leave the air-conditioned zone. The stairs stink of stale smoke, sweat and eucalyptus-scented cleaning fluid.
I start taking two steps at a time to get to the second floor, then realise that nobody is watching and I might as well waste some more of the day. The cleaner is tramping down the stairs dragging a green refuse sack, a tinny-sounding little radio hanging from her belt. I pick up my pace as I pass her, issuing a cheery ‘Good morning.’ She ignores me. She’s found me asleep on bathroom floors too often to take me seriously.
But I have something on her too. I know that she feasts on the uneaten food she clears from the meeting rooms. I caught her in the act. She looked stuck to the door, immobile, as I passed her in the Technicolor concrete corridor. Then I realised it was because she was trying to eat something off the side of the tray she was meant to be clearing. Halfway through the door, her urge for a leftover
empada
on the side of the plate had overwhelmed her, and she had bitten into it with the tray still in her arms.
‘Can I hold that for you?’ I said. ‘That way you could use your hands.’
I wasn’t trying to be sarcastic—I meant it—but she didn’t see it that way. She looked at me through frightened eyes, her mouth full, a guilty smear of sauce emerging from one side, then stomped off without a word. Her contemptuous looks when we pass each other in the corridor have been shot through with suspicion ever since. I suppose she fears I might report her to someone.
I only have to deal with two more corridor encounters before I reach the safety of my office: one brief exchange about football and an unsuccessful attempt at flirtation. Finally, I close the frosted glass door behind me and check the time. Twelve-fifteen: just in time for Oscar’s meeting. My associates will either assume that I’m arriving now because I’ve been out at a chocolate meeting, or else I will tell them my hangover story and in their desire to collude in my irreverence they will overlook the fact that I have missed a morning’s work. And so the days fly by. Practice your confidence tricks on the street and you risk getting shot by trigger-happy security guards; do it in the office and you get put on the board.
I am thinking how everyone in the building is a confidence trickster, that it’s
what we do
, when I look down at the phone on my desk to see a blinking red message light. Sweat springs in my palms and all that confidence is briskly annihilated.
Someone is leaving abusive messages on my work phone. It happens often enough to be unnerving, but not so often that I have bothered to do anything about it. It must be someone I know, because whoever it is insults me by name, and his tone projects real, targeted hatred. The words, when they come, are delivered in a rasping, guttural whisper, often separated by long periods of silence during which all I can make out are strange background noises: rushing water, machinery and, occasionally, what sounds like birdsong.
Sometimes there are no words at all. Other times I can’t understand them because the whisper is too quiet, the phrases too mumbled. But usually if I wait long enough, I’ll make something out, and get a taste of the venom. Insults. Warnings. Threats.
You’re in serious trouble, Ludo. I’ve found you out. I’ve
seen you.
What squalid hole are you hiding in tonight?
Change your life. Before I change it for you.
You better do something about this soon. You better.
Or else.
I have met the odd self-righteous madman with a cross to bear about the industry. They get almost evangelical about it, which is ridiculous—we aren’t Nazis, for God’s sake. So the first time it happened, I thought I had a lunatic. I congratulated myself on being big enough to have my own personal hater, and deleted the message without a second thought. But it keeps on happening. And now I’m almost used to it. Almost.
Who could hate me that much
? I
I start taking two steps at a time to get to the second floor, then realise that nobody is watching and I might as well waste some more of the day. The cleaner is tramping down the stairs dragging a green refuse sack, a tinny-sounding little radio hanging from her belt. I pick up my pace as I pass her, issuing a cheery ‘Good morning.’ She ignores me. She’s found me asleep on bathroom floors too often to take me seriously.
But I have something on her too. I know that she feasts on the uneaten food she clears from the meeting rooms. I caught her in the act. She looked stuck to the door, immobile, as I passed her in the Technicolor concrete corridor. Then I realised it was because she was trying to eat something off the side of the tray she was meant to be clearing. Halfway through the door, her urge for a leftover
empada
on the side of the plate had overwhelmed her, and she had bitten into it with the tray still in her arms.
‘Can I hold that for you?’ I said. ‘That way you could use your hands.’
I wasn’t trying to be sarcastic—I meant it—but she didn’t see it that way. She looked at me through frightened eyes, her mouth full, a guilty smear of sauce emerging from one side, then stomped off without a word. Her contemptuous looks when we pass each other in the corridor have been shot through with suspicion ever since. I suppose she fears I might report her to someone.
I only have to deal with two more corridor encounters before I reach the safety of my office: one brief exchange about football and an unsuccessful attempt at flirtation. Finally, I close the frosted glass door behind me and check the time. Twelve-fifteen: just in time for Oscar’s meeting. My associates will either assume that I’m arriving now because I’ve been out at a chocolate meeting, or else I will tell them my hangover story and in their desire to collude in my irreverence they will overlook the fact that I have missed a morning’s work. And so the days fly by. Practice your confidence tricks on the street and you risk getting shot by trigger-happy security guards; do it in the office and you get put on the board.
I am thinking how everyone in the building is a confidence trickster, that it’s
what we do
, when I look down at the phone on my desk to see a blinking red message light. Sweat springs in my palms and all that confidence is briskly annihilated.
Someone is leaving abusive messages on my work phone. It happens often enough to be unnerving, but not so often that I have bothered to do anything about it. It must be someone I know, because whoever it is insults me by name, and his tone projects real, targeted hatred. The words, when they come, are delivered in a rasping, guttural whisper, often separated by long periods of silence during which all I can make out are strange background noises: rushing water, machinery and, occasionally, what sounds like birdsong.
Sometimes there are no words at all. Other times I can’t understand them because the whisper is too quiet, the phrases too mumbled. But usually if I wait long enough, I’ll make something out, and get a taste of the venom. Insults. Warnings. Threats.
You’re in serious trouble, Ludo. I’ve found you out. I’ve
seen you.
What squalid hole are you hiding in tonight?
Change your life. Before I change it for you.
You better do something about this soon. You better.
Or else.
I have met the odd self-righteous madman with a cross to bear about the industry. They get almost evangelical about it, which is ridiculous—we aren’t Nazis, for God’s sake. So the first time it happened, I thought I had a lunatic. I congratulated myself on being big enough to have my own personal hater, and deleted the message without a second thought. But it keeps on happening. And now I’m almost used to it. Almost.
Who could hate me that much
? I
Similar Books
