Tall Poppies (11 page)

‘I’ll go again,’ Elizabeth told Brad furiously.

On the fifth attempt, she managed to beat Pete Myers ,by half a second.

‘Jesus!’ Pete swore, disgusted with himself.

‘Come on, Pete. You’re way off today. Just concentrate,’ Jack Taylor said loudly, belittling her achievement.

The girl flashed him a look of pure disdain, which Taylor pretended to ignore. He thought she was an

arrogant bitch, and he wanted her to know it. Privately, he had concl.uded something else. Elizabeth was the best female skier he’d ever met.

And she was the sexiest, best-looking babe he’d ever seen.

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Nina was writing a job application when it happened, sitting in Green Earth in the gloom. Connor had boarded the place up, ready for sale, but Nina had kept a spare set of keys. She snuck in the back most nights and hammered out rsums and letters, a torch propped up behind her, bombarding the big drug giants until somebody said yes. At first she felt like a thief, but Nina was getting used to be!ng ingenious. You could only ever rely on yourself. Until she” landed a new job, she couldn’t afford a typewriter of her own. Most of her severance cheque had been eaten by her new, tiny walk-up studio; you couldn’t afford to head letters with a motel address.

She was trying ICI when the first pain came. A sharp twinge in the gut that she ignored - she was always getting pains from her pregnancy. Then it was worse. Nina pressed a hand to her taut midriff. God, it hurt, it really hurt; like the worst period she ever had. Gasping, she doubled forwards, clutching herself. There was a pause, then another wrenching, flaming stab. Nina staggered out of the door and on to the sidewalk. There was a payphone there and she dialled

When the ambulance got there fiv6 minutes later, they found Nina clinging to the phone, tears streaming down her face. Her slacks were drenched. She knew what was happening. She was going to lose her baby, like she’d lost everything else.

St Jude’s Blue Cross Hospital was staffed with brisk,’

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fatigued junior doctors. A black gynaecologist saw Nina.

‘I’m sorry you lost the child, but you’re OK. No reason why you couldn’t have another.’

‘Thank you, Doctor,’ the girl said quietly. ‘Got a husband?’ ‘No.’

‘Got a job?’

‘No.’

Dr Kenmore shook her head. The kid was still the light side of twenty. Most girls in that position would be pleased to miscarry. ‘You’re nineteen? You look older.’

Nina pushed herself up on her pillows. ‘When do you think I’ll be fit to leave?’

She was taken aback. ‘You’re fit now, physically, but you can stay and rest, that’s fine. We do Medicate.’

‘I have to go,’ Nina said, and pushed back the covers.

‘Don’t you want any counselling?’ Dr Kenmore asked. ‘We have a rabbi here, he could talk to you.’

‘No. Thank you.’ Nina Roth looked up at the doctor, her face beautiful despite its pallor, heavy, silky hair rirging her face. ‘No counselling’s gonna change what happened. I’m alive, I have to get on with it.’

What a cold young woman, Dr Kenmore thought as she left.

Nina felt weak enough to take a cab home. She let herself into her apartment, collapsed on the bed and cried like she would never stop.

When she woke up, it was six p.m. It was bitterly cold, her rickety radiator barely blunting the edge of the chill. Her stomach hurt, but the emptiness and the loss hurt more.

Nina forced herself out of bed and went to the window. It was sparkling clean, like the rest of her tiny place. Food stacked neatly in the cupboards, reiection letters piled on the kitchen table. Total contrast, to the

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grime and dirt outside: hookers and dealers hanging out on the street corner, sirens screaming, traffic noises and drunks. All those people, millions of people, and not one of them who cared about her. She’d lost Frank. Jeff. And now, her baby.

Idly she picked up the bottle of painkillers Dr Kenmore had prescribed. A junkie was yelling on the sidewalk below her. She could probably get about a hundred bucks for these; powerful shit, Valium mixed with opiates. Easy to get high on, easy to check out with. She would float away on a hazy, warm cloud and just never wake up.

There was a cheap hand-mirror propped against the Cheerios packet. Nina looked at the reflection inside the ugly pink piping; she was red eyed but beautiful, pale, exhausted. She saw too much experience and cynicism in her own dark eyes. She was still just eighteen years old.

