Читать книгу Walter - Ashley Sievwright - Страница 8

Walter was washing up his mug in a small, drab kitchenette when Mick walked in with another young man very much in the Mick mould, a face that Walter hadn’t noticed around Equity Insurance before. Mick was younger than Walter, perhaps in his mid to late twenties. He belonged to a group of young men, mostly Aussie, who all went to bars together after work on a Friday night, or out for lunchtime curries, or for a Red Bull and a smoke, or whatever it was they did when they disappeared from the office. He was pasty faced and flabby, and wore loose-fitting, slightly too-big trousers halfway down his arse, a half untucked shirt and loosened tie. He had a general air of not caring about the job (not that Walter would hold that against him particularly) and not being particularly intelligent, but he was, Walter thought with a sigh, the type who would get ahead.

Walter didn’t much like Mick. He didn’t like these sorts of young men. He didn’t understand them. The way they spoke for example.

Hey, mate.

Alright?

All good.

Much on?

Yeah. You?

Enough.

That’s the way.

How could they go on like that, with a whole string of non-sequiturs, and then move away from each other as if they’d had some sort of conversation? Walter didn’t get it. He just didn’t get it.

Mick spoke to him with a smirk on his face and in his voice.

‘Walter. This is David. He’s new. With me over in wealth management.’

‘Hey, mate.’ David said.

Here we go, Walter thought.

‘Hello,’ he said with a polite smile. ‘Good to meet you. I hope you settle in OK.’

With that Walter presumed it was all over, so he dropped his eyes and made a movement indicating he wanted to pass out of the kitchenette, but Mick did not move aside. He stood blocking Walter’s way out of the pokey little space, subtly menacing through merely being so stolidly in the way with no intention of moving. He was, Walter thought, just like a grown-up schoolyard bully and even though it was a long time since he’d been at school, he instantly remembered the prickle of being singled out.

‘So, Walt,’ Mick said. ‘Got time for a quick one?’

So that’s what it was about.

‘Well, not really. I’ve got to finish the …’ He again made as if to step between them, but again Mick didn’t stand aside and so he fell back.

‘Come on. A quickie. Come onnn, Walt. No good holding out on us.’

Mick eyed David and smirked.

‘Oh, OK. OK. A quick one. Why not,’ Walter said.

‘Right. Dave, pick a method of dying. Anything you like. Anything.’

‘A what?’

‘A method of dying. Walt’s a gun with odds. Knows them all. Don’t you Walter?’

‘Well, a lot of them, yes. It’s really not that unusual.’ It wasn’t unusual. He worked in life insurance in actuaries—of course it wasn’t unusual. Well, maybe a little.

Dying was, of course, a certainty, but Walter knew the precise odds of dying by different methods. The big killers were heart disease which killed one in five of the population, cancer one in seven, and stroke one in twenty nine. But he also knew off by heart the odds of dying in other ways, right down to the more obscure methods of bee sting and lightning strike.

‘Come on,’ Mick said to David. ‘Pick.’

‘Ummm. Righto. Arrr—car accident.’

Mick smacked his hands over his eyes.

‘Too easy!’ he said.

But Walter was warming up into it now.

‘Fatal on site, or delayed?’ he asked.

‘Delayed?’ David asked.

‘He means died after—in hospital,’ Mick answered.

‘Err—fatal.’

‘Driver or passenger?’ Walter smiled now.

‘Err—driver.’

‘Based on current statistics, the lifetime odds of a driver dying on site after having been in a car accident are one in two hundred and forty four. So, for every two hundred and forty four people now living, one of them will die, whenever they die, in a car accident.’

‘In Victoria? Or Australia wide.’

‘That’s Australia-wide. You’re a bit safer in Victoria. Here only one in two hundred and seventy five people will die in a car accident.’

Dave was nodding, thinking. After a second he clicked his fingers and pointed at Walter.

‘What if you don’t drive?’ he asked, as if he’d found a loophole.

