Читать книгу Walter - Ashley Sievwright - Страница 7

He ended up driving his car to work that day. At first he was going to catch the next train and he stood waiting on the platform as more corporate commuters turned up to wait alongside him. But as the minutes ticked by he felt increasingly positive that he wasn’t going to get on the next train either, so he returned through the still-wet streets of Wintergardens to his house, got the car out and headed off towards the freeway on-ramp where he queued with all the other cars.

It wasn’t, as it turned out, a great decision. He ended up caught in a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam on the West Gate Bridge where there was one lane out due to a broken down truck. The clouds had disappeared completely by this stage and the sun was further up in the sky, warming the wet bridge until it seemed to be steaming. Walter had the windows up and the air-con on low. He also had a CD playing. He was, perhaps incongruously, listening to a chill-out album called Ibiza Summer, with slow beats, the sound of waves crashing on a shore and a man’s voice chanting abstract and vaguely sexual lyrics. Yeah baby, oooh, yeah baby.

Walter’s mobile phone, secure in its hands-free cradle, rang. He glanced at the display and saw who was calling.

Oh crap! Maggie!

His wife’s actual name was Margaret but she was only ever called Maggie, and the words ‘oh crap’, at least in Walter’s head, were often aligned with her name.

Walter had been fascinated by Maggie when he was a young man, absolutely fascinated, and had married her presuming blithely that theirs would be a happy marriage. The best that could be said of it now was that it wasn’t actively unhappy.

She was an attractive woman, with dark hair, pearly skin and a sense of entitlement about her. She had grown up having her mother, Arlette, tell her she was a princess, could do anything she wanted in life, have anything she wanted. A sense of entitlement was perhaps not an attractive trait, and on Maggie who was a little aloof and withdrawn, it was sometimes unattractive.

Arlette had been, albeit very briefly, a model—one of those Paris End of Collins Street set who were incredibly chic there for a few years in the fifties. To this day she had on display the photo Helmet Newton had taken of her in a stiff shift coat, holding a square handbag and (apparently) hailing a cab, very po-faced and straight-armed, with one leg kicked out behind her.

Following her short modelling career, in which Paton pattern books featured heavily, Arlette worked for a number of years, until her marriage and Maggie’s subsequent birth, as a consultant with a finishing school. Even in the mid to late 60s the idea of a finishing school in Melbourne was anachronistic, but it had survived to the present day. It was now called the Potter-Hopkins School of Personal Development, but it stil ran short courses in manners, grooming, which cutlery to use at dinner, and how to get out of a car without showing your undies.

Walter was not a fan of his mother-in-law. She was pinched and thin, dressed in power suits from the 80s, which now stood off her thin frame like dolls’ clothes. She wore bright patches of rouge and lipstick and her hair was thin and brittle, tortured regularly by permanent wave and blow-waved in a big curve off her face every morning. She looked, he thought, like a voodoo doll of herself.

There was (Walter would have said, ‘unfortunately’) a little bit of Arlette in Maggie. A little bit. It was in the way she moved and the way she held her cigarette—yes she smoked, Walter could not get her to quit. It was in the way she ate. It was in the way she got out of a car without showing her undies.

Maggie had told Walter early on in their relationship, and it was one of the things about her which fascinated him, that she had worn white gloves in public until the age of twelve.

He was mostly unsure about what was going on under his wife’s careful exterior. Sometimes he was wary of her, and other times he was, well, not to put too fine a point on it, just a little scared of her. With good reason it would seem, as just the other night she had tried to smother him in his sleep. Although when he said it like that, said it actually to Maggie: ‘I can’t believe you tried to smother me in my sleep,’ she just scoffed and repeated: ‘Smother you,’ in a mocking voice, as if he was just being a very silly boy. But what else did you call it when someone put a pillow over your face while you were asleep?

‘You were having a nightmare,’ Maggie said blandly.

‘That’s no … reason to put a pillow …’ He was panting.

Maggie closed her eyes.

‘Do you think you could move to the spare room? I really need to get some sleep.’

‘Well, yes. I suppose … but there was no need for … that.’