Nina unscrewed the bottle and counted out two tablets. Recommended dose. She’d never seriously consider taking the coward’s way out. She’d made herself a promise on Jeff Glazer’s front steps, and she was absolutely going to keep it.

Two days later, she got her first positive reply.

Dolan MacDonald was the tenth drug firm she’d applied to. The position was for an assistant sales manager at $z,ooo a year; a pittance by industry standards, but a fortune to Nina. She wanted the job so much she ached. Anything, anything to get her out of here.

In her first interview, she answered questions on her work experience and Dolan. Today she was meeting her prospective boss.

Nina left the subway at the Jay Street exit and headed for Dolan’s offices, a functional block of grey stone behind the Borough Hall. It looked dull, but she was

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excited. Dolan MacDonald, with its boring pill bottles and plain white packaging, was the place to be.

Her second interview took place in a drab room somewhere on the second floor, with a bored-looking flunky who chewed a pencil the whole time, and Ivan Kinzslade, head of the vitamins division.

‘You don’t have a degree, but you made good grades. Why you drop outta school?’ he asked without preamble.

‘I wanted to get on in the world, make something of myself.’

‘So why you join a tiny joint like Green Earth?’

‘It was tiny, but it made a good profit,’ Nina said defensively.

Her interviewer’s eyes narrowed. ‘Not when you ‘joined.’

Nina sat up a little straighter, realising Kinzslade had been asking around.

‘I couldn’t get a job anywhere else. It wasn’t such a great idea, dropping out of school.’

T-he Russian laughed. ‘You got any family?’ Only my parents, and I don’t talk to them.’

Kinzslade called her at home that afternoon to tell her she was hired.

Nina insisted on her first paycheque in advance; she needed it for a deposit on the rent. She was surprised that demanding the money didn’t hurt her image, in fact it impressed her bosses. Nina found that if she acted seriously people respected her. For the second time in a month she moved, to a small one-bedroom off Flatbush. It wasn’t much, but to Nina it was a triumph. Her own apartment! For the first time in her life she had a respectable place of her own, she was doing good at work, she could pay all her bills.

It was hard, though. Nina’s creamy complexion was dull with fatigue by the end of each day, even tho.ugh she

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was eating well. She couldn’t afford unhealthy convenience meals; it was all cheap pulses, potatoes and veggies from the local markets, fish and chicken if it was on offer. Nina could cook, just about. Still, she was pathetically grfiteful when Mrs Minsky, her neighbour, dropped round with the odd apple pie.

‘Lord, child,’ Mrs Minsky said, sniffing, ‘they work ya too hard, you’re white as ivory. Didn’t your momma tell ya you’re too cute for this? Ya need a man to take care of ya. I gotta grandson, Carl—’

‘Thanks, Mrs Minsky, but I like things this way,’ Nina said politely, but in a tone of such finality the old lady actually gave up. ‘If those guys at your work don’t ask ya out, they should be takin’ their own medicines,’ was her parting shot at the door.

Nina could have laughed. Ask her out! Like they ever did anything else! Almost every man on her floor, from the geeky researchers to the cash ‘n’ flash commission salesman, had tried his luck already. Slowly but surely Nina got the word out that she wasn’t interested. That might have caused resentment, but who could resent the quiet Ms Roth, that mousy, dedicated little toiler with her reports and calculations, always either glued to the phone or hammering at her computer screen? Nina got a skewed reputation. She was a major babe, but uninterested in men. She was ambitious, but bored by office politics. Nina stayed well away from the water-cooler crowd, just doing her job, finding her feet. And soon enough, the boys ignored her.

All except Ivan Kinzslade, who had an instinct about Nina. The job he’d hired her for was simple, form-filling and number-crunching. At first she seemed happy just to do that, but after the first month, Ivan noticed her calls to the field offices were taking longer, she was asking for more data.

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First thing one Monday morning she showed up in his office.

‘Morning, Nina, you gotta problem. ‘ the Russian

asked, offering her a bite of his jelly donut.

‘An idea,’ Nina said, coming right to the point.

Ivan liked it. Roth was more upfront than any other young girl he’d hired. She seemed much older than her years. Ivan was an immigrant who’d escaped from Russia and taught himself English before winding up in Brooklyn. Sometimes he thought he saw a similar hardness in Nina, the look of a person who’d been through a furnace and come out tougher the other side.

