"No, I don't have a computer."
His frown deepens. "Aren't you part of the graduating class? I'm supposed to be speaking at the graduation - your graduation."
"Yes. I just got my Bachelors."
"What did you write your dissertation on?"
"Oh...um...Classic British novels." I like Classic British novels. Like Shakespeare. And Thomas Hardy.
"No, I mean on," says Crispian Neigh. "Like physically. What did you write on? Papyrus? Vellum? How do you go through four years of higher education in the twenty-first century without owning a computer?"
"I...don't know," I say. Honestly, I don't. "I'm just not good with technology, I guess."
He looks me up and down. "Wow," he says, and I don't think it's because he's impressed.
“I guess I’m not that worldly,” I murmur.
“Innocent,” he verbs, a finger on his lower lip as he gazes speculatively at me, making me blush. I feel funny.
I bite my lip. I’m not sure, but I think his gaze grows more heated. Oh my.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” I whisper, my voice a tiny mouse squeak in the back of my dry throat.
“It’s what I do,” he purrs, his voice gravelly and cool, like an ice-cream dropped on a sidewalk. He gives me a long, assessing look and straightens up. “So,” he says, in a conversational tone. “Are those all your own teeth?”
Chapter Two
Guys And (Pony) Dolls
My heart is pounding. I am so agitated that I stand poetically in the rain and indulge in a whole two paragraphs of repetitive introspection before getting into the car. No man has ever affected me in the way that Crispian Neigh has. Is it because he's courteous and attentive and the only man to ever pay attention to me or is it because he's really really rich? I have a strange fizzy feeling in my panties and I don't understand it.
When I get home, Kate is feeling much better.
"Just fucking die already!" she hisses, through clouds of sweet smelling smoke. Our friend Jesús is sitt
ing next to her on the sofa, both of them hunched over video game controllers. The room resounds with the mashing of buttons and the moans of computer game zombies.
"I'm back..." I say, feeling more insignificant than ever. Did someone really pay attention to me for a whole forty minutes? Normally I just fade into the background, like now. They don't even look at me.
"Hijo de puta," says Jesús. He's ethnic. His second name is Rivera. "Get him, get him..."
"Get the axe, Jesús - the fucking axe!"
"Excuse me," I murmur. "I'm back. Excuse me?"
The screen goes red and Kate slumps back in her seat, throwing down the controller. "Oh hey," she says, spotting me at last. "How was the interview?"
Oh great, she's just going to interrogate me now. "I don't want to talk about it," I say.
"Okay." Kate reaches over the arm of the sofa and brings out a tall plastic cylinder. There's a little metal funnel sticking out of the side of it and this she burns with a cigarette lighter, before putting her mouth to the top of the cylinder and breathing in all the smoke.
"What's that?" I demand. Sometimes I worry about Kate - she has a lot of boyfriends and goes out a lot. She has moodswings too. I saw a thing on CNN once - I think she might be doing drugs.
"Cold medicine," she says, in a high, breath-held voice. She passes the thing to Jesús. "So what happened to you? Did Crispian Neigh try to stick his hand up your skirt?"
"I said I didn't want to talk about it."
"Bullshit, Hanna. I know you. When you say 'I don't want to talk about it' you want us to all kiss your boo-boos and tell you everything's going to be okay."
Tears well in my eyes. "Why are you being so mean to me, Kate?" I whimper.
She sighs. "It's like this, Hanna - you know those Twilight books you love? You know how there's that one blonde vampire Bella hates - the one who's ultimately only there to voice the author's opinion on abortion and babies?"
"Rosalie," I say.
"Yeah. Rosalie. I'm like that. I'm kind of like Rosalie, only I smoke a fuck of a lot more cheeba."
"Dios mio," says Jesús, who is Mexican. "It's come to this already? Cheap meta-tricks?"
Kate shrugs. "What can you do, man? Have you read the original? It pretty much parodies itself."
"What's Jesús doing here?" I ask.
"I have a cold too," coughs Jesús. Holy crap - Kate must be really contagious. His eyes are already red.
I'm so confused. Why did she ask me to go and do the interview when she knows I can barely cross the street without causing a traffic accident? Why is it that I was born in 1991 but don't know how to use e-mail? What the hell is Skype? And why the fuck does my no-no place feel all tickly?
Jesús and Kate are staring at me.
"I didn't say all that out-loud, did I?" I say, flushing scarlet.
"No." Kate shakes her head emphatically. "No. No-no, even."
"Fine," I huff, irritably. "When you're all done with the third degree I'm going to go off to work. At my job. Which I have."
"Well done you," says Kate, picking up the plastic tube again. "Maybe this evening you can call your mom, in case any of the readers were unclear on the fact that you're some kind of placental mammal."
"Thank you, yes. I'll do that."
When I get back from my job at the toystore I call my mother, who lives in Florida. There is a continent between us and yet she still manages to gross me out. She has three 'husbands' and lives in what she calls a 'anarchobisexual-polyamorous collective.' I don't know what that is, but she sends me a lot of macramé potholders.
"Have you met a boy, Hanna?" It's the first thing she asks me.
"No," I murmur down the phone. "Yes. Maybe. I don't know. Anyway, it's not important. Are you coming to my graduation?"
"Umm...uh...well..."
"So that's a no?"
