Maybe the Horse Will Talk

by Elliot Perlman

  ‘You have a beautiful daughter,’ she said to Carla, who was taking off her coat.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Betga.

  ‘She’s your daughter . . . too?’ Jessica asked Betga.

  ‘Haven’t you ever made a mistake?’ came the bullet-like reply from Carla.

  ‘Actually, I have, a lot of them, one of which brings me here now. I hope you don’t mind my being here. I don’t have to stay long.’

  ‘Well, it’s just funny that I never saw you when I was working at Torrent Industries. Could it be ’cause you want me to settle? I mean, suddenly you show up in my house uninvited.’

  ‘I invited her,’ Betga owned up.

  ‘So now you’re inviting people into my house?’

  Jessica looked momentarily perplexed until Betga explained, ‘I’m Marietta’s father but I’m not currently living here.’ Jessica looked at Maserov, who knew her to be thinking, ‘You also don’t live with your children. What is it with you guys?’ Maserov was anxious to distinguish himself from Betga as fast as he could but nothing was coming to him other than the screaming need for immediacy. It was Carla who helped him out.

  ‘Stephen doesn’t live with his kids but he’s not a philandering shithead. So anyway, Ms Human Resources, why are you here?’

  ‘Well, first, I want to apologise.’

  ‘Why, who did you sexually assault?’

  ‘Carla, there’s no need to be rude to her,’ Betga said, trying to sound simultaneously familiar, husbandly and also gallant. Within seconds the results of this attempt were audible and unambiguous.

  ‘Shut up Betga, you unfaithful prick.’

  ‘No, I didn’t sexually assault anyone, but I stood by in a climate where I knew sooner or later that this kind of thing was likely to happen if, indeed, it hadn’t already happened. And I did nothing.’

  ‘Let me guess, somebody at Torrent HQ thought it was a good idea to get a woman to come around and sweet-talk me into settling. You’re a woman protecting Mike Mercer. You’re sucking up to the company. You’ll do anything to save your own sweet arse. And you’re dumb enough to really think that’s going to save you when they come looking for your exotic pussy some wet and rainy night. So I don’t have words to describe how low you are.’

  ‘No, Carla, I swear, I’m not protecting him. That’s not why I’m here. Nobody sent me. In fact, no one from the company knows I’m here. It was only by chance that I happened to be working with Stephen and found out what happened to you, what Mike Mercer did. As Stephen knows, I’m trying to leverage his good standing with Mr Torrent to try to bring in some changes, policies, to make it less likely this kind of thing happens to any other women.’

  ‘I don’t know what policies you got in mind other than chemical castration, with or without the chemicals, but a lot of good your policies are going to do me.’

  ‘I know, that’s why I’m here. I’m not here representing the company or even the human resources department, who would want to protect Mike Mercer. You’re right. I live in fear of people like that. I hate them. Even if you had come to me in HR and reported Mike Mercer, to be honest, I don’t know what I would have done if the people above me took his side. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have let you know that there were sympathetic people, women, who would at least try to talk to those with the power to help.’

  ‘Okay, you feel guilty, thanks. I can’t bank that but I’ll take it to my psychiatrist. We could probably get a good thirty minutes out of that. Maybe she can give me the number of someone who could help you with that guilt.’

  ‘Carla, I’d be angry too.’

  ‘Now what exactly would make you angry? Would you be angry if someone tried to rape you in your workplace? Would you be angry if HR ignored it? Would you be angry if someone came into your house uninvited and started shilling the joys of a settlement that allows Mike Mercer to prosper in his career as though nothing had happened while I’m up at night worrying about how to pay my rent and feed my daughter?’

  ‘Carla,’ Maserov said calmly, quietly and without any condescension. ‘None of us in this room have the power to punish him, to deliver the retribution he deserves. Look, I don’t know how long I’ll be in this position, a position where, in effect, I’m trying to help you while acting as Malcolm Torrent’s point person on this. But your turning down the money that I could get you just because it doesn’t hurt Mike Mercer is crazy. And it really hurts you. I don’t know what Betga’s told you but I’m hopeful I could get Torrent Industries to pay you as much as five hundred, maybe even six hundred thousand. And you wouldn’t have to go through it publicly in court. There’d be nothing about it on the internet.’