‘Go on, then.’

, ‘We’re wasting a lot of money in the way we sell our stuff. Look at this,’ Nina said, spreading out research in front of her boss. ‘We tailor journeys to our salesmen. If we paid more attention to retailers, we could focus our efforts.’

‘You think so?’

‘I know it. Look, Ivan, I’ve been the customer. I know what they want.’

Kinzslade glanced up at the grave young woman standing over him. ‘I guess you can try it,’ was all he said.

Over the next year, Nina crammed as much work as possible into an eight-hour day. She tried to alter Dolan’s sales, organising training programmes and policy around the needs of the customers, not the company. Dolan’s sales force got a reputation for friendliness and efficiency. Orders picked up, and Ivan gave her a pay rise.

Nina opened a new account at Wells Fargo, with a first deposit of five hundred dollars. Every extra cent she earned, she salted away. Waiting till she had enough money to do something.

In her second year, Nina talked her boss into thirty new computers. The expense was a black hole in the

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quarterly budget, but quickly paid for itself. Productivity went up two per cent; clerical expenses fell.

It was hard, grunt work, trying to change a system that had been in place for decades, but her colleagues listened when Nina talked, even the flyboys who thought any women in offices should be taking dictation.

‘Nice idea you had for Ohio,’ Grant McCoist, a flash Midwestern rep, told her after one strategy session. ‘It’ll

help get our profile off the floor.’

‘Thanks,’ Nina said coldly.

The handsome young corner didn’t take the hint. ‘You know, that dress is real pretty. You should let me buy you dinner, we could discuss it some more.’

‘If you want to discuss it, send me a memo,’ Nina told him.

‘Good morning, Ms Roth,’ Ally Hendry announced confidently, turning up in her office at nine a.m. with a huge bunch of roses. ‘Wanna have lunch? We could swap computer strategies.’

‘I mostly eat at my desk. And they’re sweet, but I get hay fever,’ Nina said bluntly.

‘You know, you’re quite the rising star,’ Jock MacCallister, a finance manager, told her as he leaned over her computer and stared soulfully into her eyes. ‘You got some free time? You could tell me your secret.’

‘I can tell you that now, Jock,’ suggested Nina sweetly. He leaned forwards.

‘Hard work and imagination,’ she said, trying not to laugh at the offended look in his bloodshot eyes.

‘What, you’re frigid? Or you gotfa boy in your life already?’ Jock demanded, acting like a spoilt brat. Nina regarded him coldly. That’s all they were, these boys, spoilt brats whining when they couldn’t get the toys they wanted. She made twenty-six grand a year now, she paid her own way. Independence that was very precious to her. Mrs Minsky might see it as natural to seek out male’

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protection but Nina was determined never to have to. She had no respect for men and no time for romance. Jeff Glazer had bruised her heart so badly Nina never wanted to risk pain like that again.

‘Yeah, I do. I have a boy in my life,’ she lied.

Jock puffed up like a mating pigeon. Of course, or how could she have ignored his advances?

‘OK, I guess we shoulda known,’ he said magnanimously.

After that the guys left her alone. Nina was a beauty, but she was off the market.

Nina climbed quietly, seriously, relentlessly, hand over fist, without stopping for friendship or looking back for

love. She didn’t care. She thought that stuff was for ‘ weaklings.

The phone trilled on her desk right after one. It was Edwin Jensen a prestigious firm of headhunters who specialised in pharmaceuticals. She was getting herself a reputation, they said. Dragon was looking for a business dvelopment exec. Would Ms Roth be interested?

Nina lowered the soggy tuna sandwich that was her idea of a lunch break and took a deep breath. Dragon Inc. The big time. The bluest of blue chips, Dragon had pharmacies, drugstores and health food places across Europe and the States. Their executives were highly paid, with hefty bonus schemes and expensive company cars. The head offices on Park Avenue were a fantasy of marble and gold, burgundy leather and oak, exuding old world elegance and Fortune 4oo wealth.

Nina hadn’t even considered the British giant. Dragon was not known for its political correctness. Just for its profits.

Dragon acted like a gentleman’s club. The dress code was strict, recruitment conservative. Dragon wanted clean-cut young men, the cream of the Ivy League, Out of