I WAS TWENTY-NINE and eating better. Three days a week I woke up at 4:30am and did yoga before coming in to work. Bernard, my instructor, didn’t know what to make of me. He said my flexibility was impressive for a woman with my body type. When, three weeks later, I was raped in the Jakarta conference room, these yoga lessons came to mind. Cat pose – on your knees and arch your back, like you’re trying to link them up – your tail bone and the back of your head.

     At 8:30pm the cleaning lady comes by with her trolley and vacuum cleaner. She’s old, with little English, and she pauses by my office so I can demonstrate how I remember her name (Maria) and how, by the set of my smile and shoulders, I remain unfriendly to whatever superstructure places her in such a position of daily servitude. Years ago, her grown-up daughter, a woman with triangular cheekbones and a suit far more expensive than mine, came up with her and, while waiting, started talking to me. Her mother wanted to work and this was a cushy gig, she explained impatiently, and I shrugged and nodded. Afterwards I was persuaded: how much new rubbish can a person manufacture in a cubicle in a day?

     It’s quiet up here at night, and peaceful.

     It’s called the Jakarta conference room but it’s not – it’s unquestionably in this city. Or it was. Where I work, the whole sixtieth floor used to comprise conference rooms named after foreign cities. London. Tokyo. Rome. Here’s the funny thing: I’d actually fantasised about having sex in all these rooms.

     Walls and walls of windows and incredible views out to continent or sea, depending where you looked. And I’d done it, too. Peter and I, maybe a month before our split, coming out of some movie with that stupid, outsized epic feeling issuing from a world where everything you said was a clean decision and love and death and betrayal were quick and deep and then we decided to sneak up – him getting jittery in the lift because we’d used his swipe card, and his jitters only making me more horny – and when we got to Level 60 we stepped out and took each other round the world.

     ‘Fucking Almighty,’ he gasped. ‘I can see my face in the table.’

     That, of course, was part of the fantasy: the boardroom table beneath me, wood so polished it looked like glass smoked and buffed up to look like wood.

     ‘Keep going,’ I said. ‘Don’t even think about it.’

     ‘Oh,’ he said.

     ‘Go,’ I said, ‘go, go, go, go-go-go.’

     Obviously we left the lights off and the sulphurous city wafered through the vertical blinds – no, the blinds were bunched to one side and the view was open – my heels digging into black polymer chairs (each worth half a week’s salary) and Peter frowning quizzically at himself in the table, his hair loose and wild over his face. He always left his shirt on. He’d read somewhere it conveyed spontaneity.

     ‘My God,’ he said. ‘Talk about sensory overload.’ He was gazing out of the windows. I craned my head, but all I could see was the nimbus of our reflections. Me, supine on the table, in a black voile bra and matching St Tropez boy-briefs – him, leaning over me, pale and beautiful in a feral way.

     ‘Keep going,’ I cried.

     When Maria – they were all named Maria – came in and flooded the room with light I remember feeling true and weightless and delivered up at last.

 

* * *

 

But I was telling you about the other time. It wasn’t Peter that time. It all started the morning before my Professional Development session (‘Changes in the Law of Civil Liability’), with me trying to think about anything else at all. I needed to relax my mind. To this end, I thought about the Caldwell mediation I had the following day. On 16 January 2001, ROGER CALDWELL (‘the Plaintiff’), mild rheumatoid arthritic, tripped over a hardened patch of grass while mowing his lawn. He underwent a knee replacement operation at the Hospital on 17 January 2001, Doctor A presiding. On 12 June 2001, the Plaintiff consulted with Doctor B in relation to continuing pain, and was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. On 8 August 2001, after seven weeks of standard therapies, Doctor B pre­scribed intravenous infusions of infliximab to induce clinical remission. The prescription, for 3.0 mg/kg, was mistakenly administered in the amount of 30 mg/kg by Nurse A.

     Two years later, on 11 December 2003, the Plaintiff underwent a drainage procedure at the Hospital, Doctor C presiding, as treatment for infection alleged to have resulted from the dosage error. A 6cm piece of plastic tubing was discovered in the Plaintiff’s knee. On 23 December 2003, the Hospital convened a Surgery Panel (comprising, inter alia, Doctors B and C) which recommended immediate amputation of the Plaintiff’s left leg. Despite questions as to the Plaintiff’s competency to provide consent, the procedure was carried out on 3 January 2004.

