Me Without You (5 page)

I
was frantically
busy at work, which was business as usual. The directors liked to keep the workload at burnout pace, which was probably why I’d been at Tison Creative since my internship. Junior staff were disposable assets, and if you happened to survive long enough to get a promotion, the pressure became a way of life.

I was the conduit between the creatives and the business at Tison’s. When new work was on the horizon, it was me who took the phone call and then later presented the pitch. And I was good at that, bloody good actually. I loved standing before rooms full of suits and trying to change their minds, in the same way that I loved managing campaigns to change the public’s mind. There is something very addictive about making people’s thoughts line up with yours. I’ve often wondered whether, if I’d been religious, I would have been one of those television evangelists, getting rich converting people to my way of thinking.

Once we had secured a job it was my role to manage the flow of work all the way through to the final invoice. I passed the tough messages downwards and the hopeful messages upwards. So, it was my job to send the email that cancelled all planned leave during the election campaign, to fire the graphic artist who’d been caught chatting on infertility forums during business hours, and to announce the board’s decision to take on the cigarette company’s account. There have been times during my career at Tison’s when I have been able to walk from the elevator all the way to my desk in the corner office without a single person smiling or even acknowledging me. I have never been at work to make friends, and that’s probably why I only had one there.

His name was Karl Dickson, and he was one of the senior designers and an all-round nice-guy. The yin to my work yang—well liked, friends with everyone, good at remembering the details of people’s lives and enjoying small talk with them at the water cooler. He had arrived at Tison’s with the ink on his degree still wet around the same time I did, and we’d climbed the corporate ladder side by side over the past eighteen years. Karl lived on the creative side of the marketing divide, which was probably how we’d wound up friends—we were never directly competing. I imagine if we’d gone head to head for a position or even an account in the early days, our friendship would have imploded pretty quickly. Instead, we’d shared nearly two decades of life, and although we rarely saw each other outside of work now that he was a husband and father, he was closer to me than my brothers.

We had a morning ritual, when our schedules allowed it. Sometime between nine and nine thirty a.m., we’d meet by the ridiculous pot plant outside my office. It was a plastic palm tree in a plastic pot, and I’m sure someone thought it would make the work environment more appealing, but, at least to me, it represented everything that frustrated me about Tison’s and our work there. The plant never grew, it couldn’t die—it seemed to have absolutely no purpose other than to fill the space. I suppose in that sense it was the perfect place for me to meet with the one human being in the office I had actually formed a friendship with. Beside the pot plant was a stairwell, so we’d walk the ten flights of stairs to the café at the bottom of our building and catch up on any news of the day, work related or other. Karl was happily married these days, but once upon a time we’d hit the town together after work and then met back at the pot plant in the morning to swap offensively shallow tales from the nightclub scene.

We both grew up though. Karl grew up into a loving husband and father. And I grew up too, purely because my job took up all of the available space in my life and I no longer had time for juvenile games. Besides which, these days, even if I did manage to have dinner or more with a woman, I had at last achieved enough maturity not to brag about it.

The morning after Lilah, though, the words spilled from my mouth like lava from a volcano.

‘I met the most amazing woman last night.’ The door hadn’t even shut behind us as we stepped into the stairwell. Karl was in front, about to begin the long walk downwards, but he turned to stare at me, his expression stuck somewhere between disbelief and bemusement.

‘On a Thursday?’ He laughed out loud. ‘Shouldn’t you have been at home working?’

He began the descent down the first flight of stairs, and I pulled the door shut and followed him.

‘I met her on the ferry. She wasn’t wearing shoes. I asked her why. We got talking. Went out for dinner and connected in a way I didn’t even know was possible. Then we went back to my place. I woke up and she was gone.’

‘For someone who finally broke a dry spell, you don’t look very happy.’

‘She was gorgeous: smart, witty—the whole package. And then she just disappeared while I was asleep.’

