You always did have a way with words

I came in late and spent the first hour at my desk, ruminating over the flashbacks and looking out the window through the haze of a grisly hangover. 

 I had an odd amount of energy considering Ive had 2 hours sleep. I look at the happy pictures on my desk with irritability. When had I gotten so fat? I spin around in my chair a few times and try to look out at the expansive view of the financial district, little ants in grey suits running around everywhere.  I wonder if anyone else down there has emerged from a night like mine.

I procrastinate another few minutes and then head down to level 25, pause for a second when I reached your office, looking through the glass. Pictures of Super Hornet jets and Wedgetails all over the walls, a half erased diagram of triangulation on the white board,.

“We’re trying to say it’s a ‘minor defect’ but it’s still ‘state of the art’. There’s 98% radar coverage. You just cant see out the front of the damn thing!” You are animated and light up at the absurdity.

“I have no idea what you guys do down there.”

“No. It’s a secret.”

I see a vase with falling blue orchids on your table, colorful little rocks in groups of two, giant files, piles of paper and coffee cups on various surfaces, a pair of leopard print stilettos on the book shelf. You are seated at your desk, looking lifeless compared to the colour and calamity around you. You are bent forwards with your head in your hands, shaking it, looking down. I think I hear you let out a low angry moan. From this angle I can see into the gaping v-neck of your dress. You yank a clump of long dark hair, release it and shake your head again, repeating the softened brontide of a broken reindeer. I am about to announce myself when Sarah comes galumphing up the hall.

“Hey! What are you doing down here?” she shrieks with glee.

“Hi. How are you?” I try to look at you out of the corner of my eye. Your head is still down.

 “Good! I’m just heading off to Insolvency. Alicia is being a f*ckwit to their grad and Michael keeps talking about Jesus in meetings.” She grins a massive toothy grin with her eyes bulging out of her head.

“So.” She grins some more. “What are you doing down here?”

“Nothing. I’m just going to talk to Thompson.”

“About what?”

“Some boats.”

“Great! I’ll see you in a bit, I’m heading up to your group later to tell Kath her skirts are too short!” More toothy grin.

“Please don’t. I’ll talk to her.”

“Sure. But I should be there.” Bulge bulge bulge grin grin grin, it reminded me of the brief phase when my mate David was on Lithium and Ritalin, decided to take up playing the guitar and would pull it out at dinner parties in some sort of passive aggressive act of defiance with an unhinged but excited  intensity in his eyes.

“No. Please leave it alone, I’ll talk to her.”

“Sure. I’ll be up soon. See you then!”

She sashays up the hall rubbing her hands together and I hurry past your office and back to my own domain.

I flick through at a share sale agreement prepared by the new guy with the insipid mannerisms and throw it across on the desk restlessly. I take a call from my favourite client du jour who is trying to flog a company that invented an erectile dysfunction corrective nose spray.

An email pops up. Please join us for Mary Reed’s birthday cake in the level 26 kitchen in 5 minutes.

Perfect. I spin around and go to stand up but you are already standing in my door way. I now see that you are wearing a long black wrap around dress. It has no sleeves and hangs a little oddly. One skinny white arm with a pearl necklace wrapped around it several times makes a ‘knock knock’ motion in the air.

“I think we should talk.”

“Sure. Come in.” I gesture to you to sit down and tidy a pile on my desk as you slide the door shut behind you.

Seated in the chair by the table, your eyes move straight past mine and look around the office. The bottle of Effin Vodka on the windowsill, an ambersand sculpture from my sister Libby, some ugly African sh*t from a client, a football. You pause at the picture of Melanie and I where I look fat, the picture of Angus just after he was born. You skim the framed group portrait taken at the end of last year’s partnership conference and I catch you smirking slightly. “Not great looking people at the best of times. I was disgracefully hungover that morning. I’m waiting a polite amount of time until I can use the frame for something I actually want to look at.” You smile thinly. I can't tell if you're laughing.

Still looking everywhere but at me, you cross your legs and your dress splits up to the top of your thigh. A safety pin is holding it together at the top and along the sides. You are wearing little ballet shoes. Your hair could do with brushing.

