Best Sister Ever – part 1 by rondudderie
This is part one of a series:
- Best Sister Ever
- An Audience With Carstairs
- And The Winner Is
- The Trials of Carstairs
- This is Your Carstairs Speaking
- Carstairs of Arabia
- The Protocols of Carstairs
Also by this author and free on this site: Best Sinterklaas Ever, a short story that serves as a prequel to the series.
Chapter 1 – Closing up shop
The lease ran out today, January 31st 2013. By now, most of the furniture had been taken away. All of my employees were gone, too. Many of them would be starting new jobs next Monday, some had gone into early retirement and a few unfortunate souls were now at home, signing up for unemployment benefits and sending out resumés. Out of those, two had offered to work out the rest of the month, but I could manage taking apart my own company perfectly well by myself. I wasn’t taking down the logo on the roof top, but that was about all that was left of my life’s work. Some new company would be setting up shop here in a few months, maybe even weeks.
I still had my own desk, but only one chair and no more filing cabinets. Most of my time was spent digitising documents, shredding the paper copies, terminating contracts and subscriptions and staring out of my office window. The only thing I couldn’t get out of was my own phone contract.
I had taken to parking around the corner, even though we had 25 reserved spots out front. I just couldn’t bear to look at my current car, a seven year old Volkswagen Golf. The Audi had gone two years ago, when the decline had started. I wasn’t going to keep driving that thing when I had to ask my people to make economies, forego pay rises, see colleagues leave and to pick up some of their work load. My office had become as exuberant as a North Korean interrogation room. Actually, those at least had a framed picture of the current Kim Ass Hole on the wall. I had amassed a nice art collection by supporting local artists. That was when things were fine. Then I had bills to pay and now it was all gone.
We had given it our all, but our business ran on government contracts. Foreign governments. Good luck getting paid if you depend on a Mexican mayor to have your invoices authorised when he is sure to be voted out of office in a few months. Not that we weren’t used to that, but it was like that iPhone game, ‘Flight Control’, where you have to guide airplanes to a landing strip, usually several at a time. If all goes well, you can do that for hours. But then you lose focus for a second and two of them crash. Game over. Well, that had happened. Somewhere, somehow, there had been a hiccup in our cash flow from which we could not recover. The banks were not so keen to give out loans, one payment too many was just a bit too late and that set in motion a series of minor catastrophes. Our competitors and even our suppliers smelled blood and that was it.
Did I blame myself? Well, mostly. We usually had decent cash reserves and it wasn’t as if we were all flying first class and having coke-fuelled parties, but in the end there are bills and wages to pay. Then all it takes is a Mexican bank pretending to need a notarised picture of your balls to process a payment, some civil servants in the Philippines stalling your money because their bribe was apparently too low and then… boom. Bye now, thanks for playing.
Four o’clock. Nothing to shred. Nothing to scan. No one to call. Time to leave. I took one last walk around the office, picturing the faces behind desks that were already gone, then headed for the lifts and the lobby. I decided to take the stairs, as fate would probably be unable to resist locking me in a lift for the weekend, in a deserted building.
There was a sign on the inside of the glass door: ‘Would the last person to leave please turn off the lights?’ And so I did.
The drive home was fairly long these days. It used to be shorter, but about a year ago I had also lost my house. Actually, I knew exactly where it was; I just wasn’t welcome there anymore. When the money had dried up, my marriage had collapsed like a porcelain rail bridge. I suppose that is what you get for marrying the first girl that takes a shine to you. I had been alone, way too alone, until I was twenty-five. Then Monique had decided to come after me, which was about as hard as going after milk in a supermarket. One evening of kissing in the back of my car was enough to make me hers forever. I was so in love and so inexperienced, I never saw that she was merely passing the time.
She eventually married me because I’m nice and dependable and I suppose because she liked being worshipped. But even though she was my first big love, I was never hers. And when I had to take away her credit card and gardener and housemaid and Land Rover, I guess what was left was not enough to hold her interest. Thank God there were no kids involved.
I would have had kids with her if she had insisted, but she never did. I wasn’t keen on having kids either. Perhaps that’s because I didn’t enjoy being one. You know nothing, you have no control over your life, you’re made to do all sorts of things you detest (swimming lessons, communal showers after gym) and you have no money. Nope, didn’t care for it at all. Plus, I was mostly lonely as a kid. Why make someone else go through that hell?
And so now I lived in a rented vacation house, on one of those resorts where you’re not really supposed to live year-round but which is inhabited by people like me: the poor, the recently divorced. The losers. Plus several dozen Polish and Croatian day labourers, sleeping four to a room. I’m sure they worked hard, but they didn’t exactly raise the tone. These people worked twelve hours a day and many were away from their families, so when they wanted to relax they took to drinking. That led to fighting and all sorts of problems. When one of them was sent back to Poland for drinking too much (and that’s by Polish standards, mind you), he usually made the rounds along the other houses to bring some souvenirs back to Bydgoszcz or wherever. And that is why I still had patio chairs last summer, but now I didn’t.
The house was nice enough, if all you wanted was a place to visit for a few weeks in the summer. Everything was tiny and twice as narrow as back home. Nothing was insulated, so in winter you’d have to keep the heating on at full blast and, as these things go, the furniture was a mishmash of castaways, IKEA and second hand crap. It had two double beds, but one of those was actually a bunk bed for kids, in an even narrower room than the ‘master bedroom’. I’d been in hotel rooms with bigger walk-in closets than that. Still, you don’t need much if you’re alone.
So here I was, living in this tiny house with just a few thousand euros to my name, having just made myself unemployed by signing bankruptcy papers. There were quite a few messages on my phone, some a few days old, from friends, business relations and even former employees, offering me support and companionship. ‘Come over for dinner, Martin!’ ‘Don’t mope around, come have a drink.’ ‘It has been a pleasure to work for you, please let me know if there is anything you need.’ ‘You’ll be back on your feet in no time at all!’ All very nice words.