“Retarded pets,” said Hemingway, returning to his magazine.
Alan desperately hoped this was a reference to the recipients of the money raised at the morning tea, rather than to the origins of the cocktail frankfurt.
“A good cause, certainly,” he said, rejecting the ‘mystery meat’ theory.
He surreptitiously pulled a tissue from his pocket and wrapped it around the fairy bread to prevent 'hundreds and thousands' from thundering over the crustless edge onto the desktop as he secreted the item into his waste paper basket.
“How is your eye?” he asked, when the task was accomplished.
“So-so,” said Hemingway, not looking up.
“No one has remarked on it?”
“I’m saying “accidents will happen” and “there’s no point in completing a pink form.”
The vast amount of detail required by the department’s new “notification of work-related injury” pro forma was widely thought to be the single most important cause of the decline in compensation claims in the previous months. Mentioning the form was an undeniably clever method of steering discussion away from the injury, itself; everyone liked to complain about the amount of information required.
Alan retrieved two one-dollar coins from the purse in his top drawer and walked over to Hemingway. “I don’t want you to be out of pocket for the morning tea,” he said.
“There’s no need,” Hemingway replied. “We know things, you and I.”
In a general sense, this was an irrefutable truth – who didn’t know things? – and in relation to certain goings-on in the toilets that morning, it was also a statement of fact. Hemingway and Alan both knew, for example, that they’d engaged in discussion after and in relation to the flight of Quentin Quist. But if Hemingway meant to suggest that only he and Alan knew about Quentin Quist’s attack, that was patently untrue, for Quist, too, was aware of what had happened … and Alan’s knowledge, if it could be called that, was merely a creature of hearsay and deductive reasoning. Any notion of fraternity derived from shared secrets was consequently founded on an entirely false premise.
At the same time, though, Alan was relieved to be thought of as someone sharing in the cognisance of something, and not as the custodian of (currently unspecified) unshared or intentionally concealed knowledge.
He left the coins on the desktop and returned to his own cubicle where he placed more absorbent paper under the casserole, “snuck” the tissue-encased brownie into the bin and turned his attention to his emails.
There were screens full of unread messages, for these were times when it seemed safer to press “send”, if there was any doubt, rather than make a crucial omission. Alan had been obliged in the previous weeks to choose as never before, and even though the act of selecting which messages to read caused him near-constant anxiety, he was able, once choices were made, to not return to unopened missives, even if he found them impossible to delete.
He focused on an e-mail to all staff announcing a daily mail round, and on a revised circular about expenditure reporting procedures which seemed only to require the spelling of “Program” and “Programs” as “Programme” and “Programmes”, respectively. But such attention was only procrastinatory – an excuse not to read the email he’d earlier ignored from Tina Fox-Gosling, entitled “Food for the body and nurrishment for the wounded sole”.
He read a circular about executive appointments and promotions (which had no bearing on his day-to-day life), a message from Ministerial Communications Branch about a change to the spelling of the word “program” under the new government (for which his earlier reading of the expenditure reporting circular had, thankfully, prepared him) and a directive banning smoking outside departmental buildings.
There were many other emails which he could reasonably have opened and lingered over, including several efficiency suggestions from union members pursuant to the resolution of the morning meeting. However, he knew that he would have to deal with the most recent Fox-Gosling email sooner or later, so took a deep breath and clicked on it.
The message read: “You poor sweet darling man, who can tell how you have managed to go on you poor darling that ungrateful awful woman didn’t deserve a jewel as rare precious and exquisite as you, you WILL love again yes your poor broken heart will mend and when you do who knows you may yet find someone perhaps even someone already known to you who would cherish the REAL you and love you for the special sweet adorable darling man you really are. I am here for you until you’re ready, darling yummy eggplant casserole, it’s on your desk, cooked with love. Hugs and kisses; Your Teeny Weenie.”
This communication bothered Alan on several levels. It troubled him because there was something so terribly raw, breathless and intense about it. It disturbed him, too, because of the frequency with which it employed the words “poor” and “darling”– with a repetitiveness bordering on the battological. It further disturbed him because of the contempt it evinced for the rules of punctuation. Still further, it disturbed him because of the infantilism manifest in “Teeny Weenie” and because of the aversion he had to people altering their names – the ones their parents had seen fit to allocate them – without any thought for unintended irony; Tina Fox-Gosling was such a generously proportioned woman – so comprehensively and thoroughly ‘tuckshopped’ ─ that she could not have been accurately described as “teeny” or “weenie” (and never as both).
But the message disturbed him most of all because of the sinister ambiguity implicit in the statement “I am here until you are ready.” Where was “here”? With what expectations was she wherever “here” might yet be revealed to be? And what was he supposed to be ready for, once here (or there)?
He registered a sense of anxiety in keeping with the intimidating proportions of the woman. He then wondered why it was that oversized women (rather than ones who were a better match to his own slight physiognomy) were – of all the females conceivably attracted to him – the ones who were drawn with such frightening single-mindedness.
On the plus side, there was nothing about the message which indicated that anyone (apart from Alan) was yet aware of the most scandalous aspect of Eleanor’s departure: the lesbian dimension.
His stomach rumbled but he clicked on a new email from Peaches Trefusis which, no matter how incendiary and badly punctuated, could not have been as vexing as the one he’d just read.
His stomach rumbled again, causing Hemingway to put down his magazine. “I can hear your tum-tum calling for attention. It must be time to eat something.”
“I’ve had the sweet items.”
“Then it must be time for the frankfurt.”
“In just a minute,” said Alan, almost gagging at the prospect of placing in his mouth something that had rested in a cloth into which nasal secretions had once been expelled.
“It’s a bit naughty of you to have eaten your sweeties before your main,” said Hemingway.
It was too late for Alan to claim that he was a vegetarian, a vegan, or allergic to preserved meats. It was too late, also, to probe for clarification re the retarded pets. And he couldn't think of a polite way of explaining that he was incapable of fellatio-like ingestion in the presence of an out-of-the-closet colleague. He picked up the miniature frankfurt.
“You wouldn’t like it, yourself?”
“Goodness me, no. I’ve already eaten.”
At the instant his teeth broke through the red casing, causing thick, soupy juice to leak down his chin and onto the desktop, his eyes met Hemingway’s single functioning orb over the top of the magazine the ex-milliner was reading… and he knew that an event of some (as yet unknown) significance had transpired. Both men looked away and Alan secreted the greasy meat still in hand into a tissue and thence into the bin.
Peaches