Page 81 of The Compound

“What’s with the interrogation?” he asked, waspishly.

“Just trying to get along.”

When he was finished, I cleared the table and brought out dessert, a bowl of strawberries, blueberries, sliced apple and pear, mango and raspberries. I had a separate bowl of cream, freshly whipped, and a tub of ice cream.

“This is nice, Lily,” Tom said. He was more relaxed now, trying, I think, to be pleasant.

“Thanks,” I said. “There’s too much fruit for only two people, anyway. It’ll go bad in a day or two.”

I ladled fruit into his bowl, and then offered the cream and ice cream.

“Usually I wouldn’t,” he said. “Very fattening. But we’re having a nice night, aren’t we? The final two.”

“Final three,” I corrected, and added a generous portion of both cream and ice cream over his fruit. For myself, I picked only the strawberries and raspberries out of the bowl, alongside a mountain of ice cream.

“I got fired from my job,” he said. “After working there for eight years.”

I picked a strawberry from my bowl. “What happened?”

He moved his shoulders in a gesture of discomfort. “There was an issue—anger management, you could say. I’d networked extensively, and when I lost my job, I got in touch with my contacts. Well, word had got out, or someone had bad-mouthed me, had deliberately spread damaging information, and there was no one who would hire me. I went to my friend who I had gone to university with, Leo. We’d lived together for three years, and had been friends for longer. He had a high-up positionat a company similar to mine. He could have got me a job, easy. He had told me, not long before, that they were looking for someone. We had lunch, our favorite place, and he told me that the job wasn’t available anymore. It was bullshit. We both knew that it was bullshit. Even my best friend wouldn’t help me out.” He put his fork down. “Christ, I’d like a cigarette.”

“What happened next, then?”

I didn’t expect him to continue, but he said, “I didn’t have as much to do with my days as I would have liked. I decided to visit my girlfriend, Amy. Ex-girlfriend. She had depended on me a lot. She always needed someone to change her tires, or to fix the leak in the sink, or to put up a shelf or something. So I dropped in to see if she needed help. I know how she struggled to get things done.”

“And then?”

“And then she filed a restraining order. Then I applied to be on the show. I was here a month later.”

I glanced at the sky above me. It was darkening, but not yet dark. I needed more time.

“I was nearly fired from my job, too,” I said. It occurred to me, with a drum of sadness, that I would tell Tom this story, but had never told Sam. In some ways, however, it was easier. Tom already knew the worst parts of me; I suspected he had seen them before anything else.

“You’re a—hairdresser or something, right?”

“Shop assistant in a department store. Makeup section.”

“Right. You like it?”

“I mean, I did. Until I thought I was getting fired. I haven’t really enjoyed it since then.”

I could tell that Tom was struggling between being polite and telling me he didn’t care. He made a gesture with his hand, which I took as a signal to keep going.

“I’d been there for a while, and eventually they trusted me to do the cashing up in the evenings. We took in more money than you’d think in a day. I got a commission too, which was nice. If a girl came in on her own you could usually make a little sale, if you did their makeup nicely and complimented their skin. It was better if a man came in, becausethey never had a clue, and if you shook your head and gave them a certain look they’d be shamed into spending more. But the best was when a girl would come in with her man. I always took my time then, when I did her makeup. I’d pick the nicest colors and blend it so carefully; it looked like a second skin. And she’d look so beautiful when I was done, and her man would look at her and pay whatever she wanted. Mind—I think it wasn’t that he handed over the money because of how good she looked. I think it’s because a man will do a lot if they think that a girl can’t do without them: the girlhadto have the makeup, and he had to be the one to give it to her.”

“Could you get to the point, please.”

“Well, as I said, eventually I was allowed to cash up at night. At first, I did it with someone else, and then I did it on my own. Sometimes it was fine, but sometimes it was wrong—the numbers weren’t right. I’d stay there for ages after closing, trying to make it right. Well, eventually I stopped trying to sort it out. Nothing seemed to happen either way. Wasn’t that stupid of me? After a couple of months, the accountant rang the manager and said they’d noticed that the figures were off when I was closing. The manager accused me of stealing from the till. I was outraged at the accusation and threatened to quit. Then they looked at the camera footage, and said that they knew I wasn’t stealing. But they couldn’t understand why the numbers were consistently being filed incorrectly. The manager, owner, and accountant made me go through exactly how I did it, with a calculator, and I was talking for ages, going through it step by step, and when I finally looked up, I saw that the accountant was staring at me, and the others just looked embarrassed. I’d been adding up the numbers wrong, you see. Some of the numbers the computer does automatically, and some you need to add up yourself, with the calculator. But I had been adding up those ones wrong. Simple stuff, too. Simple enough that I didn’t realize I needed a calculator. I thought that six plus seven was fourteen, and I thought that eight and nine was sixteen. The accountant had to tell me that my addition was wrong. I asked if I was in trouble, and they said no, but I’d better stick to only doing makeup. The seventeen-year-old school dropout does the cash instead, now. Well, isn’t that embarrassing?”

He looked uncomfortable. I finished my glass of champagne. I dearly would have liked another glass, but I wanted to stay as alert as possible. He held his half-full glass in both hands, as though worried that I might reach across and take it from him. He topped up his own glass and not mine, then ate a few more bites of his dessert. Then he said, “I’m going to check and see if the big screen is back on.”

He was gone for only a few seconds. While I was telling my story, the sun had set, and the temperature was dropping rapidly. We would have to go in soon. He returned, but didn’t take a seat, and instead took his glass of champagne and drank it, standing. “Well?” I said. “Is it on, yet?”

He nodded. I tried to keep my face neutral.

“What’s the task?”

“Guess to the nearest hour how long until Christmas Day. Stupid, isn’t it?”

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