A Calculated Life (2 page)

“About Tom?” she said, poking her head around his door. Benjamin, slumped in his sofa, looked up at Jayna and seemingly had no inclination to say anything. She felt hot. “I thought his last report—”

“It’s not about his work,” he said, and gestured to the armchair. “You know he’s…he was on holiday?”

She did. Tom had dropped another tome on her before he left, with a brief note:
Check and forward. Thx
.

“
Was
on holiday?”

“Tragic accident,” he said. “I want to tell everyone individually.”

“Tragic?”

“Swimming in the sea…”

Benjamin, she realized, had already told the story several times. He didn’t continue. So she prompted: “Drowned?”

“His wife and kids were on the beach. Couldn’t do anything about it.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Swept out. His brother phoned me last night at home. He’s flying out today.”

Another silence. What was she supposed to say? She recalled a drowning incident reported in the news. What did the journalist ask…?

“Have they found his body?” she said with precision.

“No. Not yet. Only happened yesterday.”

“That’s terrible.”

“And it’s going to be a long time before there’s a funeral. There’ll be an autopsy when they find the body…”

Stumped.

“Jayna, can you help me out?” Benjamin, gray-faced, pulled himself up to sit straight-backed. Was this one problem too many for Benjamin, she wondered, or was he upset? Tom had only joined seven months ago. “Can you go through his files? Finish anything that needs finishing. I think the others might find it too upsetting, so soon.”

“Okay. I’m familiar—”

“Thanks. Don’t tell the others. Just fit it around your own work. Let me know if I need to do any firefighting.”

A secondary post-mortem, she thought. “Fine.”

Jayna stepped along the corridor’s repeat-pattern squares and dipped into the washroom. Inside the end cubicle, she leaned back against the door.

Such bad timing! Rebuffing Tom…of all the opportunities I could have taken
, Jayna reproached herself.
He didn’t bother to explain…just assumed.
She flushed the toilet unnecessarily as though eradicating her response to his request:
Tom, I can’t possibly find time until the end of the month. Send it to Benjamin, as is
. He’d retorted:
FU2. Thanks for nothing, wonder woman
.

I didn’t know he was in a rush, going on holiday. How stupid of him to drown!

What, she wondered, were the chances of Tom’s death? In the entire working population of the Grace Hopper Building she’d expect a premature fatality…once a year? But at Mayhew McCline, with only forty-five employees, the chance of anyone drowning was so small it was technically…She stopped herself and opened the door.

It was never negligible, it was always there. She turned the tap, too far, and water shot out from the basin. Accidents simply happened.

The kitchen became the unofficial, designated space for commiserations and the occasional sobbing over Tom as though the analysts were protecting their office space from permanent stains of
association. Jayna observed Eloise zigzagging through the department with a condolence card. She averted her eyes as each person hesitated with pen poised. Eloise didn’t bring the card to Jayna. Hester, chief analyst, announced she was installing herself for the morning in Benjamin’s quiet room and they all knew what she’d be doing—she’d inform colleagues in London about Tom’s death and speak to his personal business contacts, get them reassigned to other analysts. Jayna imagined ripples of concern of varying magnitude spreading from all these subsidiary nodes. No such after-effects from her stick insect’s demise.

She brought up Tom’s files on her array. And immediately closed them. Instead, she pulled up her own studies and began drilling through her energy data sets. Hydrogen, she decided, was worth a closer look. She interrogated the data on hydrogen car ownership, rotated the charts and geographical visuals—global, continental, and regional—and calculated a trend for global hydrogen car ownership over the past five-years. Next, she searched for a correlation with individual variables in other data sets: disposable income for the same period, fresh fruit exports, per capita holiday spending, a host of commodity production figures, wholesale energy prices…thirty-seven variables in all. Her array flashed, cycling through regressions and wildly fluctuating figures for statistical significance. She brushed twenty-one possibilities aside. Playing with combinations of the remaining variables, she derived seventeen relationships. A fair start, she thought. By instinct, she assigned a weighting for each variable and began her quest for the perfect curve, one that matched the five-year historical trend. And as she adjusted the weightings, the curves began their shape shifting. Benjamin appeared at Jayna’s shoulder. “How can you take it all in? I feel sick just watching.”

