Chapter 2
Have you ever had a week so bad you start believing that God’s punishing you for something? (Possibly for being an atheist?) We’re talking the sort of week where so many things go wrong that when you’re trying to think of solutions to everything, your brain casually offers up ideas ranging from “I could email, but maybe I should just call, that would be faster,” to “I’ll go early in the morning,” to “Maybe I should just die.” Well, this week had just become one of those weeks. Why, you ask?
Well.
I was on my way to Centrelink.
For those of you not familiar with this glorious establishment, Centrelink is the place they send all the people who need money. Everyone. Just lump them all together, students, pensioners, recently released prisoners, in you go. I had largely managed to avoid it by not going to university, but alas, now I was unemployed and here I was. Just so you get a sense of the ambience, here is the basic procedural run down: you line up for half an hour, get to the front, they write your name down, and then you’re officially waiting. Usually they’ll have a TV playing a handy tutorial on things such as how to wash your hands, there are stains all over the floor (Blood? Vomit? Cola?), and you’ll be sitting next to someone who smells of tuna. It’s quite an interesting cross-section of the community you get there.
If you’re lucky, you’ll get a good employee and not have to return on your next day off to fix up their mistakes. If you’re unlucky… Well. Apparently, hit one wrong key and instead of earning $500 you’ve earned half a million. Seven phone calls and four trips to Centrelink later, the benefit fraud inquiry might – might – be under control. Then you’ll be able to get back onto your ordinary payments (which, for anyone who isn’t well versed in welfare, means you get slightly less money than you’re able to live on unless you supplement it with some sort of illegal activity).
My trip to Centrelink was so harrowing that I’m really not prepared to go into any more detail other than they basically told me to get a job. Great.
After wasting two hours of my life to be told, essentially, to go away, I started walking home. Then the torrential rain started. This is when I discovered that the dye in my brand new blue pants was not particularly stable. So unstable was it, in fact, that they were now white pants and my (usually pasty) legs were a bright turquoise. And also the pants were now two sizes smaller, seeing as apparently they shrunk when wet. (I don’t mean to brag, but it was quite a spectacular wedgie going on – yep, another wedgie. What a glamorous life I lead.)
After arriving home, extracting my pants from my crack, and attempting (read: failing) to wash the blue dye off my legs, I decided to take action.
I needed a résumé.
I grabbed a piece of paper and a pen so that I could do up a draft, and began by writing ‘Résumé’ up the top. So far, so good. I’d even remembered to put the accents in (and I hadn’t even had to Google the spelling). Underneath the heading, I wrote my name and a brief description of myself and my goals. Well, I wrote that I wanted a job I enjoyed, anyway. If such a thing was possible. Money would probably have scored higher on my list of priorities right at that time, but I thought that it would be better to leave that off. Might not have come across too well.
Next I listed my qualifications. It wasn’t a lengthy list. It was my (rather mediocre) HSC scores. That was it. Jeez, prospective employers would be really interested to know that. I was definitely going to be at the top of their list. Their ‘Who to Avoid Hiring at All Costs’ list.
Then came the list of previous employment. After much thought I decided to actually write Gregory’s Groceries and just hope like hell that they didn’t decide to give Jeremy Martin a call.
I printed off a few sheets and decided to go door-to-door. I handed out copies to shop owners for about two hours before I ran out, then I went home. I made myself a tomato sandwich (tomato: liquid, bread: stale) and sat down at the kitchen table to think. Mum was out in the garden and dad was down at the mechanic’s fixing somebody’s car, so I had the room to myself. None of the people I had seen this morning seemed very interested in hiring me and, to be honest, I couldn’t blame them. Five years of employment as a checkout chick, no car and still living with parents wasn’t exactly impressive. To tell the truth, it was actually pretty sad. They could probably tell I was a walking disaster by the bruise on my face. And let’s not forget the sticky-taped bridge on my glasses.
OK, so I hadn’t done that well with the people I’d met so far. I considered my options. Employment agency – not exactly appealing. I decided to leave that for when I was getting seriously desperate, which honestly wasn’t going to be far away. I could visit more of the places in the CBD, but if I really wanted to have a door slammed in my face, I could probably manage it myself. Besides, everyone who needed a job probably went down the main strip looking for one.
There was another option. I could visit new parts of town and see if there were any jobs going there. There were probably a lot less unemployed idiots job-seeking in the backstreets than in downtown Gerongate. There were probably a lot less business owners looking for unemployed idiots in the backstreets than in downtown Gerongate as well, but hey, it was worth a try.
That was how I found myself, an hour later, in a part of Gerongate I’d never been in before, standing out the front of a business I’d never heard of. I’d hesitated and I wasn’t quite sure why.
It could have had been that there were about fifty cameras out the front, some trained on the entrance and some on windows and the rest moving to give a full view of the front of the building. There were probably about four cameras filming any one place at a given time. It’d make entering undetected a nightmare. Not that I was planning to break in. It was clear these guys meant business.
I looked at the front door. It had a state-of-the-art security system on the right side of the door with an intercom connecting to somebody inside. There were a few buttons, a screen, a speaker and what looked like a credit card slot (and hell, do I know credit card slots – thank you, retail).
