‘What’s she doing here?’ Carla asked.
‘Perhaps this wasn’t a great idea.’ The reality of accompanying Maserov to Carla’s house was suddenly dawning on Jessica. Betga was there minding Marietta while Carla finished her shift in the office of a cosmetics wholesaler. She was temping and considered herself lucky to get the work. The agency through which she sought work had been deluged by people, almost all women, clerical workers of varying degrees of experience and training, needing work. There was a massive imbalance between the demand and supply for clerical and administrative workers, even those who were highly skilled and experienced. The imbalance was weighted against the women with labour to sell. So Carla was forced to take shifts far across the other side of town. Today she’d had to go out near the airport and even this had been possible only because she was able to leave Marietta with Betga. So when Carla at long last walked into the house, having first emptied her letterbox of the stack of envelopes with corporate logos perfectly formatted by the computers of the various companies to which she owed money, she wasn’t at her most conciliatory.
Maserov, Betga and Jessica wanted Carla to reconsider her decision not to settle her sexual harassment suit with Torrent Industries out of court. But Jessica had gone with the additional intention of apologising as a woman, a female member of the Torrent Industries HR department, for not having done anything to protect Carla from a predator like Mike Mercer. She had not formulated a clear picture of what it was she, acting on her own, could have done but this hadn’t dampened her need to apologise. The matter of how much of this need to apologise was for Carla’s benefit and how much for her own was something that lurked away from the footlights of her consciousness behind a curtain of other needs, the need to assuage guilt being only one of them.
‘You have a beautiful daughter,’ she said to Carla, who was taking off her coat.
‘Thank you,’ said Betga.
‘She’s your daughter . . . too?’ Jessica asked Betga.
‘Haven’t you ever made a mistake?’ came the bullet-like reply from Carla.
‘Actually, I have, a lot of them, one of which brings me here now. I hope you don’t mind my being here. I don’t have to stay long.’
‘Well, it’s just funny that I never saw you when I was working at Torrent Industries. Could it be ’cause you want me to settle? I mean, suddenly you show up in my house uninvited.’
‘I invited her,’ Betga owned up.
‘So now you’re inviting people into my house?’
Jessica looked momentarily perplexed until Betga explained, ‘I’m Marietta’s father but I’m not currently living here.’ Jessica looked at Maserov, who knew her to be thinking, ‘You also don’t live with your children. What is it with you guys?’ Maserov was anxious to distinguish himself from Betga as fast as he could but nothing was coming to him other than the screaming need for immediacy. It was Carla who helped him out.
‘Stephen doesn’t live with his kids but he’s not a philandering shithead. So anyway, Ms Human Resources, why are you here?’
‘Well, first, I want to apologise.’
‘Why, who did you sexually assault?’
‘Carla, there’s no need to be rude to her,’ Betga said, trying to sound simultaneously familiar, husbandly and also gallant. Within seconds the results of this attempt were audible and unambiguous.
‘Shut up Betga, you unfaithful prick.’
‘No, I didn’t sexually assault anyone, but I stood by in a climate where I knew sooner or later that this kind of thing was likely to happen if, indeed, it hadn’t already happened. And I did nothing.’
‘Let me guess, somebody at Torrent HQ thought it was a good idea to get a woman to come around and sweet-talk me into settling. You’re a woman protecting Mike Mercer. You’re sucking up to the company. You’ll do anything to save your own sweet arse. And you’re dumb enough to really think that’s going to save you when they come looking for your exotic pussy some wet and rainy night. So I don’t have words to describe how low you are.’
‘No, Carla, I swear, I’m not protecting him. That’s not why I’m here. Nobody sent me. In fact, no one from the company knows I’m here. It was only by chance that I happened to be working with Stephen and found out what happened to you, what Mike Mercer did. As Stephen knows, I’m trying to leverage his good standing with Mr Torrent to try to bring in some changes, policies, to make it less likely this kind of thing happens to any other women.’
‘I don’t know what policies you got in mind other than chemical castration, with or without the chemicals, but a lot of good your policies are going to do me.’
‘I know, that’s why I’m here. I’m not here representing the company or even the human resources department, who would want to protect Mike Mercer. You’re right. I live in fear of people like that. I hate them. Even if you had come to me in HR and reported Mike Mercer, to be honest, I don’t know what I would have done if the people above me took his side. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have let you know that there were sympathetic people, women, who would at least try to talk to those with the power to help.’
‘Okay, you feel guilty, thanks. I can’t bank that but I’ll take it to my psychiatrist. We could probably get a good thirty minutes out of that. Maybe she can give me the number of someone who could help you with that guilt.’
‘Carla, I’d be angry too.’
‘Now what exactly would make you angry? Would you be angry if someone tried to rape you in your workplace? Would you be angry if HR ignored it? Would you be angry if someone came into your house uninvited and started shilling the joys of a settlement that allows Mike Mercer to prosper in his career as though nothing had happened while I’m up at night worrying about how to pay my rent and feed my daughter?’
