[Fiction] Inappropriate Boss

After work we talked about Elena’s inappropriate boss. ‘She’s always adjusting her bra,’ Elena said, ‘but a new all-time today, fixing her tights beside me while I’m trying to sort the quarterlies. Skirt hiked up and she’s wiggling her backside, bloody heedless.’

Per had a haunted look. ‘I’ve seen that. Clomp, shoe on the desk. Eyes straight for Christ’s sake! Half the unit knows what you’d see, she talked about grooming her downstairs in section last week.’

‘You poor devils,’ I said, and lifted my glass. We were drinking wine that day, at Per’s insistence. ‘To your innocence. In memoriam.’

‘Hell with innocence,’ Elena said. ‘I’ll drink to shame and those that have it.’

Poor Marina. She was well in her thirties but there were some basics she still hadn’t figured out. I thought I had the answers of course: ‘You have to say something to her.’

‘Doesn’t work,’ Elena said. ‘She doesn’t get it.’

Per snorted. ‘Don’t tell me: you advised her on appropriate boundaries at work, and she thanked you with a real close hug?’

I was increasingly confident in my wisdom: ‘She shouldn’t be in the job! It’s just not on, is it? Have you spoken to Mitch?’

Mitch was Marina’s boss, and Elena didn’t hide her distaste: ‘Mitch is a bastard.’

**

Friday night was drinks for Elena’s birthday, and Marina came. Per and I were settled in a booth, getting steadily merrier while discussing the travesty that was the supermarket DVD shelf, when Marina sat down and yanked the conversation in a different direction. ‘Supermarkets are amazing now! Can you imagine lubricant and vibrators are just there at the checkout! You have no idea what it used to be like. I didn’t even know lubricant existed. And that is really unfortunate, it would have made certain things much much easier when I was a teenager!’

The conversation never quite made it back to DVDs. Marina did most of the talking, and she wasn’t such a great listener when Per or I took a turn. Still, I’m a bit like that myself, and she sort of won me over to be honest. Not that I had to work with her every day.

Elena cornered me as the evening wound down. ‘You got the treatment!’

‘I think I like her,’ I said, then sucked my lips. ‘I am somewhat drunken.’

‘Exactly!’ Elena hit my arm. ‘I like her too! But she’s terrible! She got me a gift, she gave it to me in the office today – you know what it was? Lingerie! Blue lacy underwear! From my boss! What is that!’

‘Is she hitting on you?’

Elena closed her eyes and dumped her head on my shoulder. ‘Worse. I think she’s trying to be my friend.’

‘This can’t continue,’ I declared.

‘It’s really nice,’ Elena laughed into my collarbone. ‘The lingerie. It’s fancy.’

**

As I left, Marina fell in beside me. We walked to the taxi rank and waited together. She took my arm and asked me about my department, and I did my best to answer even though I was many sheets to the wind. Then out of nowhere she said, ‘Sometimes at work, actually, I don’t feel very comfortable. Sometimes when I work late to get something done, and Mitch is there. Sometimes he comes up behind me and puts both his hands on my shoulders.’

I pulled it together enough to say ‘Really?’

‘One time I think he followed me into the toilets. I was in a cubicle but the door definitely opened. But it was late, it was probably just a cleaner that time.’ She gave me a strange little smile, then she changed the subject, and I let her, and then she was in a taxi and gone.

**

Her story stayed with me. A few days later I did the only useful thing I could think of, and went to Irene, my boss. ‘There’s someone in the company being harassed,’ I said after closing her office door. ‘But I don’t think she wants to complain, so… What should I do?’

I was lucky to have Irene as a manager. She’d make sure something happened. ‘She won’t go on the record?’

‘It’s her direct line manager. I guess it doesn’t feel safe.’

Irene gave me a careful look. ‘I see. Well, yes, you can’t complain for her. But, listen. Matters like this… Sometimes there might already be conversations happening. I’m happy to add my voice to those conversations to say, in general, that we have to take this kind of behaviour very seriously. That’s something I can do, following this chat.’

I felt better immediately. Irene would handle it.

‘Good on you,’ she added as I left. ‘This person probably needs a friend.’

**

I wasn’t a friend. In fact I was probably one of the last to hear she was leaving. ‘I think Mitch pushed her out,’ Elena said with lip curled. ‘Bloody typical.’

Per shrugged. ‘Her role was going to disappear sooner or later. Why wait for the ship to sink?’

Elena gave his arm a shove. ‘You don’t get her at all.’

I couldn’t figure it either. I was tempted to share Marina’s account and Irene’s response, but it wasn’t my story to tell. ‘End of an era,’ I said instead.

‘You better be at her farewell drinks,’ Per told me. ‘Help the numbers. She deserves that at least.’

**

At the bar Marina bounced from person to person, mingling happily, and for once her outfit seemed to match the tone of the room. It was a small group but she made it big enough, putting a hand to one man’s chest and laughing, raising eyebrows at another over her glass. Mitch had already gone by the time I arrived, which pleased me, but it surprised me too, like an admission of guilt.

I caught her near the bar and wished her well for her next move. ‘I don’t have a next move,’ she said with that same weird smile. ‘But it doesn’t matter, does it?’ Then she pressed by me, closer than I would have liked; but it felt like she was pushing me away. And like waking up into a hangover, I suddenly understood who Irene had meant.

