Zigzag Street (21 page)

It's strange. Giving up sleep should mean I have more time to do things, but I seem to have far less.

I don't even have enough time for bread to toast in the mornings, so I find I'm trying to convince myself that a glass of flavoured mineral water and a handful of Tim Tams is the breakfast of champions.

I have bad feelings about today. Not that this differentiates it from any day in the recent past, but today has the visitors from Singapore, and maybe also some kind of consequences following Barry the Great's brief appearance on Saturday night.

I realise today is a day for an ironed shirt, but I don't have time for that either. So I defer the ironing and I leave home wearing something crumpled and old, and carrying the best shirt I can find in a plastic bag.

I borrow the travelling iron from the executive suite on the sixteenth floor, taking care to go nowhere near Barry's office, and I go back to fifteen and start ironing the shirt on a towel on my desk. As a well-known master of crap, this seems very likely to end in disaster, but for once things go just as they should, and I'm admiring my work, thinking, Hey, maybe I should do this more often, when Hillary comes in. Of course, she catches me in the brief period between shirts and, as I am standing behind my word processor, she thinks I am totally naked again.

Shit, sorry
, she says and walks out slamming the door. Before I can do anything the door is open again and she's saying,
What am I acting surprised for? I get to see you naked about every third day
.

Pants on, I tell her. Pants on. I am not naked, merely ironing.

That's good. I could have sworn I heard ‘Girl from Ipanema' on the Musak. You had me scared. I was wondering if you were the victim of a cruel hypnotist
.

Just don't hum that tune. I can't help myself.

Anyway, I came in with a reason
.

Yeah?

Barry. You haven't heard about Barry
?

No.

He's gone. He's out of here. Early this morning. The security guard found him in his office. He'd trashed the place. He was hallucinating, seeing naked people, they say. He was climbing the walls and vomiting chocolate and ground coffee. Apparently he was saying all kinds of crazy things. And the last thing he said as he was lifted into the ambulance was, ‘You have no idea what I might have been'
.

That's good. That's a very good line. Kind of grand and yet enigmatic. I'll have to remember that for my breakdown. So, what's the story with him? I guess he's been weird for a while, but …

Yeah. He's been stressed out for a long time. All that bullshitting takes its toll, you know. He thinks they're out to replace him in New York, which is not impossible. But it's people like you who've got him scared. Under thirty and expertise he'll never have
.

He only had to ask me. I could have told him I'm no threat to anything at all at the moment.

Well, the man thinks you dance naked here at night. That must mean something mustn't it? It's a pretty bizarre hallucination
.

So everyone knows?

Sure. Everyone knows that Barry the Great's gone
mad, and he thought he saw you dancing naked on the fifteenth floor. He even thought I was there too, but dressed. People think it's very funny. It could be worse
.

It could. So did he say I managed to be both elegant and hung like a beast?

I don't think so. But he was mad, so who knows
?

She leaves me to put on my shirt and to work, and over the next couple of hours a fistful of e-mail messages comes my way from people asking if I do Rick-a-grams at twenty-firsts, questioning the closeness of my relationship with Barry the Great, saying they've cranked the Musak up and when can I be there? So everyone knows about my interest in nude office dancing, and no-one believes it.

Even on my worst days I haven't come close to Barry's last few hours. But maybe that's just a style thing. Maybe the uncompromising scale of his fall gives him the moment of unfettered greatness he has yearned for, and maybe my breakdown will be crap, will creep up on me unnoticed and crumble me down in a much less glamorous way. Or maybe my breakdown is just a worsening inertia, and I'll be able to do less and less, until finally I'll have no idea that I'm doing nothing at all and I'm stuck rigid at my desk drooling down into my keyboard as my sphincters ease lazily open. Some awful oozing kind of breakdown, if such things exist.

Hillary's getting tense. She's pacing up and down, even though everything's ready. Probably because everything's ready and there's nothing for her to do but pace up and down.

Half an hour before they're due to arrive it brings her undone. She snaps a heel on a brisk turn. I hear her swearing in the foyer and she comes into my room hobbling and holding a shoe in one hand and a heel in the other.

What the fuck am I going to do
? she says.

We can sort it out, I tell her, though I have no idea how. My voice does sound nice and calm though.

How? How
? She will not be won by calm. She's rapidly slipping into crazy.
We've only got half an hour. I've checked. They're landing on schedule. The car's there to pick them up. I can't go out and get new shoes. I can't go out in case they get here. Deb's at lunch. What the fuck am I going to do
?

Then I remember the man in Albert Street, the man who always fixed Anna's heels (and she trashed a lot of heels, apparently due to the design of the pavers in the mall).

I think I can get it fixed, I tell her. I think I know a guy who might be able to do it right away. Okay?

Okay? Great. That's great. What do I do
?

Leave it to me. You really should be here, just in case. And I know where to go. Just stay calm. Forget the heel. The heel is in my hands.

The lift stops six times on the way to ground and blows at least a couple of my remaining twenty-eight minutes. I run. I run and I sweat any sense of crispness out of my ironed shirt in a second. I run and I manage to dodge everybody except the guy in the wheelchair selling things for the muscular dystrophy Bow Tie Day, but I only wing him, so I keep going. It occurs to me that I might bump into Peter at any moment, and that some innocent circumstance might be my undoing after all; as I collide with him, holding the pieces of his wife's broken shoe, and raise his suspicions a week after the event.

But I don't, and other than nearly spreadeagling the guy with muscular dystrophy, I'm okay. Admittedly my knee is sore from that, and when I look I see I've torn my pants on his chair and I'm bleeding, but the limp doesn't seem to slow me down.

