I first met Caitlin Brown on 21st October 2008. I was interviewing for a position in my team and she was the last person I’d interviewed that day. The global economy was imploding at the time, but for reasons that needn’t be gone into here my company was still hiring like crazy. What I remember about Caitlin from that interview is she had a winning smile, that and she seemed to vaguely know what she was talking about; at any rate she had enough about her that I offered her the job on the spot (it helped, of course, that all the other candidates I’d seen were useless).
But as it turned out, Caitlin didn’t have the first idea what she was talking about and within a few weeks it was clear she was entirely unsuited to the job I’d recruited her for. Fortunately, however, she still had that winning smile of hers and, as is well known, a winning smile goes a very long way in an office, perhaps further in the final analysis than being competent at the job that forms the basis of, and rationale for, your employment. Another way of putting this is that Caitlin was well liked by her colleagues. Of course, being well liked meant that colleagues were forever swinging by her desk for an impromptu chat or cajoling her to take a fag break or inviting her to go to the canteen for a lunch break that always seemed to stray well beyond the allotted hour, all of which only served to distract Caitlin from her work and made her even more lousy at her job. Not that I overly minded, since I was not immune to Caitlin’s simpering charm, after all I hired her for that precise reason, and if I’m honest, I rather enjoyed the social cachet that came with having her in my team, which I felt (or hoped) redounded onto me personally.
Anyway, one night, as was fairly typical for her, Caitlin had arranged to go for drinks with a few colleagues from another team after work, a team that happened to be managed by a colleague I detested, not that that’s relevant to anything. She told me this as she was clearing away her desk, in accordance with the clear-desk policy that, unlike everyone else in my team, she zealously adhered to. I asked her where she was going and when she told me I pretended to know the place, expressing my enthusiasm for it in a manner that I felt lacked any semblance of authenticity. Then there was an awkward pause and just as I was about to turn my attention back to the spreadsheet on my computer screen, Caitlin asked me if I fancied going. To the bar you mean? I asked. Uh-huh, she answered. For some reason, even though I had a huge backlog of work to get through (mainly related to having to rectify Caitlin’s myriad mistakes) and my boss was expecting it all done yesterday, I said: Sure, why not. Cool, said Caitlin, flashing me that winning smile of hers. I just need to pop to the loo and do my makeup. Okay, I said, I’ll meet you in the foyer. Right you are, she said.
Once I’d put the finishing touches to the nested sumif formula I’d been working on, I saved the spreadsheet and then shut my computer down. I put some files away in my drawer, locked it and stood up. I could feel my boss staring beadily at me from his glass lair, wondering no doubt why I was leaving so early. For a moment, I considered changing my mind, but then I thought fuck it and I brazenly walked past my boss’ office without even saying goodnight, which was a big thing for me to have done in those days, being, as I was, one of those abject myrmidons that one frequently encounters in the middling ranks of corporate management.
Caitlin had arranged to meet up with the guys – as she called them, even though the group we were meeting included a number of women – at a bar in Covent Garden. Since it was raining, we took the Tube from Warren Street to Leicester Square, a journey that lasted three minutes precisely. From Leicester Square we walked. Caitlin had an umbrella, which she invited me to stand under with her. It was raining so hard I said yes, although I insisted that I hold the umbrella. Caitlin said something about chivalry not being quite dead yet and I think I may have blushed, perhaps the first time I had done so since leaving school, which was such a long time ago it was debatable really if I was even still the same person. It felt strange walking along like that, with me holding the umbrella over our heads, as if we were lovers and not boss and subordinate. Bomblets of rain were exploding all around us. I couldn’t remember a time it had ever rained so heavily in London. Even so, a troupe of slender leotarded African men was still gamely carrying on with its performance on the piazza in Covent Garden.