  ‘Think what you could do with the money,’ said Betga. ‘Think what you could do for Marietta.’

  ‘Is this why you want to be back in our lives, Betga? You want to mooch off us?’

  ‘Carla, I’d hoped you knew me better than that.’

  ‘No, I know you as well as that.’

  ‘Okay, let me prove it to you. I’m making money, which I’m allowing Maserov to give to you because of my unshakeable love for you. I’m getting paid by Malcolm Torrent, every week you don’t settle. When you and the others settle he stops paying me. Isn’t that right, Maserov?’

  ‘It’s true, Carla.’

  ‘Whereas the settlement money, if you settle, goes directly to you. I don’t get a cent. I want to be adding to the net wealth of this family, not detracting from it.’

  ‘Family?’ Carla asked, but without the anger that had characterised everything she had said since she had come home.

  ‘Well, yeah,’ said Betga quietly. ‘Whatever a family is, we’re probably one. Don’t you think?’

  Maserov felt that last characterisation was somewhat unhelpful so he attempted to distract her from it by returning to the main issue. ‘If I can get an offer of the kind I think I can get authority to make, you should take it,’ he said, looking at her and knowing that the look on her face meant that she wanted to trust him.

  She had left the front door open and the sound of footsteps along the passage gave way to a voice that was heard before its owner could be seen. ‘He’s right, Carla. You should take the offer.’ It was Acting Sergeant Ron Quinn. He walked slowly into the room and Carla turned to him as he whispered ‘Hello, baby girl’ to Marietta, who reached out to him from within Betga’s arms.

  ‘But do you know . . . they’re saying if I accept the offer, Mercer won’t go to trial? There’ll be no criminal trial. You told me he’d committed offences. You said the criminal law was on my side.’

  ‘It is drafted to help you but something’s wrong when . . .’

  ‘When what?’

  ‘I did some research today at the station. In the data for the most recent year I could find there were 3500 rapes reported in the state. Only 3 per cent resulted in a conviction. You know I only want what’s best for you. Take the money.’

  Everyone in the room looked at Carla looking at her daughter in the policeman’s arms. A tear was sliding down her cheek. Nobody said anything. ‘Okay,’ she whispered. They almost didn’t hear her say it.

  Betga walked over to her and she let him hug her, eliciting more tears, some simply born of exhaustion. He held her for a long time and when the embrace was over Maserov spoke.

  ‘Carla, I will do everything in my power to get you the best deal I can. Please know I will.’

  She looked up from Betga’s shoulder. ‘I know you will, Stephen.’

  ‘Carla,’ Jessica began. ‘Did you say before that HR ignored what happened to you? Did somebody report it to HR?’

  ‘Yeah, I did.’

  ‘Really? I didn’t hear anything about it.’

  ‘Yeah, I went straight to the top. Reported it to your boss, Aileen van what’s-her-name.’

  ‘Aileen van der Westhuizen, you reported it to her?’

  ‘Yeah, I even made a note of it. I wrote down everything that happened within a week, certainly two weeks, of it
happening. Gave it to her in person. I don’t know why. I knew she wouldn’t do anything. Said she would talk to him. For Christ’s sake! Fucking waste of space! No offence.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not religious.’

  ‘No, but you’re in HR.’

  ‘Who’s staying for dinner?’ Betga asked suddenly, joyously, and without authority.

  ‘Well, you’re not, for starters,’ said Carla. ‘No one is. I’ve got a friend coming over. So I’m afraid you all have to leave.’

  ‘A friend? What do you mean by that?’ Betga continued.

  ‘I think we should go, Betga,’ said Maserov diplomatically.

  ‘Did you hear that, Ron?’ Betga asked the policeman. ‘She wants you to go. Says she’s got a friend coming over. You’re her friend. What do you make of this, being displaced by someone ostensibly of equal rank?’