I get to the shoe repairer with twenty minutes to go, and the people waiting step aside as I push through shouting, This is an emergency, and waving the heel like a terrorist with a hand grenade.

The shoe repairer stays calm. He addresses me as Mr Hiller. He asks how Mrs Hiller is. I say she's in Melbourne at the moment, and he makes some lame joke about me coming in with another woman's shoe while she's away.

No it's hers, I tell him.

And then it occurs to him that it might actually be another woman's shoe.

I've seen most of her shoes at some stage
, he says.
I've got a very good memory for shoes. But I don't recall a pair like this
.

They're new.

This doesn't look new
.

She doesn't wear them much. She might have had them for a while, and she's only started wearing them again lately. They're new to me.

Her feet
, and now he's really beginning to doubt me, he's really starting to think I've been fucking the owner of these shoes and it's not my wife, and I just can't get into that now. This is so much more than just the usual attempt to get out of having to face telling the trashing story.
I was sure her feet were bigger than this, by at least a couple of sizes
.

Yeah. They were.

They were
?

Sure. She had a fluid problem. It's sorted out now. Some women's thing. This is her natural size. Trust me. And she needs them right away, please. Please.

She's in Melbourne
.

Yeah.

But you need the shoes right away. She needs them right away
.

Yeah. Yeah. I've got to give them to someone who's just outside in a cab and is about to fly to Melbourne. She and my wife are involved in a business meeting in a couple of hours and my wife says she needs these shoes.

He looks at me, stares at me for what seems like a
very long time, as though there is some morality clause involved in shoe repair, and then he says,
Okay
. And he looks at the heel, looks at the shoe, fiddles round for most of the rest of my life and says,
You want a new heel, or you want me to fix the old one back on
?

Whatever's quick. Whatever takes about three minutes.

Okay. Fixing the old one back on is quick, but not as good. And I don't like to compromise. I don't like to think that people are out there walking on work that isn't my best
.

Quick is fine. What I need is something that takes about two minutes and forty-five seconds and will last the rest of the day. I promise not to tell anyone it's your work. I'll tell them I did it myself, but that we're planning to bring it to you to get the definitive solution from an expert. Okay?

Okay. The quick fix, and when your wife gets back from Melbourne, she brings it back in and I do the job properly. Okay? And today I won't charge you. Your wife is a good customer and I'm not going to rip her off by charging her for shit that I'm forced to do in two minutes forty-five seconds, okay
?

Okay. Great. Thanks.

He takes the shoe and the heel around the corner into his workroom and I hear a single loud whack. He comes back.

I'd say you've got two minutes twenty seconds up your sleeve Mr Hiller
. He hands me the shoe.

I thank him profusely for at least the twenty seconds and he stands behind the counter exuding quiet, professional cool. The members of the queue resume their places, confident that their shoes will be safe in his hands.

Who's next
? I hear him saying as I run out the door.

I circle round into the mall, watching out for the muscular dystrophy guy, and my shirt is flapping wet against my body with sweat and I feel disgusting. I dodge
among shoppers and small children, tourists with icecreams, crowds around a banjo player, crowds around a fire-eater. Don't these people have anything to do? Can't they at least understand that not everyone is aimlessly browsing? And I get into the inevitable dodging duel with someone walking towards me and at the last second he staggers out of the way, but he does manage to smear his satay stick all over my sleeve.

I decide to cut through a shopping arcade. I run into Broadway but it's packed too, mainly with people just hanging round in the air-conditioning and browsing even more aimlessly than outside. I fight my way up the escalator to the less busy gallery level. Up here I can run. I'm picking up speed. I'm going to make it now. I'll get there on time. I'll get there early and scrape the satay sauce off my sleeve and wear my jacket the whole afternoon. Things will be fine, just fine.

I cover the whole length of Broadway in about ten seconds but it feels like four, and I'm hardly slowing down when I hit the escalator to go back to ground. I'm going to make it now.

And the shoe slips from my sweaty hand and sails out ahead of me off the down escalator and I shout, Look out, just in time for a woman to turn her head and take it in the face.

This is bad, this is one of those horrible moments of slow-motion inevitability. The shoe turning over and over in its downward arc, her turning head. The two of them meeting with an almost mathematical certainty. Her head snapping back, the dark frame of her glasses snapping right in the middle at the point of impact, her knees buckling, her bags dropping, her fumbling, instinctive attempt to catch the shoe as she crumples to the ground between the ornamental figs at the base of the escalator.

And I'm careering down the escalator four steps at a time, vaulting the rubber hand rail, pushing people aside to get to her, and I'm shaking her. I'm shaking her as though that might be useful and I'm shouting, Are you
okay? Are you okay? when obviously she isn't. Her eyes open and she fights to see what's going on as she props herself up on one elbow. I put my arm around her to support her and her face is pale, apart from the growing bruise low in the middle of her forehead. And I don't know if that's from the shoe or if she hit her head on a fig pot, but either way it's a bad day for her face, either way it's all my fault.

Um
, she says, thinking hard.
I can't see without my glasses
.

This, of course, is a problem, as I have smashed her glasses to buggery. One lens is in pieces about a metre away, with its arm a metre beyond that. I'm trying to work out where the other half is when she pulls it out from beneath her and tries to wear it. She seems unable to understand why it keeps sliding off her bruise.

It's broken, I tell her.

Oh, no
, she says.
I just bought them. How am I going to get new ones? I can't afford new ones
.

That's okay. I'll get you new ones.

Really
? she says, holding the lens up to her right eye like a monocle.
Why? Why would you get me new ones
?

I broke the old ones.

How
?

It was an accident.

I think I'm missing something here. What happened? Am I okay? Hey, I'm sitting down. I'm sitting on the ground in Broadway. Between two little trees. Wait, do I know you
?