Chapter 3
AUDREY
‘Can you see where you’ve gone wrong?’ Peter booms, pointing at the second page of the employee agreement I skimmed when I started work here. I feel like I’m starring in a police procedural.
I am so bad at boundaries. Obviously, I buried that lead during the interview for this job, given we deal in highly sensitive material, but now it looks like I’m going to bring on my own demise.
‘The error was your fault,’ he accuses me.
‘It’s only six hundred dollars!’ I argue. A minor issue surely, given the amount of money this place turns over. ‘And Fraser Miller wasn’t angry about it!’
Fraser Miller was quite charming. And I’m used to dealing with an endless parade of cranky, incompatible couples citing no-fault ‘irretrievable breakdown’.
I take their coats and shuffle them into our fancy lounge while I deliver inane niceties like ‘Did you find a spot okay?’ knowing there is zero parking near our office, they’ve probably had a blowup about it in the lift, and now they’re glaring at each other, and at me like I caused it.
‘Fraser Miller wasn’t angry because he is a good person!’ Peter says. ‘In fact, you couldn’t have picked a nicer man to financially inconvenience!’
Usually, I go the other way. I am magnetised to the bad boys.
Historically, I’ve selected the type of relationship that burns up like space junk reentering the earth’s atmosphere in the kind of spectacular crash that makes everyone look up and say, Ooh, did you see that? What’s happened to Audrey now?
Not that a brief email exchange over an accounting discrepancy with one of our technically still-married clients falls into the relationship category.
‘And then, instead of investigating the complaint properly or fixing it,’ my boss continues—unfairly, I might add, because I was investigating it—‘you chose to flirt with our client, pressing him for details about his personal itinerary!’
Flirt with him?
He waits for me to dig myself further into this hole, and of course I oblige within seconds. I’m one of those people who crumple in the face of expectant pauses.
‘He was going to Antarctica!’ I argue. ‘Wouldn’t you be intrigued?’
He smacks the desk with the contract, nostrils flaring. If he doesn’t settle down, he’ll bring on a medical episode and I’ll have to whip out my half-baked skills from the first aid training I auto-piloted through.
‘It is not your role to be intrigued,’ he says, shouting. ‘It’s your role to get the accounts right so that our valued clientele do not have to contact you in the midst of their busy and important lives—which in Dr Miller’s case involves rescuing us from extinction—to discuss penguins!’
I stifle a smile. And a crush. On Dr Miller, obviously, not my rage-fuelled boss.
‘Perhaps this would be more amusing if it was your only offence,’ Peter suggests.
Sorry, is a SWAT team going to pop out from behind the leather armchair and arrest me?
I’d known this job would be a fiasco from Day One.
My attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (self-diagnosed until I can find the doctor’s referral) means I am not cut out for things like keeping on top of the filing and sending entirely accurate bills.
What I am good at is fetching boxes of tissues when warring couples break down in the conference room.
Or when I break down in the toilets, wondering if my parents ever looked at me as a baby and thought, I hope she grows up to follow her dream of always ensuring there’s enough toner in the office printer.
Actually, knowing my parents, that’s exactly where they envisaged me—rummaging through filing cabinets in my mid-thirties, inventorying the paper clips.
You want a nice, safe job, Audrey. There’s too much uncertainty in the world.
Just choose this one predictable thing in your life and you’ll thank us.
What they really meant was DON’T CHOOSE MUSIC.
Thwomp! Peter dumps a big pile of manuscript paper onto the desk, and I recoil in horror. These are very familiar lines and dots and squiggles and lyrics. My show.
‘This was discovered on the photocopier,’ he says. Exhibit B. My work in progress. Not my ‘work work’, obviously, but in my spare time I’m crafting a musical set in a divorce lawyer’s office, starring an unlucky-in-love millennial receptionist—
I thought my document had failed to print. ‘Who found this?’ I ask. Some joyless stickler for office etiquette, no doubt. Surely everyone uses the office printer for private matters every so often?
‘It’s not just the fraudulent use of office supplies, but the fact that you’re clearly working on this theatrical masterpiece on company time.’
‘That’s not true,’ I insist, jumping up, finally having an inaccuracy to defend. ‘I can’t think creatively in the office.’ Believe me, I’ve tried, but the vibe at Bates, Scrivener and Daley is lethal to the imagination.
‘Please turn to page forty-six,’ he demands in the type of withering tone he reserves for closing arguments.
Page forty-six? Suddenly, all feeling drains from my limbs.
I know exactly why he wants me to turn to that section, and I feel like I’m in a courtroom witness box.
In a panic, I try to remember the definition of slander.
Or libel. Whichever applies when you unambiguously call the fictional boss at a made-up triple-barrelled law firm the ‘Antichrist’ in your show.
‘This was a private document,’ I explain weakly.
I am horrified that he seems to have read the whole thing in such detail, partly because it’s very much a first draft and I need him to know, if he’s about to boot me out, that I am better than this, creatively.
I haven’t even shown it to Rach or Sara yet.
Gawd, my sister will have a field day when she hears this story: Oh, Audrey—how could you? Penguins? And the Antichrist?
I tell myself it’s liberating to be unexpectedly jobless. Am I not forever dreaming that fate will force my hand and make me rely on my music to pay the rent? Isn’t this exactly what performers and artists and composers and writers have been doing for centuries?
Although, how am I going to accomplish that? Busk outside Woolworths? Nobody carries cash anymore. I could pick up some piano or composition students. Surely there are a whole bunch of stressed-out high school students who I could shepherd through their final exams?
Or I could do what I’ve been promising myself for years and pick up some sort of casual job while I finally finish writing the show. Really work on it, properly, and pitch it to investors …
I go into my email one last time and set an out-of-office message: Audrey Sullivan is no longer employed by Bates, Scrivener and Daley. Please contact Anne O’Rourke with any questions.
As the sliding doors part and I escape from the glass atrium into the freedom of a meeting-less midweek mid-afternoon, there is one final, unprofessional email that part of me regrets not taking a minute to fire off:
Dear Dr Miller,
Anne O’Rourke is a stickler for financial accuracy, but should you find her wanting in the Penguin Appreciation Department, here’s my personal email …