“Oh, don’t worry, I’m not much of a one for unguents, Kayla,” I said. She goggled at me. I’d have thought that staff in the beauty business would have better-developed people skills. She was almost as bad as my colleagues back at the office.
She pushed the paper pants to one side and asked me to pull the skin taut. Then she painted a stripe of warm wax onto my pubis with a wooden spatula, and pressed a strip of fabric onto it. Taking hold of the end, she ripped it off in one rapid flourish of clean, bright pain.
“Morituri te salutant,” I whispered, tears pricking my eyes. This is what I say in such situations, and it always cheers me up to no end. I started to sit up, but she gently pushed me back down.
“Oh, there’s a good bit more to go, I’m afraid,” she said, sounding quite cheerful.
Pain is easy; pain is something with which I am familiar. I went into the little white room inside my head, the one that’s the color of clouds. It smells of clean cotton and baby rabbits. The air inside the room is the palest sugar almond pink, and the loveliest music plays. Today, it was “Top of the World” by the Carpenters. That beautiful voice . . . she sounds so blissful, so full of love. Lovely, lucky Karen Carpenter.
Kayla continued to dip and rip. She asked me to bend my knees out to the sides and place my heels together. Like frog’s legs, I said, but she ignored me, intent on her work. She ripped out the hair from right underneath. I hadn’t even considered that such a thing would be possible. When she’d finished, she asked me to lie normally again and then pulled down the paper pants. She smeared hot wax onto the remaining hair and ripped it all off triumphantly.
“There,” she said, removing the gloves and wiping her brow with the back of her hand, “now doesn’t that look so much better!”
She passed me a hand mirror so I could look at myself. “But I’m completely bare!” I said, horrified.
“That’s right, a Hollywood,” she said. “That’s what you asked for.”
I felt my fists clench tight, and shook my head in disbelief. I had come here to start to become a normal woman, and instead she’d made me look like a child.
“Kayla,” I said, unable to believe the situation I now found myself in, “the man in whom I am interested is a normal adult man. He will enjoy sexual relations with a normal adult woman. Are you trying to imply that he’s some sort of pedophile? How dare you!”
She stared at me, horrified. I had had enough of this.
“Please, leave me to get dressed now,” I said, turning my face to the wall.
She left and I climbed down from the couch. I pulled my trousers on, consoled by the thought that the hair would surely grow back before our first intimate encounter. I didn’t tip Kayla on the way out.
When I returned to the office, my computer still wasn’t working. I sat down gingerly and called Raymond in IT again, but it went straight to his preposterous message. I decided to go upstairs and find him; from his voice mail greeting, he sounded like the kind of person who would ignore a ringing telephone and sit around doing nothing. Just as I pushed my chair back, a man approached my desk. He was barely taller than me, and was wearing green training shoes, ill-fitting denim trousers and a T-shirt showing a cartoon dog lying on top of its kennel. It was stretched taut against a burgeoning belly. He had pale, sandy hair, cut short in an attempt to hide the fact that it was thinning and receding, and patchy blond stubble. All of his visible skin, both face and body, was very pink. A word sprang to mind: porcine.
“Erm, Oliphant?” he said.
“Yes—Eleanor Oliphant—I am she,” I said.
He lurched toward my desk. “I’m Raymond, IT,” he said. I offered him my hand to shake, which eventually he did, rather tentatively. Yet more evidence of the lamentable decline in modern manners. I moved away and allowed him to sit at my desk.
“What seems to be the problem?” he asked, staring at my screen. I told him. “Okey dokey,” he said, typing noisily. I picked up my Telegraph and told him I’d be in the staff room; there was little point in my standing around while he mended the computer.
The crossword setter today was “Elgar,” whose clues are always elegant and fair. I was tapping my teeth with the pen, pondering twelve down, when Raymond loped into the room, interrupting my train of thought. He looked over my shoulder.
“Crosswords, eh?” he said. “Never seen the point of them. Give me a good computer game any day. Call of Duty—”
I ignored his inane wittering. “Did you fix it?” I asked him.
“Yep,” he said, sounding pleased. “You had quite a nasty virus. I’ve cleaned up your hard drive and reset the firewall. You should run a full system scan once a week, ideally.” He must have noticed my uncomprehending expression. “Come on, I’ll show you.” We walked along the corridor. The floor squeaked beneath his hideous training shoes. He coughed.
“So . . . you, eh, have you worked here long, Eleanor?” he said.
“Yes,” I replied, increasing my pace.
He managed to keep up with me, but was slightly out of breath.
“Right,” he said. He cleared his throat. “I started here a few weeks ago. I was at Sandersons before. In town. Do you know them?”
“No,” I said.
We reached my desk and I sat down. He hovered, too close. He smelled of cooking and, faintly, of cigarettes. Unpleasant. He told me what to do and I followed his instructions, committing them to memory. By the time he had finished, I had reached the limit of my interest in technological matters for the day.
“Thank you for your assistance, Raymond,” I said, pointedly. Raymond saluted, and heaved himself to his feet. A man with a less military bearing was hard to imagine.
“No bother, Eleanor. See you around!”
I very much doubt it, I thought, opening up the spreadsheet which listed this month’s overdue accounts. He loped off with a strange bouncy walk, springing too hard on the balls of his feet. A lot of unattractive men seem to walk in such a manner, I’ve noticed. I’m sure training shoes don’t help.
The other night, the singer had worn beautiful leather brogues. He was tall, elegant and graceful. It was hard to believe that the singer and Raymond were members of the same species. I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. There was throbbing pain and the beginnings of an itch downstairs. Perhaps I should have put my underpants back on.
The leaving do started around half past four, and I made sure to clap extravagantly at the end of Bob’s speech and say, “Hear, hear, bravo!” loudly, so that everyone noticed me; I left at 4:59 p.m. and walked to the shopping mall as fast as the chafing occasioned by my newly hairless epidermis allowed. I got there by quarter past, thank God. Bird in the hand is what I was thinking, given the importance of the task, so I simply headed straight into the first big department store I saw and took the lift to the Electrical Department.
A young man with a gray shirt and a shiny tie was staring at the banks of giant TV screens. I approached, and informed him that I wished to purchase a computer. He looked scared.
“Desktop laptop tablet,” he intoned. I had no idea what he was talking about.
“I haven’t bought a computer before, Liam,” I explained, reading his name badge. “I’m a very inexperienced technology consumer.”
He pulled at the collar of his shirt, as though trying to free his enormous Adam’s apple from its constraints. He had the look of a gazelle or an impala, one of those boring beige animals with large, round eyes on the sides of its face. The kind of animal that always gets eaten by a leopard in the end.
This was a rocky start.
“What will you be using it for?” he asked, not making eye contact.
“That’s absolutely none of your business,” I said, most offended.
He looked like he might cry, and I felt bad. He was only young. I touched his arm, even though I hate touching.