Still walking
My father is a lawyer. As a child I’d try to heft his legal tomes over my head, small arms trembling. The walls of text swarming his desk, his computer screen, were impenetrable to me. To be a lawyer seemed the most tedious job in existence, synonymous with my dreaded notions of adulthood; a world cast in shades of grey. I swore over the kitchen table never to be shunted away behind a desk, under fluorescent lights. I was to be an artist, a writer, and I wandered through my childhood in a dream world, singing softly. Watching my father work twelve hours a day, hunched over with his hair greying, built a stubborn knot of resistance in me. I shunned discipline and my grades suffered. However, it turns out spending all of your time painting in your bedroom and reading in class doesn’t result in much but a rich inner world and six years working hospitality jobs you hate. I landed an interview for an assistant role in a law firm a few months ago, and attended it in flats and a cardigan from Kmart. I spoke enthusiastically about making lists and organising cupboards. I got the job.
Picture by Naohiro
I stride through the office playing a character of myself now. I listen to conversations about gym routines and the housing market. I covertly tug at the threads fraying from the hems of my shirts. When the office is empty, I slip my loafers off and curl up in my chair, eating pretzels at my desk and sweeping the crumbs onto the floor. I feel like an overgrown child. I want to make myself at home everywhere. I want to ask people about their lives and hear a real answer. I have meetings with my manager about my lack of attention to detail and tell her I’ll try harder. I’m earnest because I don’t like getting in trouble. The work I do doesn’t feel tangible; the walls of text I print and scan and file still impenetrable. I keep making mistakes.
Law firms are, of course, inherently hierarchical: with partner being the position that all else orbits around. This is despite the supposed authority of management. The title falls through conversations like a stone. A mythos surrounds the partners, each with their own eccentric qualities, wryly told around the lunch table. Some days, the partner I support shuffles around the office in polka dot socks. He recently had a tantrum at his desk and slammed a cup down so hard that it broke. His assistant carefully swept up the crumbs of glass and brought him a new one. I guess everyone feels like a child sometimes.
Another partner held a team lunch at his house in Kew over summer. He’d mistaken me for a lawyer the week before, but now greets me with a familiar kiss on the cheek when I arrive. I join a few of the young solicitors gathered around the pool, picking at potato salad. We eye off a balding senior associate paddling through the water in butterfly-patterned shorts. I envy him as we bake in the sun and discreetly peel our floral dresses from between our thighs. Swimming is out of the question, of course. We giggle at his audacity and turn to quip with a partner in a canary-yellow polo shirt. The top of his head just reaches my shoulder and I lean down to listen to an anecdote about a disturbance in the grounds of his home the previous evening. He’d been alerted by his security cameras to movement in the bushes, and thought an intruder may have climbed the fence. Only a fox though. Thank god.
When I get home I find his house on the internet. It sold for ten million a few years ago and does indeed have grounds enough for foxes to roam. I live on the corner of two main roads in Preston. I’ve lived in this suburb all my life. We’re near the Vietnamese restaurant with the green walls and the jasmine tea I’d burnt my tongue on every birthday as a child. Down the road is the cafe in which I’d shrink beneath the looming marionettes hung from the ceiling. Around the corner is the pub I used to frequent with my mother. I had a visitor from there this afternoon, as tends to happen occasionally. A man wandered in through the back gate and fumbled around in the garden. When I opened the back door to shout, broom in hand, he stumbled off again, tugging at his waistband and spitting over his shoulder. A disturbance in the grounds, I later tell my housemates.
In the evening, I stretch on my bedroom floor, eyeing the formless dust bunnies shifting under the bed. In the three hours I have at home before bed, there’s only so much time I’m willing to devote to cleaning. I go for a long walk instead. The world softens in the pale light, turns quiet and green. I tell myself there’s god or peace or something out here in these streets. A boy in a garage plays piano, hesitating briefly as I pass, before carrying on louder than before. A man tugs his dog out of my path. A woman shuffles around her yard pruning orchids planted in plastic buckets, red and yellow charms swaying over her door. My hands are soft and I wish I could walk forever. I wonder whether the people I work with mark the passage of time by the tree on the corner of their block too, watching it live and die again over the years.
When I talk about the changing leaves with my father later over the phone, he agrees that they are beautiful. He goes on to list other beautiful things, like the dappled light on the river that runs near his house and the galahs in the gums above it, as though filing them under a tab labelled ‘positive’ in his mind. He saves the information for later use, to present to me when I come to him to complain over and again of feeling stifled under fluorescent lights and low ceilings. Every year on my birthday he pulls information from this tab, telling the story of my birth. Every year he speaks of how I was born quickly and born calm, with long eyelashes. He swipes his fingers upwards from his eyes to his brows to imitate them as he tells this story. He pays attention to detail. He has bowed over the kitchen table for years so that I may write petulant stories in my bedroom, and for this I am grateful.
I walk into the city in the morning, slowly, preserving the quiet for as long as possible. The light is pale as I hum and watch the elm trees’ leaves turn, and try to ignore the rubbish trucks shuddering past. Try to think of anything but the deluge soon to hit me in the glass tower. I’m giving notice tomorrow. I’m still walking through a dream.
