Assembly

by Natasha Brown

  A puppy? I repeated, turning the syllables over. His ex would be at the anniversary, too, I knew. She was a childhood friend, virtually a part of the family, as his mother had phrased it. They’d grown up together frolicking across the English countryside like Colin and Mary Lennox. Looking at him, crouched there on the grass, with his cheeks and watery eyes contorted into an approximation of stoicism – I felt a curiosity, I wanted to know.

  ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned the puppy.’

  Our second bottles were empty. The background chatter had swelled to a buzz of only occasionally dissonant rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb. I asked to see the puppy, if he had a picture. He set down his bottle and stared at me for a while.

  ‘Just forget about the puppy,’ he said.

  We took the District Line back to Putney. The declining sun smouldered behind chimneyed rooftops as we walked along quiet roads from the station to his house. Reading before bed, he smiled sideways over his Kindle at me. Later, as he slept, I watched his chest sink and swell. Heard his occasional, wheezing snores. He’d thrown off the bed sheet and lay on his back in a cherubic pose: left foot against right knee, right arm bent around his head, fingers spread soft on the pillow. Cock pink against his thigh. Gravity smoothed his forehead and cheeks and I recognized the boy-ish, pouting face from his driving licence.

  Did I prefer this to sleeping alone?

  My neighbours’ lives were tangled up in their partners. They’d cleaved from their parents and unto each other, sharing bills, food, rent. I did not imagine they could easily separate. We had no such obligations. But we still visited galleries, watched plays, attended parties, hosted parties, travelled, cooked, together. We said we. This seemed a necessary aspect of life, like work. Or exercise.

  ‘It’s the principle,’ Rach had told me, earlier that day. ‘Fuck the sexism – harness it!’

  Rach was adamant that her entanglement with one of the firm’s global department heads was in fact her prerogative: to reclaim and subvert the narrative of workplace harassment. They were getting serious. Moving from formal praxis to something resembling mundane, genuine emotion. Living together. It was both simpler and more complex than my own relationship.

  We had our usual table at the mezzanine coffee point above the office lobby. Rach’s nails, peachy-manicured as always, tip-tapped against her almond latte. We’d slipped from co-workers to friends over the last year as her father recovered from cancer and my grandmother died of it. She was a Home Counties, Kate-loving, Jaeger-shopping, Lean In-feminist who arranged animal-welfare fundraisers at the weekends and bought handmade earrings from Etsy. She once called me in tears from the Hermès store. It’s all too beautiful, she’d sobbed in halting syllables as the shop assistant packaged her scarves.

  ‘Victimhood is a choice,’ Rach said. Part opinion, part mantra. She insisted on continual improvement: evolution, learning, growth, smashing through all ceilings at all costs. She said there’s a new victim every day. Didn’t my MD just get axed for fucking around with that intern in Legal? She shook her head at such reckless, stupid hubris. This was how our conversations invariably went.

  Still, Rach understood – even relished – the cutthroat nature of this place. And so, the coffee breaks, the drinks, the brunches, they continued. We were close, we were friends. We said it with post-postmodern earnestness: best friends. We made lists, reviewed our five-year plans and crunched out the Teflon-lined stomachs necessary for execution. There was a fundamental aspect of myself – un-storied and direct. The ugly machinery that grinds beneath all achievement. Only with Rach did I acknowledge that level.

  ‘Who will they promote, do you think? To replace him.’ She leaned back to consider her own question. Then lobbed a few names my way, chuckling as she evaluated Lou’s chances.

  ‘Or maybe they’ll go for a woman,’ she said, laying out each hand in turn, palm up. ‘A woman harmed, another rewarded – sounds legit!’

  She laughed, brushing her hands together. Despite the cynicism, I knew it got to her. During our pre-work workout, a few weeks back, I’d seen her running on the treadmill beside me, fast. Too fast. Panting hard, smacking the track with New Balance-soled feet, her angled elbows swinging wildly, sprinting. Until she wasn’t. Having leapt abruptly and landed on the plastic ledges either side of the whizzing track, her torso collapsed against the control panel. After, we’d regrouped as usual outside the changing room. Her composure restored, her still-damp hair appearing a darker blonde. We took the stairs up to the mezzanine floor to caffeinate. Bodies still flushed from the activity.