     Tamryn, the bitch, peeled off the plastic wrap before I even sat down, and took two of the three chicken parmigianas. The rest of the good sandwiches didn’t last long – the tuna and egg and portabellas – leaving little white triangles extruding pumpkin, alfalfa sprouts, indigestible etceteras, scattered and split open like unwanted loot on a bare plain. Of course, they were off limits, anyway, under my new regime. And I was much too nervous to eat.

     At the far end of the table a TV monitor flicked on and with it the real-time image of our main office: a set of separate faces around a massive table. I recognised some of them.

     Tamryn glided over to me clutching a leather folder to her chest. Perfect little lawyerette. I’d asked her for help with research on this very session but she’d been too busy. Not too busy to come, though. Not too busy for the free lunch. Now she wanted to talk to me.

     ‘Too late,’ I told her.

     I was up for promotion and this PD session was one of my make-or­breaks. Of course, everything was a make-or-break, but in this case the client – Gary Clarke, the new senior in-house at Allied Medical Insurers – was in attendance. You could see, on-screen, just under the surface of the liquid crystal, how the whole room pulsed around him. He knew it too. He repped a nine-figure client. All those senior associates and partners knew it: writing off their billable lunch hour just to show face. There’d been rumblings. A seminar this key: why was some junior associate in the satellite office running it?

     ‘Hi, there,’ one of them said. ‘Can you hear us ...?’ He jabbed, on the TV, at the grey conference-call device. His mouth lagged behind his voice.

     ‘Hi, John,’ I said.

     They ignored me.

     ‘You’ve got it on mute,’ Tamryn said.

     Someone handed me our device. It was starfish-shaped. ‘It’s ready,’ he whispered.

     ‘Hi,’ I said again.

     ‘Hi, there. Ready when you are.’

     A rectangle had appeared in the corner of the screen showing us to ourselves. There was me, in the middle of the picture. The TV and image compression must have added five kilos. God, my shoulders. Mountain pose! Tamryn – her hair so black it looked as though you’d wet your fingers just touching it. She was Eurasian, of Indian extraction – gorgeous. The new gorgeous intern. I imagined taking a stapler to her … that mouth … watching myself doing it, jerkily, in miniature. Who’s on mute now, bitch. What was that again. Could you repeat that, please.

     The protocol was you talked to the TV. There were maybe thirty people in the same room as you – we’d booked the London room, the largest – but you talked to the TV. To the main office. Over there, they ate with real cutlery: there was a hot buffet somewhere off-screen and, every time we linked up, each of us imagined for him or herself their unpixelated meal: roast beef, creamy mash, vegetables glazed with olive oil …

     Breathe, I reminded myself. The PowerPoint loaded and off I went, talking about negligence.

     I talked about the recent statutory reforms. Changes to the concept of risk. New rules for factual causation, quantum of damages. My mouth dried up and I sipped some sparkling. I got a few laughs with the amendments requiring lawyers to sign certificates asserting reasonable prospects of success. Often I’ll be doing something and suffer a little lurch of time. Like I’ll be in the shower and then I’m in the shower, or squeezing the same toothpaste from the same tube onto the same brush. Doing something that feels like the memory of doing it. No, that’s different – like I’ll find myself three blocks from where I remember myself last, all the in-between time lost, my body a machine and my mind a looped sequence of breathing in, and out. At some point Peter had slipped into the room and seated himself next to Tamryn. God, her posture – perfect. Gary Clarke had a question about jurisdiction.

     I repeated, ‘The Civil Liability Act ...’

     ‘But the Wrongs Act.’

     The volume was turned up too loud.

     ‘In this state,’ he said, his voice booming and crackling, ‘the Wrongs Act doesn’t incorporate those “obvious risk” clauses in the CLA.’

     His little blueish lips moved in echo of the words. The feedback stopped. Everyone looked at me – by then I was awake.

     ‘... or does it?’ he said.

     I froze. His face creased, now, into one of those entreating frown-smiles.

     ‘The amendments … in November ...’

