Droplets of water sprinkled over the carpet as she shed her cagoule.
“We might be staying late tonight,” Sue said. “That’s what Martin told me. We’re busy.” She rolled her eyes as she said the word busy. “Today’s the deadline for the timetable. Did you know that?”
“Yeah, I got an email last week,” Penny said. “We’ve got to figure out the clash between Abnormal Psychology and Neuroscience apparently. For the first-year students.”
“Oh right,” Sue said.
Penny was pretty certain that Sue did not fully understand her job. Sue was one of the transfers from the main university admin department during a corporate restructure. Before coming into scheduling, she’d taken calls and handled complaints from students. Sue hadn’t used their systems before, and Sue had no experience booking large venues. Penny figured the woman did nothing all day and instead relied on her, Krish or Justine to pick up the work when deadlines approached. After Justine had a nervous breakdown, it was up to her or Krish. Luckily, their job entailed little work for 90 per cent of the year, it was only the other 10 per cent where they were stretched.
While Penny was waiting for her computer to power up, she had the sudden sensation that her hair was a mess. She knew her outfit was misshapen and unfashionable, but she shopped at charity shops to keep expenses down. Plus she refused to contribute to fast fashion. The morning had been such a blur that she couldn’t remember brushing her teeth, let alone her hair. But as she was standing up to go to the bathroom, Martin walked out of his office and she paused to see what he wanted.
“Everyone here? Great. Meeting at nine in my office. Just a quickie.” He winked at them. “See you in ten, guys.” With that he wandered back to his office with his hands in his pockets.
Penny tried to smooth down her hair as she rushed to the bathroom. She was a mess. She hadn’t ironed her clothes for months, and the waistband of her skirt stretched tightly around her middle. She’d put on weight recently, and she hadn’t been out to the shops to buy new clothes yet. She hated changing rooms in charity shops. They felt so out in the open with that flimsy curtain. On her way out, Helen smiled at her. Now Helen was a well-dressed woman. Helen put make-up on in the mornings and styled her short hair. Helen always wore nicely tailored suits and carried around a smart handbag.
In the bathroom, Penny dragged her brush through her tangles. She wished she hadn’t smiled back at Helen. There was a reason no one in the office liked Helen.
6
9:01 a.m
Martin pointedly turned his phone over as Helen came into the office first, holding her notebook and a pen.
Helen nodded at the phone. “What does Ange want?”
He eyed the message again. “She wants to know whether to do chicken breast or tuna steak for tea. What happened to lasagne and chips? Everything’s got to be healthy now.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Tuna steak is pretty nice.”
She would say that, Martin thought. She was one of those skinny types who went for a jog before work. Not that he didn’t appreciate a toned body on a woman. In fact, he preferred it. But men were built to eat. Men needed some meat on their bones.
Sue, Krish and Penny came in one by one. He had a fairly small office, but it was big enough to have the team sit around in a semicircle. Big enough after the redundancies anyway.
“Right, guys,” Martin said. He tapped his pen against his desk. He was actually feeling nervous today. The powers that be were not happy with the scheduling team. They’d been sitting on this exam timetable for weeks. “How are we getting on with the clash? Any progress? What about Tuesday at three? I noticed a gap in lecture room 2b. Does that work?”
“There’s a group of students doing neuroscience that need to take an exam with the biochemistry department on Tuesday,” Krish said.
Martin liked Krish. They were a similar age—Martin was forty-two—and knew what it was like to have a nagging wife and be saddled with young kids. They were the only blokes in the office and of course had to stick together.
“Ah. Have you tried calling biochem? Maybe they can—”
Sue suddenly shot up from her seat. She stumbled back five paces and stopped. Her skin—usually somewhere near the Donald Trump level of bronzed—was as pale as wallpaper paste. “What is that?” Her crooked finger stretched out towards the far wall behind Martin’s desk. She raised her eyebrows and waggled them to make Martin turn around.
He knew what she was pointing at before he even spun his chair around. “Oh, that’s Anton.”
Sue’s eyes widened. “What?”
Martin moved closer and opened his palm. Right on cue, the partially domesticated house spider crawled onto his skin. Helen now stood up and pushed her chair away. By that point Sue was by the door, staring down at the carpet.
“Cool!” Krish said. “How did you get it to do that?”
“I found this little guy in the office last month. Whenever I put him outside, he ends up crawling back in somehow. So I gave up, and now he lives in here with me.” He put the spider back on the wall, glancing at Penny, the only one out of the womenfolk not to react.
“This is a place of work,” Sue said. “You can’t have disgusting creatures like that in the office.”
“There’s nothing disgusting about spiders,” Martin said. “They catch the flies.”
“Martin.” Helen was using her “warning” voice, the one that told him he should be more sensitive. “Spiders make some people uncomfortable.”
“Look, it’s just a quick meeting. We’re all adults. Aren’t we?” He lifted his gaze to Sue.
“I’m not staying in this room for one minute longer,” Sue said, yanking open the door.
Martin just shrugged as she left, whereas Helen sighed heavily. Helen seemed unsure whether to follow Sue or stay; she turned one way and then the other but, in the end, decided to stay.
Krish was grinning. Every now and then his body went stiff as though he was trying to quash the urge to giggle. Martin wasn’t sure, but he suspected that Krish was imagining Sue’s horrified face over and over again.
“I’m just going to say it.” Helen lifted her hands, pen tucked under her thumb, and lowered them. “Phobias are troubling to a lot of people. Keeping that spider is going to be problematic. I suffer from a phobia myself and—”
“Oh yeah? What kind?” Martin asked.
“I’m afraid of the dark,” she said.
This time Krish failed to control his giggle fit, and Martin ended up joining in. Penny, that killjoy, simply watched with a dour face.
Helen shook her head. “Laugh like children all you want, but everyone has a fear.” Her hands clenched into fists. Her body was pulled tight. “Penny, help me out. You must have a phobia.”
“I don’t like snakes,” Penny muttered.
Helen lifted a hand in Penny’s direction as though that was evidence towards her argument. “What about you, Martin? What are you afraid of?”
Martin managed to subdue his laughter. It took a bit of doing. He felt his stomach rubbing against the belt of his jeans as his body rippled with it. But then an image of his father’s face flashed into his mind. The broken blood vessels around his nose. The receding hairline. The fold of his skin in the midpoint of his short, stubby neck.