"Honey, it's complicated - Uncle Chet and Uncle Tate are going through something together and it's a very delicate situation. It's taken Chet a long time to get over his internalised homophobia and realise the importance of the root chakra within a loving and consensual relationship. They really need our support right now."
I hold the receiver away from my ear and stare at it for a moment, as if it might provide some physical clue as to the meaning of the strange sounds coming out it. "I don't understand," I say.
"I know you don't, poopkin. Sometimes I wonder how you ever came out of my yoni."
"What's a yoni?"
"Hanna, baby - I have to go. I have crystal healing in half-an-hour and you called right after Uncle Bob had finished making love to my anus. I must shower."
So must I. I shower and dry my hair and put on my nightclothes and get in my bed under the covers. When I sleep my dreams are full of strange pastel-coloured glyphs, five dollar striped fedoras from Target, and other stone obvious references to what happened in chapter one. I wake up confused and needing to pee.
*
I work at a small toystore. I used to work at a hardware store but they fired me after I tripped over the hem of my jeans and landed with my face less than half an inch from the blade of a large circular saw. The saw wasn't running or anything but I'm told it could have easily cut my head in two, so I agreed to leave. The manager was very nice about it, and wrote to his friend Mr. Claypole, who runs the toystore. He even gave me a reference.
I feel safe in the toystore. There have been accidents, like the time when I fell over a nickel someone had dropped on the floor of the stockroom, or the incident when I nearly removed my spleen with a boxcutter, but on the whole a toystore is a good place for someone as big-eyed, long-legged and winsomely uncoordinated as me. I can sit and check off the inventory in the soft play area and Paul Claypole even found me one of those padded helmets designed for children with epilepsy or behavioural difficulties.
Paul Claypole is the owner's son. I think he likes me, and he's very kind, but I want someone dark and mysterious, someone who has secrets and a dark past. And money. Maybe. Not that money is important to me. No.
I am eating a bagel for my lunch (They don't let me have cutlery - not even plastic.) when I am suddenly conscious of a mysterious presence. Thinking it might be ghosts, I look up and see a pair of chocolate brown eyes blinking inquisitively at me.
Holy crap. Neigh.
"Well," he says. "Fancy seeing you here."
I scramble out of the ball pen and remove my head-guard. My bagel sinks to the bottom of the pen, as forgotten and unloved as a bad extended metaphor. There it will linger for at least two weeks and probably constitute a health hazard and grounds for litigation. "I work here," I quiver, my heart going ten to the dozen.
"Cool," he mutters, adjusting his fedora. "Do you always have lunch in the ball pen?"
His voice is melting and tender, like sous vide chicken breast with a fontina cheese sauce...or something.
"Oh yes," I say, my knees trembling dangerously. I wish I hadn't removed the headguard - I'm in severe danger of falling and braining myself on the corner of the nearest shelf. And my hair looks weird. "I do inventory there too. It's not so bad once you get used to the smell of child pee."
"I see," he murmurs, looking directly at my lips. Oh my. The strange tickly feeling is back - I think I might faint.
"Can I help you with something, Mr. Neigh?" I fumble, tripping over my words. My hands are clammy and my underpants aflame. He's a man, a man! I've never talked to one of those before, well...except for Jesús and Paul Claypole and a bunch of other guys but they're not romantic and sexy and fascinating and...
...and filthy stinking dirty rich.
What?
Nothing.
Who are you?
Italicised voice inside your head. Nothing to worry about. Carry on.
Crispian Neigh removes his hat. "There is something I want," he says, with peculiar emphasis. His eyes are all smouldery. Unf.
"Yes," I gibber, meeting his sensual gaze with reluctance but also with a strange stirring deep down inside places I
have never explored before. I was never much for spelunking.
"And I suppose you can figure out for yourself," he whispers. "That I always, always get what I want."
"Yes, Mr. Neigh," I blither. My underpants feel funny.
"I'm a very wealthy man, Miss Squeal," he pouts. I try to answer him but when I open my mouth the only thing that comes out is a sort of long drawn out 'Ahhhhnnnnn' noise.
"So," he says, closing my mouth with his forefinger. "I want you to find me the Rarity's carriage playset."
I nod and take him to the pink aisle, the little girl's toy aisle. "This one?" I say, taking a My Little Pony from the shelf.
Oh no. His gaze has turned cold. He pinches the bridge of his nose with his fingers - his perfect fingers with those delicate orange crescents under the fingernails - and sighs slowly. "I said Rarity, Miss Squeal," he says. "This is obviously Twilight Sparkle."
"I'm sorry." I want to run away and asphyxiate myself in the ball pen. I wonder how much self-harm I could inflict with a toy lightsabre. "I don't understand."
"I know you don't," he says, and it's like the bright, dark moon coming out from behind a cloud. His voice is fragrant with meaning again and I'm basking like a dizzy drunk lizard in the chocolate sun of his beautiful eyes. He's a God, an Adonis. He's the most exquisite male animal I've ever met in my life and I want to have his fucking babies.
I may as well admit it to myself - I quite like him.
"You're innocent, Hanna," he murmurs, standing so close that I can smell his pungent, plangent male musk. It's like cinnamon and woodspice and all things nice. "You're innocent and unspoiled. Not like those shallow sluts who only want me for my money. You're not even wearing make-up, are you?"
I shake my head. Every time I try to put it on I end up looking like a drunk clown. I'm so bad at everything.
