“And did you see what she was wearing?” Dave said, and then they all laughed.
A pit formed in my stomach and knotted so tightly that it made me want to be sick.
“Hey, I wonder if Gareth will get a mystery birthday card this year?” Nonnie asked.
“I’m sure, everyone in the office does,” I heard Dave say as I pushed the door open behind the kitchen and raced downstairs to the basement, where my office was. On the way down Cynthia rushed past me. She worked on the same floor I did, on the good side, though. The side that wasn’t next to the hot server room and storeroom.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey, Zen.” She stopped and looked at me.
Finally, someone that knew me! Cynthia was in charge of accounts here. She did all the billing, sending of quotes, getting purchase orders and then invoicing. It was a long, tedious job. Especially at the end of tax year, she often pulled all-nighters around that time.
“So much work to do today,” she said. “What with all the load shedding this week, I am so behind. You probably have a lot to catch up on too.”
“Probably,” I said. “But not because of the power outages. Obviously, I was away this last week.”
Cynthia’s face scrunched up. “You were?”
“Yes,” I said flatly. “I was away the whole week. Didn’t you notice?”
“No. But I mean, you never really come out of your office during the day and your door is always shut so . . . Did you go on holiday?”
“No. I was in an accident,” I said, starting to feel hurt and offended.
“Oh no, shame.” She said it, but I could hear there was no real concern in her voice.
I pointed up at the mark on my forehead. “I’m sure you noticed this.”
“Oh, wasn’t that there before?”
“No.” I couldn’t hide the anger in my tone now. “It wasn’t.”
Cynthia shrugged casually. “Okay. Coooool. Have a good day.” And then she trotted back up the stairs and out of the door. I stood there for a while, holding onto the staircase railing. I felt like I was in that elevator again, falling. Only I wasn’t. Had I really worked here for so long and no one had noticed I was gone, or worse, even knew me? The thought made me feel like crying again. I rushed down the rest of the stairs to my office. I opened the door and slipped in. It was dark and I flipped on the lights. The room illuminated the shelves and shelves and cupboards and cupboards of files that filled it. I moved over to my desk, a small wooden table with a chair, nothing personal on it to tell you that a human had sat here for seven years. I looked out of the slot in the wall that allowed my co-workers to push the job bags into the room without even seeing me. Or throwing through their hand-scribbled timesheets, the ones that I was meant to make sense of and input into the computer software program that calculated everyone’s working hours so we knew how much to bill each client.
I looked at the massive pile of job bags that had been pushed through in my absence. There were at least a hundred lying there. Maybe more. Papers had fallen out of them too, strewn across the floor like bits of litter. Hundreds of scraps of badly scribbled bits of paper, like dead butterfly wings, also lay spread out across the floor. I reached down and started picking up the endless job bags. The big brown envelopes that are stuffed to breaking point with the creative work and endlessly changing briefs for each client and job. It was my responsibility to file these bags in an order that made some sort of sense in case they needed to be pulled out again. And with over fifty creatives working in the building, each one of them working on as many as seven different jobs at a time, the amount of job bags that came through that hole in the wall was endless. Not to mention the hand-written scraps of paper, or sometimes, if I was lucky, typed pieces of paper. If you’d asked me what my job was yesterday, this wouldnothave been it. Sitting in what was essentially a basement with a small single window close to the ceiling that looked out over the parking lot and hardly let any natural light in. Sometimes I got so panicky and claustrophobic in here that I had to pull a chair up to the wall, open the window, stick my head out and gulp in the fresh air. I was forced to do this pretty regularly. Everyone else in this office had space and air and light; I had none of those things.
“Here. It’s the latest bag for Craft Cola.” Suddenly a job bag slipped through the hole in the wall and fell onto the table below. I took it between my hands and looked down at it.
So, this was . . .
My job?
I looked over at the phone on my desk. I’d intended to call my parents the night before, but the strange lack of phone in my apartment had rendered it impossible. I dialed their number now, rather excited that I would soon speak to someone who had missed me, who had been worried about me and had noticed I was gone. Only, I was sorely mistaken . . .
I slipped the key into my apartment door. It was ten o’clock at night. It had taken hours and hours to get the job bags sorted and input all the numbers, and I wasn’t even finished yet. I walked into the apartment that still didn’t feel like mine, from a job thatreallydidn’t feel like mine. The lights flicked on; the beige didn’t come to life. It sort of whisper-murmured with boring insipidness. I tossed my bag onto the sofa, but it was so hard that the bag bounced and hit the floor. It wasn’t even a comfortable sofa. I was starved, so went to the freezer and grabbed one of the meals inside it.Maybe it wasn’t as bad as it sounded. Maybe it would surprise me.
I popped it into the microwave and then made my way to the sofa and sat down. I turned the TV on and scanned my “To Watch” lists. Series after series after series stared back at me. They seemed to be a mix of two things. Shows about dating, and shows about murder. I had no idea what that said about me, but I think it definitely said something. There were no movies really; clearly, I preferred TV shows. I sat back on the uncomfortable couch and pressed play randomly on something, anything to help take me away from this reality. A TV show about people on the autism spectrum trying to date filled the screen and I immediately thought of Noah when I saw two people at a restaurant eating together. In fact, Noah had been on my mind a lot that day. I didn’t want him on my mind, though. Noah was from a time in my life that wasn’t real.
The microwave dinged and I walked over to it and changed the settings to “cook” for four minutes. Which is one minute and thirty seconds more than it should be, but with chicken I prefer to overcook it. There are things like salmonella, E.coli and, of course, listeria . . . you just never know!
“What?” I said out loud. The person of two days ago would never have been afraid of chicken. Never been afraid of catching some invisible disease from it. But I was no longer Zoe, I was Zen. Zenobia and, apparently, she was full of phobia. I briefly smiled at the alliteration, and then it faded when I realized how sad that actually was.
The microwave gave another ding and I pulled out the hot chicken, rice and broccoli and dropped it onto a plate. It certainly didn’t look appetizing. The bright white breast stared blandly and featurelessly back at me. You could see it hadn’t been seasoned at all. It lay on a small bed of brown rice that looked just as unappealing without some kind of sauce on it.
I walked my food back to the sofa and sat again, changing the channels and trying to decide between two shows. I flicked between the channels. A show on Indian matchmaking, or a show on the worst murders in America? I chose the dating show. I liked watching dating shows, even though it was clear I never went on dates. In fact, the closest thing to a date that I had been on for years were these past few days with Noah.
Noah.