“So, I think we should talk about last night. ….” Looking, looking, nope, nothing interesting on the roof. Nothing up there to see. "And what I think is that we should agree to put in a vault of silence and never speak of it again.”

“Lets get out of here” I said.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Because I want to talk to you.”

“You are talking to me!”

“Well I want to talk to you somewhere else!”

“That’s ridiculous!” you say. But you agree with a shrug and pick up the giant gold handbag.

“I see.” What do I say to that? “I said I’d get you that time off though.”

“Um, yeah, I shouldn't have  told you any of that stuff and I take it all back.”

“Well, you cant, I said I would sort it out for you, so I will.”

You stopped talking and sighed. That’s why you’re so thin, I realsied. That explains the blue under your eyes. I’d never seen you eat.

“I REALLY regret telling you that stuff. I have taken it back. So just forget about it please.”

“No.

“Please.”

“No. I’ll sort it out.”

“I’m asking you not to. So that's the end of that. But it was good to talk and I know what I need to do to sort myself out. So that’s the end of your involvement. Except the bit about this f*cking 100km walk. If you can get me out of that it would be good.”

“Done.”

“Ok.” You go to stand up and leave.

“No hang on!” Finally your eyes bore into mine with proper direct contact and intimacy.

“The best defence is a good offence” you said, throwing you head back laughing.

You sit back down. Your skin is pale and your eyes are black. Your hands move to grip the sides of the chair with wizened wary fingers. You uncross and re-cross your legs, suddenly conscious of the slit. Do you always pin your clothes together I wonder.

"I said I’d walk you home, stop refusing. Which way?"  Suddenly we were running through the domain, arms spread out, whooping under the midnight sky. You slipped and I caught you.

“Are you ok?”

“Yes. These are the boots that make me fall over all the time.”

“Then why do you wear them?”

“Because I love them!”

“So you just wear them and ‘fall over all the time’? That makes no sense!”

“You think I should, like, just stop wearing them?”

“Yes!”

“I can’t. I love them.” You take off again, running and whooping, do a sommersault through the grass and roll back onto your feet. I pick up the pace and feel the globulous and promising drops of rain as we approach your glittery abode.

 “Could we talk about the other stuff now?” I ask.

Your hands fly to your face and you peek out from between a couple of fingers. "There is nothing to talk about. You and I both know, that Should Never Have Happened.  So it didn't. It's in The Vault.”

“Well the thing is…” I whisper emphatically, leaning forward, after a quick glance at the closed glass door... “I liked it! I’d like to see you again!” You draw a sharp breath and close your fingers even more tightly over your face. Do you think I cant see you?

You open the fridge. I see limes, a carrot, a slice of birthday cake and 2 bottles of soda. You start cutting limes on the bench, twisting them into blue high balls, moving slightly, strange beats playing in the background. I move behind you and take the knife out of your hands from behind. You gasp, surprised, and freeze for a second. I put one of my hands on your hip, move it up and down feel your stiff body relax a little. My mouth moves to your neck. Your skin smells like something light, sweet, erotic.

“What?! That’s not an option!! That should never have happened!” Why are you covering your face like this?

A flash of shoulder, my face is buried in your hair, your skin is warm, your breath is hot, you flip and move and make euphonious underwater noises like a mermaid gasping for air.

“…should NOT have happened.” We sit in silence for a few seconds.

“Oh…” I say sadly. “Ok. I guess. I just thought we could… do it again sometime.”

Your hands travel through your hair, pulling it hard, yanking it. Do you know you are doing this Miss Safety Pin Skirt Slits? “No! Are you insane? No!”

We are sitting on the roof of your building. My shirt is still open. You are in a red silk dressing gown smoking a cigarette and swilling vanilla vodka and lime over fading ice. You stare out at the lights of the city. You talk about confusion, where the night ends and mornings begins. You talk about the excruciating struggles when the sun comes up to pull together a shredded constitution, scorching showers, uppers washed down with a restorative tonic, coffee, vitamins, the uplifting strings of Phoenix, the burning in your nose, the back of your throat, chants and mantras and affirmations… isolation and hiding, secrecy and hidden compartments, shiny mirrors and scratched glass, rare glimpses of delicate equilibrium, that small small window where it feels ok. Still staring straight ahead.