OK, so he had been having one of his nightmares. They had been a regular feature of their lives over the past year, since his return from hospital, but for some time now they hadn’t been as bad. He still had them occasionally, and he knew that it must be annoying for Maggie, being woken up like that in the middle of the night by a jittery, flailing person—because that’s what she’d described him as, jittery and flailing, not a description he relished, not exactly the way a kind, supportive, considerate wife might describe her husband at one of his more vulnerable moments.

He and Maggie had been married nearly fifteen years. What did you get for that anniversary he wondered? His more blokey neighbours, he felt sure, would be certain to answer: ‘Parole.’ Parole, Walter thought, mightn’t be a bad thing, because no matter which way you cut it, you had to consider that your marriage had got to a pretty bad place when your wife was putting a pillow over your face in the middle of the night.

Despite the rather large number of things that Walter’s internal voice had imagined saying to his wife, or he’d told Dr Feldman he would like to say to his wife, as he pressed the button on his mobile phone that morning in his car, stuck in traffic on the West Gate Bridge, muting the chill-out music and answering the phone simultaneously, he had no intention of saying any of them.

‘Hiya,’ he answered. Very un-him.

‘Why did you take the car?’ Maggie said. No preamble. Not really a question.

‘I missed the train. I was running late. I needed to get in to work in a hurry.’ The irony of the traffic being at that moment at a complete standstill was not lost on Walter. He looked at the time on the dash display. He was late.

‘But I need the car today, Walter.’

She had her own car, their second car, a little blue Mazda, but it was at the shop after ‘a little bingle’ as Maggie had described it.

‘I’m sorry. I really am sorry, but it was just that …’

‘Oh never mind.’ There was a beep and the call was terminated. Maggie was usually the one to terminate the call.

Walter pressed the End Call button on the phone viciously and said in a falsely cheery voice: ‘Bye then.’ A car behind him beeped its horn. He looked up and noticed that the traffic had moved forward about ten metres and stopped again.

‘OK OK!’ Walter said to the car in his rear-view mirror.

He took his foot from the brake and rolled forward. The car behind stuck closely to his bumper, moving forward with small jerks. Walter didn’t like tailgaters. Then again who did? He gently applied the brakes and rolled ever so slowly to a stop a good couple of car-lengths away from the car in front of him. He glanced in the rear-view mirror again with a slight smirk on his face.

‘Arse-wipe,’ he said.

*

When Walter finally got into the city it was already 8.45am and he was a good forty-five minutes late. This didn’t matter particularly as most of the others in the office didn’t start until 9.00am, but he liked to begin earlier. That first hour in the morning, with the rest of the office half deserted, was the most productive part of the day. He got most of his work done then. The remainder of the day was fragmented and disjointed by the comings and goings of the rest of the office staff. The simplest of tasks were interrupted and lengthened, he felt, by phone calls, or people turning up and wanting to speak to him face to face. Of course this was partly because of that most horrible of arrangements: open plan.

He entered the car park and resigned himself to the long drive up and around the levels to the top. By this time of the morning all the lower levels were full. In fact he had to drive all the way up to the very top level before he found a spot. He pulled in and turned off the engine but not the music. For a moment he sat there in his climate controlled interior, in his own world, a world without tailgate drivers and open plan offices, a world possibly without Maggie, certainly without her nagging, and definitely without trains. But perhaps that was asking a bit too much of Ibiza Summer. He turned off the music and got out of the car.

*

Walter worked for Equity Insurance. Their motto, as displayed under the logo was ‘Probity, Honesty, Integrity’. He had always found this motto a little embarrassing—what were they, Knights of the Round Table? He wished he had been in the boardroom with the senior executive team around a table the day they were brainstorming virtues appropriate for the motto, so that he could have thrown something a bit more interesting into the mix—chastity perhaps, or even sobriety? Cleanliness? Everyone knew that was right up there next to godliness.

The Equity Insurance firm had offices in William Street in the Melbourne CBD. That part of town was resolutely corporate, a hive of activity during the working week, but mostly dead in the evenings and during the weekends, apart from the nearby King Street with its lap-dancing venues and grotty reputation. The Equity Insurance building wasn’t a particularly interesting building. It was built somewhere in the late 80s and there was a huge echoing foyer lined with white faux-granite and mirrors, two huge revolving doors at the front and a bank of six lifts. There were twenty-three floors, a number of them given over to various areas of Equity Insurance—financial services, life insurance, wealth management, the executive floor and HR. The call centres were elsewhere, although not yet offshore, Walter was pleased to note.

