12. The Impermanence of the World
Summer
I’d planned to start mopping out Roman’s house while they were gone. Every hour the water stood in there was another invitation to every mold colony in New Zealand to take up residence. It would be a whole lot easier to clean it out with a shop vac, but I could at least make a start. I was still wearing the too-long PJ pants, though, which were awkward to move in. I’d lie down and possibly take a quick nap while the dryer finished, I decided, then change my clothes and start cleaning.
I woke to the sound of voices and rolled out of bed fast, then nearly fell over as my legs tried to buckle with soreness and fatigue. Had they not gone, then? Had Roman got thirty kilometers down the road and realized how crazy this was?
Out into the kitchen, my pant legs dragging, my hair mostly out of its braid, to find Delilah dumping newsprint-wrapped packets onto the counter and Roman filling the electric jug. “What?” I asked, trying to feel less groggy and stupid. “Didn’t you go?”
“Yeah,” Delilah said, “we went. About four hours ago.”
“You can’t—four—” I reached for my phone, but I had no phone anymore. “What time is it?”
“Six-thirty,” Roman said. Now he was pulling down mugs. “On second thought … want a beer? Because I do.” He pulled a can from the fridge and waggled it at me, looking completely relaxed. But then, it was easier being the generous savior than the unwilling recipient of charity. I’d done my best my whole life not to be that, and now I knew why. Because it sucked.
“Six-thirty?” I sank onto a stool and shoved my hair back with one hand, knowing it wouldn’t stay shoved. I’d found my comb and hair elastics in the van, but somehow, I hadn’t got around to using them. “I didn’t even get started. I’m sorry. I’ll go do it now. Where’s your mop?”
Roman said, “You’re annoying me. Beer or tea?”
“If I’m annoying you,” I said, “all the more reason I should do this work and get out of here, which is the only logical solution. And the original plan. How do you know Delilah and I won’t fence all your electronics the minute you leave?”
“Believe me,” Roman said, “I’ve asked myself that. Not about you nicking my stuff—seems unlikely—but why I’m asking you to stay. It’s unlike me. I tried to get my assistant to take you in first, full disclosure, but she wouldn’t, so here we are. You’re in no shape to look after yourselves, and I’m not generous enough to shout you weeks in a hotel without getting some labor out of the deal. Whereas having you stay here costs me nothing. That’s probably it. Do you want this beer or not?” He took out a fork, jabbed it into one of the paper-wrapped bundles, ripped it farther open, removed a chip, and popped it into his mouth.
“Fish and chips,” Delilah said unnecessarily. “With tomato sauce and vinegar. Also tartar sauce. And coleslaw.” She kept pulling containers out of the plastic bag.
“I …” I wanted to say, I don’t eat fish and chips. Or drink much beer. There’s gaining weight, and then there’s gaining weight, and I’m not eighteen anymore. Instead, I said, “Yes, please.” Maybe because I was starving, the salty-fried smell of the fish and chips was beckoning to me like one of those visible aroma-trails in a cartoon, and cold beer with fried fish was … “But?—”
Delilah said, “I’ll have one too.”
“Not with concussion, you won’t,” Roman said.
“Since when do you tell me what to do?” Delilah asked.
“He’s our employer,” I said. “He just said. And no, you don’t get beer when you’re concussed. Have some tea.”
“Yeah, right,” Delilah said. “Our employer.”
“Narky because I wouldn’t let her drive your new ute back,” Roman informed me, handing me two cans of beer and going for the glasses.
“You found something?” I sat down, since I was obviously losing the battle for moral supremacy, stabbed my own paper-wrapped packet, inhaled some more calorie-laden aromas, poured my beer, took my first sip of cold, yeasty carbonation, and held myself back lest I plunge my face into fried potatoes and fish and start gobbling it all down like a Golden Retriever going for the hors d’oeuvres somebody’d stupidly left on the coffee table.
“Yeah,” Delilah said. “It’s all right.” Her tone was casual. Elaborately so.
Wait, what were we talking about? I’d just taken my first bite. Tender, whisper-thin crust, flaky white fish, all of it nearly hot enough to burn. “What’s all right?”