There was one other thing that was bothering me about this place. It wasn’t the name. Baxter & Co. wasn’t exactly frightening. A little secretive, maybe. But not scary. The thing that was worrying me was how high-tech and expensive this place looked. This wasn’t exactly a high-tech and expensive neighbourhood. This was a carry-a-gun-at-all-times kind of neighbourhood. And what bothered me about that was the suspicion I had that maybe that was how these guys made their money – by carrying guns at all times. And using them.
I hadn’t exactly meant to end up in this part of town, wherever this part was. I’d taken a wrong turn and kept going, somehow ending up in the seediest back alleys you could imagine. (Hello, metaphor for my life.) At one point I walked past what I thought was a pile of garbage bags, when suddenly they started moving and one of them groaned. Displaying admirable bravery, I screamed and ran away. Hashtag streetlife.
The more lost I got, the more broken windows I saw. Broken bottles on the road, graffiti everywhere. And not even clever graffiti. Just pictures of anatomically incorrect dicks and the word ‘gay’ scrawled across doorways of abandoned buildings. (But hey, maybe that was a really happy abandoned building, what do I know?)
This was an area in disrepair. It was even worse than that time my parents took me on a family road trip and we ended up eating lunch in a terrifying little country town that looked like the set of True Detective. I’m sure everyone there was related.
This Baxter & Co., though? Clean, tidy, untouched. It was fucking pristine.
So that was what had kept me from going in straight away. In this area, a nice building just seemed a little sinister. Oh, who was I kidding? It seemed a lot sinister.
Don’t be stupid, my daring side said. Just go in. Just do it! What’s the worst that could happen? You could get a job. Ooh, how awful?
No, my sensible/conservative/boring side said. The worst thing that could happen is that you could get shot.
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Pessimist, said Daring. Daring won.
I walked up to the future-of-security front door and tried the handle. To my amazement, it turned. I had been half hoping it wouldn’t so I could leave and not talk to anybody. This situation made me uncomfortable. Either someone had left it unlocked or someone had seen me standing outside and keyed me in. This was not the sort of place where I could imagine people left doors unlocked, at least not if they wanted to live. I was left to conclude that I’d been let in intentionally. And that scared me.
I entered cautiously. More cameras. The reception desk to my right (I use the term loosely – ‘reception’ sort of implies that there will be someone to receive you) was drowning in unsorted files and pieces of paper. It was chaos. Just seeing it brought out the (formerly latent) obsessive-compulsive in me. I resisted the urge to move behind the desk and start tidying, however, because firstly that would be weird, and secondly the desk was unattended and I was curious to know who had let me in.
I turned to my left and studied the office door. It was shut, but judging by the nameplate it belonged to the boss. I had a strong suspicion that he’d been the one to let me in, which was odd because 1) Why, and 2) What kind of boss could afford that level of security but didn’t even hire a receptionist? I quickly knocked on the doorframe before I lost heart, and hoped no one answered. No such luck.
“Come in,” called a deep male voice from inside. I opened the door and stepped in. Harry Baxter was a balding man who looked to be in his late fifties and had obviously bought the shirt he was wearing many meals ago because the buttons now had to work pretty hard to keep his belly inside. He looked at me over the rim of his glasses, which were resting three-quarters of the way down his nose. He spoke.
“You were standing outside for quite some time. I’m curious. What can I do for you?”
I was impressed that he didn’t seem to be put off by the massive bruise on my face, although I was worried that it might be because he had learnt to ignore injuries through practice. They probably got a lot of practice here. I kind of wished I hadn’t worn long pants because it would have been interesting to see if he’d be so unruffled about my Smurf legs.
I took a deep breath.
“Iwasjustwonderingwhatexactlyitisyoudohereandifthereareanyjobsavailable?” I knew I’d said it far too quickly. Great. Another job opportunity gone. Baxter took off his glasses (not sticky taped, if you’re wondering). His green eyes were crinkled at the corners and I could tell he was amused.
“We’reaprivatesecurityandinvestigationfirmandyesthereisonejobvacant.”
Great. Now he was mocking me.
“Sit down,” he said, “and tell me about yourself.”
“Well, um, here’s my résumé,” I said, passing the sheet of paper across the desk to him as I sat. “Er, my – my name’s Charlie Davies. Um, I’ve lived in Gerongate my whole life. I did OK in my HSC but I didn’t really know what I wanted to do so I didn’t go to Univer–”
“Do tell me – Charlie, isn’t it? – tell me, Charlie, why you worked at Gregory’s Groceries for five years and yet you haven’t listed your boss as a referee?”
How could he have noticed that so quickly? Darn private investigator! He was typing something into his computer. I took a deep breath. I should’ve been ready for this.
“Well, there was some conflict between us shortly before I left and – hey! What are you doing?”
He’d picked up the phone off his desk and I had a pretty good idea of who he was calling. He looked at his computer screen and punched the number into his phone. He must have been searching for Jeremy’s number when he was typing a second ago. Oh no.
“Hello, Jeremy? I was just calling you about a staff member of yours who left a short while ago, Charlie Davies.”
I remained sitting in that same chair, mortified, for the entire duration of the telephone call. I could hear some, uh, colourful language coming from the other end. Why did everything always go wrong for me?
Eventually, Baxter hung up.
“W–well?” I managed to stammer, staring down at my hands.
“When can you start?” He asked me. I was stunned. I dragged my eyes up to meet his. “I never did like Jeremy Martin much.”
I noticed that he was smiling.
“By the way,” he asked me, “how did you get that bruise?”