Better Than This (32 page)

“So, that’s two for going ahead,” I said, counting myself as well. “Sally?”

She looked trapped, her eyes darting around the table, and then she settled on me with a mute appeal. For the barest instant I wavered. But then it passed, and Sally dropped her gaze.

“Against.”

We all looked at Marcus. Seconds went by, then looking down he quietly said, “We go ahead.”

Sally stood up. “I want to go home.”

I couldn’t sleep. Sally and I had barely exchanged two words on the way home. The tension in the car seemed to suck the oxygen from the air and threatened to smother us. Sally stared out of the window, and once when I heard her sniff I thought she was crying but when I reached out she shrugged me off. As soon as I stopped outside the house she climbed out and slammed the door shut behind her. When I went inside she had just come down the stairs and I saw her in her robe go through to the kitchen. By the time I’d locked up she was back again, sweeping past me without a word towards our room. I lingered for a while in the kitchen drinking a scotch with a cube of ice, trying to convince myself that she would calm down by morning. Eventually I went up to our room. It was dark, Sally was already in bed. When I slipped in beside her and reached out a tentative hand she shrugged me off. As I lay on my back staring into the darkness I heard her breathing slowly grow regular until eventually I knew she was asleep.

I drifted off now and then into light dreaming slumber. My mind was full of images, a whole kaleidoscope that whirled and flashed before my inner eye without apparent connection. I saw Dexter as he’d appeared at our table that night, but I also saw myself as a child riding a bicycle along a sunny sidewalk, my dad running behind to make sure I didn’t fall off. I must have been very young, learning to manage without training wheels for the first time. It was a fragment of memory that held no meaning. Another image was of Sally, the day we met on campus, as she walked across the grass under a lowering sky, and then later on a boat in the bay not long after we’d moved to San Francisco, and there were other disjointed snippets of her, like flicking through a photograph album. I also saw my dad lying on the floor in his office where he’d fallen after he shot himself. He was behind the old battered desk he used, the top scarred by years of use. A pool of dark blood spread around his head, seeping into the cracks between the wooden boards, his eyes were open, vacant and staring. But this image was a false memory, a figment of my imagination. I was at school the day he shot himself. By the time I got home, my mom was there, her eyes reddened with grief and my dad’s body had been taken away.

I woke with a start, aware of everything around me. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I listened to the undisturbed rhythm of Sally’s breathing as she slept, but otherwise the house was silent. My fragmented dreams vanished, and as I lay there I wondered what had made me wake so suddenly. The clock at the side of the bed told me that it was only one a.m. It felt later than that. The last thing I’d dreamed of was the disc containing the program lying in the safe at the office, and Dexter stealthily creeping towards it. I knew it was only a manifestation of my subconscious fears. Very few people even knew of the existence of the safe, besides which there was no way to get past the locks and the security systems for the building and office without setting off enough alarms to alert every cop in the city.

For a while reason battled with paranoia, but in the end I knew there wasn’t a hope I would be able to sleep again that night. Paranoia took a grip and I began to imagine a fire at the office or a gas explosion and other equally unlikely events. Finally I decided to get up and go downstairs and watch TV to take my mind off it, but the second I swung my feet out of bed I changed my mind. Gathering jeans and a shirt in the darkness I crept from the room, pausing at the door to reassure myself that Sally was still asleep, and satisfied I went downstairs to dress.

A thin stream of late night traffic inhabited the freeway heading both in and out of town, but it was a straight drive in. When I reached our building I turned off the street and raised the grille to the basement car park. As I drove down the ramp a red lamp on the wall at the bottom cast an eerie glow that made me think of a glowing furnace. I parked in my usual place and went back up to the side entrance off the courtyard beyond the street. My footsteps echoed against the high walls. I paused in the recess by the door, buried in deep shadows and searched for the right key. I heard the sound of a vehicle turning at the intersection outside, the engine slowing, and I remembered the car that had played chicken with me on the way to the restaurant earlier. This one, however, lacked the characteristic deep throated rumble, and I relaxed as I put the key in the lock.