The bar we’d arranged to meet the others in was down a narrow side street, in a basement that you got to by descending a steep flight of steps. It had a speakeasy interior and like all bars in central London, the music was preposterously loud. Our colleagues were clustered in a softly lit alcove. We pushed our way through the throng to join them. I noticed one or two of the guy guys looking surprised or vaguely annoyed to see me, although they quickly hid their surprise or annoyance behind an outward display of bonhomie. To alleviate the tension (no doubt more imagined than real), I immediately bought a round of drinks for everyone. Briefly, I considered using the company credit card to pay for them, but then I decided not to rock the boat with my boss any more than I had already rocked it by not staying late at the office to clear my backlog of work. After that I don’t remember a lot of what happened in the bar or what I said or was said to me. It was as if I were in a timelapse video of a night out with my colleagues, flickering from one person to another, until I found myself back on the street outside the bar, from which point I have perfect recollection.
The rain had stopped, but probably only recently since everything – the road, the shop fronts, the lamp posts, the parked cars – was glistening . It wasn’t cold, or maybe it was and I was too drunk to notice. For some reason, I was on my own, or no, not exactly, my colleagues were in fact still visible, but they were congregated in a group on the opposite side of the road and had clearly separated off from me. I could see Caitlin a little further along, not part of the group either. She was talking to a man who had his back to me. I could tell, from his stature perhaps or the way he carried himself, that he wasn’t one of my colleagues. Caitlin was standing very close to this man and staring up into what I imagined were his eyes as she spoke. For some reason, an obvious reason that I immediately suppressed, I felt a pang of jealousy.
I was holding a lit cigarette. I’d given up smoking a few years back, but it wasn’t unusual for me to make an exception on the odd occasion when I got drunk. I inhaled some smoke and checked my watch. It was too late to get the Tube home, so I started walking with the intention of finding a cab. My aim was to sidle past Caitlin without being noticed, but as I approached her, I saw that her eyes were red and puffy and I realised she was crying or had recently been crying. It struck me suddenly that she might be in some kind of trouble, that the guy I’d assumed she was amorously inclined towards was in fact harassing her. Without thinking, I asked her if she was okay. She didn’t answer, so I thought she might not have heard me. I repeated the question, only louder. The guy turned around then. He had slicked-back hair, in the style of a Camorra gangster, and a heavily lined face that might have been a blueprint for a fiendishly difficult maze, the kind of face that betrays hard living or the harbouring of a terrible secret. Immediately I recognised him, but it was one of those situations where you recognise someone without knowing how exactly or what name attaches to them. Caitlin was looking at me with blank eyes, then slowly, yet also surely, a smile began to arrange itself into her face, as if an artist were painting it into existence with one deft brushstroke after another. S, she said, it’s you, which I thought was a strange thing to say. I repeated for the third time my question: Are you okay? She said she was fine. The way she said it I believed her, although it still seemed to me as if she had been crying and I found that inexplicable or at least incongruous. Then she introduced me to the man with the lined face. This is my boss, she said to the man (meaning me), and this is Leslie, she said to me (meaning him). Suddenly, I remembered who the man I’d been introduced to was: a television actor who had played a well-known character in a soap opera I used to watch daily, along with millions of my fellow countrymen, back when soap operas were popular (maybe they still were, although I didn’t know anyone who admitted to watching any). I shook his hand. No doubt I must have appeared star-struck, which I almost certainly was. He said they were about to grab a bite to eat, if I fancied joining them. I was hungry (ravenously so, I suddenly realised), but I felt like it would be weird for me to intrude on their tryst (if that is what it was), so I immediately started demurring, but to my surprise Caitlin insisted, saying I hadn’t eaten anything all night and that I must be starving. She was so insistent that it was obvious she meant what she said. Well, I said, I guess I could eat. Fine, that’s settled then, said Leslie, smiling in a way that seemed entirely genuine, but you can never tell with actors. After that we walked along Long Acre until a black cab drove past with its ‘for hire’ light switched on. Leslie waved at it and the cab did an audacious u-turn and pulled over. When we got in, the crackle of the driver’s intercom preceded his asking the following (in a cockney accent that was so clichéd it seemed feigned): where to guv’nor? Edgware Road please, replied Leslie. After this laconic exchange, the driver switched the intercom off and then the cab pulled away into the slipstream of a silver SUV with tinted windows.