But Jayna refused the interruption. She was closing in but the match simply wasn’t good enough. There was nothing to flag up, as yet, for Benjamin. Definitely needed more variables. She could, at this stage, submit a bland sector summary on hydrogen, but anyone could
do that. No, she wanted nothing less than a full investment strategy. Worth spending the extra time. She checked her own performance statistics. On average, over her six months’ service to date, she’d concluded three projects a week, quadruple the frequency of anyone else in the department. Yes, she could afford to spend more time on hydrogen.

Sitting in the park, as she always did after work on Monday, she threw crumbs to her left and right and occasionally ahead of her. Such simple creatures. Each time she flicked her wrist, she reckoned only one or two pigeons espied the flight of stale scraps. She tested her theory by throwing crumbs to her far right. One pigeon twisted around, reacting in the instant. Correct. The other pigeons followed as though a switch had been thrown in each of their tiny brains. Jayna threw to the far left. Again, a single cadger tracked the new trajectory. Leading one minute, subservient the next.

Bother!
Maybe she should have rewritten Tom’s report. She shook out the remaining crumbs from her paper bag. But she’d been right to consider her own productivity. It was all getting way out of hand.
I know now what I should have done
. She flattened the paper bag against her thigh and made quarter folds.
From the outset I should have allocated the time I spent on his jobs to
his
timesheet, not mine, without asking him. He’d have thought twice, then, about asking for help.

The birds were in a frenzy. Their heads jabbed, jabbing the air as they jerked along, jabbing at the crumbs on the ground. Jayna examined the evidence of their mishaps—empty eye sockets, stump feet, trailing feathers—and noticed that two of the birds were verging on obese.

And as for Eloise and her father, she rolled her eyes to the treetops,
I still get it wrong
.

On the way to her residence in Granby Row, she stopped by the garish menu boards at the Jasmin Five Star Tandoori Restaurant and examined the names of the dishes: King Prawn Vindaloo, Aloo Methi, Bindi Bhaji, Baroa Mozaa. A waiter hovered in the doorway, so she turned away before he could begin his entreaties. No point wasting his time. And, rejoining the mid-afternoon crowds ambling in the hot spring breeze, she thought about her work colleagues who went back to their own kitchens in their own homes at the end of each day. She wondered if they, too, gave names to all their meals.

The incessant street projections begged the city workers to delay their journeys home. They showed trailers for the latest films intercut with clips of star karaoke performers, all aimed at sucking the more impressionable commuters towards the downtown Entertainment Quarter and the Repertory Domes. As the crowds neared their metro stops, high-kick dancers were scorched across the city skyline in a last-ditch attempt to prevent anyone leaving. Jayna lowered her gaze and scrutinized the footwear worn by pedestrians who rushed towards her or cut across her path. Today, she looked for shoes that demanded attention; shoes that demanded she look up to see the wearer’s face. And in these faces she searched for any indication that they returned her curiosity. It didn’t happen. So she stared directly into the eyes of oncoming pedestrians but she failed again; she couldn’t force any connection.

She entered her residence by the side door and climbed the scrubbed stairway to her single-room quarters on the second floor, just as she had done every working day for the previous twenty-six weeks. She changed into her loose clothes and hung her suit in the narrow, open-fronted wardrobe by the sink. Dropping onto her single bed, she closed her eyes. A difficult day. She assessed her options beyond the routine of taking a shower and dining with the other residents. She could (a) chat in the common room with her friends; (b) relax alone in her room until lights out; or (c) continue her
private studies. She admitted that (b) and (c) amounted to pretty much the same thing.

“How rare is drowning at the age of thirty-four?” Jayna said as soon as Julie seated herself at the dining table. With Julie’s job at the Pensions Agency, she’d know the figures.