The key turned, and then I froze. Something was wrong, but it took me a moment to figure what it was. It was quiet, but it shouldn’t have been. The car I’d heard turn at the intersection should have driven past the front of the building, but it hadn’t. I wondered if it hadn’t registered, but I wasn’t convinced. Then I thought; so it had stopped, so what? But why stop on a deserted street in this part of town at this time of night? The apartments close by all had their own parking areas. I looked around the courtyard. The walls and the corners were thick with shadows. I had been in and out of this building at all times of night and day, and had never given it a thought. It was a familiar landscape I hardly registered even in the dark. But now I was edgy. The silence was menacing. I knew it was just the workings of my mind. I was like a child who pulls the bedclothes over his head and conjures monsters from his imagination far worse than could possibly be real. A bedroom that by day is comforting and full of familiar playthings is transformed in an instant to a perilous nightmarish landscape of dark corners, hiding places where THEY are waiting.

“Get a grip,” I told myself, slightly comforted by the sound of my own voice.

I turned the key and stepping inside closed the door behind me as I groped for the light switches. I only turned a couple of them on, enough to see by but not enough to attract the attention of a passing security patrol, then I punched in the security code. In the dim light the inside of the building with its metal perimeter walkways and flights of stairs resembled a prison more than ever. The darkened stores and offices like rows of cells. My footsteps clanked on the metal tread of the stairs and echoed hollowly in the gloomy space. I unlocked the office door and punched in the code then went straight to Marcus’s office which had a window overlooking the street. Without turning on the light I went over and peered outside. At first I thought the street was empty, but then, right below the window, I saw a car pulled up against the sidewalk. Because of the angle and the fact that it was shadowed by the wall I couldn’t make out anything except the roof and the hood. A dark shape, the colour indeterminate. I watched for a little while, looking for some sign of movement, but there was nothing. What now, I thought? I imagined stepping back out into the courtyard with the disc in my pocket, waiting for someone to jump me.

While I was thinking about it, out in reception the phone began to ring.

The sound startled me. For a moment I was rooted to the spot then I went out front as the ringing stopped and the answering machine cut in. I heard Stacey’s voice announcing our office hours and inviting callers to leave a message, and then the tone, but whoever was there didn’t speak, but neither did they hang up. Any second the machine would cut in and hang up automatically, and at last I leaned over the desk and picked up the receiver.

“Yes?”

“Time we had a little talk I think, Nick.”

It was Dexter. “Where are you?”

“Outside.”

I hesitated, then said, “Come to the door.”

He looked around as I led him through to my office. Of course he’d never been there before. He wore an expression of slightly amused disdain as he took in the modern furniture, the pale blonde wooden floors and the curving glass wall that stretched around the central work space. It was very different from the corporate bland image that KCM projected. He paused when his eye fell on the chrome scaffolding against the wall, his mouth curling in a derisory sneer.

We went into my office and he swept his gaze around. I imagined his own was several times the size of this one, with views of downtown and the bay. He went over to the pictures on my bookcase and picked up the one of me with Sally.

“This is your wife isn’t it? Very nice.”

“How about you tell me what you’re doing here, Dexter,” I said.

“Plenty of time for that.” He picked up the other picture, of me and my dad. “That’s you? So who’s the guy, your father?”

He peered close, as if he wanted to see if there was a resemblance. His condescending manner bothered me. It was as if everything he saw amused him. I went over and took the picture from him.

“You probably had one of those yourself, though maybe your mother didn’t remember his name.”

He stared at me, his expression suddenly hardening in anger.

“My parents were married for twenty-five years, asshole. Right up until my dad died when I was fifteen.”

The anger faded, and he regained control of himself. The mocking light I was familiar with returned to his eyes.

“How did you know I was here?”

“I followed you, of course.” He grinned. “What’s the problem, Nick, couldn’t sleep?”

I was irritated that he had read me so well. “Well now that you’re here, what do you want?”

He sat down, and crossed his legs, ignoring my question. “You know how my father made his living?”

I started to think of some caustic reply, but I changed my mind and sat down, thinking the sooner I let him have his say the sooner he would leave. “I expect you’re going to tell me.”