Walter worked in life insurance as an actuarial analyst. It wasn’t a particularly interesting job, but he was a numbers man, he was a spreadsheet kind of guy and so it suited him. Given his age, he should probably have risen naturally up the ladder a little higher than he had, but just as waiters and shopkeepers overlooked him, so did the executive team when it came to promotion, new opportunities, project work, and so on. In this case though, Walter was more or less happy to remain ‘under the radar’ (horrid term) because in common, he was sure, with much of the population and certainly many of his co-workers, he didn’t really give a stuff about his job. Well, he did and he didn’t. It suited him, certainly, considering he had an aptitude for the sort of number crunching required and didn’t particularly feel interested in, or good at, interacting with the public in the form of Equity Insurance clients. The wage suited him, which was good without being incredible and was paid into his account fortnightly, the four weeks of holiday suited him, taken pretty much when he liked, and the options for voluntary contributions to his Super and car payments suited him, reducing his wage below a certain threshold which meant he got taxed less. The routine of it suited him, and the longer he was there, the more he knew the work, the less it impinged on him, the less he had to think about it. It was this more than anything that suited him, the ease of it all. In a way he no longer even noticed that he worked for Equity Insurance.

Sometimes he wondered, sometimes, in a flash of perspective, for just a second, he wondered what he was saving himself for, but that thought flustered him a little, in some way he didn’t understand. It was one of those thoughts with a huge unexplored well of blackness behind it, and it wasn’t really in Walter’s nature to plumb those depths.

His team leader, Dev, a self-described ‘young gun’, was straight out of university into Equity, and had already had two promotions. He was snippy about punctuality, but luckily so was Walter, so that was never a bone of contention. Even so there was little love lost between them. Walter didn’t have a very good relationship with any of his co-workers really, probably because he wasn’t the type to go out to the pub with his workmates, or for a curry with Dev. In fact, in his last performance appraisal (a demeaning experience having his performance appraised by Dev) one of the comments made was: ‘… needs to be a better team player’. Walter had smiled at Dev benignly during this part of the performance appraisal process, but in his head he was thinking: team player this, and imagined himself giving Dev two middle fingers.

A while back Walter had told Dr Feldman that he longed sometimes to tell Dev to go get fucked. Those specific three words, he thought, although not grammatically stellar, were important—not only was Dev to get fucked, which was, of course, quite damning in itself, but he was to go to do it, go, that is, away from him, Walter, and do it somewhere out of his sight, because he couldn’t even be bothered watching it—those three words, he felt, so perfectly expressed disinterest and disdain in equal measures, he was quite pleased with them.

‘So this Dev makes you feel angry?’ Dr Feldman had asked him.

‘Angry?’ Walter had repeated, wide eyed.

‘Yes. You sounded very angry just then. When you said you wanted to tell him to go get fucked. I mean, that sounded angry to me.’

‘Did it?’

‘U-huh.’

‘Oh,’ Walter had said to the doctor. ‘I do apologise.’

‘Why don’t you tell him how you feel?’

‘Tell him?’

‘Yes. Not perhaps in those exact words …’

‘Oh,’ Walter said, slightly flustered. ‘I couldn’t do that. He’s Indian.’

*

Walter had a cubicle in an open plan office. His was a very neat desk with computer, phone and various stationery items arranged neatly, parallel to each other, all tidy and rigidly spaced, as if measured. He didn’t know it, but sometimes while he was away from his desk, out to lunch or in a meeting or something, his co-worker Mick would come up to his desk and move one of the items, maybe his stapler, so that it sat cocked a little to the side, just the smallest bit out of alignment. Then, when Walter returned to his desk, Mick, and sometimes some of the others, would be watching from a few cubicles away, peeking over the carpet divider, waiting for Walter to notice and correct the position of the stapler, which he did immediately, automatically, every time. He didn’t hear their titters of laughter, or if he did he presumed they were laughing at something else.

