Writing Our Song (8 page)

What are you looking at?
  I thought, a fraction of a second before my heel came down on a bundle of cables that led to the projector.  It was a small obstacle and in regular shoes without the burden of the coffee, it wouldn’t have produced the smallest of stumbles.  Under the circumstances though, it was catastrophic.

My right ankle rolled sideways painfully and my knee buckled in response as my body instinctively tried to take the pressure off the strained joint.  My right hand left the tray and reached towards the projector desk, seeking something to steady myself against, and this twisted my upper body in that direction.

With my left hand still on the tray and my body twisting to the right, the coffee was propelled forwards like the world’s most awkward shot-put directly towards the young man’s lap.  My right hand failed to catch the edge of the desk and I completed my fall.

I looked on in horror as the scalding-hot payload hit his upper legs with a splash and the sound of shattering cups.  His chair, pulled back from the table to start with, was propelled halfway across the room by the backs of his knees as he leapt to his feet screaming and grabbing at his pants in pain.

From my position on the ground, I could do little more than stare at the calamity before me with a dumbstruck look on my face.  The man stood in a steaming lake of coffee, now mixed with the milk, that had a mountain of white sugar in the middle slowly soaking up the liquid and turning brown from the lower slopes upwards.

With two big fistfuls of material on either side of his crotch in his hands, holding it away from some body parts he probably considered very precious, the man stared at me in shock.  I caught some movement out of the corner of my eye, which turned out to be Rod Stevens getting to his feet.  When I turned to look at him, his face couldn’t have been any redder if he had been in a hot tub filled with lava.

“You bumbling
idiot
!” he screamed.

I swore his moustache was sticking out straight to either side, instead of hanging down like usual.  It was as if his rage had caused it to stiffen and bristle out to make him look bigger or something.

“I’m so s…” I began.

“Shut up!” he fumed.  “Get out of my sight!  You’re fired!  Leave the building,
right now!
”

Slowly, I returned to my feet and backed towards the door, feeling like Rod was a predator of some kind that I dare not turn my back on.  The young man in the ruined suit looked from me to the people on the other side of the table and back again.

“Wait,” he said.

But I was out of the door and broke into an awkward run, my hand covering my mouth as I retreated from the humiliating ordeal.

Chapter 8

I slammed my front door behind me, locked it, and threw my keys towards the little table that seemed to collect all my junk mail.  The keys slid across the surface and fell to the floor, but I didn’t care.

My shoes and jacket were discarded as I stormed through my apartment, making a beeline for my bedroom.  I dived on my bed and pulled the pillow over my face, doing my best to block the world out.

This was bad.  Really bad.  I thought back to how difficult it had been to even get a position
cleaning
at Bloxhamtech.  The fact that I was already employed by them was the only reason I’d been able to get a regular office job with any kind of potential for career progression.

Nobody outside of fast food had seemed to want to hire a high school dropout with no relevant experience.  The job at Bloxhamtech was the only reason I’d been able to move out of my previous apartment, where I could never sleep easy with any confidence that one of my neighbors wouldn’t go crazy with a gun on a drug-fuelled rampage, pissed off at all the cockroaches or something.

I had some meagre savings but they would dry up pretty quickly if no more wages were coming in.  Assuming it took me as long to find a job at a similar pay-level as it had last time, there likely wouldn’t be enough for me to keep living here.  I did my best to run the numbers in my head and was left with a sinking feeling in my stomach.

The job hunt taking as long as last time might be a best-case scenario, unfortunately.  Although I had gained some relevant experience out in the ‘real world’ I had also just been fired from my very first ‘grown up’ job.  Things like that were probably a kind of red flag for employers.

Oh yes, this was bad.  From the darkness under my pillow I tried to come up with the best survival plan that I could.  For a couple of hours I mulled over my options and pondered how much I could prolong my stay in my current apartment if I made some changes to the budget like switching to a mostly rice-and-water based diet.

I was just about to get up and do a stock-take of my current food supplies when I heard the buzzer for the intercom to the main doors downstairs.  I cast the pillow aside and swung my feet on to the floor with a sigh of resignation.

Nobody ever actually visited me, it was probably somebody selling something door to door.  What they did was press every button available in the hope that somebody would buzz them through without checking who it was.  It had happened before, the most recent time just a month ago, and everybody in the building had faced a hard-sell on some low quality sets of knives.

I pressed the appropriate button and spoke into the place that said ‘mic’.

“Hello?”

