The Marriage Gap Year, page 7
“Sure,” Emma said. “Should I bring a notepad or a cardboard box?”
Isabella looked momentarily confused. “Oh, don’t be silly,” she said, getting the joke and brushing away the suggestion. “It’s nothing bad.”
The only decor in Isabella’s office was a display shelf of Catch-branded merchandise. There were keychains and stress balls and T-shirts, all with that stupid smiling catfish on them. Big Fish, Big Pond. The slogan was on everything. There was even a Catch umbrella open in the corner of the room, designed on the premise that office workers would glimpse the logo when wistfully gazing down at the street from their office windows. Time for something new, they’d say to themselves. But office windows didn’t open. Dumb idea.
“Have a seat,” Isabella said.
Emma eased herself onto one of the plastic office chairs draped in a faux-fur throw. “Ooh, this is all a bit formal now that I’m in here. Getting a little nervous.”
“Emma, you’re not going anywhere.”
“Oh, good. Because, I had this feeling of—”
“But there’s going to be a restructure.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, the rest of the staff don’t know yet. Except people who’ll be directly affected.”
“Okaaay.”
“You’re keeping comms, Emma. You’re staying exactly where you are.”
“Uh huh.”
Isabella glanced down at the phone on her desk and looked up again. “It’s just that communications is now going to be under the umbrella of a division called ‘strategic messages, partnerships and alumni relations’.”
“Okaaay.”
“And Jarod, from your team, is going to oversee that division.”
“Seriously?”
Isabella nodded. “Yes.”
“Really?” Emma shook her head and searched inside her skull for words. “Jarod? He’s going to – sorry, what is it again? Strategic…”
“Messages, partnerships and alumni relations.”
Emma frowned. “Those aren’t even real things, though. They’re just different words to describe what comms does.” Her breathing was shallow.
“Emma, you get to keep playing to your strengths. Nobody does comms better.”
Emma’s face felt hot. She knew her neck would be getting blotchy now and resisted the urge to do up the zipper on her tracksuit. “Can I…?” Emma took a breath to compose herself. Her stomach lurched. “Excuse me,” she said, bolting for the exit.
Emma strode across the office floor to the bathrooms. She tore open the cubicle door, dropped to her knees and dry-retched into the toilet bowl until a string of snot hung from her nose. She blind-groped the wall beside her and pulled out a wad of toilet paper. She blew her nose and tried to muffle her crying. Her life was falling apart. This is how it happened. Bit by bit, the foundations of your life just crumbled.
Why had she been so cavalier with Rob? He wasn’t perfect but at least he was there. What was she to other people? Just another grumpy middle-aged woman, growing more invisible by the day. A cliché. She stiffened.
Fuck that. She sniffed, stood, wiped her face and tossed the wads of paper into the toilet. Fine. If she was going to be treated like a discarded rag, she wasn’t going to make it easy. She flushed again and left the cubicle. She had things to say, and Isabella would hear them. She splashed cold water on her face, straightened her tracksuit and strode back toward Isabella’s office.
Isabella looked up. She was leaning over her phone, which lay on her spotless desk. “Peter, I’m going to have to call you back. Something’s come up.” She stabbed the hang-up button on her phone and took a breath. “I swear, sometimes it’s like you have to lead them each step of the way.” Isabella shook her head and closed the door to her office. “Have a seat, Emma. You need some water or something?”
Emma shook her head. She did want water but didn’t want to have it in her shaky hands. Besides, she wouldn’t be able to swallow past the lump in her throat.
Isabella sighed as she sat down. “Look, I know this restructure is probably a bit of a surprise—”
“A surprise? No, why? An underqualified male, a kid, getting recklessly promoted to a job he’s not ready for? Why would that come as a surprise, Isabella?”
Isabella laced her fingers together and leaned forward over her desk. “I don’t think you’re being fair. Jarod’s got credit that you’re not giving him.”
“Really?”
“Yes. He does things cheaper. The board likes that. Hell, I like that.”