‘You can’t tell me you’ve never been the one to disappear,’ Karl shrugged. ‘You got laid, and you didn’t have an awkward morning after. Sounds win-win to me.’

‘Except for the part where I don’t have her contact details and I’m assuming since she didn’t leave them she’s not hoping to hear from me again.’

My words echoed around me in the stairwell and I heard how petulant I sounded. As he turned the first corner to the floor below us, I saw Karl grinning to himself.

‘I think someone is smitten.’

‘Fat lot of good it’s going to do me.’ I was outright sulking now. There was no hiding it.

‘Google her.’

I’d googled her on my phone on the way to work. Apparently either Lilah Owens, lawyer, kept an incredibly low profile—or she’d given me a false name. I had a sneaking suspicion it was the latter. With another search, I quickly found the public outcry and then the media coverage of the tree at Shelly Beach being saved, and even a reference to a bunch of lawyers who’d worked on the case, but the name she’d given me wasn’t mentioned anywhere.

‘That’s a little too stalker-ish for my liking,’ I lied.

‘So your game plan is to—what—hope you run into her on the ferry again and she doesn’t jump overboard to get away from you and your crappy sexual performance?’

‘My sexual performance was fine. And something like that.’

That was precisely my plan. In fact, I was already formulating my next move. The only common ground I really had with her in our day-to-day lives was the ferry, and so I was going to stagger my ferry trips as much as possible and try to bump into her again. A phone number, or even her real name, would have been easier, but in the absence of those things I was going to have to find a hidden well of patience.

A
s the morning wore on
, my thoughts turned to the conversation I’d had with Lilah about visiting my brother, Ed. I opened my email and began to construct a message to him.

I had a sister-in-law I’d never met, whose name I could never remember, and embarrassingly she’d been married to my brother for several years. They’d invited me to the wedding of course, but it had been a whirlwind romance and they'd only given a few weeks' notice. I vaguely remembered trying to shuffle a few things at work and realising that it wasn’t going to happen, and informing Ed via email that I wouldn’t be there. I had a feeling our infrequent communications became markedly more so after I missed his wedding.

Ed, I really need to come see you and meet…

Lizette? Suzette? Hell.

…your lovely wife. When’s a good time to visit?

I sent the email. Ed replied almost immediately and suggested the European winter which was months away, and I was thrilled—it was far away enough that I could postpone taking any action for some time. I forwarded the email to William, my brother in Melbourne, with a vague note about catching up on the phone sometime and maybe arranging to go to France together.

And then, feeling as if I’d at least achieved one thing for the morning, I shut my laptop and went to find lunch.

There’s a shopping centre underground near my office, and I almost always sat in at the food court to eat. Generally I read the newspaper at the same time.

I’m not sure why I did something different that day. I remember the blue skies beckoning as I walked from my office to the food court, and so I got a takeaway lunch instead.

I thought I’d walk up George Street and find myself a sunny spot on Martin Place, an open air pedestrian-only plaza entirely framed by sandstone buildings. There were even a few small trees here and there and I thought yet again of Lilah. I wondered why she hadn’t even woken me before she left. Had I said something to offend her? I’d been so sure she felt the connection between us too—had I been wrong? Or would she just turn up again if the mood took her? Would I hear the intercom sound one night and find her on the other side of the door as if she’d never left?

When I first saw her step from the taxi, I assumed I was imagining her. There are nearly five million people in the city of Sydney; surely I wouldn’t be lucky enough to bump into her two days in a row. But there she was, just around the corner from my office, wearing in a dark grey suit this time with her hair again trapped within the confines of a too-tight bun. She stepped out of a taxi and began to powerwalk towards a lobby.

‘Lilah?’

Her eyes widened when she turned towards me, and I saw her sharp intake of breath. I couldn’t quite read the expression on her face—but it wasn’t delight; if I had to guess, I’d say it was probably closer to dismay. There was a sudden drop in my guts, that feeling you get when a plane hits an air pocket and dips without warning.