  Maserov, Jessica and Acting Sergeant Ron Quinn quietly said their goodbyes and walked out into the darkening street. The policeman went to his car on his own while Jessica and Maserov went to the one car, Maserov’s.

  Betga was not far behind them, much to his displeasure. He saw the friend coming and was relieved to see it was a woman. In this he had it over Maserov, whose wife had had a male friend come to the house not long after he, Maserov, had left. What Betga couldn’t have known was that Carla’s visitor was, in fact, Maserov’s wife, Eleanor. She had arranged for her mother to babysit and was visiting Carla without her children for the first time.

  Eleanor could see that Carla had recently been crying. Once she’d been assured that Carla was now fine, she turned her attention to that which was suddenly uppermost on her mind. There had been people leaving Carla’s house. She’d seen them leaving while she was parking her car. She couldn’t tell exactly how many but she was surprised to see that her husband was one of them.

  ‘Was that Stephen just leaving?’

  ‘Yeah, some kind of a delegation.’

  ‘And that . . . woman?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘She was . . . Who was she? They left together . . . in his car. Did you know that?’

  IV

  ‘And what about the other three victims, Lilly, Monika and Pauline, Betga’s other three plaintiffs?’ Jessica asked. ‘Their experiences weren’t as bad as Carla’s but they were still pretty bad.’

  ‘Betga said that if Carla settles, the other three will too.’

  ‘Are they all in touch with each other?’ Maserov indicated that he didn’t know with a slight movement of his hands and a gentle shrug of his shoulders. Somehow his not knowing this and his not pretending to know lifted Maserov even more, just slightly, in Jessica’s estimation.

  They’d had dinner together and then had gone to Jessica’s local haunt, the Ghost of Alfred Felton, the cocktail bar at the Espy, to toast Carla’s agreeing to settle. The bartenders there were famously egoless, an attribute in a bartender, waiter or any other man that suited Jessica perfectly. They were allies, not predators. But for all that, when Jessica left the bar that evening, the place she and Maserov had gone to toast Carla’s agreeing to settle, one bartender couldn’t help but notice the regard his favourite late-night corporate regular had shown Maserov, not through any conversation, which amidst the crushed and shaken ice he could not hear, but through her body language and proximity to Maserov.

  He might well have been one of the famously egoless bartenders but Jessica’s fondness for Maserov shook him and left him ever-so-slightly depressed. And that she was always so friendly and didn’t act as though she was aware of the power of her beauty only made it worse for this man who, for a moment, hated Maserov as much as Hamilton now did.

  The side street outside the cocktail bar was quiet but for the faraway sounds of Gogol’s distant relatives girding and ungirding their threadbare overcoats, sometimes in company and sometimes alone, in the uneven, potholed seaside laneways that waited for social archaeologists who had not yet been born. It was cold but at least it was no longer raining.

  ‘So tomorrow you’ll go to Malcolm Torrent to get the authority to offer, what, five hundred or even six hundred thousand for Carla?’ Jessica asked Maserov.

  ‘Yep, tomorrow’s the big day.’

  ‘Have you checked that he’ll be in?’

  ‘Yep, no getting out of it.’

  ‘Are you nervous?’

  ‘I’ll tell you honestly, I’m nervous every time I speak to him.’

  ‘But he listens to you. It’s always gone well with him.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s true. When I started this I was winging it just for myself, just trying to buy time to figure out what to do when they got rid of me, what to do with my life. But now I’m . . . involved.’

  ‘Involved?’

  ‘Emotionally involved.’

  ‘You’re emotionally involved?’ Jessica said, edging imperceptibly closer to him.

  ‘Yes, I haven’t used the time to secure any options, to find work, when Freely Savage gets rid of me. I’ve just been working with Betga and you and getting emotionally involved.’

  ‘I think it’s great that you can say this, that a man can feel comfortable admitting that he’s become . . . emotionally involved.’

  ‘Well, only a heartless shit could know what happened to these women and not become emotionally involved in the outcome.’

