Atu (2) “Tony. It’s not ‘literally’ round the corner it’s –”. “Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp “IT IS LITERALLY round the corner! It’s down the road!” “What? What, like literally around the corner…?” “Yeah, right there!” He shouted angrily with an exasperated look in his face “Down the road and round the corner!” “C’mon, that’s bullshit. Nothing’s ever literally round the corner.” Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp “Here, I’ll – ” Tony turned down at himself as if to search his pockets then broke from that and looked instead to his desk, scrambling his hands through and over invoices, samples, catalogue books and assorted boxes of drill-bits and irrigation pipe taps and the like, finding nothing then for a second glancing up and darting a look over his shoulder to the woman and then turning back to himself, he paused. “Uh, Gabby.” He sounded nervous. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp I heard the woman speak for the first time. “Yeah?” “Do you have that map book?” “You want the map?” She was looking in Tony’s general direction, but over her shoulder at him and just out of the corners of her eyes. The phone was driving me mad. “Hey listen can you also get that phone? It’s really distracting.” Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp “WAIT!” She shouted, holding her fingers up, annoyed with me and the phone. We waited. Tony and I looked at each other. Miraculously, the phone didn’t ring again. Tony let out a sigh of relief. “See?” Said Gabby “You don’t have to whine and bitch like little girls, just ignore it. What did you say you wanted? The map book. Okay I’ll find it.” After a while she took a last long drag from her cigarette, held it, then blew the depleted noxious cloud of smoke jet up to the roof where it hit the top and dispersed, dissipating and becoming nothing. Then she butted out her cigarette and rolled back her desk-chair with one foot and let the other boot fall off the desk, the metal spurs slicing into the wood-panel floor-boarding when she did. After a moment of biting one of her nails and seeming to be thinking about something she slowly raised herself up from her seat. She dusted off her chaps and then looked about her desktop briefly. She paused then reached down to the bottle of whiskey, took a mouthful and winced then after a while she mumbled something to herself about eating something. She picked the map book up from her desk and walked towards Tony’s desk, spurs clinking, and then as she walked out in front of the window she looked out instinctively and got the glare of the 4 O’clock sun head-on that was flooding through the office window – she recoiled slightly and gasped, “Jesus!” quickly shading her eyes with her hand and the book, then turning herself towards Tony angrily as if he were partially responsible, for not thinking about the sun shining in through the window beforehand and warning her. “Here.” She tossed the book on his desk. “Thanks.” They held each other’s eyes for a short while. Then Gabby turned away and Tony flipped through the map book which had little pieces of paper used for markers stuck in the pages. He didn’t have to use the markers or search the index. He opened to page 63. “Here. It is actually literally round the corner.” He held the map-book up to me with his fingertip on a very specific spot on the open page. “The next legal right turn you can take is the road. Wayburn road. There. Look.” He held the book up to me with his finger still on it and tapped it. “Here is Wayburn…” He moved his finger along the page then came to a stop, “And here…is our road.” Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp “Oh right. Wayburn” I decided to change the subject, “Uh, the phone is ringing again.” “DAMN IT! Gabby, please – go answer the call at your desk. Rueben -” “But it’s just that same guy.” she moaned. “Gabby, maybe it’s not that same guy; maybe it’s a new client. And if it is that same guy then talk to him, which is what I hired you to do if I remember correctly, and get him to stop calling. Take down his complaint and tell him we’ll go back and sort it out when we can. You can do that, right? You said you were good with people.” “No, I said I was good at dealing with people.” Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp “Just answer the phone!” At that moment I realized that I found this woman interesting for some strange reason. If I were back there knowing what I know now I would have known it was because we both dressed like cowboys and that she owned a horse, but back then all I knew was that, like me, she also didn’t quite seem to fit into society in a ‘conventional’ manner: she didn’t play by the rules, and made her own. In the moment that I saw her that way my hatred for my job disappeared: I forgot about getting lost on the highway, Radcliffe, the rotorvator getting stolen outside the site, going up the wrong way on a one-way street with a trailer and six-blade ride-on John Deere mower on the back and having to reverse back onto the main road with a broken passenger mirror, that bitch with the big hair with the dog at the garden clearance job who’s back fence I brought down when I rear-ended it with the JCB, all that dead turf, countless call-backs on jobs we thought we finished weeks ago. “Yes hello.” Gabby listened on the phone for a second then turned to Tony and mouthed the words “Same guy” with an annoyed look on her face. “Mmhmm. Okay. Well if you’ll just stop talking…uh-huh. Yuh.” She rolled her eyes, held the phone away from her ear and gestured to it at Tony with a shrug. “Jesus, c’mon,” she said silently, “I can’t understand his fucking accent.” “Talk to him.” He said, not looking at Gabby, then shaking his head and finally holding it in his hands with his elbows on the desk. “Jesus. This is a nightmare.” “Okay mister, you’re going to have to calm down. I can’t get the ‘guys’ or whatever to go up to wherever the hell you are today, alright? Shit happens. Just leave me your number and well – huh? I’m not swearing at you, mister, I’m – yeh, whell I’m swearing, yeah shit I swear all the time, I – ” Listening to her talk on the phone I smiled, actually liking the idea of working with her. In the past I would always feel competitive and territorial if someone who dressed and acted in a similar way to me would show up – invariably male – but a female cowboy; for some reason, in spite of the unsavoury ‘pro-feminist’ ramifications that would naturally be attached to the idea – a cold chill ran up my spine – I felt it had a good chance of working out. I turned to Tony. He had his eyes closed now, the sides of his head still clasped in his hands. He turned up to me and looked at me for a few seconds. “I’m going to have to let you go. Rueben. I’m sorry, okay?” I couldn’t believe it. This was sudden. Not only that, but then I realized that female cowboys were in many senses much worse than normal ones. “What – why, because you’re hiring her?” “No, I’m not firing you because I’m hiring her – I’m not: I’ve got a load of guys working in the field and I need someone else here in the office to take care of the clients. I can’t afford to hire 12 guys at the moment with just me talking to the clients.” “That’s what I just said. Firing me and hiring her. Tony, are you insane? Look at her. She’s terrible!” I gestured for him to look at her. She had her feet back up on the desk making one-word answers to the phone. “Forget about her. She has nothing to do with you. But out of the whole team, most of the clients who’ve been phoning up and complaining about are the ones you did jobs for.” “What? Complaining about what?” “Jobs not finished, rush-jobs, bad paint-jobs, dead turf, plants dying, washed out pointing –” “What, the job out in San Marino? It rained that day.” “It’s not just that, it’s coming in late, not coming in at all, the lunch breaks, the days off sick, the road violations, everything, Christ, everything – you’re a cowboy Rueben.” It sunk in. The reality of the situation ground into me and I grew enraged. “So you’re going to fire me and hire chain-smoking dyke who sits on her ass getting stoned all day and can’t answer the phone?”
Copyright © 2011 Rube |