That morning was exactly the same as any other in Walter’s work life—that was kind of the point with him—but in the back of his mind he was unable to stop thinking about that man at the station. Don’t get on the next train. It was there with him all morning, like something hovering over his shoulder, in his peripheral vision. By mid-morning he decided he had to do something about it. He went and got himself a cup of tea—first things first—black with two sugars. Then, after checking the whereabouts of Dev, whose cubicle backed onto his (he was safely ensconced in the Senior Staff Meeting and wouldn’t be out until lunch) he logged on to the internet and checked a couple of local news websites. He glanced down through the headlines—something about the outcome of a major crime trial, sporting news, some political mumbo-jumbo about the next budget, blah blah, but nothing was reported as having occurred on or to the 7.15am express from Wintergardens to the city. Perhaps it was ridiculous of him to think that something had happened, but checking the internet news pages, finding out, knowing for sure, that wasn’t ridiculous at all, that was just conscientious.

Perhaps the story, whatever it might be, just hadn’t been reported yet. It was only—he glanced at the time on the bottom right hand side of his computer screen—10.45am after all. He tapped his fingers on his desk, then, after a moment, he looked around the office. Most of the desks near his were empty. The coast, as they say, was clear.

He typed another web address in the browser and found the website of the company that ran the suburban train system in Melbourne. A few more clicks and he had found a phone number for enquiries. He picked up his phone, dialled zero for an outside line, then dialled the number.

The call was answered by a recorded voice giving Walter various options. He pressed zero to be put through to a real person. Soon enough someone answered. A woman.

‘Hello,’ Walter said. ‘I wonder if you could put me through to …’ Only then did he realise that he probably should have thought ahead to this moment. ‘Information,’ he finished lamely.

‘Information on our services, Sir?’

‘Well no, not that. Information about …’

‘Timetables?’

‘No, no. Is there someone I could talk to who could tell me about the … well, tell me if anything happened to the 7.15am express from Wintergardens this morning?’

‘Tell you if anything happened to it?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Like what, Sir?’

‘I don’t know. An accident? A … something. I don’t know.’

There was a considerable pause before the voice resumed.

‘Could you please hold the line, Sir? I’ll get someone to speak with you.’

Walter waited. He swapped the phone to his other ear and gave a quick look around the office. No-one close enough to overhear.

Soon a new voice was on the phone. A man this time.

‘Hello, Sir. Is there something I can help you with?’

‘I just wanted to know if anything happened to the Wintergardens train this morning.’

‘Could I have your name, please, Sir?’

Walter hesitated. He blinked a couple of times. Oh crap!

He hung up quickly, slamming the phone down with such violence that a conversation a couple of cubicles away stopped dead. He sat hunched and still until the conversation started up again.

His hand was still on the phone when it rang. He jumped and withdrew his hand to his chest as if it was burnt. Then, after a moment and a breath or two, he picked it up again. It was Ros-at-Reception (he thought of her like that, not Ros, but Ros-at-Reception), a middle-aged woman who had obviously once been told, possibly on some professional development course, that she should always answer the phone with a smile because the person on the other end could hear it. Having done the job perhaps a little too long, the smile had gradually become a grimace, and her voice, when she answered the phone, ‘Equity-Insurance-good-afternoon’, sounded lilting, arch and incredibly insincere.

‘Man here to see you,’ she said shortly. She didn’t smile for internal calls.

‘Really?’ Walter didn’t usually get visitors to the office. ‘Who is it?’

There was a pause as Ros-at-Reception presumably asked the visitor for a name.

‘A Mr Michael Everaardt,’ she said.

Walter had never heard the name before. Didn’t have a clue who it was.

‘I’ll come round.’

The man waiting in Reception was young, dressed in denim jeans and an untucked button shirt, with a sports jacket over it. He had brown hair and a triangular tuft of facial hair under his bottom lip. He was slightly crumpled and gave Walter the impression of being a slacker. He extended his hand as Walter approached, and Walter, still not knowing who he was or what this was about, extended his own hand. They shook hands, three pumps, up and down, of medium firmness—entirely appropriate for a greeting in a business setting.

‘Mr Kovak?’ the young man asked.

‘That’s right. And you’re Michael … Everaardt was it?’

‘That’s right.’

‘What can I do for you?’

‘I wonder if I can have a minute or two of your time?’ he said, not really explaining anything.

Selling something, Walter wondered? Although that didn’t seem right.