“Hi.  Is that Beatrice?  Beatrice Hampton?” a man’s voice came through the speaker accompanied by generous amounts of static.

“Yes.  Who’s this?”

“Jeremy Holt.”

“Who?”

“Uh… you poured six cups of coffee on me today.  Really hot coffee.  Not sure if you remember?”

“Oh!  I’m… I’m really sorry about that… I didn’t mean…”

“Can I come up?”

“Uh… I suppose so.  Just a second.”

I pressed the green button and heard the buzz through the speaker, followed by the sound of the door opening and footsteps fading away before the audio feed from downstairs cut off.  What was he doing here?  He didn’t sound like he was coming to continue the berating that Rod Stevens had started, so what then?

A few minutes later there was a knock on the door and I tentatively opened it, still unsure about what exactly I was going to be facing.  Of all the possibilities I wasn’t expecting to be greeted by such a big smile, given what had happened.

“Hello?” I said.

“Hi Beatrice, can I come in?”

“How did you know where I live?”

“The Colonel is under the impression that I’m here to come after you for the cost of a new suit.”

“The Colonel?”

“Oh… uh… Rod Stevens.  Don’t tell me you haven’t pictured him in a safari hat and thought ‘Yep, Rod Stevens in the library with a candlestick’?  That moustache is ridiculous.”

I hadn’t played Clue since I was ten years old and hadn’t really liked it that much.  I had to admit the resemblance to Colonel Mustard, from what I could recall, though I had never made the connection myself.

“Oh, yeah it is.  So you’re not here for a new suit then?”

“Technically no, I’m here to thank you.”

“What do you mean?  I poured hot coffee right into your lap.”

Jeremy waved his hand dismissively, “I was actually looking for a good excuse to cut the meeting short.  You gave a better reason than I could have made up on the spot, and I ended up looking a lot less crazy than if I had poured the coffee in my own lap.”

Despite my predicament, and the person I was talking to, I couldn’t stop the corner of my mouth rising in a smirk.  Only for a moment though.

“Well, glad I could be of service I guess.  It didn’t work out so well for me though.  So, thanks accepted, but if you don’t mind I’ve got a lot of things to think about because I’m pretty much screwed now.”

“Ah yes, that.  Listen, that’s bullshit.  You can’t be fired for falling victim to a health and safety issue, I saw that bunch of cables you tripped over.  The five thousand dollar suit should be the only casualty of this whole situation.  Can I come in?  I’ll tell you exactly what you can do about that.”

“No.  I don’t need your help,” I said.

“I thought you said you were pretty much screwed?”

“Whether I am or not, it’s got nothing to do with you,” I said, beginning to get annoyed with his very presence.  “I don’t need you charging in like some kind of freakin’ white knight throwing money at problems to make them go away.  You’ll just make it worse.”

“Throw money?  Who said anything about throwing money?  And how could I make it worse?”

I wondered if he thought mentioning that his suit cost five thousand dollars was subtle.  So I’d ruined a piece of clothing that cost an eerily similar amount to my total net worth, that didn’t mean I was helpless.

At my side my fist bunched up as I felt my anger growing.  For the past few hours I’d been blaming myself for what happened but I never would have been in this situation if they had just made their own damn coffee or just got the receptionist, whose job it actually was, to serve it.

“You people, you always find a way.”

“What do you mean ‘you people’?”

“Never mind.  Look, I’m going to get through this myself, OK?”

“Wait.  Wait, calm down.  Don’t punch me, I can only take so much physical abuse in one day.”

I looked down at my hand and forced it to relax but made sure my expression remained as firm as possible when I looked back up to him.

“Somehow,” he said, “we’ve got off on entirely the wrong foot.  Let’s put it this way. 
You
don’t owe
me
anything.  I understand that.  OK?”

I raised an eyebrow, which he took as a signal to continue.

“On the other hand,
I
owe
you
something and I can see you’re the type of person that could understand that I want to make everything square again.”

“How do you figure that?”

“It’s kind of hard to explain.  For the sake of argument, can you let that part slide for the moment?”

“Go on then,” I said.

“I have to go to New Zealand this weekend and I’d like you to come with me.”

“New Zealand?  Are you crazy?  That’s on the other side of the world!  Why would you want me to go there?  Why would I go there with you?”

“I’m going there on business anyway and taking my private jet, so if you wanted to come along it wouldn’t be any extra hassle or expense for me.  I hear it’s a nice place, you could relax a bit.”