  What compelled Rach to pursue this career? I knew why I did it. Banks – I understood what they were. Ruthless, efficient money-machines with a byproduct of social mobility. Really, what other industry would have offered me the same chance? Unlike my boyfriend, I didn’t have the prerequisite connections or money to venture into politics. The financial industry was the only viable route upwards. I’d traded in my life for a sliver of middle-class comfort. For a future. My parents and grandparents had no such opportunities; I felt I could hardly waste mine. Yet, it didn’t sit right with me to propagate the same beliefs within a new generation of children. It belied the lack of progress – shaping their aspiration into a uniform and compliant form; their selves into workers who were grateful and industrious and understood their role in society. Who knew the limit to any ascent.

  I’d rather say something else. Something better. But of course, without the legitimacy of a flashy title at a blue-chip company, I wouldn’t have a platform to say anything at all. Any value my words have in this country is derived from my association with its institutions: universities, banks, government. I can only repeat their words and hope to convey a kind of truth. Perhaps that’s a poor justification for my own complicity. My part in convincing children that they, too, must endure. Silence, surely, was the least harmful choice.

  Rach had moved on.

  ‘This weekend means big things,’ she told me. Serious, exciting things. Things she abstracted to diamond-ring emojis. I wasn’t sure that I was ready for any things. I knew these were the things to want, the right things to reach for. But I felt sick of reaching, enduring. Of the ascent.

  His parents tolerated me. As good, socially liberal parents would. They were patient with their son in the matter of his relationships. They imagined, I imagined, that this was a phase. Why prolong it with negative attention? And so they accommodated it. Welcomed it – me, ostensibly. In fact, they insisted, he told me more than once, insisted that I join the family for their anniversary celebrations.

  I’d met them before, of course. Though nothing like this weekend. It had always been in London, before, four of us around a restaurant table. A two- or three-hour limit on how long we would all be together. The conversation light, and entertaining. They really did know how to entertain. How to talk, to ask, to listen, how to converse. They conjured a sense of occasion. Especially the father, who wielded words with deft precision, like a physical instrument. A scalpel, perhaps, or a quill.

  Sitting around a dim-lit table, a few months back, in a windowless restaurant beneath an art gallery, I watched the father speak through lips tinged red with wine (ordered after a wide-ranging and apparently very welcome, vigorous discussion with the sommelier). He raised up his quill and drew me into their world. On the page of that evening I was a part of it, I belonged. Yet, it was a distanced intimacy. Sincere but lacking permanence or consequence beyond a particular interaction. He asked me variations of the same questions each time. With the same indulging interest he extended to the restaurant staff.

  The mother’s ambivalence was more traditional. She introduced me once with the awkward mouthful, ‘our youngest’s latest lady-friend’. Followed by a knowing smile to the acquaintance who had inquired. Still, I understood her. I felt I could see it through her eyes: to a love of her son, yes. But also, the family she had come from and the one she’d married into. Futures and children and purity – no
t in any crass, racial sense, no. Of course not. It was a purity of lineage, of history: shared cultural mores and sensibilities. The preservation of a way of life, a class, the necessary higher echelon of society. Her son’s arrested development (and what was this relationship, if not childish folly?) should not wreck the family name.

  I was unsurprised to learn the titles and heritage properties were all on the father’s side. There was an uncertainty beneath the mother’s hostility that I almost identified with.

  In the morning, I watched as their son sat on the edge of his bed and squeezed a sugar-coated tablet from a blister pack. He stared down at the white speck in his hand until finally – with needless, performative resolve – he threw his head back and clasped hand over mouth until all was swallowed. Citalopram, 5mg. One per day or as directed by your doctor. He leaned forward, flushed, threw the pack aside. Gulped water from the glass on his bedside table. Then looked over to me, expectant, like he’d just finished all the broccoli on his plate. I was across the room, pinning up my hair. We formed a perfect scene. Sun sliced through the sash windows. His room was bright and sparse and he sat small in it at the edge of the frame, a plump suitcase on the floor beside him. I chuckled and he smiled back, uncertain. I went over to him, cupped his jaw in my left hand and swept the soft edge of his hair back with my right. It was time to go.