Per’s arm around me jolted me back. ‘Come sign our card.’

‘I already signed the card.’ This was a lie. I didn’t feel I could.

‘No, we have our own one,’ Per said. ‘Elena chose it.’

‘It’s special for her!’ Elena said, and she grabbed my arm and pulled me to the task. Both of them watched as I held the pen and couldn’t think what to write. Eventually Per nudged me, so I scribbled my name and wrote ‘good luck’.

We gave it to Marina as she was leaving. Her face brightened as she pulled it out of the envelope. ‘Oh, thank you!’ she said, hugging Elena and Per, and then me. ‘So carefully chosen! You see?’ Marina displayed the card: enormous breasts straining a colourful Mediterranean bikini. ‘They look just like mine!’

She wasn’t going to forgive me, of course. She wouldn’t need to forgive anyone. So I laughed with the others, and I meant it, because she was right: the card was well-chosen. And that would have to be enough.

***

I wrote this sketch about a decade ago, and I’ve lightly edited it before publishing here. It is based on true events.

The problem with men

This has been an unpleasant week; by which I mean I have been reminded many times that for women, every week is an unpleasant week. All this came across my screen.

The dark side of Guardian comments
“New research into our own comment threads provides the first quantitative evidence for what female journalists have long suspected: that articles written by women attract more abuse and dismissive trolling than those written by men, regardless of what the article is about.”

The women abandoned to their online abusers
On the internet, if I ever complain and say; ‘This has happened, I’m sick of it’, people say; ‘You’re on the internet, what do you expect?’
“There’s no support for women at all, from the police or anyone else.”

This horrifying and newly trendy online harasment tactic is ruining careers
“Both 8chan and Kotaku in Action regularly crowdsource research into the histories of private individuals who’ve done little more than post about feminism on social media.”

I will come forward
How a prominent New Zealand music identity conducted a troubling series of relationships with young women, including girls as young as 12.

Tabletop Gaming has a White Male Terrorism Problem
“I know that if I speak out against the abuses myself and my friends have suffered as a result of our participation in the “friendly gaming community” I can expect to be silenced with extreme prejudice.”

But at least there was also, in response to that last one:

For good men to see nothing
I have a list of things you can do.

in move ebook available

in move cover

My novel about teenage guys facing the end of their friendship, in move, is now available in ebook formats. (The blog serialisation has finished, but of course you can still read it there too.)

As I’ve mentioned before, this was the first novel I wrote. I started writing in 1993, when I was in my final year of high school. I was writing about the world immediately around me – Catholic single sex school in the Hutt Valley, playing some basketball, you get the idea.

Reading it again after many years away from it? If I was a publisher, I wouldn’t publish it either. I think I trapped myself with the very concept of the book – the action of the story begins when one character gets some news that demands action and decision, but instead he freezes up, and that freeze creates the rest of the story. Problem is, I’m just not a good enough writer to make really compelling work of that period, when the main character is avoiding taking action. It’s like that one Harry Potter book where all Harry did was shout at people and sulk: the other stuff going on carries the narrative some of the way, but it’s still bothersome.

So this book is about Hutt boys. But what is it really about? (Per Kermode: Jaws is not about a giant shark, Tinker Tailor is not about spies, in move is not about Hutt boys.)

Mostly, it’s about small group dynamics, which just happens to be the same thing I did a Masters thesis on a few years ago, because I guess I am just interested in that subject. And, like most character-driven fiction, it’s about the tension between what’s going on inside someone’s head and what they actually do and say.

This read-through it also became clear to me just how much the book is about rape culture. It almost pains me to type those two words, because I certainly wouldn’t have characterised it that way before. But now, it’s hard to ignore how much this book shows of some deeply unpleasant things that seemed ordinary throughout my youth.

Throughout the book, the boys (including some of the lead characters) say some pretty atrocious things about women. They do this a lot. There’s a kind of gross-out competition underway, mixed in with bravado and not a little irony, about who can say something more extreme about women and sex. There are rape jokes, which are taken as jokes by all the characters. Women are regularly dehumanised, both as a category and specific people who happen to get noticed at the wrong time.

This, I accept, is more or less how it was. This talk is more prevalent in the book than it was in reality, but that’s just a matter of degree. The overall tone matches my recollections. It was meant to, of course; it’s a deliberate theme of the book. It’s just looking back now, in the aftermath of Steubenville and many other incidents, I see that theme in a new and harsher light.

I’m also less confident now that the book deals with this content as effectively as it might. The characters are never called out for their talk; the counterbalance comes in two ways. First, and most obviously, there is a sexual assault near the end of the book. The fact that this act is verbally foreshadowed throughout the book by almost every male character is hopefully not lost on anyone. Intended message: talk has consequences.

Secondly, the simple fact that the young women in the story are real people. Every time they are “on stage”, their very presence (hopefully) exposes all that talk as ridiculous and wrongheaded.

So if authorial intent counts for anything, that was mine. On balance I think this book isn’t exactly a menace to society in its current form. But that isn’t clear-cut, and it probably can’t be, because fiction needs ambiguity. I just hope I got it more or less right, anyway.

I’ve often thought about a followup to in move, where Scott goes to visit Richard in New York City twenty years later. Maybe one day.