‘Me? No. I’m not miserable.’ It wasn’t a lie. I didn’t feel miserable, just slightly unhappy ever since Life had made himself and my flaws known to me. ‘He is bloody miserable.’
‘Tell me how it works.’
‘He’s like the Pinky and I’m the Brain,’ I said. ‘Or I’m the X-ray and he’s the broken foot.’ I tried to explain but got confused. ‘He’s the nose and I’m the Pinocchio. Yes,’ I smiled, ‘I got the last one right.’
‘What are you talking about?’
I sighed. ‘He just accompanies me. Like this.’
‘Why?’
‘To observe and then to try to make things better.’
‘For who? For you?’
‘And for him.’
‘What kinds of things, what’s wrong?’
I searched my brain for an answer that wasn’t a lie. There were very few thoughts in my head. Melanie never read the papers or listened to the news so she wouldn’t know about the office incident. ‘For example. There was a thing at work the other day. A man I work with was fired then came back to the office with a gun – don’t worry, it was a water pistol though we didn’t know it at the time, but he shook everybody up and a couple of things happened so now Life is here for a while.’ It was as vague as I could possibly make it.
I thought a fire alarm went off and was momentarily thankful that we’d have to evacuate and the conversation could be dropped, but then realised it was the sound of an American police car going whoop whoop. I looked around for the action and saw a waitress walking towards us with a police-car light flashing on the tray along with our drinks.
‘Well, that’s subtle,’ I said.
‘Hi, guys,’ the waitress sang. ‘The man says he’ll have his at the bar.’
‘Thanks.’ Melanie looked her up and down, gave her the biggest flirtiest smile she could. When the girl walked away Melanie leaned in. ‘She’s new. She’s cute.’
I checked her out. ‘Nice legs.’
When Melanie told me she was gay when we were teenagers I was immediately unnerved though I tried not to show it. It wasn’t because I was homophobic, it was more because we had spent all our lives being extremely close, sharing a lot of things together such as changing rooms, showers, toilets on nights out, that kind of thing. I didn’t know how to move forward with continuing those habits after she’d informed me she liked women. I didn’t do a good job of trying to hide it so one night while I’d run to barricade myself into a toilet cubicle by myself, she firmly informed me – and the rest of the queue behind her – that she was under no circumstances, nor would she ever ever be, remotely interested in me. This resulted in my feeling worse, particularly by the use of the double ‘ever’, I mean, would she ever even consider giving me a chance? It was quite possible that I could change in the future, and her closemindedness bothered me. We sipped our drinks. I was hoping we could now change the subject though I knew there wasn’t a chance of that happening.
‘So what kinds of things happened?’ She picked up where we left off.
‘Oh, nothing, I just got into a bit of trouble, that’s all.’
Her eyes widened. ‘What kind of trouble?’
‘I told a little fib on my resumé.’ I waved a hand dismissively.
Melanie threw her head back and laughed. ‘What did you say?’ She was enjoying this but I knew she wouldn’t for much longer, it was leading to somewhere I didn’t want to go. I was planning on telling a juicy big lie when Life must have sensed it and rejoined us at the table.
Melanie looked at him with new admiration. ‘Lucy was just telling me that you’re her life.’
Life looked at me, happy I’d told a truth. ‘That’s great, Lucy.’
‘This is so cool, can I give you a hug?’ She didn’t wait for an answer, and went straight for the kill, wrapping her long limbs around him and squeezing. Life seemed to melt at the attention. He closed his eyes. ‘Wait a minute.’ She pulled away. ‘I have to get a photo.’ She rooted in her bag for her phone and held it up to herself and Life. He smiled, his teeth a mustard colour next to Melanie’s white gnashers. ‘That’s one for Facebook. So, Lucy was telling me she fibbed on her CV.’ She smiled and hunkered down for the gossip, her big glossy lips permanently planted on the straw in her drink, like the man in the tank sucking on oxygen.