‘Then you’re unlikely to be that one person,’ Walter said dryly. He shrugged. ‘There are plenty of caveats, and being at risk of dying in a certain way isn’t the same as the odds of dying in that way. Risk varies with age and location and medical history. And of course the odds skew if there is an unexpected medical epidemic say, or a natural disaster. The odds of dying are based on generic overall number crunching, but they’re incredibly accurate all the same.’

‘Right,’ Dave said.

‘Good one, Walt.’

They were impressed, certainly, but there were still smirks across their faces. Walter knew that even though he had an impressive memory and had such detailed statistical information at his fingertips, he was, nonetheless, to them, an oddity. He made another move to leave the kitchenette, but again they remained standing in his way. He couldn’t get past them without pushing past, without crossing a line somewhere, breaking some rule of workplace etiquette—the ‘I pretend not to know you’re taking the piss and you pretend not to be taking the piss’ rule.

Don’t make me push past, he thought.

They just looked at him.

And suddenly Walter thought of the moment on the train station platform that morning when he had stood rooted to the spot, unable to enter the train, and people had met his eye, looked at him. He blushed at the memory. Sometimes he felt as if the worst thing in the world was to be looked at, sometimes he felt as if it bruised him.

*

Walter usually arrived at work at 8.00am, had his morning tea at 10.30am and his lunch at 12.30pm. That morning, having arrived at 8.45am, he found his routine out of whack—he had his morning cup of tea at 10.45am and he only noticed the time on his computer, grabbed his coat and headed out for lunch at 1.10pm.

Walter regularly bought his lunch at a sandwich shop around the corner from Equity, and he invariably got a ham, cheese, tomato sandwich and an orange juice. If the weather was bad he would eat in at one of the little tables down the back of the shop, or at the bench that lined the shop window. If the weather was good he would take his lunch and go to a nearby churchyard. It wasn’t that Walter was in any way religious—he had been brought up to be a good Catholic, as most Poles were, but had abandoned religion as soon as he moved out of home. He visited this little church, hidden away behind a spiked fence between two hi-rise buildings, because it had a small public garden that nobody seemed to know about. He enjoyed coming there to sit and eat his lunch on one of the benches under the straggly plane trees, watching the religious pass into and out of the church while the scrappy little city sparrows hopped around his feet and darted in for crumbs.

The sandwich shop was owned by a middle-aged couple and amazingly, given his track record with shop people, the second time he had gone there, so long ago now, the woman had remembered his order and had asked if he wanted the same thing. Walter was impressed that she had got it right, flattered and amazed that she had remembered him, and he nodded and agreed, even though he probably would have ordered something else. From that day on he had ‘the regular’ no matter what he actually felt like.

When it came time to pay for his lunch, Walter realised he was missing his wallet. He felt in his hip pocket, then patted the rest of his pants pockets, both front and back—nothing. He checked his coat pockets but again, nothing.

Perhaps he had left it in the office?

He apologised quickly to the woman who had made his sandwich and said they should keep it aside, he would be back shortly, that he’d left his wallet behind. The woman told him he could pay another day, but now that he knew he’d misplaced his wallet he wanted to find it as soon as possible.

It took him only five minutes to get back to his desk at Equity, but there was no sign of his wallet. He checked his briefcase—again no wallet.

Odd.

Perhaps it was in the car? He thought back to arriving that morning, late and a bit flustered. Had he taken his wallet out of his briefcase then? Perhaps to put away the car park ticket he took from the machine on entering?

It was only a quick trot a half block to the multi-level car park. When he got there he entered the lift, pressed a button for his level, then stood back and noticed a sign advising patrons that valuables should not be left visible in cars as this encouraged theft. As the lift ascended slowly to the top of the car park Walter stared at the poster. It had a tacky clipart picture, a silhouette of a hooded man with a crowbar, and a red circle with a line diagonally across the middle over the top of him. As the door dinged open Walter felt a sort of resignation wash over him.

Great, he thought. Just great.

He went to his car. The driver’s side window had been smashed. Little cubes of shattered glass were scattered all over the driver’s side seat and the floor. He peered in through the shattered window but could see no sign of his wallet. It also appeared that his CD player had been stolen. Ibiza Summer with it? Possibly.