     ‘… weren’t introduced here. If I’m correct.’ Of course he was correct, the fuck.

     ‘You’re correct,’ I said, then perused my notes in the precise manner of someone who doesn’t know the answer. I didn’t know the answer. ‘I don’t have it in front of me.’

     It’s easy to look back at these moments and make fun of yourself for taking things too seriously at the time. But some moments – the important ones – are exactly as bad as you fear at the time they might be. Which leads me to the weight of what happened next.

     Tamryn whipped something out of her folder, scribbled across the top and swiped it along the table to Peter. It deserved a dramatic on-screen zoom. Seconds, unleavened by professional profit, passed by.

     The new representative from my firm’s major clients leaned back in his chair. ‘Well,’ he said.

     I’d been with the firm three years and I’d just blown my promotion. ‘If I may,’ said Peter. His mouth was stuffed with sandwich.

     ‘No …,’ I said, waving expansively, ‘yes … of course.’

     ‘Peter.’ The voice came from the TV. One of the partners in the main office. He could have been lying in a gutter, gut-shot, gasping ‘Mother’.

     ‘There’s an explanatory memorandum attached to the Act.’ Peter held it up with one hand and waggled it. At that moment I noticed the sandwich in his other hand: chicken parm. She’d saved it for him. ‘You’ll love it, Gary. It deals with all this transition stuff. Very sexy.’

     Later, in David Porter’s corner office, I explained myself: ‘I asked her and she said she didn’t have capacity.’

     ‘She’s a very promising candidate.’

     I nodded evenly and looked out of his window. The river was brown and shiny below.

     ‘What?’

     ‘No, nothing.’

     David Porter was the managing partner in our office. He was stocky and going bald. He lisped when he was drunk and had a reputation for hiring attractive females. One Friday night, he’d thrown his arm around my shoulders in front of his secretaries. ‘Great work,’ he’d said, ‘exthellent.’ It was college all over again – the world dividing into two types of girls: those who were cool with it and those who weren’t ...

     He got up and closed the door.

     ‘I needed someone,’ I said, ‘to research the very material that came up.’

     ‘What an asshole – Gary.’

     ‘And Tamryn said she was flat out on the Exxon case.’

     ‘And he knows he’s got us, too. Well. You guys, anyway.’ He grinned then pouted innocently: ‘Who’s feeding her?’

     I pretended to ponder. ‘Peter, I think?’

     ‘You didn’t ask one of the others.’

     I didn’t say anything – we both knew Tamryn was the best of the lot.

     ‘These fucking interns,’ he said. ‘Next they’ll be delegating to us.’

     ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I screwed up.’

     ‘You’re up for senior. We’re excited.’ He meant: we nominated you and now you’ve embarrassed us in front of main office. He also meant: management consultants advised us recently to promote more women. ‘The inter-office meeting is next month.’

     ‘I fucked up. It won’t … you know.’

     ‘No, yeah, we’re optimistic. It’s just....’ he smiled and flipped over two palms – both empty – but what, seriously, could he – anyone – be expected to do with that? ‘Yeah, the new guy’s an asshole. But, you know –’

     I knew. AMI, who insured the hospital, was our group’s only client. That’s what you signed up for in med. neg. lit.: all your eggs in the one basket, your client had you by the balls, the short-and-curlies, etc (all sexual, those commitment clichés).

     We listened to the lights for a while. Then I asked, ‘Did he say anything?’

     After a while David Porter looked at me, smiled and said, ‘I may still have some influence up there.’ He shook his polished-dome head incredulously. ‘These fucking interns.’

 

* * *

 

It’s true that they gather, secretaries, twos and threes, around water coolers. I threw out a comment as I passed, concerning the previous night’s episode – the hot new show revolved around an emotionally crippled attorney whose hotness was universally acknowledged – important to stay abreast of these things – but the synchrony and volume of their agree­ment was distressing to me. I stayed in my cubicle, trying to think about the Caldwell case, then dilly-dallied online, memorising the weekend’s football results.

     Someone had microwaved a curry and it was stinking up the whole floor.

