Spinning Around (24 page)

‘Or a
Maisy
book,' Emily suggested.

‘Yes! That's a good idea!' Gorgeous Emily. She was patting him clumsily on the back. What a blessing that child is. ‘Cheer up, sweetie—look, it's Thomas on now. Thomas the tank engine. Oh no! Look! He's run off the rails! I think he might be broken!'

‘I don't like Thomas.'

‘Yes, you do, bloke. You love Thomas.' Matt began to loosen Jonah's stranglehold, peeling the soft little arms off my neck. He shot me a look which said, as clearly as if he had spoken: Quick! Get out while you can! ‘What if I make you guys some pancakes, eh?' he offered. ‘What about that? Yumm
ee
.'

I managed to get away eventually, but I had to run for the train—through the rain, with a streaming cold. By the time I had flung myself into a steam-filled carriage, I was gasping for breath and coughing like a plague victim. I'm sure everyone was sullenly thinking: What a bitch. She's going to infect us all.

But at least it meant that they moved away from me, and I got a bit of space. And a seat, too! So it wasn't
all
bad, this morning. There was a small silver lining on the thundercloud sitting directly over my head.

I was in good time for the conference, which was scheduled to be a shuttle negotiation. A shuttle negotiation is always a lot of work for a Complaints Officer. Basically, the complainant's team sits in one room, the respondent's team sits in another, and I have to scuttle back and forth between them, bearing offers and counter-offers. Shuttle negotiations aren't common. They generally occur when the comparable negotiating capacity of each party is heavily weighted on the side of the respondent— or when the complainant just isn't strong enough to confront his or her nemesis face to face. In this instance, we had a big age gap (twenty-odd years). We also had a business owner versus a humble waitress. And we had a very articulate, very bright and sharp-witted man versus a young girl who was rather inarticulate, rather naive, and not terribly well educated.

I believe that she was doubly confused because this was yet another case of a relationship gone sour on the job. Her boss had overwhelmed her with a flattering and (I would have to say) somewhat obsessive attention, to the point where she had spent one or two nights with him. Then she had begun to regret her involvement. No doubt his groping her at work, and presenting her with various trampy garments to wear in the restaurant, had had something to do with her decision to end the intimate phase of their association. Unfortunately, however, her boss wouldn't leave her alone. He had continued to grope her. He had continued to push her up against kitchen or backstairs walls. He had left salacious drawings in her order-book, written indecent comments about her on the door of the staff toilet, and commented loudly on her personal appearance to some of the restaurant's male patrons. In the end she had been forced to quit.

She had kept two of his lewd drawings, happily; copies of them were tucked away in my file. Photographs had also been taken of the toilet door. And we had one or two witnesses, though not as many as I had anticipated because the patrons singled out as the respondent's confidantes were mostly his friends, who weren't easily pinned down. As for the groping, that had almost invariably taken place when no-one else had been around to witness it. The respondent, as I have said, was a very sharp-witted man.

Not sharp-witted enough, though. Despite the highpowered lawyer he had hired, a settlement was reached. The complainant was satisfied. I don't think that the respondent was satisfied, exactly, but he was persuaded to see reason. He was persuaded that the costs associated with a public hearing would be far more detrimental to his business than the payment deemed acceptable to his former employee. It was his position all along that the matter was a personal one—that it was a domestic dispute in which the government had no right to interfere. He was also convinced that the complainant had set out to ‘screw him over', quite deliberately, and that we had all been fooled by the innocent appearance which ‘that little slut' could assume at will.

I could see why she was afraid of him. In fact it was one of those rare occasions when I could actually sense the threat of stalking—or perhaps even violence—in the air. I almost wondered if he would have attacked her physically if she had been in the room with him.

I rather feared for her safety, to be honest. If I had been in her shoes, I would have taken out an apprehended violence order. Obviously he perceived that she had ‘won' the case by extracting money from him, and he wasn't the kind of person who would take kindly to ‘losing', especially to a nineteen-year-old girl.

What a monumental prick, is all I can say.