“Cheaper,” said Emma, “but not better. I put together great stuff.”
Isabella sighed. “You do, Emma. But you’ve never accepted that a big part of your job is making the people above you look good.”
“Right, so I don’t suck up enough?”
Isabella’s unblinking eyes were unnerving as they locked on to Emma’s, who felt certain her own eyelids were fluttering like bee wings.
“Look,” said Isabella, “maybe you need the afternoon to—”
“No.” Emma shook her head. “Pretty sure ‘the afternoon’ isn’t going to help me feel better about this.”
“Emma.” Isabella put her palms down on the desk and stood up. “This was a unanimous decision at the executive level. It’s out of my hands.”
“No, I get it. The tribe has spoken. I mean, why should I get upset about not getting a job I didn’t know existed? That’d be crazy.”
“Emma.”
“It’s fine.” Emma put both hands on the arms of the chair and stood abruptly. “Seriously. It’s just…” She closed her eyes. Don’t cry. She tried to draw breath into her belly.
“Emma, I can see you’re upset. Maybe you should talk to someone. The employee assistance program—”
“Yes, definitely,” Emma said, nodding furiously. “By all means, let’s outsource this. Great idea.” She turned and reached for the door handle.
“He claims you bullied him, Emma.”
Emma’s hand froze on the door handle. “What?” She turned.
“Sit down,” Isabella said, coming out from behind her desk.
“What did he say?” Emma crossed her arms.
Isabella cleared her throat. “He said that you favor Mish and Angie, and that you get him to do all the shit jobs. He says you call him out in meetings and shame him in front of the team.”
“What, so you’re promoting him?”
“Is it true?”
Emma shook her head. “No. I mean, we banter at team meetings and stuff. We make a few jokes, but it’s not bullying. I thought I was meeting him halfway. Being playful. He said that?”
“It’s not just what he said, Emma.”
“So, you’re saying the others agreed?”
“Not all of them. He says he feels threatened by you, that you discriminate against him.”
Emma crinkled her nose. “What?”
“Yes, Jarod identifies as queer.”
“Well, I didn’t even know he was gay or whatever. And, anyway, so what, that doesn’t make him special. You can be queer and still be an asshole.”
“Em—”
“So, what now? The whole team’s against me?”
Emma retraced her steps, replayed conversations with her team, searched for that instant, that rupture where she had definitively crossed a line. She came up empty, which was worrying. She’d always thought of herself as self-aware and self-effacing, a good judge of character, including her own. This accusation was blindsiding. Was it bullshit or was there something to it? Had she been so preoccupied with her relationship that she’d lost sense of how she was coming across at work?
“Liam,” she said. That little prick. She always knew he didn’t like her, no matter how nice she tried to be. “It was Liam, wasn’t it?”
Isabella remained expressionless. What a poker face. There was power in saying nothing.
“Look,” said Isabella, softening her tone. She came and sat down on the other chair next to Emma. “This isn’t actually a big deal.”
A contagion of self-doubt spread inside Emma.
“Feels like a big deal to me,” she said.
Isabella sighed. “I know it feels huge. But try to look at this in perspective. It’s a weak claim, Emma. I can’t tell you the details, but I can tell you there’s nothing solid in this. And nothing’s going to happen because of it. The board just wants the problem to go away quietly.”
“Oh my god. The board knows? This is insane.”
“Emma,” said Isabella softly. “The board wants this to float away on a little cloud, avoid anything that even looks like bad press. We were planning this restructure anyway, so with a few tweaks, the problem’s gone. Poof. And, even though he has nothing to do with what we’ve been talking about” – she winked – “Liam will be in a different team altogether from next week.”
Emma appreciated Isabella’s tacit confirmation about Liam as co-conspirator, but she wasn’t prepared to accept the broader injustice of Jarod’s promotion. “So, I should be thankful, is that what you’re saying?”
“No,” said Isabella immediately. “If I were you, I’d be pissed. I’d want to go on the warpath. But that’s only going to support this claim. Hard as it is, it’s better for you to stay quiet. Suck it up.”