  He lifted the case into the boot of his car. Cold morning sun lit us unforgivingly and the air smelled damp. But he appeared inflated, revived. Imbued by the outdoors with the promise of a drive in the country, his family, his home, all ahead. Before I left, he placed his hands around my waist and leaned down for a kiss.

  ‘Could I, possibly, steal you away?’ he said, eyes smiling.

  A part of me did want to get in the car with him and drive off. To spare myself the tense and unhappy day ahead. The full calendar of bullshit meetings, glass cliff-edges, and lying to children. But – to be rash, to act on impulse, to live like him… No. Though I had begun to recognize its confines, I remained bound to the life I led. I needed to keep moving. Gently, softly, I guided his arms away. Back to his sides.

  I’d see him tonight.

  Strategy Onsite

  At the onsite, we review the latest figures, the overall trends, the key drivers of those trends, or – perhaps, the steps to determine the key drivers of those trends. I sit with right ankle over left, knees together, shoulders back, arms on the table, hands soft. Prepared. When I speak, I am to-the-point with a measured pace and an even tone. Backed by the data. Illustrated with slides.

  Mid-afternoon, there’s a comfort break. The men stand, stretch, wander the room. The air is stale from sweat and talk and sandwiches. One man gestures at the espresso machine, says he doesn’t know how it works: which button to press, where to put the pod. When is the receptionist coming back? The others concur, they don’t know either. They ask me, perhaps I know.

  Well.

  I make their coffees. And if they’d like, add frothed milk to the top. The men, relieved, say oh, thank you.

  Thank you.

  After, I wait for Merrick in the small office. It’s cordoned off from the open-plan area with glass panes. This place is all glass. Its glass separates and divides without transparency. Still, Lou manages to watch. He watched the PA stop me on the way back to my desk. Watched over monitor tops as I walked across the floor and into the former managing director’s former office. And he’s watching me now, his neck straining with flagrant nosiness. I place my things – a notebook, pen, wallet – on the desk and sit down.

  Let Lou watch.

  But it’s there. Dread. Every day is an opportunity to fuck up. Every decision, every meeting, every report. There’s no success, only the temporary aversion of failure. Dread. From the buzz and jingle of my alarm until I finally get back to sleep. Dread. Weighing cold in my gut, winding up around my oesophagus, seizing my throat. Dread. I lie stretched out on the couch or on my bed or just supine on the floor. Dread. I repeat the day over, interrogate it for errors or missteps or – anything. Dread, dread, dread, dread. Anything at all could be the thing that fucks everything up. I know it. That truth reverberates in my chest, a thumping bass line. Dread, dread, it’s choking me. Dread.

  I don’t remember when I didn’t feel this.

  Oh, you’re here. Good.

  Merrick’s face appears huge, beaming with effusive American warmth and insincerity. The conferencing screen refocuses, then pans out, revealing a woman sat beside him.

  Good, Merrick says again.

  The woman doesn’t smile.

  I know this woman. My colleagues call her that woman. They say they know how that woman got that job. They say worse, too. She’s a frequent, favourite topic of theirs. This successful woman. This beleaguered, embattled woman. Kicked about and laughed about. Anyway, now she supports other women. She’s a regular speaker on the women’s events circuit. With fourteen mentees, apparently. And here she is with Merrick. Sitting back, her arms crossed, staring stone-faced down at me.

  Well, shit. Ain’t I a woman?

  Merrick hasn’t started yet. He’s fidgeting and saying oh um yes well. He places his palms flat on the table, says well, then leans back and adjusts his glasses. Um, yes. He looks from the woman to me.

  The unpleasantness is behind us, he finally says. We’d like to put all that behind us and move forward. In a new direction.

  He attempts a milky smile.

