Chapter 11
In the light of day, the new dress, shoes, bag and jewellery seem to have lost their lustre. As I pack them back into their covers and cases, resigned to returning them to Gregory, I replay that conversation and keep seeing the pained look on his face as he told me about his past.
His father owns Sea People International. This is a hostile takeover.
That’s why he’s paying over the odds for something he doesn’t want. That’s why Lawrence indirectly keeps control in Sea People. He’s doing on paper what Gregory is doing in his mind: keeping watch over his nemesis.
Jack’s words come back to me. Do not fuck this up. The opportunity I could have by keeping Eclectic Technologies and Gregory as a client is enormous. It’s a career game changer.
I slump down onto the edge of my bed and cradle a pillow.
But that’s just not me. Gregory was right, a hostile takeover isn’t illegal but he’s doing it for all the wrong reasons.
It’s underhanded. He’s plotting with Lawrence and Williams to take what his father most cherishes.
I’m not that lawyer. I’m not that person.
My moral compass points in one direction and that isn’t the direction of operating in the grey, blurring the lines of what’s right and wrong in the eyes of the law.
Gregory wants revenge and I just don’t think I’m the person to help him take it.
But I’m torn up over this man I’ve known for less than two weeks.
That look on his face is plaguing me.
I fall back on the bed and drop the pillow over my face, as if hiding from the world would make this all go away.
I could make this disappear. I just tell him I won’t act for Eclectic.
Simple as that. I’ve seen corrupt lawyers.
First, they dump time on a matter to be paid by a client.
Next, they change documents without telling the other side.
Then they’re paying people off to get what they want.
Acting for Gregory would be the first step down a slippery slope.
‘But I want to help him,’ I mumble into the pillow, crushing it harder to my face to stop the words.
With my only intention being to spend the day with my dad, I pull on my oldest and most stretched pair of jeans, and an equally comfortable, oversized knit jumper. I contemplate make-up but decide washing my face, cleaning my teeth and tying my hair in a rough knot will do.
After tapping on his bedroom door, I slip into Dad’s room. He’s still sleeping but I take a seat in a wicker chair by his bed and watch him. Sleep is the only time I can guarantee he’s at peace, not hating his life stuck in this bedroom with the demon in his mind stealing him from his old life.
I watch the rise and fall of his chest and the intermittent flickering of his eyelids as he dreams. He used to do everything for me.
I can’t imagine growing up with a parent who hated his own flesh and blood so much, he’d let his little boy see his mother being beaten.
The two people who are supposed to love him and cherish him beyond all reason, fighting, destroying his life.
Making him grow into a man whose past follows him like a dark shadow and dictates the kind of person he wants to be years later.
The thought of any man raising a hand to a woman disgusts me. Holding my knees to my chest, I lean my head on the side of the chair, somewhere between awake and asleep, that window of irrational thought. The dangerous place where nightmares are a reality.
I envisage myself in my dad’s hospital as a child, in his office, standing on a pink, plastic stool in my dungarees and light-up, pink shoes, trying to reach his desk.
He’s young and healthy. A stethoscope hangs over the shoulders of his white coat.
His skin is golden and his hair still has traces of dark brown interspersed with grey strands.
Years away from the pale, aged man sleeping in front of me.
I’m handing him bandages which he’s packing into an already full storage cupboard, when a male nurse dressed head to toe in pastel green bursts into the room and yells that there’s an emergency.
I follow my dad as he runs down the blue and white corridor.
I remember the day as if it were yesterday, except now we’re in an operating theatre and this isn’t my true memory at all.
A woman who’s been badly beaten lies on an operating table, bleeding heavily, utterly helpless. Tubes rest into the creases of her mouth, pulling it wide and open. Her purple eyes are swollen shut.
Dad shouts orders into the commotion but the room falls silent.
As I dream the hospital drama unfolding, a noise builds in my ear until it’s loud enough for me to recognise as soft sobs.
In the corner of the theatre, a little boy sits on the floor, his knees pulled into his body, his head tucked under his hands.
‘Mummy, please be okay, Mummy,’ he sniffs, with a hint of South African twang.
The boy has blood on his shirt. He looks up at me through deep, brown irises, the same irises that pleaded with me as I left the charity gala last night. Tears stream down the boy’s beautiful, young face.
‘Please don’t let her die,’ he cries.
My lungs jump to action with a thick, jagged breath and my chest aches so bad, I raise my hand to it. Looking at my dad, still sleeping despite my panic, I know that he’d do everything he could to help the little boy.
* * *
When I eventually leave my dad and head downstairs, Sandy has made my favourite: pancakes with maple syrup and crispy bacon. She sets a plate with four pancakes in front of me on the breakfast bar.
