Apartment 255

by Bunty Avieson

  ‘Yell at me, scream, lose your temper,’ she pleaded quietly. ‘Please don’t give me the cold treatment.’

  ‘And what would that achieve, Sarah?’ he replied. ‘I think we have had enough yelling and screaming in the past few weeks, don’t you?’

  It was a bullseye. The arrow hit its mark, lodging right under Sarah’s skin. The implication was clear. She was the one who had been doing the yelling over the past few weeks. She wanted to apologise for breaking his confidence, telling the girls about his story. But that was it. She didn’t feel she had anything else to apologise for. Tom was lumping it all together and she bristled.

  ‘I’m talking about your story, Tom,’ she said, trying to keep their discussion clearly defined. She didn’t trust herself if they moved onto the other problems they had been having.

  ‘I am very sorry that Ginny blurted it out today in front of John. I’m sure he won’t use it. You know he won’t use it.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter if he uses it or not. He knows. He can’t now not know. That’s just how it is. Whatever he is working on has to be affected by knowing that the body builder has spoken to us. And because I am not privy to what he is working on, I can’t assess what that damage might be.

  ‘You know how hard I have been working to get that body builder to talk to me. I am astounded you take my work so lightly that you just chat to all and sundry about it.’

  ‘Tom, it wasn’t like that,’ said Sarah feebly.

  ‘Oh really?’ said Tom. ‘You get your friends over, Anne included, and tell them my work secrets. Don’t you have enough to talk about without revealing all about my work? What else have you told them?’

  His tone was acidic. Sarah had never seen him this angry. The intensity of his anger frightened her.

  ‘I was just explaining why you were in Canberra the night we had dinner. I didn’t mean to tell them so much but they were really interested and I don’t know why I told them so much. I know I shouldn’t have. I was sorry the moment I spoke,’ said Sarah, massaging her temples in a vain attempt to quell her throbbing head. ‘I am so very sorry it came up today in front of John. I know it couldn’t have come up at a worse time. I don’t know why Ginny brought it up …’

  ‘Don’t blame Ginny,’ thundered Tom. ‘She’s not the one supposedly marrying a journalist.’

  Sarah recoiled at the venom in Tom’s words.

  ‘What are you saying, Tom?’ she asked quietly.

  Tom stared steadfastly at the road. He didn’t reply.

  ‘What are you saying?’ Sarah repeated, her voice rising.

  Tom glared at her, then turned his eyes back to the road.

  ‘Get a grip on yourself, Sarah. I am not in the mood for another one of your tantrums right now, thank you.’

  CHAPTER 12

  Sarah came back from her run just as Tom was leaving for work. He kissed her awkwardly on the cheek then he was gone. Sarah felt lonely in the empty apartment. Lonely and resentful. She telephoned the station and spoke to McKenzie’s secretary, Fay.

  ‘How’s his mood?’ asked Sarah.

  ‘Fair to middling,’ replied Fay.

  That sounded promising for a Monday morning.

  ‘Can you tell him I’ll be late in? I lost a filling over the weekend and I have a dental appointment at nine,’ lied Sarah.

  Fay whistled. ‘Oh Sarah, I don’t think he will be very happy about that.’

  Sarah tugged at a strand of hair. ‘I know. But I can’t help it. I’m in agony. I can’t eat or drink anything hot.’

  ‘Oh, you poor thing. Take it easy. I’ll tell him. You may be in luck. He’s upstairs with the big chiefs and may not be back down here till lunchtime. There’s all sorts of heavy shit going down.’

  Sarah felt anxious. That usually meant cutbacks. If so, now wasn’t the time to be seen to be slacking off on the job.

  ‘Do you know what’s going on?’

  As long as McKenzie wasn’t within earshot Sarah knew she could count on Fay to be indiscreet.

  ‘I can’t be sure but I do know the lawyers and the accountants have been called to the same meeting,’ said Fay, confirming Sarah’s worst fears.

  As Sarah drove to the Roads and Traffic Authority at Bondi Junction, she worried about her job. She hated to think what might happen if McKenzie, under pressure from his own bosses, cast an unfavourable eye in her direction.