As we zoomed through the West End, Caitlin stared mournfully out of the window at the rain-drenched streets, whilst Leslie and I sat opposite her making small talk. The weather, the diabolical awfulness of the economic situation, the surprisingly enduring relevance of stoicism, the seemingly irrepressible rise of demagogic forces in democratic society, the utter pointlessness of the internet, the indispensability and directly proportional insidiousness of mobile phones, the slow and steady decline of American imperialism, the illusion of free will. At some point we found ourselves skirting along Hyde Park, which was shrouded in fog for some reason, then we drove through Marble Arch, which as always gave me a thrill, although I couldn’t say why exactly, and shortly thereafter we arrived on the Edgware Road. Not that far along it, Leslie rapped a knuckle on the glass partition and made a gesture for the driver to pull over, which is exactly what the driver proceeded to do. The fare was twenty quid. I offered to pay, but Leslie waved me away as if he wouldn’t hear of it. I protested, of course, but Leslie insisted again, more firmly this time, a touch aggressively in fact, and although it felt like a charade on my part, I protested again, but with somewhat less conviction and when Leslie reached into his pocket and withdrew his wallet, I quietly accepted defeat, not that I could have cared less if he paid.
The restaurant we went to was called Beirut. There were chandeliers over every table. The walls were stencilled with arabesques that put you into a trance if you stared at them for too long. We were the only customers. We ordered mezze. It took half an hour to come. I thought that was too long to wait, given the restaurant was empty. Thankfully the food was delectable and for a while the consumption of it completely occupied our attention, with no one saying a word. Then all of a sudden, Leslie started talking, although he continued to eat at the same time, placing a discreet hand over his mouth whenever he was chewing. After explaining that Caitlin was his daughter (lest, he said, you get completely the wrong idea) – which didn’t surprise me as much as it could have done for some reason – he launched into a vaguely histrionic monologue about his life. As far as I could ascertain, the life he had lived bore all the hallmarks of cliché, a classic tale of hardship, love gained and lost multiple times, frivolity, hatred, fear, absurdity, untrammelled intoxication and criminal machinations, a life that in summary had led, inevitably he felt, to the conclusion (and here he raised his voice as if declaiming to an auditorium) that contrary to what the poets and the mystics would have us believe, existence, the tawdry human version of it in any case, was neither transcendable nor transfigurable. I agreed with him wholeheartedly on this point, indeed I augmented it by saying that in fact life was not only not transcendable or transfigurable, it was also a sham, a kind of sadistic conjuring trick devised for who-knew-what nefarious purpose and that Schopenhauer had hit the bullseye when he said (and I paraphrase, I said): Everything in life proclaims that earthly happiness is destined to be frustrated or recognized as an illusion. Nothing else can be stated as the aim of our existence except the knowledge that it would be better for us not to exist. My saying this seemed to enliven Caitlin, who I suddenly realised hadn’t said anything since she’d introduced me to her father however long ago on the street outside the bar (it seemed to me like a lifetime ago or maybe it seemed like it happened in another life). Ah ha, she said, I knew it! Knew what? I couldn’t help but instantaneously ask her. That there’s more to you than meets the eye! She smiled then, one of her winning ones of course, as if an orchid had spontaneously bloomed or a shaft of sunlight had found a secret way into a knotted old arbour. She was right, of course, there was a lot more to me than met the eye, although that was not necessarily a good thing.