‘There’s plenty more if you want.’ She smiles, pouring me a large cup of coffee.
‘Amazing,’ I grunt through a large, graceless bite. That I hardly slept last night has left my stomach raging, acidic with hunger.
‘Aren’t you eating?’ I ask as she busies herself around the kitchen in a blue blouse and a black, A-line skirt that I bought her for Christmas last year. Not an outfit she’d usually wear in the house.
‘I’ve already eaten; I’ve been up for a while.’
‘Couldn’t sleep?’
She shakes her head, scrubbing bacon fat from the grill pan in the steaming water of the ceramic white sink.
‘How was your evening?’ she asks. ‘You know, I wasn’t sure if you’d be back here last night.’
‘Sandy!’ I blush. ‘If I didn’t come back, it would’ve been for fear of catching Jackson humping your leg.’
She tuts and puts a marigold-gloved hand on her hip.
‘I saw you two flirting,’ I tell her.
‘You have a very vivid imagination.’
‘Mmm-hmm, and I suppose I’m also imagining seeing you dressed in a skirt and blouse to scrub the dishes?’
‘I thought I’d pop out today, that’s all.’
‘With Jackson?’
‘No, not with Geoffrey Jackson. My goodness.’ She wafts a hand as if she’s annoyed but the sides of her cheeks betray her smile as she turns back to the sink. ‘Anyway, I asked about your night.’
The sick, churning feeling comes back to my stomach and I push away the remainder of my pancakes.
‘Actually, it didn’t end well. Gregory and I sort of had a fight. Well, a disagreement.’
‘Does that mean you’re, you know, together?’ she asks, turning from the sink, drying her hands on a towel.
‘Oh, erm, no, no, we’re not together.’ And we aren’t, so why is this whole thing driving me to the brink of sanity? ‘Gregory’s a client. Maybe not even that any more.’
‘I’ve not known your other clients buy you designer dresses and jewels.’
The problem is, I don’t know whether he bought those for the woman he danced with, the woman whose skin he caressed and pressed his warm lips against or his lawyer. The lawyer he needed to bribe into a dodgy deal.
‘Sandy, can I ask you something?’
‘Always.’ She pulls up a stool and sits opposite me, her hands wrapped around a hot cup of tea.
‘What would you do if someone asked you to do something that you knew wouldn’t really be right but for their sake, you wanted to do it and doing it somehow felt like the right thing to do?’
She regards me with a frown, assessing a person she’s unsure of, a person she doesn’t know. Or perhaps my own subconscious just thinks that.
‘Well, I would think that if you wanted to do that maybe wrong thing for that person, that person must mean a lot to you. Having said that, if you mean as much to that person as he, or they, do to you, perhaps they shouldn’t have asked you to do something that wasn’t really right in the first place? ’
‘Okay, and supposing they said that, or implied that, you had the option not to do the thing , but you really wanted to help them?’
‘Scarlett, what’s this about?’
‘I can’t really say.’
‘This is what you and Gregory argued over?’
I nod.
‘Scarlett, I know you and I know how you’ve been brought up.
I know the person you are and whatever this thing is, I know you’ll make the right decision.
Just remember that you haven’t known this Gregory chap for long.
It’s a tough time at the moment, with your dad, and I understand Gregory is wealthy and?—’
‘It’s not about that, Sandy, I promise. He’s more than that, much more, I think.
’ The words seem for the first time to be real when I say them aloud.
‘I want to help him, I really do, more than anything, but I know it’s wrong.
I can’t explain why I want to help him so much.
It doesn’t make sense. It probably doesn’t even matter after last night. ’
Sandy suppresses a smile behind her cup.
‘Did you really say “chap”?’ I tease, changing the subject.
‘What’s wrong with “chap”?’
‘Nothing, nothing at all, it’s very happening .’
She clips me playfully with a tea towel. ‘Be quiet, you. It’s hard to be happening in your forties.’
‘I can see that.’ I laugh.
Sandy hangs the tea towel onto the rail of the range oven door then walks behind me and places one hand on my shoulder. ‘I’m sure you’ll make the right decision. I’m going to see if your dad is ready for breakfast.’
I think about everything my dad has ever done for me and all the things the little boy from my dream didn’t have. His childhood blackened undeservedly. It hurts me that my mother left and didn’t want me. I can’t imagine how awful it must’ve been for Gregory to see the things he saw.
If you mean as much to that person as they do to you, perhaps they shouldn’t have asked you to do something that wasn’t really right in the first place . He didn’t. He owned the truth and gave me the opportunity to walk away from the deal.
Maybe he does care for me.