Accidental Crime - 11

Dawn

Dawn was delighted to secure a job that involved meetings. There was something distinctly professional-sounding about the phrase ‘I’ve got a meeting at 10’, whilst it provided the perfect excuse for any shortcomings in her punctuality. Who could possibly blame someone whose meeting overran? Meetings are important. People who go to meetings are important. Punctuality is therefore far less important than the important person being at the important meeting.

Will there be lots of meetings? It was a question she had asked a surprised panel of interviewers, adding slightly too gleeful a tone of enthusiasm to her query. She had thought, for a while after, that her enthusiasm for meetings was probably the main reason she secured the position. Enthusiasm, she believed, was the key to a successful career in marketing and it was her responsibility to make even the most worthless of products sound fabulous. Then, one day, she would have her moment, the moment that her whole world would change.

It would be a Wednesday – or possibly a Thursday – and she would be seated in her third meeting of the day. An old-timer – let’s call him Gus – would be opening his lips and pointing at a flip-chart but Dawn would hear no words, she would see no scratchy drawings. Glazed over, transfixed on an idea that had been bubbling away for a few weeks now, she would sit staring directly ahead, unsettling a nervous unmarried middle-aged man called Neville who momentarily thinks she is gazing lovingly into his eyes. Her name would be called, over and over again, as Gus grows ever more irritated at her lack of interest in the restyling of a toothpaste lid. And then the moment. Suddenly, planting her hands on the arm-rests of the chair she barely feels beneath her, she would push backwards, perhaps even sending the chair tumbling to the floor, and rise to her feet, slamming her hands on the table and shouting something dramatically non-specific like ‘I’ve got it!’. Heads would turn, jaws would drop, Neville’s legs would cross and uncross, and all eyes would be fixed on Dawn’s moment of delivery.

She was still unsure whether she would then declare her magnificent, life-changing idea before the panel, Gus and all, or would stride confidently out of the room without uttering another word, ready to set up her own multi-million pound company overnight, the word ‘suckers’ bouncing around her over-active imagination. At 7am this morning it would be the second option, although, since it was a Tuesday today, it clearly would not be time for the moment’s fulfilment. Besides, waiting a little longer wouldn’t be a bad thing. She would become successful when she would appreciate it most.

It was three months since she had skipped into her first meeting at Clarkson & Co and it was barely a week before her skip slipped into a slump. Much of this was down to her unexpected meeting with Clarkson – she was yet to meet Co – when a slight technical slip at the water dispenser led to an unwise flurry of paper towels hurtling rapidly towards the area just beneath the buckle on the boss’s belt. Had they not been in Dawn’s hands as they padded away at the seemingly-ever-increasing-patch, the moment would have maintained at least a glimmer of dignity. Almost speechless, Clarkson had grabbed her wrist with a forcefulness that led Dawn to briefly flirt with the words ‘sexual harassment’ and offered her a brutal look of disappointment, before adding in a gruff tone an unmistakably clear imperative: ‘Leave it’. She had turned instantly and shuffled away furtively, reassuring herself that at least he would have no idea who she was and, besides, it was probably years before any chance of promotion came up and so this incident would most likely be long behind them when the interview came around. And then he spoke.

‘Oh, and Dawn?’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Meeting room. Five minutes. Don’t forget.’

She hurried towards the toilets – the perfect hideaway – with eyes half-closed. The words ‘sexual harassment’ were now joined by ‘affair’ and ‘scandal’, the revelation months down the line that ‘it all started at the water fountain’. Five minutes. In five minutes she would walk in and find him trouser-less. He would say something like, ‘I think I wet my pants’ – well, perhaps not – and she would glide towards him, her career being given the same lift his hands would give her skirt, as his managerial hands massaged their way mercilessly over the contours of her unprepared yet unafraid body. He would whisper in her ear that he had ‘watched her from a distance’ and that she was ‘beautiful’. She couldn’t call him Clarkson and so she would call him ‘sir’, praying earnestly that no-one would walk in to offer him a coffee or tell him that his wife was on the line.

Deborah entered the toilets to find Dawn staring into the mirror before her.

‘Dawn? Dawn, are you OK?’

Deborah was irrepressibly likeable, even though every contribution she made plunged you ever deeper into despair at the realisation that you would never be like her, and even now her arrival served to destroy another fantasy.

‘All ready for the meeting in five? I’m a bit worried about it, to tell you the truth, but I’m sure it’ll be fine.’

For a moment, Dawn’s fantasy had taken an unexpected and undesirable direction.

‘The meeting?’

‘The big one. You know. Clarkson’s meeting. It’s the first time he’s chaired one we’ve been allowed in on. Exciting, isn’t it?’

Excitement had become harder to define since the water dispenser incident of 9.54. It was with some relief that Deborah reminded her of the eminently more likely source of Clarkson’s words and yet it was difficult to hide the tinge of disappointment she felt as she smoothed down her skirt and washed her already-clean hands. A part of her still hoped he would be trouser-less on arrival, although the likely presence of five other graduate trainees and six established experts – their words, not Dawn’s – would probably grant the moment a less intimate tone than she had previously envisaged.