  The woman puts it simply, they want diversity now.

  Merrick nods with ludicrous gravitas.

  Yes, he says. Indeed! Exactly. He drums the table. And that’s why he’s speaking to me now, he says. Lou’s already on board.

  They go on:

  Joint leadership, says Merrick.

  A big opportunity, says the woman.

  I’m very lucky, they both agree.

  The floor, the tight-packed rows of suited men, operates with a lurching autonomy. Even after weeks without strategic direction from this glass box. The men are laughing, breathing, talking in twos or threes, gathered around a screen. Or standing, chests puffed, and pointing. Punctuated by an occasional woman. Some crouch down, their noses in plastic trays of early dinner or late lunch. There’s a stink to it. So many men talking and sweating and burping and coughing and existing – packed in sleeve to sleeve. Dry, weathered faces; soft, flabby cheeks; grease-shined foreheads. Necks bursting from as-yet-unbuttoned collars. All shades of pink, beige, tan. Fingers stabbing at keyboards and meaty fists wrapped around phone receivers. Or handsfree, gesturing and talking into slender headsets while tossing and catching a ball or pen.

  Is this it – the crescendo of my career?

  My life?

  Lou stands, waves. He’s heading over, smiling.

  Lou!

  I grew up dirt poor, you know. Dirt-fucking-poor in a shack, essentially, in Bedford. So, I get it. I get the grind. All this – it’s as foreign to me as it is to you. Really. And I respect it, what you’re about. The hustle. I do. So, look, of course I agreed to share the promotion. Of course. You deserve this, just as much as me. Okay? Okay. Don’t let anyone tell you different. Fuck, I’m excited. For this, for us – the dream team! Alright, well. Just wanted to tell you that. Anyway. The boys are heading downstairs for a cheeky one to celebrate.

  You coming along?

  Back at my desk, I savour the rare moment of quiet. With Lou and the rest out celebrating, I feel an unfamiliar calm in this space. Curiously, I appreciate anew the physicality of my work area. I have the corner window spot. Lou’s desk is across from mine. A two-foot-tall felt-padded divider is all that separates us during the thousands of hours we spend here together. The various teams we will now jointly manage occupy the rows of monitors and softly whirring machines surrounding me.

  This success, this attainment: everything I’ve strived for. Within my hands. My fingers tight around a joist of the proverbial ceiling. I have a two-thousanddollar ergonomic office chair and a Bluetooth headset that flashes, content
edly, from the glossy cube it reclines on to charge. Three thirty-two-inch monitors render red and green with breathtaking intensity. And a stack of business cards; each bearing my name and corporate title – another reprint needed now, on weighty stock beside the bank’s embossed logo.

  This is everything.

  I have everything.

  In a panorama around me, the sky is melting: reds and oranges into inky blue and nighttime. I stare through the surely colour-distorting, anti-UV-tinted, floor-to-ceiling window-walls. Out past the skyscrapers and into the blurred green-grey horizon beyond. My fingers feel numb but my face is hot, and prickles. I log out of my workstation, pack up my handbag and head towards the lifts.

  Here I Am At The Station, I Should

  The departure boards display leisurely. Flick from one of two, to two of two, and back again. I find mine amongst the screens. A platform number shines blurry from a handful of orange dots.

  So, here I am at the station. I should go find my platform and get on the train. It’s a forty-minute ride. He’ll meet me on the other end. Parked outside the station in his Mini, ready to drive me the rest of the way.

  I don’t feel that I’m going on a journey. Here I am, no heavy bags or comfortable shoes. I’m still dressed for work, I’m here straight from the office. The leather tips of my shoe-boots wink against sharp-pressed hems.

  It would have been better to make this trip tomorrow morning.

  But I’m here now. And I should at least move. I’m in the way, standing here. Jostled by the currents of rushing people, dawdling people, people arranged as families, clustered like ducklings. I’m right in the throughway. So come on now. Lift left foot and swing it ahead, spring forward. Don’t slow down, don’t stop. Don’t think. Just keep it moving.

  Go get on the train.