‘Really?’ Life looked at me, impressed again. I was getting Brownie points.
‘Yeah.’ I scratched my head. ‘I just said I could speak a language, but I can’t.’ I threw it away, hoped that we could laugh over it and it would be gone but I knew I couldn’t be so lucky.
Melanie threw her head back and laughed again. ‘What was it? Swahili or something?’
‘No,’ I laughed awkwardly.
‘Why, what language did you say? Honestly, Cosmo, I have to squeeze information about herself out from her all the time.’
‘Spanish.’
Her dark eyes darkened a little but she smiled, though not as ecstatically. ‘You’re even worse at Spanish than me.’
‘Yeah,’ I smiled. I wanted to change the subject, but I couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t forced and unnatural.
‘But what if they’d asked you to use it?’ she said, and I was sure she was testing me.
‘They did.’ I took a sip of my drink. ‘They did all the time. Our main manual languages are English, French, Dutch and Italian.’
‘And Spanish,’ she said, studying me.
‘And Spanish,’ I confirmed.
She sucked on her straw, her eyes not moving from mine. ‘So what did you do?’ She was slowly getting it, or she’d already got it. Or I was paranoid but I already knew my paranoia was instinct so either way I was in trouble.
‘I got a little help.’
Life was looking from her to me and me to her, sensing something was up but not knowing exactly what. I waited for him to take his computer out to search for the answer but he didn’t. He politely sat it out.
‘From who?’ she asked. She was still now. Tense. Expectant. Waiting for confirmation.
‘Melanie, I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry, just answer the question,’ she said coldly.
‘The answer is yes and I’m sorry.’
‘You went to Mariza.’
‘Yes.’
She stared at me, shocked. Even knowing it was coming, she couldn’t believe it. I thought she was going to throw her drink over me but the anger subsided and she just looked hurt. ‘You’ve been in contact with Mariza?’
Mariza was the love of her life who’d broken her heart very badly and we were all destined to hate her for the rest of our lives. And I did, until she emailed me one day asking after Melanie’s well-being. I’d done the proper friend thing at first, being coldly distant and distantly cold, telling lies about how Melanie was doing great, but then it changed and I needed her.
‘Only a little contact. It was just for translations, nothing personal.’
‘Nothing personal?’
‘Okay maybe a little. She was always asking about you, I told her you were travelling the world, really successful, meeting other people, I never ever told her anything about you that you wouldn’t have wanted me to say. I promise. She was worried about you.’
‘Sure she was.’ Then another thought. ‘You’ve been in that job for how long?’
‘Two and a half years,’ I mumbled. I was so embarrassed, partly because it was happening in front of my life but mostly because it was happening at all.
‘So for two and a half years you’ve been contacting her. Lucy, I can’t believe this.’ She stood up, took a few random steps in different directions but ultimately didn’t want to go anywhere. She returned to the table but remained standing. ‘How would you feel if I had spent the last two and a half years contacting an ex of yours without your knowledge, while you haven’t heard a thing directly from them since the moment they broke up with you? The amount of times I wondered what she was doing, or where she was, and you knew all that time and did
n’t say anything. How would you feel if I did that to you?’
Life looked at me. I felt he was urging me to say something, something about Blake. I couldn’t risk him telling a truth at this time. Not now, it was the wrong time, but I couldn’t lie.
‘I understand. I’d be incredibly hurt too.’ I swallowed. ‘But you do speak to Blake all the time,’ I said in my defence.
She looked at me as though I were stupid. ‘Blake is different. Blake didn’t just decide one day for no clear reason to step on your heart and crush it into a million little pieces. You left Blake. You have no idea how I feel.’
Life’s eyes were bearing into me. Speak now or forever hold your peace. I held my peace.
She stopped herself before she said too much, though she already had. ‘I need to take a minute, I just need to get some air.’ She grabbed her cigarettes from the table and went outside.
I looked at my life. ‘Happy now?’