After dinner, we retired to a terrace at the back of the restaurant to smoke a hookah. Once the waiter, a young Arab with impeccable skin and long eyelashes, had filled the clay bowl with some shisha tobacco, Leslie said something to him in a language that I presumed was Arabic. The waiter looked confused for a moment, as if weighing something up, then he nodded, a nervous smile flickering almost indiscernibly in his eyes. At this point, Leslie took out a small lump of hash from his shirt pocket and held it up for me to see. Lebanese Red, he said. I nodded as if I were some sort of hash connoisseur, which I wasn’t, although as a student I had smoked rather a lot of it it’s true: I preferred it to weed, although not skunk, but in those days skunk was a rare commodity. Got a lighter? Leslie asked me. I said I did. I took it out of my trouser pocket, lit a cigarette and then gave it to him (the lighter, not the cigarette). Leslie used it to burn off a small segment of hash, which he then crumbled between his thumb and index finger into the hookah bowl. He did this three or four times and then he lit the coals under the bowl and took several vigorous drags on the hookah pipe before passing it along to me. For a moment I hesitated, but then I thought when in Rome and I sucked on the pipe. The smoke was far more pungent than I was expecting and immediately my alveoli took umbrage. I spluttered and everyone at the table laughed, apart from me. I passed the hookah pipe along to Caitlin, who took a ridiculously long drag, which as far as I could tell she didn’t exhale. Then, if I am not mistaken, the waiter took a few surreptitious puffs on the hookah. After that a curtain came down on the night.
I woke up the next morning in an unfamiliar bed lying next to Caitlin. She was wide awake, her head propped on an upturned palm, staring at me with an intensity I found slightly unnerving. She asked me if I had slept all right and I answered in the affirmative. Then either she rolled closer to me or I rolled closer to her, but either way we ended up kissing and pretty soon after that, fucking. She liked it up her arse and I found this a turn on; it was all I could do to stop myself from ejaculating prematurely (thinking about what my wife would make of all this seemed to do the trick). Afterwards, we had a shower together in her ensuite and then we got dressed and left for work. On the walk to the nearest Tube station, we held hands as if we were lovers rather than boss and subordinate. And then we continued to hold hands on the train, which was strangely empty given it was rush hour. Or we continued to hold hands up until the moment Caitlin pulled her hand away so that she could fetch the discarded newspaper from the seat next to her, which she proceeded to flick through with the nonchalance I recognised from her approach to work at the office. I, meanwhile, took the opportunity to cast an eye over my phone’s notifications. There were fifteen missed calls from my wife, plus a plethora of text messages, each more desperate than the last. I felt bad, but not as bad as I might have expected.
In the office, we acted as if nothing had happened between us. I spent the day holed up in various meeting rooms attending meetings with people who seemed to me to be saying blah blah blah, which wasn’t unusual. I contributed precisely nothing to these meetings and after one of them my boss took me to one side and asked me if I was feeling okay, only I seemed a bit withdrawn. I said I was fine, that I was maybe coming down with a bug, but otherwise there was no issue. My boss seemed content with that response and then proceeded to severely admonish me for being behind on umpteen deliverables. I assured him I would get the deliverables delivered pronto. At some point during the afternoon my wife phoned. I took the call in my boss’s office (he was off at some conference for bigwigs on the glass-encased top floor). So you are alive, she said when I answered. Then she demanded to know where I’d been last night. I said I’d stayed at a friend’s, having got unexpectedly drunk after agreeing to go for a quick beer on my way home. Then she demanded to know why I hadn’t answered the phone or let her know where I was or that I was staying out, which I had to admit seemed like reasonable enough questions. I said I’d been in a basement bar and that my phone had had no reception all night and by the time I left I was too drunk to know my own name let alone remember to text my wife. Then my wife said she didn’t believe me and started crying. I told her it was the truth. Then I told her it was a once in-a-blue-moon thing and it wouldn’t happen again. She asked me to swear on my life that it was the truth. I didn’t like doing it, but I swore on my life. Then I said I had to get back to my desk, that my boss was on the warpath. My wife said he wasn’t the only one on the warpath, but after extracting a commitment from me as to exactly what time I would be home, she let me go.
I worked late that night and so did Caitlin, which was so unusual it had never happened before. When I logged off, she yawned, stretched and then said she might as well go too. I said okay. We were the only people left on the floor and on our way out she suddenly grabbed my hand and pulled me into the stationery room. I can’t, I managed to say, but I was helpless and she knew it. She was helpless too and I knew it. We fucked standing up, her against the wall, her legs wrapped around my waist. It was the best sex I’d had since the morning.
