Chapter 55
I was a good student. My teachers said I was a quick learner and, despite Dad’s objection, I was allowed to skip fifth class in junior school when I was ten.
I think Mum was proud of me in those days.
In the summer holidays, I would read the schoolbooks for the coming year out of interest, and I’d joined a CoderDojo club when I was nine because school wasn’t stimulating enough, and coding was useful for everything.
I didn’t want to do transition year either and consequently I did my Leaving Certificate at sixteen and went to college.
I had no intention of following my parents into show business.
When I was younger, I had considered it because Mum thought it was a good idea.
Dad was against it. I took all the classes in the Academy, but never felt like I was the person I was pretending to be.
It certainly didn’t come naturally. I know that Mum was disappointed in me.
Also there were times when we had lots of money and times when we were broke, but it meant never being able to plan anything.
When I was eleven, we moved from a mid-terrace house on a former council estate in Inchicore to a detached house in Ranelagh.
Mum and Dad fought about that too. She thought she was going to get some big inheritance from Grandad when he died but she got far less than she expected.
In the following years, meeting the mortgage payments was like constantly walking a tightrope.
Dad had to be away a lot for work after that.
Feature films mostly. I suppose you could say my dad was famous, but as far as I was concerned, he was just my dad.
When it came to career options, I was turned off by anything artsy.
I wanted independence and I knew that if I was ever going to move out of Mum and Dad’s, I’d have to earn a shitload of my own money.
The future seemed to be in FinTech, or Financial Technology as I had to explain to my parents, who looked at each other, bewildered.
I was good at maths and science, which also bewildered them.
Perhaps I’d inherited those skills from my birth father, whoever he was.
Simon Perry was on the interview panel when I went for the interview for my internship at ComStat Holdings.
I was extremely well qualified, having done computer science specializing in cyber security, I was confident and I knew I’d done a good interview.
When I started, I was assigned to work with a team that reported to Susan Cunningham, but after a week there was a change.
I never knew the reason, but I was reassigned to work for the team that was led by Simon Perry.
I was pleased because Simon was more senior.
He was a good boss, quick to assign credit when it was due, and when we got things wrong, he explained everything clearly.
He didn’t look for who to blame, he was all about problem-solving.
We were in an open-plan office and my desk was closest to his.
The first thing I noticed about him was how good he smelled.
He would sometimes come to my desk and lean over to show me something on my monitor.
He smelled clean, of soap or aftershave.
He wore a suit well, and he often mentioned going to the gym before going home.
I couldn’t help noticing what good shape he was in when he would stand up and stretch at the end of the day.
Sometimes, his shirt might have come loose, and I’d see a bare tanned patch of his toned stomach.
One day we were in the break room together at lunchtime and he was talking about some new café bar that had opened and he said to me, ‘Want to check it out for lunch next week?’ There was only me in the room, and I wasn’t sure if it was a date or not, like, he was about fifteen years older than me, but I said yes, because it seemed rude to say no to your boss.
I’m not a fool: I had googled Simon, and he was married with a baby and an attractive raven-haired wife.
I was not interested in having an affair.
The next day, leaning over my desk again, he asked me what I thought of a gold bracelet he was going to buy for his wife.
It was over €2k. Okay, I thought, it definitely wasn’t a date, and over lunch in the shiny new café bar, he talked about his political journalist wife and showed me photos of their holidays in the Seychelles.
He was wearing board shorts in the photos which he swiped through.
I talked about being the youngest graduate at my college.
We drank Cokes and sparkling water, and I came back to my desk a little late, but relieved that there was no question of him seeing me in any romantic way.
But after that, I began to think of him differently. I imagined myself on that beach with him in the Seychelles. I was slimmer than his wife. And a lot younger.
A few weeks later, he found another new restaurant that had just opened, though this one was further away. He asked me if I wanted to go and again I said yes, feeling a little ripple of excitement this time.
When the day came and I saw the others on my team dressed up, I had a slight feeling of disappointment that I was not the chosen one after all.
We were all going. This time we did not go back to work after lunch and there were bottles of wine on the table.
I never drank that much, but Simon was constantly filling our glasses.
He was becoming more and more attractive to me, but he didn’t pay me any special attention.
Daniel, who’d started in the office at the same time as me, made some comment to me about Simon, that it was obvious I liked him.
He’d caught me gazing at Simon while I was supposed to be listening to Steph’s tale of hiking in Tibet.
Daniel said he wished Simon was playing for his team.
Daniel was funny and sweet, and I guess this was his way of telling me he was gay, though he didn’t have to.
My gaydar was finely tuned, except when it came to myself.
I’d had a month-long fling with a Canadian girl in college.
I was crazy about her and told Mum and Dad I was a lesbian.
They were, as expected, annoyingly laid-back and unshocked.
‘Good for you,’ said Dad, and then Mum said, ‘Nasrin’s daughter is gay too.
You might get along?’ and my eyes rolled so far back in my head that I could see my ass.
Daniel was my work pal, and we were seven weeks into the placement.
We’d been told that only five out of fifteen of us would be chosen for full-time jobs.
I already knew that I was one of the five.
I’d won contracts and had created a database to streamline each approach to a new client, based on seven core criteria.
It had been adopted across the entire company, and I’d received a hefty bonus.
I was popular with the others in our team too – they wanted to learn from me.
But I was not the centre of Simon’s attention on this afternoon that progressed into a drunken evening.
At the end of the night, I was feeling out of control.
I went to the bathroom and downed a few of the complimentary bottles of water.
As I emerged, Simon exited from the gents.
He took my arm and twirled me around like a ballroom dance move.
‘You’re something else, you know that?’ he said and, with his arm cradling me, dipped me back, so that my head almost touched the floor.
Then he lifted me upright, kissed me a smacker on the lips and moved past me back into the restaurant.
It had all happened so fast, I couldn’t believe it was real.
As the others began to drift off, I lingered, eyeing Simon, who was now completely ignoring me, showing the boys something on his phone. Daniel said goodbye.
‘Remember, he’s married and he’s got a reputation,’ he said as he was leaving.
I wanted to know more about the reputation, but I was watching Simon. ‘See you Monday,’ I said.
At the end there was Simon, Greg, the accounts manager, Ian, one of the other interns, and me.
We were talking about the worst summer jobs we had ever done.
I was careful to put my hand across my glass as more wine was poured.
‘Spoilsport,’ said Simon and then continued his story of working the bar at a golf club in Martha’s Vineyard as the Bernie Madoff scandal became public knowledge, and people got up and abandoned their tables during lunch service.
We all hung on his every word, and then Simon suggested to the men that they go on to a casino.
I was not invited. I went home alone, feeling humiliated and foolish.
The mixed signals continued for weeks. I couldn’t understand it. Simon would often join me for lunch, but I noted he went for lunch with another intern, Gina, too. Daniel was my only confidant. ‘Be careful,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think it’s weird what he’s doing?’
I tried to act innocent. ‘What?’
‘Come on. He’s trying to play you off against each other.’
‘That’s ridiculous, I like Gina.’
‘I’m sure she’d say the same about you, but why don’t you go for lunch with her if you’re such good pals, instead of waiting to see which of you he’s going to choose?
Greg told me there was a girl here last year who had the hots for Simon, and one day she called in, handed in her notice and wouldn’t give any reason.
Everyone thinks he rejected her. He enjoys the flirtation, but he’s married. He has a kid.’
‘So? That could mean anything. Anyway, I’m hardly going to give up a job like a lovesick puppy. I don’t even have the hots for him.’
‘Sure you don’t.’ Daniel did not believe me.