I didn’t realise until that moment that I had actually been excited, let myself get carried away a bit in my own head. I thought it was the start of something. 

My shoulders slump and I exhale. I see that you mean it. “Oh. Ok. You sure? Will you have a think about it?” You stare at me, incredulous.

“No!”

I process it, percolate and some of the erratic behavior starts to make sense. The day your hair was full of pink paint. The meeting where you couldn’t sit still like a child actor in an interview. The meeting where you moved too slow. The bluntness. The way when you stared laughing you couldn’t stop. They called it unhinged. I thought you just didn’t care. I thought you had aspergers.

The mornings where I saw you at work at 6am in half of yesterday’s suit, pencils in your hair, listening to music, deep in a trance, alternating between typing furiously and clutching, skimming different bits of paper, scribbling notes in margins.

“I cant keep going like this. But I' trying to stop and I can't. I need to go away for a bit. There’s a place I know.” You looked at me hard for a moment and then stared straight ahead again. You shook your head, took a mouthful of your drink, swilled the memory of ice around for a moment and threw the glass off the roof. I took a gulp of mine. My head was spinning.

“You hadn’t thought about it?” I ask, a little fallen.

Your tone softens. “You’ve always been my friend. It’s not an option.”

I tried clumsily to tell you I could fix things for you. In the end we sat in comfortable silence for while as the earth moved around the sun, inch by inch and the stary darkness turned to an indigo glow. You put your hand on my cheek. “It’s the blue hour. Time for you to go.”

You walk to the door and turn to look at me for a few more seconds. I am actually really sad. The feeling takes me by surprise and you must have read it in my face for you shake you head, not unkindly and I can feel the memory of your hand to my cheek. “Thank you for everything. I’m sorry.” Your voice is gentle but firm, with a rueful smile. With that you are gone.

At that very moment Sarah is again galumphing down the hall and watches you disappear around a corner as she swings into my office.

“What was she doing in here?” she asks.

“Mind your own business” I say. “Actually, no, she needs some time off. 5 weeks. Like, asap. But with as few people involved as possible.”

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!” she says with a big smile. “What’s going on? “

“I‘ll come and talk to you about it, in strict confidence, this afternoon. Not now if that’s ok.”

She thinks about it. “Ok. So I told Kath her skirts are too short and she told me to f*ck off! Can you believe it?”

“Maybe you should f*ck off!”

“Hahahahahahahahahahahaahhahahaahhahaha! No, YOU f*ck off! HAHAHAHAHHAHAAHAHHA!” she stops laughing. “Anyways, I better go. The creepy new boy-scout guy in litigation has been making the pregnant float admin crawl around on the floor while he eats a sandwich and watches. All the girls down there have file notes on him. He bills like a demon though. So get this – we found a gender sensitivity camp we can send him to! Can you believe that sh* exists? Its fantastic! HAHAHA! I’m about to go and tell him that he has to spend a week there. Highlight of my week.”

Kath has returned clutching half a piece of cheesecake and is rearranging a picture on her cubical wall of her and 5 identical girls wearing tiaras, drinking from oversized test tubes.  She gives Sarah a filthy look.

In a deja vu Sarah now stands at the door and looks back. “I’m free after 3 though, to talk about you know who.” She flings back Kath’s filthy stare as she departs, cackling.

Half an hour later my phone beeps. Unbeknownst to me you have stepped out for fresh air and a strong coffee. You are standing in the middle of a crowded street, amdist the grey ants, thinking. How much worse can it get? You have no filters and are worn down by life.

I stare at the message in front of me. Just so you know, the thought had crossed my mind, and for the record, the idea is not entirely without merit.

My heart skips a beat. I hope that somewhere, Miss Last Night is still twisting limes and the corners of her mouth curl up just a little. You always did have a way with words I reply.