Emma scoffed. “Right.”
Isabella crossed her arms, framing her thick, braided gold necklace. “You know, these young people, they want stuff from their jobs that we never thought of. They want their workplaces to be supportive.”
“Right,” said Emma. “Like a ‘family’?” She rolled her eyes and air quoted.
“No, they want the opposite. They just want to parcel up the job, make it as small a part of their life as they can, but for maximum pay and benefits. It’s awe-inspiring if it wasn’t such a pain. Whatever the job is, it’s got to fit around their life, not the other way around. They want to be able to log in to a meeting while paddleboarding in Broome.”
“A lot of sharks in Broome,” Emma said.
“The pizzazz of an office doesn’t cut it anymore,” said Isabella, as if Emma had said nothing. “A paycheck and a coffee machine is not enough. They want to be themselves.” Isabella flashed both hands as if miming small explosions on either side of her head. “I had a girl walk in here last week – nineteen years old, just started with us. You know what she wanted? An office. Know why? Because she felt anxious making business calls with other people listening. True story.”
Emma scanned the display shelf of Catch-branded merchandise. The keychain had been Angie’s idea; the stress ball, Liam’s. The umbrella was no one’s to claim. They’d come up with that one together, in a crazy brainstorming session that had gone well into the evening. Emma couldn’t remember how it got started, but it was late, and everyone was delirious. For a laugh, people started pitching absurdly niche and impractical stuff to brand: a truffle grater, an all-you-can eat shrimp canon, Sergey Brin’s baby teeth. The umbrella was the first “normal” suggestion after that, and everyone jumped at it.
Had she read that vibe completely wrong? Was she that hard to deal with at work? Prickly and stubborn, like her father?
Or was she deluding herself? Maybe she had no business running this team. Maybe she wasn’t smart enough, or cool enough, or patient or good or empathetic enough to be anyone’s boss. She couldn’t make a marriage work after all.
Mom used to say to her, “You’re good. You don’t have to be great.” Emma suddenly wondered if she’d spent her life refuting that advice or heeding it.
Chapter Ten
The purple Ford Raptor lurched over some bumps on the dirt road, rattling the heavy contents of the aluminum toolboxes that flashed in the sun. Rob closed his sketch pad and leaned his arm on the tray of his own pickup as the truck pulled up, dwarfing his own vehicle.
The windows were tinted; Rob could barely make out the shape of the person moving around inside. Who the fuck was this? And whoever they were, the doof-doof beat of their music was unwelcome noise. Could they at least turn off their engine so he could stop breathing diesel fumes?
The engine cut and the music stopped abruptly, restoring the silence that had preceded this intrusion. The driver’s side door opened. The crunch of boots on gravel. A nest of dark, frizzy hair hovered just above the roof of the truck. A tall bugger. Rob remained seated and absorbed the truck’s personalized number plate: P1ES. First the doof-doof music and now this: a Collingwood supporter. Of all the football clubs. It was getting worse by the minute.
Rob looked down at the ground, pretending to be distracted when a pair of legs moved into view. It took him a second to recognize them as a woman’s legs. He looked up. Definitely a woman. Not bad looking either, with a mane of curly dark hair.
“Hey,” she said. “You must be Rob.”
“Nice truck,” he said, nodding in the vehicle’s direction. “Pity about the number plate.”
She glanced back at her car, and laughed. “Not a fan then?”
Rob shook his head and tapped his own chest. “Bulldogs.”
“Oh yeah. They’re alright. If you like self-punishment.” She grinned and stuck out her hand. “I’m Sareena.” Rob shook her hand, a little more gently than he would if she were a guy. Her grip was tighter than most. Rough hands too.
“So, this is it,” said Sareena, shielding her eyes to gaze up at the roofline of the stone building. “Nice lines on the gable. It’s that classic barn shape.” She turned back toward him and steepled her fingertips. Sareena lined the shape of her hands up against the silhouette of the building’s roof line. “Sweet,” she said. “This is going to look sick.”