It was therefore in fact with some relief that Clarkson stood newly-trousered as he welcomed the others into the room. Dawn wondered just how many spare suits he kept in his office for such moments as these. She’d heard rumours that he’d recently had his own personal shower installed in an unused corner of the office and the revelation of dry, freshly-ironed trousers suggested that such rumours may have in fact underplayed the comforts that lay behind the door. One day, she promised herself, one day she would get into that office and she would know once and for all.

No words were reserved for Dawn’s arrival; a mere look, perhaps a slight wink, indicated a shared experience that would prove too embarrassing for either to make reference to. Dawn matched his awkwardness with professional grace and took her seat next to Deborah. In such moments, she felt, it was important to compound one’s sense of failure further and discover just how much better than ourselves others are.

Ten minutes into the meeting, a wry smile fell upon her lips as Deborah’s fourth contribution so far brought a rare compliment from Clarkson. It would be her skirt he would lift up and she would be the coffee lady, peering in at her replacement.

Dawn wasn’t sure what troubled her most: having the fantasy in the first place or being crushed at the realisation that it would never happen, at least not for her; Deborah’s fate was still unknown. She had been brought up well – her parents regularly reminded her – and she certainly agreed that the ideal scenario would be to save herself for the one love of her life, whatever that meant, and not throw away her childhood – her parents’ phrase – on a moment of madness, however enjoyable it might be. As a 22 year old graduate trainee she was unsure if the term childhood still applied.

However much her imagination fought against it, she knew that she could never play Deborah’s role and yet she permitted a moment’s bitterness to be aimed in her direction, before rapidly shifting towards the well-trodden ground of guilt. It was, she reasoned, a little unfair on Deborah to be thrust into a role she had never shown any desire to fulfil, particularly since the top she was wearing was suggesting that, if anything, she would like men’s eyes to look away from –

 ‘Dawn? Dawn? Dawn? I’m sorry, are we boring you? Is there somewhere else you’d rather be?’

It was Clarkson’s revenge – she expected better – and brought the eyes of the table to a focal point, staring at her open-mouth gasp across the table before her. Robyn drew her arms across her chest, a little flush colouring her cheeks, provoking unwarranted conclusions to be instantly drawn.

‘I’m, I’m sorry. I was miles away,’ Dawn responded, as calmly as possible, shaking her head as if to wipe away the thought.

The meeting continued, with the occasional inquisitive look being passed around the table, but Dawn remembered little about it. Robyn had caught Clarkson trouser-less and experienced the massage of his managerial hands – sadly, at least for somebody, within the confines of imagination – but Dawn had quickly rebuked herself for her latest variation and instead tried to remember whether she had actually seen The Graduate or whether she was getting it confused with Clueless. As Clarkson brought the meeting to a close, the idea of a spin-off combination of the two amused her and she was already a significant way into formulating the perfect plot when Deborah disrupted the drama.

‘Are you OK, Dawn? You looked a bit spaced-out back there.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,’ she lied, ‘I was just thinking about something.’

‘Coming up with the next great idea, right?’

‘Yeah, yeah, something like that.’

Deborah’s smile concealed her sense of superiority but Dawn knew it was there, her eyes disapproving of this dreamer occupying a place alongside her, as if she were somehow equally worthy of being part of the training programme. Dawn knew she were right; while Deborah dreamt of slogans and statistics, she imagined Robyn frolicking with the man whose trousers she had soaked. If she were someone else she would dismiss and condemn this person for their lack of drive and focus before reassuring herself that at least she wasn’t like them. Being Dawn, however, an inward-looking condemnation seemed a little too close to self-abuse and so she turned her attention to Darren’s open zip as he strode past, comforted that his neglectful approach to preserving his modesty would at least go some way towards balancing out the proportion of shame she was currently unfairly hogging. She even longed for his button to pop and the trousers to come tumbling down so that the shame could be fully shifted across.

As she drove home that evening, echoing the words to Eleanor Rigby in a slightly-discordant soprano screech, she reflected on the prominence of trousers in both the events of the day and her regularly-reworked-fantasy. Her desire for a staple feature of slapstick comedy to suddenly manifest itself in real life surprised and irritated her, particularly since the revelation of hairy legs and stripy underwear had never played an especially active role in sparking sexual interest for her (or anybody, for that matter). However, perhaps the most disillusioning realisation was that she saw re-hashed ideas everywhere she looked, be they in her dreams or in the mini-dramas of her daily interactions. The search for something new merely exposed just how much everything seemed to have been done before. Her job was to bring new ideas to market, to sum up a concept in a neatly-packaged phrase for the public to ponder. Everyone and everything needed a phrase.

Even her traffic jam seemed to demand a slogan – Why get there in 5 when you can get there in 50? – although it was with some relief that there was no-one to judge the quality of her ideas, or her singing, as she slightly altered the words to Drive my Car, irritated by the chirpy tone of Paul’s voice (or was it John’s? – she was never 100% certain either way).

Clocking in at 3 minutes under 50, she turned the car into the drive and switched off the engine, her eyes lifting to the bedroom window above. A slight parting of the curtains offered a glimpse of a book held in mid-air, the lettering a little too distant, and the occasional flick of a finger as the page was turned.

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