‘Carla,’ Maserov said calmly, quietly and without any condescension. ‘None of us in this room have the power to punish him, to deliver the retribution he deserves. Look, I don’t know how long I’ll be in this position, a position where, in effect, I’m trying to help you while acting as Malcolm Torrent’s point person on this. But your turning down the money that I could get you just because it doesn’t hurt Mike Mercer is crazy. And it really hurts you. I don’t know what Betga’s told you but I’m hopeful I could get Torrent Industries to pay you as much as five hundred, maybe even six hundred thousand. And you wouldn’t have to go through it publicly in court. There’d be nothing about it on the internet.’
‘Think what you could do with the money,’ said Betga. ‘Think what you could do for Marietta.’
‘Is this why you want to be back in our lives, Betga? You want to mooch off us?’
‘Carla, I’d hoped you knew me better than that.’
‘No, I know you as well as that.’
‘Okay, let me prove it to you. I’m making money, which I’m allowing Maserov to give to you because of my unshakeable love for you. I’m getting paid by Malcolm Torrent, every week you don’t settle. When you and the others settle he stops paying me. Isn’t that right, Maserov?’
‘It’s true, Carla.’
‘Whereas the settlement money, if you settle, goes directly to you. I don’t get a cent. I want to be adding to the net wealth of this family, not detracting from it.’
‘Family?’ Carla asked, but without the anger that had characterised everything she had said since she had come home.
‘Well, yeah,’ said Betga quietly. ‘Whatever a family is, we’re probably one. Don’t you think?’
Maserov felt that last characterisation was somewhat unhelpful so he attempted to distract her from it by returning to the main issue. ‘If I can get an offer of the kind I think I can get authority to make, you should take it,’ he said, looking at her and knowing that the look on her face meant that she wanted to trust him.
She had left the front door open and the sound of footsteps along the passage gave way to a voice that was heard before its owner could be seen. ‘He’s right, Carla. You should take the offer.’ It was Acting Sergeant Ron Quinn. He walked slowly into the room and Carla turned to him as he whispered ‘Hello, baby girl’ to Marietta, who reached out to him from within Betga’s arms.
‘But do you know . . . they’re saying if I accept the offer, Mercer won’t go to trial? There’ll be no criminal trial. You told me he’d committed offences. You said the criminal law was on my side.’
‘It is drafted to help you but something’s wrong when . . .’
‘When what?’
‘I did some research today at the station. In the data for the most recent year I could find there were 3500 rapes reported in the state. Only 3 per cent resulted in a conviction. You know I only want what’s best for you. Take the money.’
Everyone in the room looked at Carla looking at her daughter in the policeman’s arms. A tear was sliding down her cheek. Nobody said anything. ‘Okay,’ she whispered. They almost didn’t hear her say it.
Betga walked over to her and she let him hug her, eliciting more tears, some simply born of exhaustion. He held her for a long time and when the embrace was over Maserov spoke.
‘Carla, I will do everything in my power to get you the best deal I can. Please know I will.’
She looked up from Betga’s shoulder. ‘I know you will, Stephen.’
‘Carla,’ Jessica began. ‘Did you say before that HR ignored what happened to you? Did somebody report it to HR?’
‘Yeah, I did.’
‘Really? I didn’t hear anything about it.’
‘Yeah, I went straight to the top. Reported it to your boss, Aileen van what’s-her-name.’
‘Aileen van der Westhuizen, you reported it to her?’
‘Yeah, I even made a note of it. I wrote down everything that happened within a week, certainly two weeks, of it happening. Gave it to her in person. I don’t know why. I knew she wouldn’t do anything. Said she would talk to him. For Christ’s sake! Fucking waste of space! No offence.’
‘Oh, I’m not religious.’
‘No, but you’re in HR.’
‘Who’s staying for dinner?’ Betga asked suddenly, joyously, and without authority.
‘Well, you’re not, for starters,’ said Carla. ‘No one is. I’ve got a friend coming over. So I’m afraid you all have to leave.’
‘A friend? What do you mean by that?’ Betga continued.
‘I think we should go, Betga,’ said Maserov diplomatically.
‘Did you hear that, Ron?’ Betga asked the policeman. ‘She wants you to go. Says she’s got a friend coming over. You’re her friend. What do you make of this, being displaced by someone ostensibly of equal rank?’
Maserov, Jessica and Acting Sergeant Ron Quinn quietly said their goodbyes and walked out into the darkening street. The policeman went to his car on his own while Jessica and Maserov went to the one car, Maserov’s.
Betga was not far behind them, much to his displeasure. He saw the friend coming and was relieved to see it was a woman. In this he had it over Maserov, whose wife had had a male friend come to the house not long after he, Maserov, had left. What Betga couldn’t have known was that Carla’s visitor was, in fact, Maserov’s wife, Eleanor. She had arranged for her mother to babysit and was visiting Carla without her children for the first time.
Eleanor could see that Carla had recently been crying. Once she’d been assured that Carla was now fine, she turned her attention to that which was suddenly uppermost on her mind. There had been people leaving Carla’s house. She’d seen them leaving while she was parking her car. She couldn’t tell exactly how many but she was surprised to see that her husband was one of them.
‘Was that Stephen just leaving?’
‘Yeah, some kind of a delegation.’
‘And that . . . woman?’
‘Yeah.’
‘She was . . . Who was she? They left together . . . in his car. Did you know that?’