     I thought about calling Tamryn to my office-slash-cubicle then decided better. Appropriate would be a strongly worded email. Tamryn (what is that, a fruit or something where you’re from?), I thought it interesting that you did have capacity, after all, to research the questions I’d outlined in my earlier memo to you (see attached), you cunt-faced slut, though you opted not to revert to me in a professional and timely manner, notwithstanding the fact that, for Pete Hammond’s cock at least, you clearly have plenty of capacity. In every jurisdiction, I bet. I sighed into my imaginary digital recorder. Delete last sentence.

     I got up and wandered the corridors, looking for friendly faces. One of the new, straight-backed Office Services boys flirted with me and I let him brush my breasts with his reams of paper. Next, I looked for the librarian. We were getting along fine until she paused, then started on the senseless convolutions of recent tort law reform. I fled her pity. This really wasn’t a good place to find spiritual equilibrium. Too many contending energies in play. No one here really wants to be anyone else and maybe that’s the saddest thing.

     I went downstairs and crossed the street to the food court. Everywhere, reversing trucks beeped out recrimination. I ordered a full-sized lamb kebab. The tabouli and garlic sauce poured into me like sunlight.

     Later, David Porter would call Tamryn into his office and shut his door. The secretaries would recount how, far in advance to the hiring schedule, he’d offered her a position and how, get this, she told him she needed more time. An intern – holding out. I’d be unsure, for a while, how it made me feel. It must have made a difference.

 

* * *

 

‘During the war,’ Peter used to say, ‘women couldn’t afford lingerie and drew merry-widow seams on their own bodies.’ He spoke straight out of Cigar Aficionado and I decided to like that about him. ‘I could put in a word,’ he’d said. This was three years ago. I was an intern and he was a junior (non-equity) partner in Litigation and a rising star. ‘I’ll be your mentor,’ he’d said. ‘They’d fire me,’ he’d said, later. He named four other firms where it had happened. He knew the specific circumstances, too, in each case. ‘What’s worse, I’m in a position to benefit you.’

     ‘Not really.’

     ‘Well, I was,’ he said.

     ‘Not any more.’

     He sighed. ‘Which makes it worse.’

     Of course, that was the end – after the canted compliments and the last-minute, late-night brief and the well-earned drink afterwards where he knew, the way actresses know, the lay of his face, how it looked in what light at what angle, and where he wrote his number on the back of the receipt which showed our absurd tab on the other side. That was after the coded emails and text messages and the blowjobs in the car and the quickies in the due diligence room between V and W, after London and Istanbul and Jakarta and then Maria, sweet Maria, who would never have jeopardised her cushy job but still the idiot had to beg and then try to bribe her. That – that – was the end of it.

     Years later, Bernard would tell me I was better than that. I wanted to scream – ‘No one’s better than anything!’ – but felt immediately the dishonesty of that statement.

     ‘I’m waiting,’ I’d said at one point. He’d made me answer him.

     ‘What for?’

     ‘For something terrible to happen.’

     ‘No one knows,’ he said – though that wasn’t true.

     ‘No – not that.’

     ‘Then what?’

     I turned onto my side, my hip so tall it tented the sheet up. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It hasn’t happened yet.’

     Peter took a deep breath. He’d continued to fuck me – after my hiring – for almost a year. ‘A man,’ he said, ‘should be able to slip his finger under one strap, just like this, and the whole shebang should slide to the woman’s feet.’

     I deserved this. I didn’t love him but I could have. Are you telling me there’s a difference? He introduced his wife to me at the end of the second financial year. He scared at an old immigrant cleaning lady. Even when I asked him not to, he watched me whenever I got out of bed, and – the way he did it – I didn’t mind. That was the thing. I never minded, and maybe I should’ve told him that when I had the chance.

 

* * *

 

Lunch was at a restaurant overlooking the river. It was the sort of Irish linen, crystal and silver affair where the staff knew the precise extent to which each dish complied with all of the current diets. AMI’s local in-house was there, a man named Ned, who liked me in a sad way, and who reminded me of an ex-boyfriend for whom I’d had an abortion. Ned was one of those guys who’d figured it all out.

     Who else should be there but Peter (to whom Gary, Ned’s new boss, had obviously taken a shine) – and who else should he have brought along but little Miss Tamryn herself?

     We were discussing strategy for the mediation later that afternoon.