  Sarah was careful to park out of view of the RTA. The car was officially unregistered and she knew she shouldn’t be driving it. She didn’t want anyone giving her a hard time. She felt close to tears. They welled inside her and she felt ready to burst. She worried that if she let out a little, she wouldn’t be able to stop.

  The RTA office was like dozens of government offices around the country – grey carpet, grey walls and bored and unhelpful staff milling about behind the counter. Sarah took her number, 42, and sat down. The digital clock showed 27. It was going to be a long wait. She looked at the faces around her. They all looked as bored and hostile as she felt. Everything about the office seemed designed to aggravate. The waiting chairs were uncomfortable, hard plastic, joined in rows of four that made it virtually impossible to separate yourself from your neighbour. The ticket system was dehumanising. The fluorescent lights were harsh and offensive. The carpet smelled like dirty hair. The RTA staff peered out from behind glass screens so you had to yell your business for all to hear. The staff were so used to abuse from the customers they got in first, making clear their indifference. They were inflexible in the face of the bureaucratic lunacy they were paid to administer and forced each day to defend.

  Every moment spent waiting heaped more stress on Sarah’s already jagged nerves. She fidgeted and tugged at her hair as the morning ground slowly on. She shouldn’t be here. She glared at the people behind the counter. ‘Hurry up. You’re going to make me lose my job,’ she screamed inside. She directed her anger at Tom, railing against him. He should be here, taking some responsibility for the domestic minutiae of their lives.

  By the time her number was called Sarah had worked herself into a state. She was near hysterical when the woman behind the counter spoke.

  ‘Yeees,’ said the woman, shuffling papers and not deigning to look up.

  ‘I’m here to pay my registration,’ said Sarah, pushing the papers under the glass partition.

  The woman was in her twenties. Her skin was sallow and she had large bulbous eyes with blobs of congealed mascara on the lashes. She took the papers from Sarah without looking up. Sarah was getting the message. I’m really too good for this job. You bore me. It reminded Sarah of the girl in the trendy Paddington dress shop who hadn’t seemed to understand the word orange. Sarah hated them both, the tacky little tart with the yellow nail polish and the snooty clerk here with her nose stuck in the air. Sarah hated the inefficient RTA system that had wasted her morning, sucking away time that she should have spent elsewhere. She hated Tom for not being there with her and for a dozen other things that lay in the gulf that was widening dangerously between them.

  ‘I’ll have to key these numbers into the other computer,’ said the clerk.

  Sarah missed the reason why. She was too irritated and impatient to listen.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for hours and I’m in a hurry,’ Sarah said.

  The young woman ignored her. As if she had all the time in the world, she swivelled out of her chair and rose, Sarah’s papers in her hand. She took them across to a desk where a good-looking young man was staring at a computer screen. The office heart-throb. Sarah thought he looked sleazy. The clerk sidled up to him and spoke. Sarah had a perfect view of her pouting and flirting, giggling suggestively, stroking the young man’s shirtcuff, in fact, doing everything but process Sarah’s registration. The clerk didn’t seem to care that everybody could see her. The young man leaned back in his chair, clearly enjoying the attention.

  Sarah couldn’t just stand there and watch patiently. She was way past having such control over her emotions. She
tapped her car keys loudly on the glass partition.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she called out, then louder. ‘Excuse me!’

  The young woman couldn’t not have heard. Every other RTA employee looked up or across at Sarah, relieved she wasn’t their problem. But the clerk steeled herself and ignored Sarah.

  ‘I’m talking to you,’ yelled Sarah.

  The young man looked at Sarah and whispered something into the clerk’s ear. She laughed coquettishly, letting Sarah know with the slightest roll of her shoulders that she wasn’t about to jump to attention for her.

  ‘Hey, you with the bug eyes,’ yelled Sarah.

  This seemed to shock the RTA employee and she froze. It shocked everyone else in the offices, the staff and all the customers waiting impatiently on the plastic chairs. Everyone stopped what they were doing – serving other customers, re-reading for the fifth time the road-safety posters on the walls – to pay attention to the angry young woman. She was an anomaly in her surroundings. Designer suit. Expensive shoes. Belligerent and lacking control. Anticipation rippled through the room.

