He was mostly unsure about what was going on under his wife’s careful exterior. Sometimes he was wary of her, and other times he was, well, not to put too fine a point on it, just a little scared of her. With good reason it would seem, as just the other night she had tried to smother him in his sleep. Although when he said it like that, said it actually to Maggie: ‘I can’t believe you tried to smother me in my sleep,’ she just scoffed and repeated: ‘Smother you,’ in a mocking voice, as if he was just being a very silly boy. But what else did you call it when someone put a pillow over your face while you were asleep?
‘You were having a nightmare,’ Maggie said blandly.
‘That’s no … reason to put a pillow …’ He was panting.
Maggie closed her eyes.
‘Do you think you could move to the spare room? I really need to get some sleep.’
‘Well, yes. I suppose … but there was no need for … that.’
OK, so he had been having one of his nightmares. They had been a regular feature of their lives over the past year, since his return from hospital, but for some time now they hadn’t been as bad. He still had them occasionally, and he knew that it must be annoying for Maggie, being woken up like that in the middle of the night by a jittery, flailing person—because that’s what she’d described him as, jittery and flailing, not a description he relished, not exactly the way a kind, supportive, considerate wife might describe her husband at one of his more vulnerable moments.
He and Maggie had been married nearly fifteen years. What did you get for that anniversary he wondered? His more blokey neighbours, he felt sure, would be certain to answer: ‘Parole.’ Parole, Walter thought, mightn’t be a bad thing, because no matter which way you cut it, you had to consider that your marriage had got to a pretty bad place when your wife was putting a pillow over your face in the middle of the night.
Despite the rather large number of things that Walter’s internal voice had imagined saying to his wife, or he’d told Dr Feldman he would like to say to his wife, as he pressed the button on his mobile phone that morning in his car, stuck in traffic on the West Gate Bridge, muting the chill-out music and answering the phone simultaneously, he had no intention of saying any of them.
‘Hiya,’ he answered. Very un-him.
‘Why did you take the car?’ Maggie said. No preamble. Not really a question.
‘I missed the train. I was running late. I needed to get in to work in a hurry.’ The irony of the traffic being at that moment at a complete standstill was not lost on Walter. He looked at the time on the dash display. He was late.
‘But I need the car today, Walter.’
She had her own car, their second car, a little blue Mazda, but it was at the shop after ‘a little bingle’ as Maggie had described it.
‘I’m sorry. I really am sorry, but it was just that …’
‘Oh never mind.’ There was a beep and the call was terminated. Maggie was usually the one to terminate the call.
Walter pressed the End Call button on the phone viciously and said in a falsely cheery voice: ‘Bye then.’ A car behind him beeped its horn. He looked up and noticed that the traffic had moved forward about ten metres and stopped again.
‘OK OK!’ Walter said to the car in his rear-view mirror.
He took his foot from the brake and rolled forward. The car behind stuck closely to his bumper, moving forward with small jerks. Walter didn’t like tailgaters. Then again who did? He gently applied the brakes and rolled ever so slowly to a stop a good couple of car-lengths away from the car in front of him. He glanced in the rear-view mirror again with a slight smirk on his face.
‘Arse-wipe,’ he said.
*
When Walter finally got into the city it was already 8.45am and he was a good forty-five minutes late. This didn’t matter particularly as most of the others in the office didn’t start until 9.00am, but he liked to begin earlier. That first hour in the morning, with the rest of the office half deserted, was the most productive part of the day. He got most of his work done then. The remainder of the day was fragmented and disjointed by the comings and goings of the rest of the office staff. The simplest of tasks were interrupted and lengthened, he felt, by phone calls, or people turning up and wanting to speak to him face to face. Of course this was partly because of that most horrible of arrangements: open plan.
He entered the car park and resigned himself to the long drive up and around the levels to the top. By this time of the morning all the lower levels were full. In fact he had to drive all the way up to the very top level before he found a spot. He pulled in and turned off the engine but not the music. For a moment he sat there in his climate controlled interior, in his own world, a world without tailgate drivers and open plan offices, a world possibly without Maggie, certainly without her nagging, and definitely without trains. But perhaps that was asking a bit too much of Ibiza Summer. He turned off the music and got out of the car.
*
Walter worked for Equity Insurance. Their motto, as displayed under the logo was ‘Probity, Honesty, Integrity’. He had always found this motto a little embarrassing—what were they, Knights of the Round Table? He wished he had been in the boardroom with the senior executive team around a table the day they were brainstorming virtues appropriate for the motto, so that he could have thrown something a bit more interesting into the mix—chastity perhaps, or even sobriety? Cleanliness? Everyone knew that was right up there next to godliness.
The Equity Insurance firm had offices in William Street in the Melbourne CBD. That part of town was resolutely corporate, a hive of activity during the working week, but mostly dead in the evenings and during the weekends, apart from the nearby King Street with its lap-dancing venues and grotty reputation. The Equity Insurance building wasn’t a particularly interesting building. It was built somewhere in the late 80s and there was a huge echoing foyer lined with white faux-granite and mirrors, two huge revolving doors at the front and a bank of six lifts. There were twenty-three floors, a number of them given over to various areas of Equity Insurance—financial services, life insurance, wealth management, the executive floor and HR. The call centres were elsewhere, although not yet offshore, Walter was pleased to note.
Walter worked in life insurance as an actuarial analyst. It wasn’t a particularly interesting job, but he was a numbers man, he was a spreadsheet kind of guy and so it suited him. Given his age, he should probably have risen naturally up the ladder a little higher than he had, but just as waiters and shopkeepers overlooked him, so did the executive team when it came to promotion, new opportunities, project work, and so on. In this case though, Walter was more or less happy to remain ‘under the radar’ (horrid term) because in common, he was sure, with much of the population and certainly many of his co-workers, he didn’t really give a stuff about his job. Well, he did and he didn’t. It suited him, certainly, considering he had an aptitude for the sort of number crunching required and didn’t particularly feel interested in, or good at, interacting with the public in the form of Equity Insurance clients. The wage suited him, which was good without being incredible and was paid into his account fortnightly, the four weeks of holiday suited him, taken pretty much when he liked, and the options for voluntary contributions to his Super and car payments suited him, reducing his wage below a certain threshold which meant he got taxed less. The routine of it suited him, and the longer he was there, the more he knew the work, the less it impinged on him, the less he had to think about it. It was this more than anything that suited him, the ease of it all. In a way he no longer even noticed that he worked for Equity Insurance.
Sometimes he wondered, sometimes, in a flash of perspective, for just a second, he wondered what he was saving himself for, but that thought flustered him a little, in some way he didn’t understand. It was one of those thoughts with a huge unexplored well of blackness behind it, and it wasn’t really in Walter’s nature to plumb those depths.
His team