     All up, Caldwell was claiming $1.5 million in damages. We’d counter-offered $300,000. That figure might seem arbitrary but it was, of course, a scientific calculation based, in chief, on our estimation of his ability to sustain prolonged litigation.Giventhe facts, youmight say that our client’snegligence was reasonably clear-cut. However, Ned argued, we could offset our liability by alleging contributory negligence on Caldwell’s part. This argument boiled down to: one, his waiting twenty-seven months (an unreasonable amount of time) before the drainage procedure; and two, aggravating, during this interim, his infection by regularly exercising on a stationary bicycle (on the advice of his local GP, who had initially diagnosed the arthritis).

     ‘Why haven’t we joined this guy as a third party?’ asked Peter.

     ‘My instructions are to settle today,’ said Ned.

     ‘The GP?’ I said. ‘We might.’

     Peter chewed through another mouthful of Atlantic salmon.

     ‘So what’s our ceiling?’ he asked.

     ‘One fifty,’ said Ned. He smiled shyly.

     ‘And really?’

     ‘Two hundred.’

     ‘But we started at three hundred.’ It was Tamryn who spoke. She’d stayed surprisingly quiet up to then. Now she was trying on naivety like a new make-up regime.

     I hated these cases. The guy couldn’t afford a prosthetic and just yesterday we’d been advised he’d turn up in a wheelchair. We knew his lawyer to be an overcharging incompetent. Cases like this made me feel a bit soiled. I put down my Pellegrino. What was I doing here? I’d been told I was full of promise. I could have gone into management consulting, or investment banking.

     ‘He had his chance,’ I explained curtly. ‘That offer expired.’

     I stood up, went down to the railing for a cigarette. The esplanade below was busy with people, lunch-hour suits but also other, ordinary people strolling along. Who were these people? Who had the time to just stroll? The suits mixed into the crowd as if they belonged. Peter appeared beside me.

     ‘You think he’ll take it?’ He tapped out a cigarette, then said, ‘He hasn’t got a choice.’

     ‘Don’t be so sure.’ I looked back at the table. ‘She’s gorgeous,’ I said.

     ‘You should go easy on her. She’s been putting in fourteen-hour days.’ He smiled grimly. ‘And yesterday, at lunch – she was just trying to help.’

     ‘Porter says it’ll cost me.’

     ‘Porter?’ His voice turned wry, ‘Let me guess. He’ll talk to main office for you.’

     ‘Did he say something?’

     ‘Just trust me, kiddo. You don’t want to hitch your star to David Porter.’

     He’d graduated, in the two years since, from magazines to movie argot. I wondered how his scenes spun out now with Tamryn. What scripted entertainments they shared.

     ‘Why’d you bring her?’

     ‘Just be careful, is all I’m saying.’ He inhaled the smoke deeply. He started to say something, then stopped. He frowned.

     ‘Spit it out,’ I said.

     ‘Porter made a pass at her in his office.’

     ‘He offered her a job is what I heard.’

     ‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘Why would she make it up?’

     On the grassy riverbank a brown-haired girl sunbathed in a bikini. Her body was long and toned. She turned onto her stomach and opened a book under her face.

     ‘I guess she’d rather hitch her star to you,’ I said.

     ‘Don’t do that.’

     ‘Sort of a mentor thing, right?’

     ‘That was years ago.’ He inhaled deeply. ‘That was a one-off.’

     ‘You’re a bastard.’

     He couldn’t even look at me. Beneath us, as if to a sub-audible bell, the suits now hearkened back to work. I looked at the sun-browned girl, engrossed in her reading, oblivious to the desperate hum of money all around her.

     Peter said, ‘I know Gary Clarke. I went to law school with him.’

     ‘Don’t,’ I said. We both fell silent. People strolled. The brunette turned a page. Then I said, ‘You know Gary Clarke?’

     He looked at me, full-faced, the face I’d seen in all those polished surfaces. A rough, maverick aspect in there I’d long recognised as a put-on – a pretence like the rest of it – but, to be honest, I still felt a bit of the old tug.

     ‘Tell him his offer’s too low,’ I said. ‘I’ve met Caldwell. I don’t think – he’s not like the usual. He thinks we’re fucking with him, he’ll risk everything. And we are. And you don’t want him in front of a jury.’