After that, sex between us became quite regular. We didn’t do it in the office again. Instead, we went to a cheap motel in Kings Cross where they rented out rooms by the hour and didn’t ask questions. After we’d had sex, we usually talked for a while, filling in the backstories of our lives, unravelling ourselves to each other bit by sordid bit. She didn’t care I was married (in fact, she seemed to get off on the fact that she was having an illicit affair with a married man) although she did sometimes get jealous when I couldn’t see her, which was past a certain time on a weeknight and never on the weekend. My wife knew something was up, of course, but she chose to ignore the signs. Eventually, her wilful blindness (or stoicism is a nicer and maybe more accurate way of putting it) paid off, which is to say my relationship with Caitlin ended, sexually anyway, and my wife had me all to herself again. There was no one thing that led to this, it just kind of petered out of its own accord, as illicit romantic liaisons are wont to do (in my albeit limited experience anyway).
Our work relationship, however, endured. I was still her boss and she was still my subordinate. The fact that we had been lovers complicated things obviously, for me anyway. I realised this during Caitlin’s yearly appraisal. I gave her a three, which I thought was fair, more than fair in fact, but she saw things differently. In her opinion, she was a high four or even a five. I tried reasoning with her, explaining as gently as I could that her work performance didn’t justify that type of grade. I told her that, with certain provisos, it was certainly a possibility that she would get a four next year if she did x, y and z to demonstrate her development in the role. You’re punishing me, she said with barely suppressed vitriol, for ending the relationship. I said that I thought the relationship had ended by mutual agreement, not that that had anything to do with her appraisal. She told me to go fuck myself and that if I didn’t bump her up to a four, minimum, she would make sure I regretted it. Her eyes were suffused with a fury I had only ever seen in my father’s crazed eyes as he pummelled me for whatever misdemeanour he imagined I’d committed. I was flummoxed. I told her I would see what I could do, that my boss would make it difficult for me to sign off a four, that there was a quota of fours for the whole department and that was pretty much used up. She said, Do I look like I give a fuck? I said it didn’t.
Naturally, after the appraisal I revised Caitlin’s three to a four, concluding in her appraisal report that she was ‘an assiduous employee with first-rate technical skills and a great future ahead of her at the company’. I wasn’t lying about the quota of fours, but I’d managed to talk my boss round, since like everyone else he’d been suckered in by Caitlin’s smile and had no idea she was terrible at her job (or if he did, he didn’t care, perhaps he even liked that it made my life harder). That was that, I thought, only it wasn’t; what sort of a story would this be if it was? About four weeks after the bonuses (which were inextricably linked to our appraisal scores; I had been given a three incidentally) had been announced, my boss phoned me to ask me to step into his office. I looked across at him from my desk. He stared back at me with a face that seemed to suggest a profound weariness, a weariness borne not just of overworking to the point of collapse, but of the certainty that the best years of his life were behind him, that the corporate world had sucked them out of him as if it were a thirsty monkey sucking the juice out of a jackfruit, leaving nothing but the bitter-tasting pith behind, that there was no point to any of this, no hope that it could ever be different etc. We hung up synchronously. When I stepped into his office, my boss asked me to shut the door, which was something he did when he wanted our conversation to be confidential, not an uncommon occurrence. I did so and rather than sitting down, I leaned against the chair facing his desk. You might want to sit down, my boss said. Why? I said, sitting down. It’s Caitlin, he said, she’s made a complaint. After that I don’t remember much of what my boss said or what I said, or indeed if I said anything at all. It was as if a grenade had detonated in the office, a silent grenade that left no visible trace of the destruction it had wrought. I do remember that at some point my boss took me to a meeting in the Board Room with the Head of HR, who explained that there was nothing they could do, that I would be suspended on full pay pending an investigation, that I would of course be able to resume my employment if the allegations were proven to be untrue (the way she said this left me in no doubt that she’d already made her mind up on that score). Then I was asked if I had any questions. I didn’t or, no, I did, but they only occurred to me later on as I was driving home. Then I was escorted off the premises by the Head of HR and that was that. Not so much as a thank you for the ten years’ service I’d given, not that that would have made any difference, of course.