The Accountant
The numbers swarmed like hundreds of small black ants in front of my eyes, vibrating, stubbornly refusing to sit still. I’m not dyslexic. Nothing like that. I just happen to have been staring at these particular numbers for the last several hours. Locked in a furious staring competition I was destined to lose. Try as I might, I simply couldn’t make sense of them. I looked up from the page, relinquishing what was left of my self-respect to the pristine, printed blackness, which now swam ghostlike in front of my eyes.
My gaze was drawn by a disturbance of the silence to the overpriced, prestige watch blinking on my fat, gone-to-seed wrist, once so spry and well-shaped, now strangled by the leather band pushing up repulsively on either side. 10:30 pm. Wow. Time really does fly when you’re having fun. This thought made me chuckle, mirthlessly, self-pityingly. Of course. The sensation felt strange in my face. An odd, but welcome stretching of the muscles that had been absent far too long. I looked up expecting to be relieved to see myself smiling in the polished reflection of my office window only to be horrified at seeing a stretched, haggard stranger grinning back at me. An oddly familiar face. A childhood memory gone sour.
It was hardly as though I had always been this way. On the contrary, I could have done anything, been happy. But she drove a nice Audi. She spoke at my school. My friend’s mum. One lazy-easy decision later I was a cadet at her accountancy firm. Sort of funny I guess. I’m a pig, pinned in this shit. And I’m not happy. I would have been, you know. My “other plans”, my “dreams”, my university life, my writer’s soul, all let slip by a 17-year-old’s greedy lust for a bit of money. Weirdly I think I knew then exactly the trade I was making. I could almost smell that late-twenties lump just over the hill ahead, with no shred of social life, spending his nights, spending his vital spirit, poring over the accounts of the wealthy parents of friends who weren’t friends, ever yearning for new ways to skirt tax laws. I thought I would fly. I thought I would love. Now, I don’t even like my Audi. Not even joking, my most intimate relationships are with my chair, its leather betraying a ghostly, perfect palimpsest of an ample and expanding backside, and with microsoft bloody excel. Unless of course you count my favourite, stained coffee mug, sad and always lonely by my elbow.
The Writer
The taxi smelled. They all did in New York. The faded stains of vomit, urine, and, what even is that? Let’s say “other things of which I hope to remain ignorant,” forever etched onto the cracked vinyl. They clunked as well, so damned dilapidated - so “timeless” as papers (ok, now influencers) and locals called it. Everything in New York seemed rusty, like the worn suspension of the yellow taxi in which I sat. Periodically jolting, crawling Madison Avenue slowly, a procession of yellow ants yelling weirdly at each other with blaring honks, past the park, and away from the only New York that anyone really cares about. Towards the New York that anyone (correction, anyone lucky) can afford.
Hindustani music reverberated around the cramped Bollywood of the backseat, forcing its way into the part of my brain where it knew it could cause the greatest discomfort.
I made it to the end of that car trip alive and even more impressively: sane, having forced myself by Jedi mind trick and prior intoxication, to enjoy Indian music. To the great displeasure of the heavy, moustachioed driver, I began to sing along, two and a half octaves out of key and to a completely different rhythm. I told you I was drunk right? It may have been this, my - though he phrased it somewhat less eloquently - “childish antics” that resulted in the ballooning taxi fare. Why is there an extras button on taxi meters anyway?
I levered myself out of the cab, grasping at anything. The movement made my head spin. I think I grabbed a street light that held me like a life raft while I was sick all over the bright yellow trunk of the taxi.
That is how I made my exit from the public eye that night, wobbling into my building, dignified, dripping vomit, waving to that moustache that was shaking its fist and calling me names that I don’t think had previously made it to New York. In my tiny studio I relieved myself, disgorged more soggy bar fries, and collapsed onto the beanbag desk where I spent more of my life than I care to admit.
It’s a New York cliche but I awoke to the sound of honking and some guy yelling “Come on, move it lady.” The room smelled of urine. I’d missed. The mess of papers in front of me had vomit on it. A genius pile of manuscripts and handwritten scribbles. I came to New York 17 years ago. Like Fitzgerald, Salinger, and Wharton I came to write novels, to unlock this living organism of a city, its imagination, my wildest dreams.
You’ve read my stuff. Not my novels. They’re at home with vomit on them, remember? But you’ve devoured page six of the New Yorker right? “Who Went Where?” Tantalising hints about which elite did what with the wrong husband or substance.Wild fantasies of the rich and famous. Or bland fashion reviews. My intellectually stimulating column fillers in the Post about losing that extra pound with kale smoothies and avocado bagels. Anonymous of course.
It pays the rent. Was there a more New York thing? At the end of the day, I’ll have paid my rent. I’ll be like a receipt pinned through the guts over one of those spikes. I like to think I drink to exacerbate my inability to be happy, so I can feel more like Fitzgerald, unable to find satisfaction and happiness in success. Sans the success, of course. I won’t ring on. “I never caught his name. But dammit, did he ever pay his rent!” they’ll cry.
The Inheritor
The fluorescent, perfectly designed sign of Heron's builders stood out, a beacon of good taste and expensive contractors, against the dark of pressing night. The sign hadn't always looked quite like that. Indeed, when Dad first took over the business from his dad twenty-five years ago when Pops retired, the sign had no lights and looked more like graffiti. A messy scrawl across the front of the building as if someone had spilt paint there. But Dad, Dad took pride in his business, Dad had created a respectable local icon. He even made “Goulburn Man of the Year,” and was friends with the mayor. The Mayor of Goulburn. Gawd, any normal person would be planning an escape. I watched my friends craft essays and applications to catapult them into the rest of their lives; I spent my days trudging towards the rest of mine. I’d be one of them. The ones who never left. The ones who never grew up.
It was hardly as though life was bad, or even hard. I had spent years drinking, speeding, and avoiding growing up. I’d been able to skate through thanks to Dad, blonde hair, and the ability to kick a football a really long way. But still, still I had the feeling I was slowly being pinned to a board, where I would kick and struggle against nothing. Pinned against the featureless board of my own life.
I sidled languidly towards the sign, letting it guide me as it had done for so long, but as I got to it turned left, taking not the pristine main entrance, but the one with the gravel driveway. Insignificant tornados of dust flew with every step, rising frantically into the fluorescent light that ushered my way, which also let off a reassuring hum like that of a reliable car, letting me know it would always be there for me.
In the middle of Dad’s office, well lit as always, I sagged into his comfy chair. A few times I made eye contact with the framed photo on Dad’s desk. The only one. Me, at the age of three, dressed as Bob the Builder, hammer, helmet and all. Surrounded by Scoop, Muck, and Dizzy.
I picked it up and threw it across the room, straight through the office window. And when I left, five minutes later the office was unrecognisable. I ran to my car and drove.
