The Hut

The canteen in the Allstar Investments building is down on the second floor. It has hot meals and sandwiches and you can get tea and coffee there. It’s comfortable in that food court kind of way where you could sit around all day and no one would care. They got big windows. If you get a seat by the windows, you can see down onto the street.

It’s nice.

But you can’t smoke.

If you want to smoke, you go out the back of the building. Crouched to one side of the loading bay there’s a hut; a drab, grey-green pre-fab. It’s a wretched thing, faded and sagging. The kind of place that never had a glory day.

That’s where I was going that Thursday morning. It was the middle of January and it was cold and wet. I’d been out with customers the night before, showing them a good time. Lars had vomited all over the rear seat of the cab on the way back to the hotel, so I guess I got the job done. Now they were back in Denmark and I needed a cigarette.

So I went to the hut.

I pushed in the door and stepped inside. “Whoo,” I said, “It’s a stinker.”

“It sure is that,” said a woman’s voice. She was sitting cross-legged on a white plastic chair by the wall opposite the door. She looked at me scientifically, then not at all.

Alison Donnelly.

Shit.

*

We had history, Alison and me. About a year back we dated. Just the once. She wore dark purple lipstick and some perfume I remembered from when I was a teenager. We went to a new Korean place, drank beer, ate kimchi and chatted about chop-sticks and cities we had lived in. And that was it. She kissed me on the lips outside her apartment building and then she was gone. I drove home slowly.

I didn’t see her much at work for a while after that. She must have quit smoking. I’d bump into her every now and then in the canteen on the second floor, but she blanked me twice and after that it was just quick salutes and sweet smiles. I guess she didn’t like the kimchi.

Life goes on.

About two months ago she got promoted. Got a nice corner office on the seventh floor and started wearing smarter suits. A month after that, I got pulled into a meeting to talk about databases and there she was. I laid out some facts about Oracle and she didn’t like what I had to say.

I said: “Facts are facts.”

She made some snarky comment about how it was hard to take someone seriously when they were wearing a Where’s Wally tie. That was below the belt. I like my Where’s Wally tie. It’s cheery and colourful. You shouldn’t insult a guy’s tie.

The following weekend in the back of Byrne’s with Ed from Q.A., before I knew what I was doing, I had dreamt up a story about how the same Alison Donnelly was leaking acquisition data to Bluebird Securities. It was a spur of the moment kind of thing – a kind of creative impulse. It was late and both me and Ed were good and drunk. “No,” I said, “I shouldn’t tell you.” To be fair, he pressed me pretty hard. And I made it convincing. Allstar and Bluebird were always stealing each others accounts. The big ones we lost were usually announced to staff before it hit the business sections. Senior managers would talk about healthy competition and meeting challenges head-on. The news rarely survived more than a couple of days lunchtime conversation. But there were those hints and whispers.

I told Ed not to breathe a word.

I kind of forgot about it after that. Then last week I was closing off a ticket in Human Resources up on the fifteenth. I had just updated the virus definitions and I was restarting the computer. Next thing the doors of the elevator opened and Alison strode out flanked on either side by a member of H.R. She marched defiantly down the passageway and was guided into the office of Terence Shaw. I sat in front of the computer. I kept my head low. She was in there for about sixty minutes. When she came back out she looked confused, angry. I felt kinda bad.

*

There was another person in the hut that morning. She worked somewhere upstairs – a P.A. for some bigwig in Sales. Skeleton thin, her skin was pale, almost transparent. She sucked at the end of her cigarette like it was a teat. I saw her in the hut all the time. She must have smoked forty a day. There was a magazine on her lap, glossy photos of celebrities and weddings.

“Oh, it’s yourself,” she said. She knew my name, but she never used it.

“Hi Tina,” I said. I stood and smiled. I looked over at Alison. She was staring at a space on the wall. My survival instinct screamed at me to leave. I sat down opposite Tina and fished out a cigarette.

“Well, they’ll have to do something, it’s a disgrace,” said Tina, picking up her conversation with Alison.

Alison stared in contempt around the forsaken waiting room that was the smoking hut. “No one ever does anything in this place without thinking it over very carefully,” she said. I lit my cigarette because it felt like the right thing to do.

“Well, if they don’t get round to it soon, it’ll be too late,” said Tina.

“Yeah,” said Alison, “it’s gotten pretty bad.”

I glanced up from warped peeling linoleum tiles. Alison was shaking her head.

Tina said: “There’s no fixing it, though, really, is there?”

“I don’t know,” said Alison. “They should at least do something about the mould.”

The state of the hut. Well trodden conversational ground.

“Well, it’s not going to go away,” I put in. “Not while there are all these leaks.” I leant hard on the ‘leaks’. Attack, I figured, would be the best form of defense.

“Are there leaks?” asked Tina. She looked around the ceiling and then looked at me, concerned. I looked up, at Tina, at Alison. Alison’s eyes were cold fire.

“Sure,” I said. I stood and edged my way past Alison. “Sorry Alison,” I said. I could feel her hatred in my throat. “Up here.” I pointed to an area of the wall near the ceiling where there was a small tear in the fabrication. Alison exhaled something between a sigh and a gasp of exasperation. “See, someone tried to stuff it,” I said, “See. There’s chewing gum.” I pointed to the lumps of gum that had been crammed into the corner between the wall and the ceiling.

“Well, they’re quite resourceful, aren’t they?” said Tina.

“Yeah. Still leaking though,” I said. I touched the clammy wall and let a water drop roll onto my finger. I said: “I wonder how much you’d get paid for a job like that?” I waited for Tina to laugh.

I sat down again and looked at the water drop on my finger. I could sense Alison’s clenched jaw and her aura, black and shrunken. Tina looked down at her magazine.

“Oh, lovely pictures of Powerscourt,” she said.

“They’re all upside-down to me,” I said. Tina smiled and held the magazine up, so I could see. A bride and groom and a line of smiling faces stood in front of a full summer’s growth of flowers. She turned it towards Alison. Alison said nothing. Tina held the magazine there and eventually Alison nodded and Tina took the magazine away again. Tina and I looked down and no one said anything.

It was like that for while.

At last, Alison broke the silence: “Powerscourt. There’s a big waterfall there, isn’t there?”

“There is,” said Tina, and her eyebrows lifted as she heard herself say the words: “They won’t be able to plug that one up with chewing gum!”

It was a small bit easier after we’d stopped laughing.

 

 

The Hut © 2017 Fergus Deffely