It was night and Jessica was alone in her apartment, half-undressed and lying on her bed, her head propped up on a small pile of pillows that she would otherwise have deemed superfluous. She took a sip from her wine glass and then placed it down on the book her book club was forcing her to read. The novel was about a woman who eventually found love on a small boat that cruised the canals of Paris in search of bookshops only to dock, somehow, in Tuscany. It managed to have ‘bookshop’, ‘Paris’, ‘Tuscany’ and ‘love’ in the title. The book was written by a trusted and experienced author, someone who had written this kind of book many times before and could be relied upon to do it again. But this wasn’t what she was going to read, not tonight.
Maserov had copied and given her all of the affidavits in support of each of the four women alleging sexual harassment at Torrent Industries. Finally, she was going to see what was done, or was alleged to have been done, and who it was that the women alleged had done it. She was hoping to see Frank Cardigan’s name on the pages.
Each of the four women were support staff. With her laptop beside her on the bed, Jessica was able to log into the Torrent Industries HR database remotely and see a photo of each of the women within minutes. None of them worked there anymore. Jessica wondered if they had found work anywhere else. Was it any different anywhere else?
Jessica looked at a photo of the first plaintiff in the pile, a Ms Pauline Hart, twenty-six years old with mousey-brown hair and a diploma in secretarial studies and office management from McPhersons Secretarial College. She had seen Pauline, she recognised her from the photo, but couldn’t remember ever having spoken to her. Jessica wanted to get a better sense of Pauline before reading her affidavit but there wasn’t much about her in her file. She lived or had lived in Croydon, took the Lilydale line to Flinders Street. She had gone to Croydon Primary School and then to Lilydale High School, where she left at seventeen before undertaking a twelve-month diploma course that Jessica estimated would have cost somewhere around $18 000. She learned to type up to ninety-five words per minute before there was even slight diminution in her accuracy. She had worked at Torrent Industries since McPhersons Secretarial College had managed to get her placed there. When asked if she had any dependents, Pauline had listed her cat. She lived at home with her mother and certain minimal, never-articulated hopes that dared to surface only at night and on public holidays in the bedroom she had slept in all her life and she was not even infinitesimally responsible for what happened to her at the hands of an older, wealthier, more powerful man at the headquarters of Torrent Industries.
She had been working diligently and seemingly anonymously in Accounts when she was told that the secretary to an executive in Urban Infrastructure was on leave and that she had been chosen to fill in while the other woman was away. Frank Cardigan worked in Urban Infrastructure. Jessica felt sure she was about to read his name in the affidavit, any paragraph now. But she didn’t. The executive Pauline was sent to work for was junior to Frank Cardigan, a man named Michael Mercer. Jessica knew Mike Mercer and, even before reading on, knew she would have no trouble believing whatever allegations she was about to read. Several years of attending the same office Christmas parties and having him leer at her, brush past her in the corridor, touch her arm lightly but unnecessarily, all of it had primed her to believe whatever was coming.
As it transpired, Pauline had not been working unnoticed. Having seen her in the elevator, Mike Mercer found where she was working. Then when the need arose for a temporary replacement for his secretary he asked specifically for her. How would she know this, Jessica wondered? The next paragraph in the affidavit made it clear. Mercer had told Pauline that she had been specially chosen by him.
On her first day working for him she arrived earlier than she’d been told to, just to ensure she wasn’t late. She was nervous and wondered if this was a promotion of sorts or a test to determine whether she ought to get a promotion.
It was on that first day working for him, indeed, on the very first morning, that he asked her if she had a boyfriend. She had been taken aback by the question and, not having expected it, she told the truth. She didn’t have a boyfriend. This led to the beginning of a line of questioning about her experience with men, beginning with questions about the existence and length of any previous relationships.
The questions, she said in the affidavit, made her uncomfortable but eventually she summoned the courage to ask why he was asking them. He told her that she had a sweetness, an innocence, that he found endearing but that if she was going to succeed in the corporate world she would benefit from a mentor, a protector, someone who would guide her through its alleyways. He said he would teach her how to get on, how to move up the ladder faster. She said she had smiled when he had said this but only because she was nervous. She didn’t really know what he meant and didn’t really know the appropriate way to respond. He made her feel uncomfortable but, she said, she didn’t really know how to describe why. She had wondered if she was being uncharitable to him and if she should consider herself lucky.
Then Mercer started asking her about her previous sexual experience. She pretended she thought he was joking and didn’t answer. This went on almost every day. And the questions became more and more explicit. Jessica poured herself another drink and shifted on the bed before reading the precise nature of the questions Pauline Hart had sworn under oath she had been asked by her boss, Mike Mercer, of Urban Infrastructure. Was she a virgin? Did she like performing oral sex? Did she like receiving oral sex? Had she ever had anal sex?
She said in her affidavit that when she refused to answer, pretending, she said, that she thought he was joking and wasn’t really interested in her answers, Mercer became less clinical in the language he used and this compounded her discomfort. Did she take it up the arse? Did she swallow? Had she ever had a man spell her entire name in cum on her tits? These words were there in black and white in the affidavit.
Alone on her bed in her apartment, Jessica asked out loud, ‘Why didn’t you come to me? Why didn’t you tell anyone?’ Then, as though answering her, in the very next paragraph of the affidavit Pauline Hart stated that at that stage she didn’t tell anyone because, she explained, the very language embarrassed her. It was not, she said, how she talked.
One night when she was working back on some urgent matter, a presentation he had to give, Mercer called her from her workstation outside his office and told her to come into his office and offered her his seat behind his desk. She was made uncomfortable by this because there was, as far as she knew, no one else on the floor at that time of night but she didn’t think she could refuse. She saw that he had been drinking wine and he poured her a glass, praising her diligence. Then he started praising her dress sense. Then he started commenting on her body. ‘Nice tits, great arse, but you’re letting it all go to waste. If you’re telling me the truth, you’re in your prime and not using any of your assets. Is it that you don’t know what to do?’ Mercer had said. By this stage he had closed the door. She stood up saying that she needed to get home and in standing up abruptly from his desk, spilled her wine on some of his papers.
He came over to where she had been sitting, grabbing some tissues and telling her not to worry about the papers or the mess. He said there had been bigger messes in his office and then she saw that his erect penis was exposed through the open fly in his pants. He grabbed her hand and placed it on his penis. The affidavit said that she managed to get out of the room before he could stop her and when she turned around in the corridor to see if he was chasing her she saw he was standing in the corridor masturbating. Not wanting to wait for the elevator, she ran to the fire-escape door and down five flights before waiting for the elevator to take her to the ground floor.
She called her mother from the street in great distress but was not able to explain what had happened. The next day she called in sick and the day after that she came into work but did not go back to Mike Mercer’s office. Instead she went back down to Accounts, where she told her supervisor, without mentioning Mike Mercer’s name, that she wouldn’t be returning to Urban Infrastructure. The supervisor, a woman, didn’t ask any questions, nodded and made space for her back at her previous workstation. The other women in Accounts looked at her but none of them asked any questions either.
Pauline Hart became withdrawn after that. The speed and the quality of her work suffered. Within three weeks of this she had ceased to be an employee of Torrent Industries. But she was there long enough to see another woman pack up a few personal possessions – some photos of her family, a fluffy stuffed cat – into her handbag and make her way up to Urban Infrastructure as the other women looked on in silence.