“Help! Help!” I shouted, banging on the door. I could hear my banging and my shouting echoing down the hall, but no one shouted back. No one came for me.
“No, no, no!” I looked around the room in a total panic. What if there was a real fire? What if this wasn’t a drill and I was trapped and I was going to burn alive? Do you know how painful being burnt alive is? I called out for help again, but still didn’t get a response. I finally looked up at the tiny window at the top of the wall. It was my only escape. But how the hell was I going to squeeze through it?
CHAPTER 38
“Zenobia? Zenobia?” my boss called, looking out over the crowd assembled in front of him in the parking lot.
“Zenobia?” He said the name as if he’d never heard it before. The way his mouth formed and wrapped around the letters sounded strange. As if this specific group of letters and syllables was totally foreign to him and this was the first time his mouth was making them.
“Zeeenobiaaaaa,” he said again, stretching all the letters out as his mouth began getting comfortable with the sounds. I watched as people started looking at each other, shaking their heads. A murmur started. I could make out snippets of what was being said as I hung halfway out the window. I’d had to pull boxes of files out and make a tower in order to get high enough to reach it and climb through.
“I don’t think a Zenobia works here?” Angi said. How the hell did Angi not know who I was? I knew almost everything about her. I had read her personal file. She was twenty-five; this was her first job out of college, where she’d come top of her class in animation graphics!
“Didn’t she work here once, and then leave?” Ed from the IT department said, which I couldnotbelieve. He’d come around only a month ago to fix my computer! How did he not know who I was? We’d even had a conversation while he was there in which we’d established that he hated rainy weather and would rather it be sunny.
Someone must know who the fuck I was! Someone. Anyone.
And then, to my relief, Cynthia stepped forward. “Zen works in the room at the end of the basement passage. She does our timesheets,” she said. Everyone turned around and looked at her blankly.
“Well, I think she does. I know she does the job bags, though. I just assumed she does the timesheets because that’s where we hand them in.”
“Aaaaahhh!” Another murmur rose up from the crowd, as people suddenly started to click. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen who works in there,” someone else said. I craned my neck to see who was talking, while still trying to pull my body fully through the window. It was Sello. The cool strategist. The guy that everyone looked up to and wanted to be, even though he was always the last one in the office in the morning and the first one to leave in the evenings and probably did the least amount of work.
A few “me neither”s rang out, a lot of head-shaking and general face-scrunching took place, and that’s when it happened. Like something uncontrollable. Something inside me snapped. I could simplify this all by saying it must have been the champagne, I mean, who drinks three glasses of champagne before coming to work? That was surely the reason it happened. I could maybe even say that being psychosomatically burnt alive might have also contributed to this. But that would all be a lie. That explanation would be far too simplistic for what happened next. Because I knew that this had nothing to do with the champagne or the imagined flames. This was a feeling that had been much, much, much longer in the making. This was a feeling that I’d been sitting with inside me for years and years. A feeling that had been weighing on me for so long that today it was just too much to take and I finally crumpled under its weight. I could no longer be this invisible ghost that worked downstairs in a crappy, damp, musty basement filing room that no one seemed to know, or care about. I pulled myself fully out the window, and then, teetering on the small windowsill, I jumped down and hit the floor with an audible thud. And then I screamed.