He went to the passenger side, opened the door and got in, fastidiously brushing some of the broken glass off the seat first. He checked the glove box but found it empty. No wallet. No CDs. He sat there looking from the broken window to the gaping hole where his CD player had been. He felt this was just his luck. He said to himself, in his head, feeling sorry for himself: The story of my life. He sighed, and as he breathed in again he noticed something. He sniffed a couple of times, then wrinkled up his nose.

What was that smell?

He leaned across towards the driver’s side seat and sniffed. Again he smelt it, but not noticeably stronger. He looked into the back seat. There was nothing in there. He sniffed again, and again there was the smell but again not noticeably stronger.

What was it? It was definitely unpleasant and somehow human. Was it the smell of the man who had smashed the window of his car and sat, presumably, on the driver’s side seat on top of the glass? Yes, he thought, it was the smell of perspiration, unwashed clothes, stale cigarette smoke, and perhaps, he sniffed again, the slightest suggestion, somewhere in there, of human or animal faeces. Dog shit?

Walter got out of the car rather rapidly and returned to work. There, he went directly to the toilets and washed his hands— thoroughly. After a while of scrubbing he dried them under the air drier, wiped them together a little, then gently sniffed them. Sniffed again. They seemed OK but …

He sniffed at the cuff of his suit jacket. Oh crap.

*

Back at his desk, in his shirt sleeves, Walter got on the phone and began all the necessary arrangements with a definite sense of ennui. First he called the police and reported the break-in. After being placed on hold for some time, a constable asked a lot of questions in a desultory manner and didn’t seem, Walter thought, all that hopeful of any outcome other than a lot of paperwork. Then Walter rang his bank to arrange the cancellation of his credit card and VicRoads to notify them of his stolen driver’s licence. Both also put him on hold, but at least his bank notified him of his ‘place in the queue’ and how long the wait would be. This didn’t serve to cheer him up any.

While on hold this last time, Dev put his head up over Walter’s carpeted cubicle wall.

‘You do work here, don’t you?’ he asked. ‘I mean, for us?’

*

Driving home after work was, to put it mildly, a bit of a challenge for Walter. Usually he enjoyed being alone in the car—it gave him at least the pretence of isolation from everything else, from other people, from other road users. Sure, in peak hour he was hemmed in amongst his fellow man, bumper to bumper, but at the same time he felt completely separate from them all, removed, like a child who puts his hands over his eyes in order to hide, because if he can’t see you, well obviously you can’t see him. That morning, after the incident at the train station, his car had been a welcome little cocoon for him, a hermetically sealed environment where he could control the climate at the press of a button, contact whomever he wished via mobile phone, listen to whatever music he liked. It was so gloriously private and isolated and, the word came unexpectedly, safe.

But now things were different. The window had been smashed, there was a gaping hole instead of a driver’s side window, and thus no way he could seal himself in. There was no CD player and no CDs, so there was no music. More, there was that smell—that foreign, dirty, alien smell of someone else, some unwanted intruder now gone, but who had left his stink.

He turned his head towards the open window and took a good long sniff of the outside air.

*

Maggie didn’t have a job as such. Well, she did, but it wasn’t the same sort of eight to five grind in the city that Walter endured. She worked in a fashion boutique on a small shopping strip in Fitzroy North, a suburb a good hour away from Wintergardens by car, an inner city suburb more wealthy and artsy. Her hours weren’t as prescribed as Walter’s and her income was erratic. Walter was never sure, to be honest, how often she worked or how much she made. It wasn’t, he thought to himself (very definitely only to himself) a real job, as the boutique was owned by a friend of hers from school, and he suspected the arrangement was more an excuse for them to spend time together and go on the occasional trip overseas. They called them ‘buying trips’.

Maggie’s closet was packed tight with clothes, although she usually seemed to Walter to be wearing the exact same thing. She looked stylish and very finished, but also sort of simple and severe. Black and grey featured prominently in her wardrobe, although that was not unusual for Melbourne women. She also wore small patterned scarves tied tight around her throat, a look that Walter had always admired—it seemed to him vaguely 60s and even a little bit airline-hostess. He hadn’t shared this with Maggie—he wasn’t sure she would appreciate it.