  ‘You tell ’em,’ chortled an elderly man in a smelly overcoat.

  ‘Oh get fucked,’ snapped Sarah at him.

  Something inside Sarah opened up. A gap. A small fissure.

  ‘And you get your fucking fat arse over here and serve me,’ she shouted at the young woman, whose mouth was hanging open in stunned disbelief. She looked around for her supervisor. This woman was a nutter. She may not have looked like their normal nutter, but it was pretty obvious to everyone that that’s what she was. They had about one a month, a customer who, as they said at the RTA, ‘lost it’. This meant the clerk was off the hook. It was over to Mr Singh now. There were procedures in place for such situations.

  The atmosphere in the offices changed. It was no longer the employees on one side of the counter and the impatient customers on the other side. Now they were united. Sarah had stepped over that unseen barrier of social niceties and she was on her own.

  Mr Singh heard the yelling, it was impossible for him not to, and came out of his glass-walled office, meeting the clerk at the window. His voice was calm when he spoke to Sarah, his face a blank mask of civility. Underneath he was paddling furiously. He was a dedicated civil servant, who had proudly accepted the supervisor’s job just two months ago. He knew everyone was looking to him to take charge, to be the boss. He knew he would win. After all, there were rules and procedures. As long as he stuck to those he held the power. That was how bureaucracy worked. But he took his new role very seriously and it was important to him that he do it in the right way. He wanted to be an example to his staff.

  ‘Is there a problem here?’

  ‘Yes, there’s a problem,’ spat Sarah. ‘I’ve been waiting three hours in that queue and now that I finally get to the front Miss Bug Eyes here is too interested in your office stud to process my registration. I have wasted enough of my life in here. I want some fucking service.’

  If only Sarah had not sworn, it could have turned out very differently. She would have been just another angry customer, annoyed by the delay. But swearing and name calling, according to the RTA procedure book, took it to a whole new level. In terms of the law it constituted an assault, a verbal assault. On page thirteen of Mr Singh’s procedure book, under the heading ‘Customer Disputation’, this was a level-three conflict. And Sarah had become ‘the Disputant’.

  ‘If madam would just calm down,’ said Mr Singh, motioning for his clerk to move aside.

  Sarah was incensed by his tone. She knew she was marginalised and on her own because of her own actions, but she was beyond caring. The fissure widened. Her pent-up aggression of the past weeks, her anger at Tom, her fears for her job, the nagging voice inside her head telling her she wasn’t good enough, each had been another layer of pressure. The frustration of the morning was that one layer too many. She had let a little of the pressure out and she was powerless now to halt the outpouring of emotion that followed.

  She wanted to leap over that counter and smash that polite, insincere smile of Mr Singh. She wanted to grab Miss Bug Eyes on either side of the head and grind her face into the counter. The glass partition blocked her from doing either. In frustration, and with little idea what she was doing, she opened her throat and gave voice to all the rage and pain she had been keeping inside. Oblivious of the shocked faces around her, unaware of everything but her own release, Sarah howled. The sound was so raw and full of such tangible despair that it physically hurt the people closest to Sarah. They recoiled in fear and repulsion. Sarah’s agony reverberated around the walls of the RTA offices and out onto the road. She threw herself against the glass partition, pounding it with her fists, the car keys still clenched in her hand. The screen was bulletproof and not likely to break but the sound of the keys and Sarah’s fists beating on the glass made it seem perilously fragile.

  What happened next was a blur and the people in the offices gave conflicting accounts to police later that day. One man, customer number 53, grabbed her flailing arms just as James, a young RTA employee, rounded the end of the counter and threw himself on Sarah. Who got to her first was a matter of conjecture and depended on where the observer was standing at the time, but once she was restrained the two men held her tightly on the ground, on her back with her arms pinned to her sides. The man in the smelly overcoat who Sarah had abused was delighted with the new turn of events and jumped on her feet, sitting triumphantly and smiling back at everyone. In his version of events, he had got to her first.