Dexter ignored my tone. “He worked in a food warehouse his whole life. He was a picker, though you probably don’t know what that is. He went around the bins on the shelving and picked out orders from a sheet, which he hauled onto a pallet on the front of a forklift truck. He had to stack them up there until he had the whole order. A lot of the time he would be down on his hands and knees so he could crawl back into the shelving to haul out boxes of canned peaches or whatever. Sometimes the big catering packs can weigh eighty or ninety pounds. Can you imagine how hard that is? The strain on a person’s back when they’re doing it day in day out for years on end. I remember he’d come home at the end of his shift and the pain in his back was so bad my mother would massage him and I’d be sent to another room so I wouldn’t see how much he was hurting. For that he got fourteen dollars an hour. It killed him in the end. He had a heart attack one day when he was trying to lift a crate of cherries down from a high rack.”

As he sat there talking in my dimly lit office, Dexter’s expression was masked by shadows, but he sounded bitter.

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

He didn’t reply for a moment, and then he made a dismissive gesture. “You wouldn’t understand.”

But I was intrigued. “Try me.”

He stared at me, then I saw the gleam of his sardonic smile. “Don’t try to analyse me, Weston.”

“Hey, you’re the one that started this conversation,” I reminded him. “Does this have something to do with why you’re such an unpleasant prick, Dexter? Is it why you hate everyone? Because you do don’t you? You walk around with that look in your eye like you’re so much smarter than everyone else.”

“That’s because I am. I proved I was better than any of you.”

“Is that what you’re about? Proving you’re better? Why? Because your dad worked all his life in a lousy job?”

“You know, I remember the day you came to work at KCM. You were just like all those other slick assholes. All with your college degrees, the bullshit way you talk, and the way you dress in your designer jeans and Tshirts. You know what I thought? I thought here comes another fucking phony like the rest of them.”

I was taken aback by the strength of his feeling. “Jesus, Dexter. If you hated everyone so much why did you stay?”

“Because I wanted to show you all who was really the smart one. You just walked into that job without a thought, as if it was something you were owed, but you know how long I’d been at KCM when you started? Five years, that’s how long. I started out in the mail room and making coffee for a bunch of shitheads like you who didn’t even notice I was alive. But you know what? I told myself I’d keep my head down, listen and learn, and one day I’d be telling them what to do.”

I understood something about Dexter then. I’d always had him pegged as simply highly ambitious, one of those people who are determined to get to the top, and he wasn’t too fussy about whose face he stepped in on the way up, but there was more to him than that. He was walking around with a chip on his shoulder the size of Texas.

“My God, this is about jealousy isn’t it?” I said. “You think you had it tough and everyone else had it easy. That’s what you hate.”

“What the hell would you know? You probably grew up in some well to do suburb. Big house, nice school. Mom at home, your dad making a hundred thousand a year to put you through some fancy college where you probably spent half your time going to parties and fucking your brains out. Well let me tell you something, I had to work my way through college. While people like you were having such a great time I was up to my armpits in greasy water washing pans in the back of a restaurant. Only I couldn’t finish my last year because my mother got sick and somebody had to take care of her. Do you have any idea how hard it was to get hired by a company like KCM without a degree? Do you know about all the shitty fucking jobs I had to do before anyone would even take me seriously? Yet as swipes like you just walked through the goddamn door and got hired like that.” He snapped his fingers in the air.

I glanced at the picture of myself as a kid with my dad. I almost wanted to tell Dexter how wrong he was about me, but I realized it didn’t really matter. There were plenty of people in the world who didn’t have college degrees, who had nevertheless done well. Whatever had made Dexter feel so bitter and insecure had happened a long time ago. The same set of circumstances might have made someone else equally as ambitious, but Dexter’s genes and his own peculiar interpretation of the world had made him into a shithead with it. He didn’t fit in, because that’s what he believed, but I thought he liked it that way. The truth was he saw himself as struggling against the odds and it gave him an excuse to be the asshole that he was and enjoyed being. The rest was just a smoke screen.