Iguanadon
A mad woman was squatting in the outer office. I’d unwittingly let in a mad woman. She’d shivered, twitched, looked me up and down and then insisted Johnny Havelock appraise the contents of her battered flat case.
I’d been standing at Johnny’s … Mister Havelock’s desk for a good few minutes now, in a kind of limbo, unable to speak but anxious. I’d left the mad woman in the outer office with the confidential papers fanned out on my desk.
Recently, Mister Havelock had taken to making me wait. If I needed to ask him something he’d first raise his eyebrow, the facial equivalent of a holding e-mail, and then finish whatever he was doing. The building might be on fire. It didn’t matter. I’d have to wait.
Since the last company rationalization, a new formality had characterized our working relationship. He liked to call me Miss Merton now. I addressed him as Mr Havelock, not Johnny. He’s such a Johnny, though.
He glanced up and blinked as if he’d only just noticed me.
‘Miss Merton?’
‘There’s a Selima Gayler to see you.’
He threw his pencil so hard onto the desktop that it bounced off and clicked on the rim of the wastepaper receptacle.
‘Jesus of the Tits,’ he said. ‘Not again.’
‘She has shoulder pads,’ I said, spreading out my arms to indicate their width.
‘Still? Do me a favour, will you? Petty-cash it. Take her to lunch. Don’t be too mean.’
I pressed my hand to my heart.
‘Me? Mean?’
‘Not Elba’s or The Top Floor. And the answer’s no, whatever she says.’
An old man was peering through his face again. Over the last six months or so I’d noticed him age. The groove across his chin had deepened and his ears had started to purple. He’d had a good run, though. He couldn’t complain.
I turned on my heels and rehearsed the speech about a plane waiting on a runway, a business trip to Bahrain.
I decided to take Selima to Tabouki and described the menu as we took the stairs. They do a delicious but reasonably priced meze with frankly superior spicy lamb sausages and wonderful haydari. At first she seemed keen. Outside the office, though, she parked the case between her gym shoes.
‘Are you certain he can’t spare five minutes?’ she said.
‘Departure is at two-thirty, I’m afraid.’
She lit a cigarette and leant sullenly against the building as she smoked. It was difficult to judge her age. Somewhere between Johnny and me, I supposed. If she dyed the grey in her hair she would have looked younger. If she’d let her dogtooth-check jacket share a hot tub with Mr Dry Cleaning, and if she’d worn tights with that red leather miniskirt or tanned her legs she could have made more of herself. She’d once had a golden age, though. She used to turn heads. I could tell.
‘It used to be a much bigger building,’ she said. ‘There was a huge, wonderful foyer, a terrific space.’
‘Before my time,’ I said.
‘There were hundreds of you.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You used to be in Endell Street. Then Rotherhithe. It took me so much asking about to find him again.’
‘Are you warm enough, Selima?’
‘I’d rather go to a pub, if that’s alright with you.’
As we walked her case kept scraping on the pavement. There was little traffic. Hardly anything passed us.
The lunchtime clientele in the Eustace Arms reminded me why we usually imbibe at Elba’s or The Top Floor. At least here I’d get triple points for pacifying her with nothing more expensive than a bottle of house red.
She worked her way through the bottle. I let a cup of wet caffeine go cold. The table needed mopping. She slid the case around on her knees and unzipped it. She reached deep inside it and then rummaged so frantically that the workmen at the bar stopped talking. When she started to curse and hiss they turned away. Papers fell out onto the table: sheets of graph paper covered with pencil diagrams; a recurring pyramid that rose and fell over a series of drawings; pages of scrawled notes in watery brown ink; versions of a man and sketches of some sort of animal that distorted and bled as the papers soaked up the beer-spills on the tabletop.
Each of the pages had a date scribbled in its top left-hand corner.
Some of the dates went back as far as when I was still at school.
I didn’t like it.
I didn’t like watching her distress mount when she couldn’t find whatever she wanted to show us.
‘Voila, maestra,’ she said.
She produced a laminated board. It was a photograph of some sort of sculpture standing in an untidy, oily place, spare metal limbs and plaster body parts strewn on the floor and sheets tacked to the walls.
‘You must pass on my apologies,’ said Selima. ‘You will pass on my apologies to Johnny, won’t you? It’s so late, you see … well, I’ll tell you, but you can’t tell Johnny. I had some problems. Don’t tell Johnny this but six … seven years ago I had another child. A gift, I suppose, but he was slower than the others. One day you might understand what that does to you, sister. And then I got even more behind, because Johnny changed from Knight to Mammoth Holdings, so it couldn’t be a knight anymore, and then he wasn’t Mammoth, he told me last time, so I had to start from scratch, from scratch you see. You do see that, don’t you?’
If I’m quite honest, the sculpture looked like a dinosaur made from random bits of other dinosaurs.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘It’s for your foyer, to stand beside the fountain. Running water and a sentinel image, that’s what he asked for.’
‘Selima, you’ve seen our premises. We can’t possibly accommodate this. Mr Havelock says he’s sorry. I’m very sorry.’
I tensed. She looked like she was going to burst into tears.
‘But it’s for him. I made it for him. He wanted it. He said. He used to be ever so appreciative.’
‘Really? Was he?’
‘Ever so. Ever so appreciative of me. When we first met.’
A cold feeling hardened around my shoulders. I let her go on. I tried not to listen while she told me a romantic story. I kept thinking about the dates on the sketches. I’d been at school, the very first few years of secondary school and not yet held hands with a boy when Selima first started to date the stages of her construction. I pictured Selima in her room, with her pieces and parts, trying to anticipate what he’d want and what he could do for her.
After her story fizzled out with not much of an ending she collected her papers and returned the laminate to the case. She zipped it up and shrugged. She shrugged like an aunt might shrug, an aunt at yet another wedding, another doomed mismatch.
We said polite things to one another, and then parted at the crossroads between the office and the station. I watched her fade into the glistening street. She was keeping the case up now. I wondered if she’d accidentally-on-purpose lose it on the train.
I had done my job.
Outside the office I found myself leaning against the building in the same place Selima had stood, minus the gasper, unable to go in, unable go back.
Oh no, I thought, oh dear. Those dates on the pages. The things on the floor. The time in that room. The dates on the pages. The limbs on the floor. The pieces. The parts.
*Ashley Stokes’s fiction has appeared in a variety of journals and
anthologies and he won a 2002 Bridport Prize for The Suspicion of Bones. His first novel, Touching the Starfish was published in February 2010 by www.unthankbooks.com. He has recently completed The Syllabus of Errors: Twelve Stories of Obsession, Loss and Getting in a State and is working on a second collection Forever Breathes the Lonely Word.