Now that I was aware of Kay, we kept on making eye contact across that great open-plan divide that separates hacks from their saviours. We would see each other in places like the canteen with its canine-friendly food, the distorting brushed-steel lifts and the less glamorous parking basement, where she might rush by in her second-hand BMW while I fired up my very seasoned Honda Civic.
It didn’t make any sense. She was somewhere near her big-three crisis (in other words, thirty), while I was definitely managing a permanent one in my early forties. She was on the up and up and I was on the fixed sideways with a bias, all things considered, down. She no doubt believed in the corp and the country, while I found it hard to even believe in the after-hours’ writing I did to relieve the endless tedium of relativity. She radiated an air of positivity, while I wore the sour mantle of a recent divorcé. She was probably a good person, when all she had to do was give our opposition paper a call and ask The Ex what kind of creatures ground their serrated legs between my ears.
Or was I imagining things? It had happened before, much to my acute embarrassment. Maybe she wasn’t attracted to me at all. Maybe she was just being friendly, with a dash of sympathy thrown in for my age and all the misanthropes, druggies, pisscats, cynics, tired chefs, failed writers, broke muzos and vicarious sportsmen who seemed to litter my profession. I couldn’t be sure about those looks, which was why I kept things friendly but aloof. The last thing I felt like doing was making a fool of myself with someone I might have to see every working day thereafter: one of the many lessons I had learned from The Ex.
But after a few more days of visual fornication we were introduced by good old Jay at an event that was clearly intended to be a little more than just a post-deadline drinks session (and usual call home) that Thursday night. We had gathered on the balcony of a fortress-like building that reeked of mid-Eighties paranoia, but it was a late-summer’s evening that still had a faint whiff of lemony jasmine battling its way through the metallic carbon monoxide, closer nicotine and rank journalistic sweat. Most of her mousy hair had fallen away from the clip that was supposed to contain it, and she’d been scratching her face again, her old-fashioned specs slightly greased up. Moreover, a bra strap was protruding from under an ample orange tank top, and her brand-new, unwashed black Kenyan kikoy seemed on the verge of falling to her very used brown sandals at any moment.
All she had on her side, really, was youth.
Of course, we men were not allowed to dress so sparingly. We had to wear collars, even though we never got to work with the public. But at least we had moved beyond that sartorial atrocity, that corporate noose, the necktie. So I generally wore brown boots, black jeans and good, freshly ironed white shirts (thank you, Beauty), which I flattered myself carried a head sparking with subversion. Jay, on the other hand, showed his deep and abiding regard for management by wearing old red sneakers, holey blue jeans and a Liverpool supporter’s jersey which, if the suits really wanted to get technical about it, sported a collar, even if it was one of canvas. In winter he deigned to wear one of his father’s sick-green check jackets that dated to roughly around the time of the Rinderpest. The reason he got away with this, of course, was that he was so bloody good and fast at what he did that he was indispensable.
“And this is Len Bezuidenhout,” he said, getting to the point where everybody was his good old chum. She looked me directly in the eyes with her steady, framed ones, but she had a damp handshake.
“Hi Len.”
“Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” I mocked, having had a couple of beers to summon up the me I preferred.
“Ja, I started here a few, like, days ago,” she said earnestly.
“So what, as we in Joburg so subtly say, do you do?”
This, of course, was a stupid giveaway because it could mean that I knew she wasn’t from the Highveld and had therefore made discreet enquiries about her.
“I’m one of the, like, new political reporters,” she replied, not giving anything away either.
I knew that, too, but couldn’t tell her I, like, knew.
“And you?” she said.
“What about me?” I said, noticing her fingertips held the bubbly glass with the concentrated pressure of an alcoholic in training.
“What do you, like, do?” she said rather earnestly.
“Oh, I work in hell.”
“What do you me –”
“I fix other people’s copy.”
“Oh, you’re the guys who make us look good,” she said rather witlessly.
“That’s us,” I said, impressed that she could utter a full sentence without liking it, whereupon she concluded our conversation with that new word du jour.
“Cool.”
The editor cleared his throat loudly and said he would like to welcome two new additions – “not editions”, he added, eliciting polite if not necessarily sincere grins – to our editorial team. The first was Kay Greenwood, freshly arrived from the Mother City, who most of the men tried hard not to show they were assessing sexually, making the air all the more charged. The other was a “fellow comrade”, a bald-shaven Edward Mhlophe. I had seen this strutting peacock in passing but hadn’t thought for one second he might be a journalist; he certainly wasn’t dressed like one. He was wearing a very expensive Italian suit, a designer T-shirt that would have covered my monthly drinking bill, a gold necklace for the mortgage and those fashionable, elongated crocodile-leather boots that made him walk as if he’d spent the night with a cellful of sex-starved impi.
I watched the older, more regular political reporters and picked up expressions of detached disapproval from the last remaining whitey to ones of dead-eyed patience among the darkies, meaning they’d seen similar poseurs come and go before the likes of Mhlophe, but the times they were a-changing. Fast.
Towards the end of the evening Edward and a vertically challenged, obsequious prat called Jack Schwartz spoke to Kay. Schwartz was another piece of work in his colonial uniform of tasselled, well-polished brown shoelets, grey flannel trousers, a navy-blue, double-breasted jacket to soften the blows of the pallid gut beneath, an equally pale shirt, and a maroon cravat and matching pocket kerchief to complement his florid phiz. Then, to complete the picture, he sported a billowing coiff to give his remaining few hairs “body” and, just to show that he had once been a hip music critic back in the Eighties, Bono-like specs. He had worked his way up from junior reporter to senior arts editor to freebie general and, finally, deputy head and sole honky in that department which always gets it budget cut first: human fucking resources.
But if he and Edward looked all pally-pally while they laughed and chatted with Kay, then their exorbitant deodorants were invisibly battling for racial and corporate dominance. More odiously, they were smoking fat cigars, fingering their Johnnie Walker Blacks and talking to her in such a manner that they might as well have been ejaculating onto her – let’s be kind here – black skirt.