  Sarah, feeling like an animal with a leg caught in a trap and its instinct to run irrevocably blocked, went finally, completely berserk, thrashing wildly, screaming abuse at the men holding her. Most of what she screamed was nonsensical. But there was no mistaking the anger, the rage and the pain in her voice. It was chilling. Women shielded their children and moved as far from the writhing body on the threadbare grey carpet as they could.

  Mr Singh, with a shaking hand, dialled the nearby police station.

  Sarah was still roaring, her face contorted and unrecognisable, when they arrived to take her away. The policemen tried to be gentle but she fought them every inch of the way, screaming and punching out at them, using her nails, her knees and her elbows. They simply and efficiently overpowered her, putting her into the back of their van. There was no need to turn on the siren. Sarah screamed and raged against them all the way to the police station. Her rage continued as they locked her in a cell and told her once again to calm down. Finally she was left alone with no-one to rage against. She kicked the iron bed, hurting her foot and then burst into tears, great uncontrollable tears that spilled out of her eyes and poured down her cheeks. She howled and howled, giving vent to all the pain and despair she felt.

  When a policewoman came to see her half an hour later, Sarah had calmed down. She was completely spent, exhausted. The policewoman looked at her with sympathy.

  ‘How are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘Okay,’ said Sarah weakly. ‘Am I in big trouble?’

  ‘Not so much,’ said the policewoman. ‘We were worried you were going to hurt yourself so we put you in here. But you haven’t committed murder so I don’t suppose it’s too bad.’

  Sarah considered this perspective. She appreciated the policewoman’s sympathy but here she was sitting in a dank cell that reeked so strongly of urine she didn’t dare breathe deeply. She was looking at the policewoman through a row of iron bars. She had, through her own actions, put herself on the other side of a line that nicely brought up, middle-class girls like herself, not to mention smart, capable career women with a public profile, weren’t supposed to cross. She thought her definition of bad and that of the policewoman must be vastly different. A vision of her mother in one of her smart Chanel suits wafted in front of her.

  ‘Can I go then?’ she asked.

  ‘Let me talk to the senior detective. He’s the one in charge. You relax and I’ll see what needs to be done to get you o
ut of here.’

  Sarah was left alone again. She felt miserable. She wanted Tom. No, she realised, she didn’t want Tom. She didn’t want him to see her like this. She thought about the newsroom and wondered if McKenzie was back from his meeting and looking for her. It seemed a long way away. Sarah couldn’t find it in herself to be concerned. She just wanted to go home.

  *

  Tom was deep into writing the latest instalment on his steroid abuse series when Linda, the chief of staff, pulled up a chair at his desk. Linda was in her mid-thirties, with neat round glasses and a clipped English accent. She had been Tom’s immediate boss for two years and they got on well. She was tough on the reporters, giving them orders each morning and monitoring their productivity throughout the day. But Tom didn’t need to be monitored. He was mostly left alone to turn out award-winning groundbreaking stories.

  ‘I’m nearly done,’ said Tom, tapping away at the computer.

  ‘Can I talk to you, Tom?’ said Linda.

  Something about her tone caught Tom mid-thought and he stopped writing immediately. He looked at her and saw she was serious. She was speaking quietly so that the rest of the workers in the open-plan office couldn’t hear.

  ‘I’ve just been talking to Bill, the police reporter,’ said Linda. ‘There has been a bit of a barney at the RTA offices in Bondi Junction.’

  Tom wondered what this had to do with him. He could see Bill standing over by the picture desk, looking at him. He seemed embarrassed when Tom caught his eye.

  ‘I’m afraid it involves Sarah.’

  ‘Sarah? What are you talking about?’

  Tom felt the world recede. Everything seemed to slow down.

  ‘There has been an incident at the RTA offices in Bondi Junction involving Sarah.’

  Tom had visions of a gunman shooting up the offices and Sarah being caught in the crossfire.

  ‘Is she hurt? Is she all right?’

  Linda realised she was being ambiguous but she was trying to be as gentle as she could. She wondered how she would react if she heard bad news about her partner in this way, at work, because it was considered a news story. She felt for Tom.