perhaps, or even sobriety? Cleanliness? Everyone knew that was right up there next to godliness.
The Equity Insurance firm had offices in William Street in the Melbourne CBD. That part of town was resolutely corporate, a hive of activity during the working week, but mostly dead in the evenings and during the weekends, apart from the nearby King Street with its lap-dancing venues and grotty reputation. The Equity Insurance building wasn’t a particularly interesting building. It was built somewhere in the late 80s and there was a huge echoing foyer lined with white faux-granite and mirrors, two huge revolving doors at the front and a bank of six lifts. There were twenty-three floors, a number of them given over to various areas of Equity Insurance—financial services, life insurance, wealth management, the executive floor and HR. The call centres were elsewhere, although not yet offshore, Walter was pleased to note.
Walter worked in life insurance as an actuarial analyst. It wasn’t a particularly interesting job, but he was a numbers man, he was a spreadsheet kind of guy and so it suited him. Given his age, he should probably have risen naturally up the ladder a little higher than he had, but just as waiters and shopkeepers overlooked him, so did the executive team when it came to promotion, new opportunities, project work, and so on. In this case though, Walter was more or less happy to remain ‘under the radar’ (horrid term) because in common, he was sure, with much of the population and certainly many of his co-workers, he didn’t really give a stuff about his job. Well, he did and he didn’t. It suited him, certainly, considering he had an aptitude for the sort of number crunching required and didn’t particularly feel interested in, or good at, interacting with the public in the form of Equity Insurance clients. The wage suited him, which was good without being incredible and was paid into his account fortnightly, the four weeks of holiday suited him, taken pretty much when he liked, and the options for voluntary contributions to his Super and car payments suited him, reducing his wage below a certain threshold which meant he got taxed less. The routine of it suited him, and the longer he was there, the more he knew the work, the less it impinged on him, the less he had to think about it. It was this more than anything that suited him, the ease of it all. In a way he no longer even noticed that he worked for Equity Insurance.
Sometimes he wondered, sometimes, in a flash of perspective, for just a second, he wondered what he was saving himself for, but that thought flustered him a little, in some way he didn’t understand. It was one of those thoughts with a huge unexplored well of blackness behind it, and it wasn’t really in Walter’s nature to plumb those depths.
His team leader, Dev, a self-described ‘young gun’, was straight out of university into Equity, and had already had two promotions. He was snippy about punctuality, but luckily so was Walter, so that was never a bone of contention. Even so there was little love lost between them. Walter didn’t have a very good relationship with any of his co-workers really, probably because he wasn’t the type to go out to the pub with his workmates, or for a curry with Dev. In fact, in his last performance appraisal (a demeaning experience having his performance appraised by Dev) one of the comments made was: ‘… needs to be a better team player’. Walter had smiled at Dev benignly during this part of the performance appraisal process, but in his head he was thinking: team player this, and imagined himself giving Dev two middle fingers.
A while back Walter had told Dr Feldman that he longed sometimes to tell Dev to go get fucked. Those specific three words, he thought, although not grammatically stellar, were important—not only was Dev to get fucked, which was, of course, quite damning in itself, but he was to go to do it, go, that is, away from him, Walter, and do it somewhere out of his sight, because he couldn’t even be bothered watching it—those three words, he felt, so perfectly expressed disinterest and disdain in equal measures, he was quite pleased with them.
‘So this Dev makes you feel angry?’ Dr Feldman had asked him.
‘Angry?’ Walter had repeated, wide eyed.
‘Yes. You sounded very angry just then. When you said you wanted to tell him to go get fucked. I mean, that sounded angry to me.’
‘Did it?’
‘U-huh.’
‘Oh,’ Walter had said to the doctor. ‘I do apologise.’
‘Why don’t you tell him how you feel?’
‘Tell him?’
‘Yes. Not perhaps in those exact words …’
‘Oh,’ Walter said, slightly flustered. ‘I couldn’t do that. He’s Indian.’
*
Walter had a cubicle in an open plan office. His was a very neat desk with computer, phone and various stationery items arranged neatly, parallel to each other, all tidy and rigidly spaced, as if measured. He didn’t know it, but sometimes while he was away from his desk, out to lunch or in a meeting or something, his co-worker Mick would come up to his desk and move one of the items, maybe his stapler, so that it sat cocked a little to the side, just the smallest bit out of alignment. Then, when Walter returned to his desk, Mick, and sometimes some of the others, would be watching from a few cubicles away, peeking over the carpet divider, waiting for Walter to notice and correct the position of the stapler, which he did immediately, automatically, every time. He didn’t hear their titters of laughter, or if he did he presumed they were laughing at something else.
That morning was exactly the same as any other in Walter’s work life—that was kind of the point with him—but in the back of his mind he was unable to stop thinking about that man at the station. Don’t get on the next train. It was there with him all morning, like something hovering over his shoulder, in his peripheral vision. By mid-morning he decided he had to do something about it. He went and got himself a cup of tea—first things first—black with two sugars. Then, after checking the whereabouts of Dev, whose cubicle backed onto his (he was safely ensconced in the Senior Staff Meeting and wouldn’t be out until lunch) he logged on to the internet and checked a couple of local news websites. He glanced down through the headlines—something about the outcome of a major crime trial, sporting news, some political mumbo-jumbo about the next budget, blah blah, but nothing was reported as having occurred on or to the 7.15am express from Wintergardens to the city. Perhaps it was ridiculous of him to think that something had happened, but checking the internet news pages, finding out, knowing for sure, that wasn’t ridiculous at all, that was just conscientious.
Perhaps the story, whatever it might be, just hadn’t been reported yet. It was only—he glanced at the time on the bottom right hand side of his computer screen—10.45am after all. He tapped his fingers on his desk, then, after a moment, he looked around the office. Most of the desks near his were empty. The coast, as they say, was clear.
He typed another web address in the browser and found the website of the company that ran the suburban train system in Melbourne. A few more clicks and he had found a phone number for enquiries. He picked up his phone, dialled zero for an outside line, then dialled the number.
The call was answered by a recorded voice giving Walter various options. He pressed zero to be put through to a real person. Soon enough someone answered. A woman.
‘Hello,’ Walter said. ‘I wonder if you could put me through to …’ Only then did he realise that he probably should have thought ahead to this moment. ‘Information,’ he finished lamely.
‘Information on our services, Sir?’
‘Well no, not that. Information about …’
‘Timetables?’
‘No, no. Is there someone I could talk