     He considered this for a long while. Then he mused, ‘Tamryn was just saying that.’ He flicked his cigarette butt into the decorative hedges.

     ‘Really?’

     ‘Almost exactly.’

     ‘And she knows this how? She met him when?’

     ‘Still.’

     ‘She’s really just got,’ I said, ‘a sixth sense about people.’

     I was leaving when he clutched my wrist. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Just be careful. With Porter.’

     There are so many things I wish I’d said right then, but right then it was hard enough just holding a straight face.

     In the bathroom, Tamryn said, ‘I’m sorry about the thing yesterday, at lunch.’

     ‘What thing?’

     ‘I didn’t even think. I wasn’t even thinking.’

     ‘You just thought you were helping.’

     She looked blankly at me while I checked my mascara. The new gorgeous intern. I believed him that it hadn’t happened since – but it was happening now. What did I care? It had been two years ago; now it was her turn – to be his one-off. What did I care? She hadn’t come in to use the toilets. ‘Anyway,’ she said.

     She turned to leave and I said, ‘I heard you had a chat with David Porter.’

     She rearranged her face into a half smile, then shrugged.

     ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Come on. Who are you holding out for?’

     She started blushing under that creamy skin. I gave her my most godmotherly smile.

     ‘Come on,’ I insisted.

     The girl ran her hand through her black hair several times. It was like watching a sped-up shampoo ad. ‘You can’t tell anyone.’

     I scoffed. I was mortified by the suggestion.

     ‘I’ve committed to another job.’

     Now I gaped my mouth open, aghast and yet proud, like an actual friend. She shook her head as I reeled off the names of the other top firms.

     ‘It’s with an NGO,’ she said at last.

     The door opened and a woman headed into one of the stalls.

     ‘That’s always nice on the CV,’ I said in a low voice.

     ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s permanent.’

     I was genuinely taken aback for a moment. ‘Then why ...?’

     Her face moved fully into one of those strange, child-like smiles you see on old people’s faces. It was utterly surprising.

     ‘I just wanted to know,’ she said, ‘that I could.’

     I believed her. Just like that. We walked out of the bathroom and toward the balcony where our two men waited, with effortful ease, as though they were our double dates and had really just met. Peter’s hair roughed up, just enough, by the breeze. I saw how he looked at her. I felt intently sorry for myself, and then for her.

     She stopped by the glass door. On the other side, Ned and Peter waved soundlessly at us. They were in good spirits and ready to screw over a one-legged man. I’d walked behind and hadn’t touched any part of her but she stopped, anyway, and turned around.

     She waited for me.

     I asked, ‘Why are you with Peter?’

     In truth, I can’t remember whether I asked this question. All I remember is that – in that specific moment – I cared. Not about him, so much, as about what this young summer intern had to say to me. She was beautiful, this girl. What did she have to say to me? What did she know? She didn’t know, for example, that she’d over-exerted her powers with him, that there was proportion to these things, consequence. She didn’t know that you didn’t push thirty, it pushed you – right into the Jakarta room with David Porter – no, okay, it was me shanghaied him there, three weeks later, at Friday night drinks – where, though, he’d nudge me into a ballroom-style turn and say, ‘You’re gonna be a thenior,’ and I’d think, What? and then, I don’t deserve this. Of course, I was wrong. Your life leads you to every single strangulated moment in it. ‘A thenior athothiate,’ he’d say, the table beneath us as smooth and glossy as a bowling alley, and me with my head arched back, unable to see the dark pit behind me where the pins dropped. ‘Yeth, yeth,’ he’d say. And then I’d say no. What was I thinking? According to Bernard, every human being gets a finite number of breaths in their lifetime and that, there, is the secret to long life. Now, I work in that room – they unnamed it and refurbished it as an office – and it’s difficult to think at all about what happened here, even now, as I try to write about it – what it was like to be violated like that. Now, I’m not the least bit happy. But then, in that moment, Tamryn didn’t know this, nor that I’d marry David Porter, or sue him for sexual harassment, but she must have known, or at least recognised, something: that aspect of me, of us both, that – even if it didn’t – wanted, at the crucial time, to say ‘no’. No! No! No! No! No!