Her companions, a younger man and woman, had been trailing behind from the taxi and came to an uncertain stop beside her. Around us, the buzz of the city continued, car horns sounding and engines roaring past. But the sight of Lilah filled my field of vision, and all I could think was that I’d come so close to eating in the damned food court, and I’d have missed the terrifying exhilaration of this moment.

‘Wait for me in the boardroom.’ Her tone was sharp, and her colleagues silently obeyed. And then we were alone—at least it felt like we were, even though George Street is the busiest street in the city.

For far too long we stared at each other. It was becoming apparent to me that Lilah was trying to figure out what to say. Should I be embarrassed to admit my heart was pounding with a flight-or-fight response? I’m not afraid of confrontation and never have been. It wasn’t fear of the discussion that was affecting me; it was a stone-cold fear of rejection.

‘I met this lady on a ferry once,’ I said, or rather blurted, just to end the taut stretch of time since one of us had spoken. Lilah raised her eyebrows.

‘You did.’ She was unsurprised. Unimpressed. And, worst of all, the set of her expression was still hard. I pressed on.

‘She was incredible. Best night of my life. Then she disappeared.’

‘That is a terribly sad tale.’

‘That’s not the worst of it. I’m pretty sure she lied to me about her name.’

‘The wench.’ Lilah didn’t deny it, and didn’t look at all surprised that I suspected her subterfuge. She clucked her tongue in mock-sympathy. ‘How traumatic for you. I hope you’ve recovered.’

‘Hard to say. I still cry myself to sleep but at least I’m eating again.’

‘Tell me, Mr…?’

‘You can call me Mr Lonely,’ I said. I realised that she was engaging in my game, which meant that in spite of the tight way she’d crossed her arms over her chest and the hard line of her mouth, she hadn’t entirely closed the door on me.

‘Mr Lonely. Tell me, did you and this amazing woman discuss a golden future together?’

‘I thought at least some analysis of the likely success of such a future was warranted.’

She raised an eyebrow.

‘Are you
sure
you’re not a lawyer?’

‘Why did you sneak out?’ I heard the frustration in my tone and knew I needed to keep it in check. There was another moment of silence, briefer this time, but once again made awkward by the fact that she was obviously formulating a way to get rid of me.

‘I told you I had court today. I had to leave early to prepare, to make up for the night I spent naked with you instead of reading.’

‘Then why did you give me a false name?’

‘I always give false names to men I pick up on ferries. That way if I don’t want to see them again, it’s easy to avoid them.’ She flashed me a charming smile and I could almost have forgiven her then and there. Her words sunk in. I didn’t want this conversation to be light-hearted anymore. I wanted answers.

‘Are you really telling me you didn’t want to see me again?’

‘That’s not what I said,’ Lilah corrected me carefully. ‘I said I gave you a false name
in case
I didn’t want to see you again. We did have a really great night together.’

‘Now you’re lawyering me.’

‘Callum,’ she sighed impatiently. ‘I am really not the relationship type. I thought it would be like ripping off a band-aid—over within an instant.’

The day was far too beautiful for a potentially painful conversation like this one, but even more than that, I’d
noticed
the beauty of it. For too long I’d gone through the motions, days and weeks and months and maybe years blurring into one another in a monotony. And yet this day was different to the one before it; the cycle of sameness had been shattered. I wanted to point these things out to Lilah and impress her with the depth of my thoughts. Instead, I knew I was fighting for the chance to share such things with her and to have her share her equally random thoughts with me. I’d take what I could get, from both this woman and this conversation, even just a coffee together every now and again, or the promise to smile at each other if we saw one other on the ferry.

This encounter just had to end with the chance of a continued connection.

It
had
to.

She’d shifted her attention to the revolving door beside us, and I glanced there too.
Davis McNally
. Was this where she worked, or was she there for a meeting?

It was time for a different approach, before she skittled through the doors and disappeared from my life forever.

‘I think,’ I said quietly, ‘you were scared.’