‘I suppose so,’ he said. He checked with Ros-at-Reception that the smaller of the meeting rooms just off Reception was free and they went in there. He indicated a seat and the young man sat down, folded his hands on the table and leaned toward Walter.

Not selling something, Walter decided. The body language was wrong. He had recently done some reading on body language. This man was trying to ingratiate himself, certainly, but not in a sales kind of way. This was something else.

Walter’s mind flashed back to the phone call he had made to the train company just moments ago, and flushed with embarrassment and guilt. How stupid to ring a transport company and ask if anything had happened to one of their services. He remembered how the person who he had been transferred to, the one who kept calling him Sir, had asked him for his name, and how he had then hung up. He couldn’t have sounded any more like a terrorist if he tried.

He looked at the young man sitting with his hands folded on the table. Surely they couldn’t have traced him so quickly.

‘I want to talk to you about the accident,’ the young man said.

*

‘Tell me about the accident,’ Dr Feldman had said.

‘Why?’ Walter had responded in a surly manner.

This was in the early days, soon after coming out of hospital, before he had got into his groove with Dr Feldman.

‘I want you to.’

‘Why? I don’t understand why.’

‘I’m asking you to, that’s why.’

‘You know what happened.’

‘Correct.’

‘So why do you want me to tell you? It’s stupid. It’s irrelevant. It’s unnecessary.’

‘All of those things, yes. But Walter, that’s why you’re here.’

Yeah yeah. He was there to talk about the accident. The Australian Centre for Post Traumatic Mental Health had referred him to Dr Feldman. That’s where all this psychiatrist stuff had started. But he didn’t want to talk about the accident—he didn’t even want to think about it.

*

Michael Everaardt sat watching Walter who seemed a million miles away, his eyes blank and staring straight ahead.

‘Are you OK?’ he asked after a while.

He touched Walter on the elbow.

At the touch Walter’s eyes slowly focussed.

‘Can I get you something? Some water?’ Michael asked.

‘No …’ Walter said. ‘No thanks. Who are you?’

Michael wriggled in his chair. This, he knew, was where things were going to get sticky—stickier.

‘I’m a writer.’

‘Oh,’ Walter said with considerable dislike. ‘You mean a journalist, don’t you?’

‘I know you feel you were hounded by the press, but if you could just give me just a few minutes … I can assure you, you’ll have final say on what’s in and what’s …’

Walter didn’t appear to be listening. He got up slowly from his chair and stood with his feet firmly planted. Michael didn’t know this about Walter, of course, having never met him, but the stolid, sturdy stance was very much a Walter thing.

‘No,’ he said simply.

Michael stood also and put his hand out to touch Walter on the arm soothingly.

‘I’m sure we could come to some …’

‘No we couldn’t,’ Walter said, moving away slightly. ‘I think you should go.’

So he went. There was little else he could do. Coming as he had without making an appointment, without announcing his intentions or his profession, was stupid enough, without compounding the felony by making a complete arsehole of himself now.

Michael considered himself a pragmatic kind of guy and, with only the slightest head-nod of acknowledgement to Walter, he walked back out into the foyer and pressed the lift-call button.

As amazing as it was considering their shared circumstances, this had been his very first face-to-face meeting with Walter Kovak. He had seen the wife before, Maggie was it? But never Walter himself, well not properly. He’d seen photos of him in the papers and news footage of him leaving the hospital, but he’d never seen him in the flesh like this, back in his own life, in his own suit and tie, out of the news and back at work.

He had been, he admitted to himself, slightly excited by the prospect. In fact, wasn’t it this that had led him into acting so rashly? So easy, wasn’t it, to look him up on the net, find out where he worked, ask at Reception if he could see him? They’d sent him out just like that, as if he was just anybody. And so he’d got his first face-to-face look at Walter Kovak.

And yet … like someone meeting their favourite movie star and finding out that he or she was shorter than expected, or their skin wasn’t as perfect as it was up on screen, that they were annoying or tongue-tied or rude, or worse that they were old—that they were, in fact, ordinary, everyday people— Michael was aware of a feeling of acute disappointment. Here was a man who had survived a major accident, a man who had survived against the most alarming, the most stupendous odds, and yet face to face he was a totally ordinary bloke, kind of daggy, working in an insurance firm. There was nothing special about him at all.