‘I’m feeling a little better.’
‘The better I do for you, the more I alienate other people. What good is that for me?’
‘Right now, not much, but down the line it’ll pay off. They just need to get to know you.’
‘They know me.’
‘You don’t even know you, how can you expect them to?’
‘Very philosophical.’ I grabbed my bag.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Home.’
‘But we just got here.’
‘She doesn’t want me here.’
‘She never said that.’
‘She didn’t have to.’
‘So make it up to her.’
‘How?’
‘By staying. You’ve never done that before.’
‘And do what?’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Dance.’
‘I am not dancing with you.’
‘Come on.’ He stood up and grabbed my hands and pulled me up. I fought him but he was strong.
‘I don’t dance,’ I said, trying to pull myself away from him.
‘You used to. You and Blake were Dirty Dancing competition winners two years in a row.’
‘Well, I don’t dance any more. There’s no one even on the dance floor, we’ll look like tools. And I’m not dirty dancing with you.’
‘Dance like they’re not watching.’
Which they were, including Melanie who had come back inside and was currently watching us from the darkness, even though she was mad at me. I felt a weight I didn’t even know was there lift from my shoulders at having revealed a truth. Life was like a drunken uncle at a bad wedding, attempting to dance like John Travolta in a bizarre mix between Pulp Fiction and Stayin’ Alive, but he was happy and he made me smile. So I did a little Uma Thurman and danced with Life like no one was watching until we were the last on the floor and last out the door. He was persuasive; life has a way of getting what it wants when it really knows what it wants.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
‘So tell me about your dad,’ Life asked the following morning. We were sitting on a park bench drinking coffee from take-out cups and watching Mr Pan chasing a butterfly and leaping around with such joy I tried not to think about the fact the last time he’d felt grass under his feet was when I’d walked it into the flat.
‘First of all, it’s not Dad,’ I corrected him. ‘It’s Father. He made that very clear as soon as our lips could form actual words. And secondly, there’s not much to tell.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really.’
Life turned to the old woman beside him. ‘Excuse me, this lady’s boyfriend left her but they concocted a lie to make people think it was the other way around.’
‘Oh,’ the lady said, confused, thinking she should have known what he was talking about but couldn’t quite figure it out.
‘I can’t believe you did that,’ I grumbled.
‘You lie, I tell a truth,’ he repeated his mantra.
‘I didn’t lie, there’s really not much to tell about my father.’
‘Lucy, has it ever occurred to you that I might be here for a specific reason? And as soon as I investigate all areas and find the thing that’s wrong with you, I’m gone, out of your life. You won’t have to see me again and imagine how happy your days will be then? So it’s in your best interest to co operate, even if you think the thing I’m asking you about is a non-issue.’
‘What are you here to fix?’
‘I don’t know, it’s exploratory surgery. I examine all areas, see what the problem is.’
‘So you are the endoscope to my anus.’
He winced. ‘Again we’re having metaphor issues.’
We smiled.
‘I recall you saying that your father was a pretentious little man who needed to get off his high horse. That implies there’s something to talk about.’
‘I didn’t say that, I called him a pretentious little shit.’
‘I was paraphrasing.’
‘We’ve just never gotten along. We used to, to a certain extent, when we were polite enough to tolerate one another but there’s no room for politeness any more.’ I looked at him. ‘Are you here to sort out daddy issues? Because if so, we might as well call the whole thing off now because if I really had daddy issues I would spend my days trying to endlessly please him which would result in my becoming a high achiever, and right now I’m not even close to that. He can’t even piss me off enough to make me successful. Our issues are just a waste of time.’
‘You’re right. You’re a failure, you don’t have daddy issues.’
We laughed.
‘He doesn’t like me,’ I said simply. ‘There’s nothing deeper to it than that, nothing to fix, nothing to explore. He’s just never liked me.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘He told me.’
‘He didn’t tell you that.’