When Walter got home that night, Maggie was there, which wasn’t always the case, and was cooking dinner, something else that wasn’t always the case. Often she stayed late at work, or was out a little late doing errands or perhaps visiting with friends, or with Arlette, but the arrangement was that whoever arrived home first began dinner. It was usually him—he was a competent if unimaginative cook. It was a simple, common-sense, domestic understanding, but sometimes it felt to Walter as if their home life was slightly disjointed, as if their lives overlapped like a Venn diagram, rather than were lived together.

He told her immediately about the car being broken into, confessed it almost like a penitent school-boy. He was remembering her phone call of that morning—she had needed the car as her little runabout was in having body-work done. She had ticked him off about it. He expected her to say something about that, perhaps say that if he hadn’t taken the car it wouldn’t have happened. It would be the sort of thing she might bring up, but she didn’t. She was annoyed about the car being broken into, certainly, but nothing more. She was not dismayed as Walter had been. Her annoyance seemed to be about the inconvenience of fixing the car, the time it would be off the road, the bother of claiming insurance, not because she felt it in any way an affront or a worry. She seemed to be of the opinion it was just the sort of thing that happened, annoying of course, but a fact of life. Little bingles and scratches and fender-benders—they happened. She herself was the kind of driver to park by touch.

It was only later, during dinner, that Walter mentioned the smell.

Maggie stopped chewing and looked at him, really looked at him for the first time since he’d walked through the door. It made him realise how little she actually did look at him these days—only when he’d done something surprising, and perhaps he didn’t surprise her much any more.

‘A smell?’ she asked. ‘What smell?’

‘There’s a smell.’

‘Is there? What’s it smell like?’

‘I don’t know,’ Walter said. ‘I don’t … know. It just smells dirty … unclean. I don’t know …’

Maggie wrinkled her nose.

‘I thought I could smell something.’

Walter’s face froze. After a second he put his fork down, swallowed and tensed his neck muscles in his collar. His nostrils twitched. Was it still there? The smell? Was it? He couldn’t smell anything—but what if he had got used to it and no longer smelt it on himself?

‘Excuse me,’ he said, then got up from the table and left the room.

*

A couple of minutes later Walter was in the shower, the warm water streaming over him. He scrubbed his body with a face-washer that was foaming with too much soap.

In the middle of his shower the water went suddenly cold and he stepped gingerly out from under it, bashing his shoulder and forehead on the glass of the shower-screen.

Maggie must have turned on the hot water to do the dishes or something. Surely she knew that it affected the temperature of the water in the shower when she did that? Walter suspected that she knew alright, that she must know, and that she did it anyway, in fact on purpose, specifically when he was in the shower.

He adjusted the hot water, waited, tested the temperature, then stepped cautiously back under.

‘Bitch,’ he said under his breath.

*

A little later Walter came into the kitchen, freshly scrubbed, redolent of the smell of soap and shampoo, in his pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers—it was too early for pyjamas perhaps, but he wasn’t going to get dressed again now. He was, rather incongruously, also wearing rubber gloves.

Maggie was standing at the sink slowly drying the dishes. More accurately she was taking a break from drying the dishes, standing with the tea-towel over her shoulder, smoking, staring over the bench into the room beyond, watching television—some reality show she wasn’t really interested in.

Walter went to the cupboard under the sink, pulled out the bin and took the lid off. Then he picked up a partly full ashtray and held it towards Maggie, making a distasteful little face. Maggie looked at him for a second then butted her cigarette out in the ashtray with two big stabs, leaving it smouldering.

Walter made sure the butt was properly out then emptied the ashtray into the garbage bin, tied off the rubbish bag and lifted it out of the bin. Passing through the laundry, he picked up the clothes that he had worn that day—the jacket, trousers and the shirt, the underwear even—and took them with the kitchen rubbish to the wheelie bin at the side of the house. He threw the whole lot in there and took the bin to the nature strip. Then, after a moment, he took each of the rubber gloves off with a snap and threw them both in the bin as well.

‘There,’ he said to himself. ‘Done.’

He could almost have dusted his hands symbolically, but he decided against it—he wasn’t one for extravagant gestures.