  ‘Oh . . . you mean emotionally involved in the cases.’

  ‘Yeah, what did you think I . . .?’

  Jessica turned her head to one side so that her face was pointed away from him. She was surprised to feel the fingers of one of his hands combing the hair on the side that was turned away. Maserov was surprised to be combing. But emboldened by gin and absinthe and the sudden increase in the force of the wind, he turned her face back to his, leaned in and slightly down to kiss her.

  It wasn’t a tentative kiss or one whose intent could be the subject of plausible deniability at any later time. He found the smallest space between her lips and used all the power of his longing to let her know how much he wanted her and when she responded as though hungry for him there was nothing but the wind to stop them kissing for several minutes.

  ‘Should I . . .?’ Maserov asked. Jessica was hoping he was asking if he should come home with her but instead his next word was ‘go’. She tried to hide her disappointment.

  ‘Oh . . . I guess. It’s late.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  They stood there in the street alternately looking at each other and away and then back again. She was wondering now why he hadn’t continued kissing her, if he was going to start again and whether she had made a fool of herself by so obviously wanting him to once he had started. He was wondering if he had made a fool of himself, or worse, somehow taken the first albeit tiny step on the road towards behaving like Mike Mercer. He was thinking about the kiss, the first one he’d had in a long time. It was the first time he had kissed a woman who wasn’t Eleanor since he had started dating Eleanor all those years ago. He was wondering if he had just been unfaithful to his wife and maybe even to his children. And he was wondering if they were going to kiss again before they got into their respective cars.

  ‘So tomorrow you’ll go to Malcolm Torrent to get the authority to offer,’ she said, starting the whole thing all over again and returning to the assault as though it was all about that.

  ‘Yeah, but first I have to go back to Freely Savage to satisfy HR’s quota of fool’s errands, wild-goose chases and the like.’

  ‘Why do you still have to do this shit?’

  ‘I figure it’s easier to quickly do whatever bullshit they want me to do than to deal with the consequences of Hamilton finding out I’m not doing it.’

  ‘So . . . I’ll see you in the morning?’ Jessica asked tentatively before adding, ‘Or the afternoon, whenever. Let me know what Mr Torrent says.’

  ‘Of course. You’ll be the first person I tell.’

  ‘Don’t be nervous,’ she said. ‘Remember, he tends to listen to you and, frankly, you being the person o
n the other side is the best thing that’s happened to Carla since the assault. So . . . I don’t know if that came out right. You know what I mean.’

  ‘You mean she’s lucky there’s such a lousy lawyer on the other side.’

  ‘I mean she’s lucky to find a man with so much integrity on the other side. Good luck.’ With that she leaned in and gave him a peck on the cheek and, when she had returned to her pre-peck position, he pulled her back and began kissing her passionately just as he had a few minutes earlier. Jessica returned the fervour and neither was at all embarrassed, not in the street and not as they lay in their respective beds thinking of it all through the night.

  V

  Maserov was in his car driving into the CBD, where he would go, first, to Freely Savage in order to comply with the absurd demands of its HR department and thereby not re-enter Hamilton’s consciousness any more than he had to ever since his meteoric rise to the status of target, and then on to Torrent Industries, where he would see Malcolm Torrent to try to get the authority to make the best offer to Carla and the other three plaintiffs that he could.

  The traffic was barely crawling and sometimes not even that but it gave him time to survey his life and as long as his car didn’t shudder more violently than usual between spasms of forward motion he didn’t mind. Today was a new day. In this it was just like every other day. But this was the first day he had arisen, showered and put on a suit and tie knowing that a woman like Jessica Annand had wanted to kiss him passionately. In fact, it wasn’t a woman like Jessica Annand, it was Jessica Annand. He hadn’t been trying to charm or entice her. He didn’t remember how to be flirtatious, couldn’t recall when he had last been, if ever. No, Jessica had got to know him during a time where he had merely been himself, Stephen Maserov, a man in increasingly difficult circumstances, circumstances that he had never attempted to hide.