‘You know that he did. When I got fired from my last job it was the final straw for him, which was ridiculous because up to that point I had actually been doing well so it should technically have been the first straw. Actually, it shouldn’t have been a straw at all because I didn’t tell him I was fired, I told them I left the job because I didn’t agree with the company’s take on their environmental responsibility. We had an argument and I told him I knew he hated me and he said quote, “Lucy, I don’t hate you, I just don’t like you very much.” Unquote.’ I looked at him. ‘So there, it’s not just my paranoia. Take out your little computer and see for yourself.’
‘I’m sure he just meant in that moment.’
‘Yes, he absolutely meant in that moment, thing is, the moment hasn’t ended, we’re still stuck right in it.’
‘Why did you get fired?’
We had finally arrived at it.
I sighed. ‘Do you know what CSR is?’
He frowned and shook his head.
‘CSR, or Corporate Social Responsibility to you, is a form of corporate self-regulation integrated into a business modal. CSR policy honours the triple bottom line: people, planet, profit. It’s like a corporate conscience, integrating the public interest in corporate decision-making by encouraging community growth and development and voluntarily eliminating practices that harm the public, regardless of legality. The idea is that the company makes more profit by operating with perspective though some argue that it distracts from the economic role of business.’ I took a sip of coffee. ‘I agree with the former, by the way. I worked in a large multinational who should have taken their policy more seriously, and I didn’t agree with the decisions they were making.’
‘So what happened? You found paper in the plastic bin?’
‘No.’ I rolled my eyes. ‘I won’t get into the exact ins and outs but I basically shared my opinions with the CEO and I was swiftly fired.’
Life nodded his head to himself and pondered what I’d said. Then he threw his head back and laughed, laughed so loudly the old lady beside him jumped with fright, laughed on behalf of the entire country. He was breathles
s by the time he’d finished.
‘Man, that was a good one,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’
‘You’re welcome.’ I took a slug of my coffee, gearing myself up for the payback.
‘I think you’ll find it was worth it though.’ He turned to the old lady, ‘Sometimes she doesn’t wash her bras for weeks at a time.’
I gasped. The lady finally stood up and left.
‘So where did you get that lie from?’ he asked.
‘Wikipedia. Couldn’t sleep one night and so I surfed around for a good story.’
‘Nice. Is that what you told everybody?’
‘Yep. No one ever asked what exactly the company practices were that I didn’t agree with. I was going to go with something like illegal dumping but it seemed too obvious and too eighties.’
He laughed again. Then stopped. ‘You didn’t tell your dad that, did you?’
‘Yes, I did.’ I cringed, recalling the moment. ‘It turned out he already knew the truth but he still let me say my little spiel first before revealing it. He’s the only one who knows the truth behind that particular lie. Hence the argument.’
‘How did he know?’
‘He’s a judge, and I have learned the judging world is a small one.’
‘Ah. Care to kindly share the truth with me?’
I drained my cup and fired it into the nearest basket. It missed and hit the ground. I sighed wearily, the world heavy on my shoulders just because of that one incident, then got up and put it back in the bin and returned to the bench.
‘I was drunk while collecting a client from the airport. I got lost, so we drove around for an hour, he missed a meeting and then I dropped him at the wrong hotel and left him there.’ I looked at him. ‘They fired me and I lost my driver’s licence for a year, so I sold the car and rented a flat in the city where I could cycle everywhere.’
‘Which tied in with the environmentally responsible thing.’
I nodded.
‘Clever.’
‘Thanks.’
‘So technically you lied to your father and he caught you out and you’re angry with him for being angry with you?’
I thought about that; wanted to protest, justify myself, and explain the years I’d endured his patronising comments and his pushiness, which had played a large part in our relationship breakdown because of course it was so much more complicated than just one argument, but it was too much to explain and I didn’t know where to start, hadn’t the time, energy or inclination to delve into its infinitesimal detail so eventually I took the lazy way out and nodded.