She sighed. “Excuse me. Which of us is concussed? The truck. Sorry, the ute. On the one hand, it’s not a campervan. On the other hand, we can probably sleep in the back if we have to, it’s not approximately thirty-seven years old, the tires aren’t half bald, and zero warning lights went off on the drive down here, so I’d call it a net gain.”
I asked, “How much do I owe you?”
Roman pulled out a bill of sale and handed it over. “Seventy-nine hundred,” he said, and ate some more fish. Extremely casually.
The signature lines were blank. Also, he was listed as the seller.
“Where’s the original bill of sale?” I asked. “You know, from when you bought it?”
“It was a casual arrangement.”
“A what? I told you?—”
“All firms have excess equipment at times,” he said. “When that happens, they generally sell that equipment cheaply to a middleman, because they’re not in the equipment-selling business, and take the tax writeoff. I’d rather offer my employees the deal. It’s no skin off my nose, and it creates goodwill. Cheaper than bonuses, and Kiwis love a bargain. That was my first company, in fact. How I made my start. Bargains.co.nz. You could say I’m a pro at providing bargains. This time, I provided one to myself and passed it along to you.”
“That can’t be …”
“And yet it is. What d’you think happens when some firm goes bust? All their equipment and fixtures, right down to the wiring, have to go somewhere, which is why those Aeron chairs that cost them three thousand get unloaded at a hundred or less to somebody who resells them for one thousand. Somebody like, for example, me. In the past. All it took was a warehouse and some transport. Amazing that nobody got in there before me with the idea, but there you are, they didn’t. ‘One must be deeply aware of the impermanence of the world.’ Dogen. Turns out that’s good business advice as well. You heard it here first.”
I looked at Delilah. Still innocently eating fish and chips. “Is that true?”
She shrugged. “How do I know? I just went along for the ride. He picked it up from some guy who works for him who’s getting a new truck, so I guess so. The guy was hot, by the way. Lots of muscles. Much manly.”
“The guy was thirty,” Roman said.
Delilah sighed. “As you’ve mentioned. Didn’t some monk ever point out that you can’t control everything and everybody? Wait—that’s all of Buddhism. Huh. Guess you’re not very good at it.”
“We only practice,” Roman said. “We do not perfect.”
Delilah narrowed her eyes at him. “Who said that?”
“Me,” he said, and ate another chip.
“All right,” I decided. “I’m accepting all this, because I can’t think of any reason you’d do me any more favors than you already have. Text your banking info to Delilah’s phone, and I’ll transfer the first payment. I can pay you five thousand now, and five hundred more every month.” I wasn’t going to worry about it. I wouldn’t have to pay for accommodation while we were here, and all I needed to do after that was survive. In that tent, or, of course, I could go for the software-engineer job after all. Why did I assume anybody was still looking for me? Why did I think they’d care?
Roman could probably help me with the job search, in fact. He wanted to be competent and helpful and powerful? There you go.
“Do that,” he said. “For my records. And then I’ll transfer it back to you so you can pay for everything you’ll need to clean this place. Text me if you need more. Get the wreckers out to pull the van up and get it out of here, and buy food as well, will you? I’ll be back next weekend to check how things are going, and it’ll help if there’s something reasonably healthy to eat. A bit much on the burgers and fish and chips lately.”
All my Spidey-senses were tingling, and I was completely off-balance, but I truly couldn’t work out what his nefarious purpose would be here, so maybe he was just rich and stupid. And lucky, of course, because you normally didn’t get rich by being stupid. Or he’d been rich to start with.
Stupid and lucky? Maybe. But that wasn’t how he seemed.
Roman
You’re thinking, why didn’t I check this woman out? What kind of a businessman was I?
I did check her out, and not just because Delilah hissed, “Much lying,” at me before heading off to bed again, and also, “but then, Summer’s been lying like crazy too. Why am I the only one who ever tells the truth? And, wait, the only one who’s always been poor? I think I just answered my own question.”
Which was why, when I was meant to be putting in a couple of long-delayed hours going over the profit projections for the new wind turbines, preparing for that decision on their problematic location, I was clicking away from the complicated spreadsheet that would help me make said decision, opening a browser window, and typing in Summer Adair UK.
You could say there were hits.