He’s right about her kids. Packed off to Social Services. If my conscience hadn’t long been hammered into oblivion, maybe I’d care. Maybe I’d even feel sorry.
But I’ve done worse. A lot worse.
I know how it feels to lose your fucking kids, but life goes on. Same shit, different day. Only Wendy Brown has a chance of getting hers back, a couple of months clean and some supervised visits, and they’ll be back home, watching daytime TV while their mother fucks men for money in the room next door.
Poor fucking sods.
But that’s the world we live in.
The world all around us, around every shadowy corner.
The world that speared me and left me for dead under the heel of Ronald journalist scum Robertson himself, but we don’t talk about that. Not since my father paid him almost seven figures to keep my face out of his shitty paper.
The city passes by the window and I’m glad of the tinted glass. Glad that nobody can see me scrub my hands with antibacterial gel, as though that stands a chance of getting Bill Catterson’s grime off me. But it won’t.
Bill Catterson’s grime is in me, along with all the others – all the other slimy cunts I’ve been paid obscenely well to divert justice for.
I’m full of them. Every backhanded deal, every character assassination I’ve undertaken in their name, every loophole in the law I’ve exploited to keep their records clean.
I pull out the phone from my inside pocket.
If I’m going to feel dirty it’ll be on my own fucking terms.
I think it’ll be a Candice evening tonight.MelissaFloor sixteen is beautiful. Glass and chrome and thick carpet that your shoes sink into.
My entire apartment could fit inside one of the executive toilet blocks up here, and it makes my heart pang a little, the contrast – my life and theirs.
I wonder if they realise how lucky they are, in their smart suits and their trendy hair, kicking back during meetings, unaware that I’m waiting, watching, hovering to swoop in like a thief in the night and clean up their mess when they’re done.
Discreet. That’s what Janet Yorkley told us. You have to be discreet.
We really are an embarrassment, that’s obvious. We aren’t allowed to walk along the main corridors in office hours, rushing along the service passages behind the scenes, hiding out in alcoves in fear of being spotted by those so much more important than us.
Floor sixteen has greater advantages than those obvious ones. The staffroom behind meeting suite seven is the hub of the higher floors, and it’s in there that we first met Cindy Harris, Mr Henley’s personal cleaner. She does his office – right at the back of the eighteenth floor – and more than that, so much more that it gives me shivers, she cleans his home. His actual home.
She loads his dishwasher, and stocks his fridge, and collects his suits from the dry cleaners on the way.
And she changes his sheets.
His bedsheets.
Takes his dirty laundry from the hamper, washes and presses it and folds it neatly back in his dressing room.
Sonnie’s face was a picture when she told us. She mouthed me a sweet Jesus and wiped her brow, and I knew then that the goalposts were moving.
Floor eighteen is no longer our final destination.
We’re heading for Alexander Henley’s bedroom, and it won’t be his seat we’ll be sniffing.
Call it fate, or another breadcrumb in the tatty novel that is my life, but we got a flash of good fortune at the end of our third post-promotion week.
Cindy likes us, and that’s lucky as hell, because we’re the first to hear her news, before it’s official, before she’s even told Janet Yorkley.
Her husband’s taken a new job posting, in Canada, and with it will come her two-month notice period, tops. Two months for Janet Yorkley to select a replacement for Mr Henley’s personal scrubber, two months to prove that we’re the team for the job.
Providing there is a team for the job, of course. The thought of going head to head with Sonnie for the new position makes my heart race, and not in a good way.
Hell, we’ll toss a coin for it if it comes to it, that’s what Sonnie says, but we both know it won’t come down to that. It’ll be Janet Yorkley’s call as to who washes Alexander Henley’s boxers, and that knowledge drives us on that bit harder, like women possessed, scrubbing our assigned areas like competition athletes and hoping we’ve got the edge. Even over each other, although we’d never say it.
Cindy figures we’ll get it, one of us if not both, she tells us so. She runs us through the opposition when we catch her on a break, and points out all the reasons they’ll never get promoted over us.
Takes cigarette breaks, and nobody will ever be allowed a cigarette break around Mr Henley’s property.