100% True Love

I used to work forty-two hours a week. Ever tried managing an entire department through your phone? I did. I don’t miss it, but I barely noticed at the time. All in all, I liked my life. I checked the paperwork, I redirected the mail, I binned the spam. I was not important, but I felt needed. That was what enabled me to get up at 6 AM every morning, ride two separate buses, and turn up behind my desk, solving problems other people deemed irrelevant but which, to me, were after all my daily bread. Like answering emails. Making sure, on top of everything else, that coffee was ready by 3 PM. I tried to make myself useful, that was all. According to Mr Reynolds – head of recruiters – I was a pillar supporting the whole building. “Penny,” he often told me, “Penny, what would we do without you?” Well, I really had no clue. As far as I was concerned, I felt this close to a nervous breakdown, but, all considered, more or less stable. I liked stability. It meant antidepressants stayed in their box and chocolate doughnuts stayed away from my bag. I was just one of three hundred workers answering the phones at Coraline Industries. A name like any other. Penny Lane. And yet, in my little world, made up of a white desk, a laptop, and a steaming mug of coffee, I was… happy. I was pretty, not a head-turner. Not someone who’d show up on a fashion magazine. Thin. Enough. Not skinny, not fit. Naturally thin, that’s all, not madly dependent on a treadmill. I lived in an attic under the roof in South Loop. Not far from the aquarium, if you’re familiar with the area. I had a fairly satisfying relationship with Michael Dillard, a freelance photographer. He kept his obsessions away from my flat. One such was chess, which I hated. I didn’t even know the names of the pieces, and this kept us apart pretty much every weekend. Michael went off for his tournaments, and came back with his trophies. As for me, I pretended to listen to his retelling. He knew, and was content with that. We were a quiet couple. We had no ambitions of perfection. To earn his forgiveness, I wore extremely sexy underwear. A whole collections of g-strings, briefs, bustiers. You’d never guess, looking at what I wore to work. I liked to look reassuring, I was not an outgoing person. I mean… I was rather shy. An introvert. Any trivial thing would make me blush. I had a silly dream of turning into one of those TV femmes fatales, a rush of latex and scalding glances, but in the end I was simply myself: a secretary going slightly downhill, wearing denims and a white cardigan. Brown hair, a fringe, rectangular frames on my glasses. That foray into the fetish world was somewhat disappointment, but what about it? I had friends who cared about me, a job, a boyfriend. No career options, all right, but I still earned more than Tom Sanders. I hated Tom, his constant yearning for attention, his belief that he was the only one who knew how to turn the printer on. It might even be true, the printer did always work for him, but I earned two hundred dollars more than him. So you couldn’t say that I led such an empty life. It was just destined to sizzle out, as things always do when they have no beginning and are naturally heading for their end, and they’re about to turn into something else entirely that you might have not seen coming. That was about to happen to me. At the time, however, I didn’t have the slightest clue. I thought I was destined for a postcard kind of life. A relaxed marriage, a suburban home, a dog. Children. Two at least. I could see myself making cakes for the Sunday fair. I thought I’d go on sorting out paperwork and binning spam roughly for as long as it would take to reach the minimum age for retirement. At that point in time, for instance, my only problem was trying to fit the name ‘Kit William Kardashian of Street Food, Jackson, Mississippi’ on the dotted line on a document I’d been told needed sending as soon as possible. I was fighting with my notes. I was fighting with my laptop. “Hey, Penny...” I hadn’t even noticed Margareth Brown approaching. She’d come out of her office. She was wearing a red cardigan and a brown check shirt. Margareth had beautiful hair, a hooked nose which gave her a snobbish vibe, and an endless supply of gossip to deploy during coffee breaks. She walked up to the filing cabinet. I was slamming the drawers, trying to keep my frustration in check. Kit William Kardashian… what kind of a name is that? “What is it?” I spat out. Not even ‘hi, how are you?’ “Feeling tense?” she asked. “Somewhat,” I replied. “Can you help me?” I asked, resting my elbow on the cabinet. I gave her a deeply disconsolate look. “No,” Margareth confessed, amused by how easily work managed to get to me. She thought I took everything too seriously. “I can give you something better,” she offered. She looked oddly hyped. Had to be nothing good, I thought. I still listened on. “Is it money? An opportunity? Please tell me it’s about that Gucci bag I saw in the sales today,” I begged. “Change is in the air”. She clicked her tongue. It felt like the beginning of one of those tales which always end with ‘and then he got sacked’. “Oh”. Losing interest, I walked back to my desk. “I had hoped for the bag”. I didn’t like to gossip, especially not about people finding themselves on the dole all of sudden. So I turned on my heels, and went back to my seat. I had a whole pack of paper with me, still pristine. I might make my way through it all, but I swore to myself I would fit Kit William Kardashian on that bloody dotted line. “You’re not interested?” Margareth followed me, looking slightly disappointed. She hated not being able to catch people’s curiosity. I hated disappointing her. “No, please. Tell me about it”. I stopped, sat on the edge of the desk, and listened. Kit could wait, after all. Relaxing a little, Margareth came up closer and whispered: “The marketing department has a new director”. “Didn’t they like the old one?” I smiled. “This one doesn’t like underage girls”. “Man of the year, really,” I noted, but in truth I cared very little about what happened in the upper echelons of the company. My work was rarely affected by it. As I said, what I was doing was necessary, but pointless to everyone else. Which made me, yes, pointless. But thankfully necessary. That meant I was one of the few people who did not fear a market crisis or a personnel cut. There is always a need for someone to pick up the phone and say ‘Coraline Industries, how can I help you?’ I made sure my tone was always friendly enough, which fulfilled about 75% of my duties. “I don’t know if he’s man of the year, but I can promise you he’d a man. He’s just come in from Pittsburgh. A hundred percent certified”. She winked. I gave it some thought. Margareth tended to exaggerate. I always suspected she did it to make her stories more interesting. I may not have fully believed her when she suggested a provocative manager had come in from Pennsylvania. “Uh-huh”. I still rejoiced, just not too enthusiastically. “Not persuaded? Go take a look at him. Nathan Sloan. They gave him an office on the eighteenth floor. I’m telling you again. Make a note of it. Nathan Sloan. Just past the meeting room. You can’t get it wrong”. She winked again. The repetition managed to spark my curiosity. “All right. Just a quick glance, perhaps”, That was how I decided I’d go take a look at what was happening on the Coraline upper floors. I know I shouldn’t have. It’s just that sometimes, I too was vulnerable to the charm of a nice backside in a pair of tight… the charm of power, I mean. Therefore, I left my stuff and pretended I was rushing off to deliver a letter to the Admin Centre. That was my usual excuse. What are you doing there by the coffee machines, Penny? Delivering a letter to the Admin Centre, of course. Everyone thought it reasonable for me to have nothing else to do but trot up and down the stairs delivering tracked post. It suited me too, if they kept finding it reasonable. So I grabbed a couple bills from my bag – I absolutely needed to remember to pay them – and left Kit William Kardashian to ponder the option of turning into Mr Kardashian, or perhaps K.W. Kardashian.