Contacts. Mark Watson
Tonally, the only thing that differentiated her from a robot assistant, like Alexa, was the modern tendency to slope upwards at the end of sentences, as if everything was a question.
‘OK,’ said Sal, ‘and then we head for the dinner at …’
‘At six-thirty, they want you there seven for the drinks reception, your actual speech is nine?’ said Meghan, not even glancing down at these details on the screen in front of her. ‘I’ll be with you obviously, but the cars are all booked. And Andrew, the guy you’re speaking to now? Just a heads-up that he’s arrived?’
‘Send him up.’ Sal slid the phone across the desk. She didn’t expect to see it again for a couple of hours, but then, very little of the day from now on would go as she had imagined.
*
‘… and why do you think we do obsess over running late? Shouldn’t we all be more chill about it? Do you worry people read your book and get judgey?’
Sure enough, straight for the cliché questions. It wasn’t a surprise; as soon as they shook hands, he’d made a quip about how he’d been scared to get coffee on the way here, in case he was late. Also: ‘chill’. ‘Chill’, as an adjective. The guy was in his forties, like her.
‘Well, it isn’t about “obsessing”. Time management is just one of the ways I try to help people focus on what’s most important. If you learn to prioritize, divide your priorities into simple lists of five, it’s—’
‘So this speech tonight, will you be nervous? Do you get stage fright?’
I mean for the love of God, thought Sal. It was one of her favourite inner cries.
‘Well, I’ve been giving speeches for quite a few years. Obviously, it does have its challenges, and part of what I try to do in my work is coach people who aren’t – sorry – who aren’t experienced in it.’
The hesitation had been provoked by the appearance of Meghan in the doorway, for the second time. With a slight angling of her head, Sal sent her away, as she had done ten minutes ago. Whatever it was, Meghan was experienced enough to sort it out, and Sal didn’t want to be in this room a minute longer than she needed to be. If she knocked the interview on the head by one, they’d have proper time for lunch, and she could go out and look at her speech notes and maybe even nip into Myer for foundation. Meghan’s eyes flickered behind the big round lenses, but she shut the door, noiselessly.
‘Tell me about Mind the Gap,’ said the journalist, at last, and Sal went gratefully into her bullet points. Women were still paid fourteen per cent less than men across Australia. So the point of this campaign … The journalist was nodding, making the occasional note, but it didn’t seem like much was going in. He was very likely wondering why he’d been nailed to do this on a Saturday lunchtime when he could be in a beer garden. Sal could see a doodle of a shark in the corner of the page. This was going to be one of those pieces that were super-light on content, heavy on what-I-did-with-my-weekend narrative. ‘Chiltern, unsurprisingly, calls me into the office at eleven-thirty on the dot.’ ‘Chiltern sips her green tea as she tells me that addressing an audience can sometimes be challenging.’
‘And that’s why – even though I do know it’s not the sexiest subject – I feel like for anyone with a woman in their life they care about, which is hopefully everyone … can I help you with something, Meghan?’
It was a jarring sentence to say out loud, an inversion of their natural relationship. Meghan wasn’t there so that Sal could help her with stuff. Sal wasn’t going to start being PA to her own PA. And yet here she was, in the doorway for the third time now, the hat-trick as Dec would say, glancing between the floor and Sal’s phone in her left hand. The overall effect of all this pantomime discretion far more distracting than if she’d just bloody come out and said whatever it was when she first walked in.
‘So, there’s a message you – I think you’d want to deal with it?’ said Meghan.
‘To do with what?’ It came out brusquer than Sal intended. But this wasn’t good. The journo was doodling, again, and Sal knew he was enjoying this, the human angle, the comic relief. He’d end up putting this in his piece, the prick. ‘Chiltern – famed for being in charge of her time – is visibly rattled when her assistant …’
Meghan hesitated.
‘Give me a clue at least, darl,’ said Sal, working hard to keep her tone humorous.
‘Your brother’s about to kill himself?’ said Meghan.
MICHAELA ADLER
Michaela Adler’s phone was in her handbag. The incoming text lit the whole interior of the bag for a second, like a torch in a tent, but she didn’t read it straight away. I need to turn off some of my notifications, she told herself, once again. All her chat threads, Facebook, the pushy running app which still piped up every couple of days – ‘let’s go run! The best time is right now!’ Phillip didn’t like it when she was glancing at it all the time. Even though it was very often gallery business. And even though, as she liked to point out, ‘People do tend to do things by text sometimes, because it’s not 1995.’
Phillip was only four years older than her, just like James had been, but he enjoyed his caricature as a grumpy old man; played up to it with a certain glee. He feigned ignorance of Justin Bieber’s life and work, however many times the name came up; he went to the local government office to register to vote, even though you could do it in five minutes on the internet. He visited Facebook no more than once a week, which in this day and age meant you might as well be living on a desert island.
In this place, they probably were the oldest people. Phillip with his thick-rimmed Tom Ford specs slightly misted over in the warmth of the club. Michaela in a dress she would describe as pretty revealing, but which by the standards of the 18-year-olds here might as well be a spacesuit.
The place had been a power plant before the Wall came down. The mezzanine was lit by bare bulbs that poked out on wires between the exposed girders of the ceiling. Michaela and Phillip often came here for late drinks. The throb of music from the floor below always made them grateful they didn’t have to dance, didn’t have to ‘go out’, try to meet someone. When they finally did go home they would joke about how they’d outlasted all the teenagers, who came out full of talk but by one in the morning were slumped in alleys outside, texting, sobbing, vomiting.
Maybe this would have to stop if Michaela got pregnant. When she got pregnant. But this was a good consolation prize for now. There was time. Occasionally she did get scared that there wasn’t as much time as there should be. People on the internet told horror stories about what happened if you left it past 35. If you had to have treatments. But, as Phillip said, ‘Everything is horror stories on the internet. Remember when you googled the pain in your side, it looked for half an hour like cancer, but it turns out you just had a pain in your side.’
She’d never met anyone whose opinion she deferred to so automatically, wanted to defer to. When they came out of a film she waited to hear what he thought, and tinkered with her own review automatically. If there was a weird noise in the night, she would nudge him awake just so he could say it was nothing, it was just the building. None of this was very feminist, probably, but in all her previous relationships – including with James – she’d always been the one to take the lead. It was tiring, being that person. It had been a fun couple of years on the other side of it. Couple of years and counting.
Of course, she hadn’t been able to articulate all this to James when she left him for Phillip. The conversation, the horrible bombshell dropped over a dinner: it had all been a mess. Her explanation had