We broke for lunch. It was agreed that the conference would resume at two o'clock, so I had plenty of time in which to check my messages. One was from Ms F. One was from Amelia, my co-worker. One was from Ronnie—no doubt she had obtained Briony's address for the good people of the Pacific Commercial Bank Ltd. One was from a complainant called Mr P. (Interesting case, that one: a man being sexually harassed by his male co-worker, who would goose him, grab his testicles, and simulate masturbation when he walked past. Mr P., being an admitted homosexual, was an easy target for someone like Mr H., who strenuously denies that he himself has homosexual leanings. His actions, he insists, were purely the result of malice and bigotry.

(Makes you wonder, though, doesn't it?)

The final message had been left by Jim McRae, at 12.05 p.m. I rang him at once. When he answered, I could tell that he was in a public place—a shopping centre, perhaps, to judge from the distant sound of piped music. He had to raise his voice to make himself heard.

‘I've got some information!' he said, in a kind of muted bellow.

‘Good news?' I asked.

‘What's that?'

‘
Is it good news, or bad?
'

‘That depends on what you make of it!' There was a noisy pause. ‘Nothing conclusive,' he finally said. ‘You're in Castlereagh, aren't you?'

‘Yes.' I gave him the address.

‘Well I'm at the Town Hall, under cover, and it's a zoo. I can call you back later this afternoon, and you can risk having the conversation recorded, or I could meet you somewhere for lunch. Twenty minutes, tops.'

‘What do you mean, I'd risk being recorded?'

‘Eh?'

‘
What do you mean, I'd risk being recorded?
'

‘For training purposes. In the interests of customer service.'

‘Oh, we don't do that here. Do we?'

‘I was told that you did when I was put on hold, earlier. A little robot said so.'

‘Really?' I couldn't believe it. We weren't a telecommunications provider, for God's sake. We were dealing with very sensitive material. ‘Well—well, maybe I should meet you. Where are you now?'

‘Town Hall.'

‘Oh. That's right. Okay, um—can you come over here?'

‘To your office?'

‘No, I mean to the café next door. There's a café downstairs in the building next to ours. It's called “Al Fresco”, for some reason.'

‘Al Fresco. Yeah, I've been there. It's got that collection of old coffee-makers in the window.'

‘That's the one. In . . . ten minutes, say?'

‘Ten minutes.'

He signed off. I leapt to my feet at once, gathering up my purse, my umbrella and the office mobile. As I did so, I knocked against a teetering stack of files, which immediately tumbled to the floor. I was on my knees retrieving them, a dangling hairslide bumping against the side of my neck, when there was a tap at the door.

Without waiting for an invitation, the Commissioner stuck her head into the office.

‘Oh! Helen.' She looked slightly surprised to see me grovelling at her feet, for some reason. God knows, she must be used to it by now. Pretty much everyone grovels to the Commissioner. ‘Are you all right?'

‘Oh yes!' A careless little laugh. ‘Just picking up some files!' It hardly needed saying. I probably wouldn't have bothered, with anyone else. But I doubt that the Commissioner had picked anything up off the floor for years. At work she has a secretary to do it for her, and at home she has a nanny. That's what I tell myself, when I start to feel envious of her flawless make-up, her exquisite clothes, her gleaming office, her long business lunches and her perfect attendance record. Diane has money to burn, so she can afford support staff. The kind of support staff that
I
could do with.

‘Just wanted to say, good job on that genital warts case,' she smiled. ‘I forgot to tell you, but I was very impressed with the settlement.'

‘Oh. Thanks. Thanks very much.'

‘I'm thinking that you might like to write it up for the annual report,' she added. ‘Would you?'

‘Sure. Absolutely.'

‘Fine. Excellent.' She bestowed on me a carefully graded smile, then disappeared as abruptly as she had materialised. You might think: Why didn't she help you with all that mess? If so, you obviously don't know much about organisational power structures.

It didn't take me long to straighten things up, anyway. Within minutes I had tidied my desk, fixed my hair and struggled out into the miserable weather. God, it was a foul day. When I walked through the building's front door, I was hit in the face by a wet slap, as an erratic easterly lashed heavy rain through the canyons of the central business district. The pavements were seething with damp and sullen office workers. Cars swished through puddles on the road, throwing up sprays of dirty water that spattered the ankles of nearby pedestrians. Smelly buses roared and shuddered. Brakes squealed. Walk-signs chattered like machine guns.