“IT’S ME! I AM ZENOBIA!” My voice came out high-pitched, and everyone turned and looked at me. I rushed forward and stared at all my co-workers. “I am the person that no one bothered to look for or think about when a fire might have started. The person that no one even noticed was missing after an almost fatal fucking accident in an elevator that landed me up in hospital for daaaaayyys! And YES, I am also the person who does the fucking timesheets every single bloody day! Did no one ever wonder how all those crappy hand-scribbled bits of torn, flappy paper that you shove through that hole in the wall then get translated into something that actually makes sense and then finds its way into your . . .” I pointed at the MD now. “Your inbox! Did you not realize that someone called Zenobia did that for you? Did the email address [email protected] not alert you to the fact that someone called Zen might work for you? That someone called Zen trawled through all those crappy bits and pieces and things that aren’t even written on paper sometimes.” I pointed at someone in the third row, “Like you, Andile! Stop writing your fucking hours on scraps of chocolate paper. Do you know how many ants that brings into my ‘office’?” I made very large and dramatic air commas. “Office!” I scoffed. “As if! You know how cold it gets in there in winter? It’s like a bloody icebox, but none of you would know that, now would you, because none of you have ever set foot in it. It’s probably not even legal to have someone work in there. I bet that room is a safety hazard, hardly any fresh air. Almost zero light. Only a really crappy person would stick another human being into a damp, dingy icebox.” I turned to the MD and scowled at him, and his eyes widened in shock, and then anger. “And while I am at it, just a general note, please can you all try to write a little better. Most of you look like you didn’t even make it past Grade Two with your bloody writing. Like you, Eric!” I pointed at Eric, who was one of the illustrators. “You might be able to draw, but let me tell you, you can’t write! I can’t tell your ‘l’s’ from your ‘f’s’! And that becomes a problem when one of your clients is called ‘Lucky Loo Clothing.’ ” I paused and looked around to gauge the effects of my rant. People were still looking at me as if they had never seen me before in their lives.
“You still don’t know who I am, do you?” I looked around the floor and then saw something. Two pieces of cardboard lay strewn there. I grabbed them and held them up to my face, cutting it in half, so only my eyes and forehead were visible. “Well!” I screeched. “Does this ring any bells yet? HUH? HUH?” I peered through the small hole I’d just created with the pieces of cardboard and everyone suddenly started to nod in acknowledgment. I dropped the pieces of cardboard, now feeling totally gutted. I had worked there for seven years and the only way these people recognized me was when I peered at them through a hole that only showed my eyes and forehead. I felt tears well up. But I was not going to cry! I wasn’t going to cry!
“And you know what else?” I said, and despite not wanting to cry, I could hear my voice was shaky now. “Iam the one that makes you all the cards. That’s me. The one who puts the birthday and congratulations cards on your desks, because the thing is, I know so much about each and every single one of you that I feel like I know you, and you have no idea who I am. Do you?” I put my hands on my hips and stared out over the crowd. I might as well be a ghost to everyone here. And I knew this wasn’t entirely their fault either; I had deliberately made myself into a ghost. Like I had with my neighbor. I waited for someone to say something to me. Anything. For someone to step forward and say, “Oh yes, I know you! I see you!” But no one did. Not even Cynthia. Everyone just stared at me in wide-eyed, gaping shock. So I turned my back on all the people I had “shared” my life with for seven years and I ran. Ran to the one person in the world who probably cared about me.
CHAPTER 39
I banged on the door, tears running down my face, I couldn’t keep them down; they had been pouring out of my eyes the entire way here. And when the door opened, the relief washed over me in waves and I couldn’t hold back.
“I’m here,” I said, wiping tears from my eyes and looking at this man that I didn’t recognize but knew I knew.
“Where have you been? I’ve been looking for you,” he said.
“I know! I know!” I nodded my head and then rushed towards him for a hug.
“Whoa, whoa . . . what are you doing?” He stepped back and held his hands up, blocking me.
“I was trying to hug you.” I was still smiling at him.
“We don’t hug,” he said flatly.
“So I’ve heard. And I’m sorry. I don’t remember how long we’ve been friends, because I can’t really remember— Long story, I’ll tell you soon, but I swear I’m going to start hugging you. I want to change. I know I probably haven’t been the best of friends towards you, but I’m ready to start now.” I stepped forward and tried to hug Eugene again. And he took a big step back.
“Uh . . . we’re not friends,” he said.
“What? We are!”
“No. We’re not.”
I blinked. “But you left me all those notes. You filed a missing person report? Of course we’re friends.”
“I only left you those notes and filed the missing person report because I thought you had done a runner on me.”