New Zealand.  If he’d said anywhere but there the conversation would probably have been over, but as soon as he mentioned it I had a feeling I’d spoken to somebody else about it before.  While he was saying something about his private jet I managed to place a name and face to the memory.  It was my dad, he’d said he’d always wanted to go but hadn’t made it.

Jeremy could clearly see me mulling it over and pressed on with his spiel, “No obligations or expectations or pressure or anything, just me repaying my debt.  You can do your own thing if you want, maybe meet up with me occasionally for a bite to eat?”

I thought about being able to visit my dad and tell him all about what it was like in that place he never got to visit.  It would be nice to tell him some news that might have actually made him smile if he was still around.

I’d have given anything to see that smile again but when I went to see him these days all I had to talk about was the day-to-day drudgery of fast food or cleaning or working in an office.  Sitting there next to his grave and talking about that, it was easier to imagine him telling me to shut up rather than smiling.

The more I thought about it the more I felt like I needed to go, but then the reality of my situation came crawling back to the forefront of my mind and I deflated a bit.

“I… I’d actually like to go…”

“Great!”

“… but I can’t.  I’ve got to find a new job, or figure out how to get my job back at Bloxhamtech.  I can’t go anywhere by this weekend I don’t think.”

“I can appreciate that, but please think about it and if you come up with a way to safely free up the next two weeks, let me know.”

“Uh… OK, yeah.  Sure.  How can I get in touch with you?”

“Here.”

Jeremy pulled out a business card from an inside pocket of his jacket and handed it to me.  It was a simple card with no pictures or logos.  Just a couple flourishes, his name, cell phone number and an office landline number, not even a job title.  I examined it for a moment with my lips pulled to one side before looking back up to him.

“OK?” he asked, that smile returning to his face.

Once again, as I had been in the boardroom, I was struck by his natural good looks.  It wasn’t easy being caught with the full force of that smile, a part of me wanted to giggle like a fool despite everything he stood for.  I kept a straight face though.

“I will think about it,” I said.

“I hope so.  It was nice to meet you, Beatrice.”

“OK… uh… you too.  Bye.”

I closed the door, turned around, and leaned against it, looking at Jeremy’s business card again.  Who was this guy?  Who just invites random people around the world?  Private jet?

*****

The next day I visited the local library because it had free internet access you could book in half-hour blocks.  All the computers were taken when I arrived so I booked one for as soon as possible and sat in a nice comfortable seat while I waited.

On the table next to me was a small stand of novels supposedly hand-picked by some of the library staff.  After reading a few of the little cards next to each book wherein the library person had given their own very short review I picked one up to kill the time until I could use the computer.

The book wasn’t great but kept me occupied until I was sitting in front of a screen and began trying to figure out what I should do about my employment situation.  As much as I dreaded going back to Bloxhamtech and facing Rod Stevens again, I was also apprehensive about trying to start again somewhere else for all the reasons I had thought of the previous night.  Plus there was nothing to say things wouldn’t be the same or worse at a different company.

I began searching for things like ‘unfair dismissal’ and ‘fired illegally’ until I happened across what seemed like a few reasonably good articles.  Sadly, it looked like I would probably need to get a lawyer to fight this battle properly.

With my head resting on my hand, I finished reading the last few paragraphs and sighed.  I was in no position to pay for a lawyer.  If anything went wrong, and the articles stated that nothing was guaranteed, I would be out on the streets and unemployed even faster than if I did nothing.

I didn’t have much time left on the internet but I thought I’d start looking at some job sites until I had to leave.  I’d barely looked at anything when my phone started ringing in my pocket.

Several heads turned in my direction, giving me dirty looks.  I glanced around apologetically as I sprang to my feet and tried to fumble the phone out while I rushed towards the front doors.

The screen indicated that it was somebody calling from the Bloxhamtech building and I frantically pressed the button to take the call as I pushed through the doors and out into the street where noise was permitted.  In my rush I hadn’t even thought about whether I should answer it or not, for legal reasons, but it was too late for that.

“Hello?”

“Beatrice, it’s me, Antoine,” said my Sales Manager.

“Oh, hi.”

“Are you OK?  Can we talk?” he asked.

“I’m fine, and yes, I can talk,” I said.

“Great.  Look, Mr. Stevens has asked me to contact you to make it clear that what was said in the heat of the moment was by no means ‘official’ and you are more than welcome to still consider yourself a valued employee of Bloxhamtech.”