Rob slipped his drawing pen into the front pocket of his shirt. Sareena’s eyes lit up when she saw the stack of papers in his hands.
“Oooh, those the drawings?”
Rob nodded once.
“Can I have a look?”
He tucked the papers under his arm. “No offense,” he said, scratching his eyebrow with his thumb, “but I don’t know who you are.”
Sareena drew a long breath through her teeth. “Seriously. That little fucker.” She cocked her head to one side. “So, Syed never told you I was coming?”
“Nah.”
“Well, that’s a shit introduction then?”
Rob shrugged.
Sareena squinted in the sunlight and shielded her eyes with her hand. “He asked me if I could drop whatever I was doing and head over here to help you out.”
“Do I look like I need help?”
Sareena’s eyes widened. “I mean, no disrespect or nothing, but I was expecting a bunch of people, some kind of crew working on a house. Instead, I see one dude in the back of a truck looking up at a building. I mean, inspiring and all, but this project’s not where I thought it was at and, I got to be honest” – she moved her hands between herself and Rob – “I’m not really feeling this.”
Rob stepped out the back of his truck. He was used to standing taller than most people, but Sareena looked him straight in the eye. He stood up straight, tried to speak but something caught in his throat. He coughed. “I’m sure you’re good at whatever it is you do, but this place isn’t like a normal house. It’s old, and there’s all kinds of rules around it, heritage stuff, so you have to be careful because it’s easy to muck it up. I have guys, a crew––”
“I’ve got guys too.” Sareena grinned and flicked a bushel of hair off her shoulder. “But okay,” she said, turning back toward her truck. “I get it. You sound like a man who’s made up his mind.”
Rob raised both his palms. “Sorry, darl.”
Sareena nodded. “Sure.” She stooped and climbed back inside her truck. The engine roared and the doof-doof music thumped back to life. She spun truck round so it was facing up the hill and backed up until the driver’s side window lined up to where Rob was standing. It had taken all his nerve not to step out of the way. The tinted window lowered. The base beat of the music poured out of the cab. Sareena turned it down but not off.
“Just thought you should know,” she said, putting on a pair of pink-wraparound sunglasses. “Before you get stuck in. The building’s not just ‘old.’ It was built in 1891. And made of solid granite blocks that came from a quarry in Cape Woolamai, just a few miles from here. It’s solid as a lighthouse cuz it’s made of the same stuff as the cliff it’s standing on.” She pointed at the house, and he noticed that two of her fingernails were black from bruising. “The stone in that house is the same stuff that used to be in some of the nicest buildings in Melbourne before some dickhead tore them all down. It’s not just a house you’re restoring, it’s a piece of history.” She aggressively shifted the truck into gear and leaned out the window. “Oh, and my name’s not darl, champ.” Sareena spun the tires and left Rob in a cloud of fresh dust.
He watched the Ford carve its way up the dirt track, leaving a dust plume and a steady base beat in its wake.
Chapter Eleven
Emma didn’t need to check the map on her phone to know this was the right place. The vibe was exactly what Mish and Angie liked. An old building that used to be a car garage zhuzh’d up in that retro-chic that was Melbourne’s specialty. The place, like Mish and Angie, was effortlessly fashionable.
The glint of shimmery material drew Emma’s attention to a pair of young women vaping outside the venue. The too-sweet scent of artificial cherry wafted over. Their dresses had cut-out sections around their hips and arms, the very areas of Emma’s own body that most disappointed her. She admired these young women with their youth and confidence but wished they had the sense to put on a coat. It was cold out here, and this priority for warmth left Emma feeling conspicuously middle-aged. She hadn’t even opened the door and already she felt intimidated by the stylishness of this place. It left her wondering if any of the things she thought were cool were still considered cool. Jazz mixed with some kind of electronic music spilled out of the building, uncontained. How this squat brick building in the formerly working-class suburb of Northcote had become the latest high-water mark of Melbourne cool was unknown to Emma. She didn’t much care to know either. She was just happy to be out.