But I didn't have far to go, thank God. About four metres. Then I turned into the wide, glossy entrance of the Building Next Door, which is one of those Shangri-La shopping complexes wedged under a fancy-pants office block. Lots of brass and marble. Glass elevator. Small tropical jungle, sculptural water feature, and artistic, suspended light fittings about two storeys high. The shops are all really classy (the sort that Miriam's probably been patronising): a gallery, a perfumery, a jeweller's that isn't a chain store, a clothes shop containing about twenty-five garments and no mannequins.

Al Fresco is a café with Attitude, sitting right on the street. Matt and I have eaten lunch there sometimes, though not often, because (a) it's pretty expensive; and (b) it's a little too postmodern. You know—the sort of place where the coffee's been elevated to a religion. And the salt cellars look like components from some kind of NASA filtration device. And the cook can't produce anything as simple as a chip or a sausage without larding it heavily with ironic references. Take the prawn cocktail, for instance. Last time I ate there with Matt, there was prawn cocktail on the menu. I couldn't believe it. Prawn cocktail! With
iceberg lettuce
! Al Fresco isn't the kind of place that usually serves iceberg lettuce. You'd be more likely to find a jar of
Vegemite
on the premises. I pointed it out to Matt in astonishment.

‘Must be a misprint,' he suggested.

‘You mean they were trying to say “medallions of truffle hindquarters with braised alpaca
jus
and marinated cumquats”?'

He burst out laughing—and everyone stared. You don't snort and honk in the Al Fresco café.

‘Sorry,' he muttered, smothering a grin. ‘Maybe the prawns are stuffed with pheasant livers, or something.'

‘You'd hope so, for the price.'

‘Are you going to get them?'

‘Shit, yes. Live dangerously—that's my motto.'

‘
You
said it, sweetheart. Not me.'

‘Yeah, well.' My one and only encounter with food poisoning had resulted from a dish of English scampi. ‘At least I'll be able to sue. At least these guys will have some money.'

‘I hope so. I wouldn't want you sticking your head in a toilet for less than fifty thou.'

In the end, it turned out that those prawns
didn't
contain pheasant livers. Nor were they a misprint. No—they were an amusing, retro
homage
, with pink sauce and everything. Very nice too, I might add, though the iceberg lettuce was nothing special. I mean, it hadn't been pickled or spiced or rolled around a few scallops, or anything. It was just lying on the plate. Chopped.

Maybe there was a joke in that somewhere, and I didn't get it. I'm not really an Al Fresco kind of girl, I guess—not any more. But even if the chef 's humour escaped us, Matt and I still had a good laugh.

Those were the days.

I arrived in the café about ten minutes before Jim did, and ordered myself a mineral water. Then I perused the menu, looking for something inexpensive, before deciding on the pumpkin soup. I was informing the waiter of this decision when Jim McRae appeared; without warning, he seemed to materialise in the seat opposite me. He gave me quite a shock, I can tell you.

‘God!' I exclaimed. ‘Did you beam down, or what?'

‘Pardon?'

‘Nothing. I didn't see you come in.' He was wearing a raincoat, I noticed—a trenchcoat-style raincoat. Beige and everything. It made him look quite different, somehow. Seedy.

‘A raincoat.' I couldn't believe it. ‘At last you're wearing a raincoat!'

He blinked at me. ‘Eh?'

‘You know. Like Columbo.'

‘Oh.' For the first time, I saw him grin. ‘Right,' he said. ‘But I only wear a raincoat when it's raining.' He turned to the waiter, who was hovering impatiently. ‘I'll just have a coffee please. Black.'

Black. But of course. No lily-livered milk for Mister Bland. Suddenly I'd run out of steam. Reaching my destination, even after such a brief trip, had filled me with a sense of warmth and hilarity which had evaporated quickly in Jim's presence. I don't know what it is about that guy. He has such a squelching effect on me.