The Lawyer
By Andy Marlow
Copyright 2011 Andy Marlow
Smashwords Edition
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The Lawyer
“How was work today, honey?” called Nicky from the kitchen.
Jonathan didn’t answer straight away. He was busy lugging his suitcase through the front door, a deceptively simple task which was proving to be surprisingly difficult. The front door was of a curious design in that it would swing shut whenever you ceased to prop it open, a fact which would not have been a problem had Jonathan’s suitcase not been so heavy. As it was, however, it took all his strength and both his hands simply to lift it, so that his rear end was being continually abused by the sharp end of the door while he tried with all his effort to pull his load through.
“Fine,” he replied through gritted teeth. “Fine, as always.”
He looked behind him at the damage the door was inflicting and was dismayed to find his brand new suit being strained by the constant impact of wood on fabric.
His new suit: it had cost him £495, designed by and purchased from Emporio Armani no less.
Eventually the suitcase was through and the door slammed shut with a bang. Jonathan felt the fabric of his trousers to see what damage had been done and grunted in annoyance. It was cosmetic, but in his line of work image was everything. Only a small part of his day was occupied by dispensing legal advice; the rest, and by all means the most important part, was about simply looking the part. It almost didn’t matter whether you knew what you were talking about: as long as you wore a nice suit, had a nice haircut and threw in the right terminology like “breach of contract”, “offer”, “acceptance”, and “cause of action”, the firm was largely happy with your work. Put on this show all day, every day, and he was rewarded with a fat little pay cheque somewhere in the region of £200 per hour.
His working day: from eight a.m. in the morning to six p.m. at night, it earned him £2000. Per day. With that much in pocket, spending £495 on a suit is just spare change.
“Look at what this door did to my suit!” he exclaimed, almost to himself. He may as well have been talking to himself, for Nicky was not listening. She was busy in the kitchen cooking up dinner. She had, most likely, spent the whole day in that room, cooking and cleaning, washing and ironing. Yet it wasn’t that she was her husband’s domestic slave, forbidden from leaving the house; nor was it that she couldn’t get a job. It was simply the fact that she didn’t need one. When your husband is bringing home around £12,000 per week, you can afford to live a lifestyle of bored luxury.
That’s the keyword, though: ‘bored’. Housework had become a hobby for her, simply because the only alternative was daytime TV and she could not face the prospect of watching yet another episode of ‘Cash in the Attic’ or ‘Homes under the Hammer’.
She occasionally went out shopping. Yesterday, for example, she had gone to Dolce and Gabana on a £1,500 shopping spree, in which she had bought one mini skirt (£215), one short dress (£390) and a medium leather bag (which on its own came to a whopping £600). She had used the remaining £295 for lunch.
Jonathan walked into the kitchen and greeted his wife with a kiss. On the face of it, their marriage was strong, desirable, enviable. Under the surface, it was not so: for all her mind told her that she should be loving this lifestyle of obscene wealth and luxury in which anything could be hers, her soul was disenchanted by it all; meanwhile her husband, for all his wealth and apparent success, had gained a world-weary attitude which would have befitted a man twice his age. As it was, by his thirtieth birthday he had given up on all his dreams and accepted life as it was: artificial, cold, unfulfilling. He trudged from day to day wearing a mask, pretending like everyone around him that he was living the dream and loving every second, when really his essence had long since died and was buried somewhere in the pit of his stomach.
Nevertheless, the pair of them wore plastic faces towards each other. Jonathan only knew the attractive, glamorous surface of the woman in front of him and could never hope to pierce into the truth of her soul; Nicky could only see the success and charm associated with her husband, blind to his tired, worn eyes and inner darkness.
“How was your day?” he asked obligingly.
“Fine,” she replied, faux-thoughtfully. “I made us chicken pie, potatoes and peas for dinner.”
“Sounds scrumptious!”
The entire conversation was artificial, forced, and they both knew it. This had become a daily ritual for them: indeed, their entire lives were now ruled by ritual. Every day, Jonathan would leave home at seven o’clock in the morning for work. They would ritualistically say goodbye and ritualistically kiss, telling one another ‘I love you’ using words which had lost their meaning long ago. Then, at half past six in the evening, Jonathan would come home and they would have their kitchen ritual of asking each other how their day was. Nicky would have cooked them a meal and he would eat it, often in silence. Finally, both of them would retire into separate rooms to watch their separate TV shows and then go separately to bed. Every day was as predictable as the last.
Their television sets: both widescreen, both Panasonic, both £550. In total: £1,100.
“I closed the deal today,” announced Jonathan. His voice tried to convey excitement but failed miserably. Nicky, though, had just as much invested in their collective fiction as he did, so she answered just as faux-excitedly:
“Ooh! How much did you get?”
“In total, considering how long I’ve been working on it, £10,000 I’ve earned on this one.”
Jonathan had been working tirelessly all week on the deal. He was the solicitor in charge of drafting the contracts for a business merger between two giants of the mobile phone world. His efforts had left him with little time for his friends or even his wife, but it was over now- and it had paid off.
She hugged him happily. This was genuine happiness. Yet it was not out of pride in her husband but out of something more like greed: her joy was the same as she would have felt if a cheque for £10,000 had just been dropped through her letterbox.
Jonathan winced. He had little contact with his wife these days and, truth be told, he had secret inclinations about her true feelings. Despite his appearances- and hers- something inside him was uncomfortable, as if it understood that theirs was an empty marriage, an empty life, and all these monetary achievements brought nothing in the way of fulfilment. Yet if he did indeed feel that way, he did not show it.
“We can get that extension now!” she declared merrily as she returned to the pie cooking on the stove. “Ooh- I found something today. You might be interested. It’s on the coffee table.”
Jonathan traipsed into the living room to see what she was on about. Before him was the standard set-up: one sofa, two chairs, one of their televisions, a radio and their coffee table, with something odd and out of place lying on top of it.
Their coffee table: carved from mahogany, imported from Scandinavia and bought for £1,000 from an independent retailer.
He approached the mysterious object and recognised it instantly. It was his old diary which he had kept as a student. He had started writing it in on the first day of his Law degree at the University of Bath and had continued until sometime in his third year. It was battered, torn, old, and unsightly. If he was seen carrying it about, it would do nothing for his image. Yet there it was. It had a certain charm about it, an other-worldly ‘alternative’ feel which had attracted him to it in his youth.
His youth. He smiled a genuine smile as he remembered his eighteen year old self.
He had never been an avid writer, so his entries were less than eloquent. Nevertheless he opened the diary up on the first page and read:
“September 25th, 1999: First day at University today. Finally free! Freshers week is amazing. Remember: Amy. She’ll be important. Lectures start next week. Looking forward to it. Three years time: Jonathan Barnett, LLB, fighting against corruption and oppression and injustice!”
It was like reading someone else’s diary. He almost didn’t recognise the person who had penned those words, but whoever it was intrigued him. He read on, and as he did so he began to feel something unnameable growing inside him:
“March 3rd, 2000: Turns out university invests in arms dealers. Not happy. Went to demonstration and ended up in occupation. We’re in lecture theatre now. Been here two days now. We shall not be moved!”
“July 12th, 2000: Visited a commune today. Hippies are still alive! Must visit again. Good way of life.”
The person who had written the words before him had been an idealist, a revolutionary, unjaded by the realities of life and still in possession of his dreams and values. Could that have been him, all those years ago? It was scarcely believable.
Yet it became believable. For as he continued to read, he began to see himself, the person he knew himself to be now, emerging. Gradually, over the course of 2000 and 2001, the entries became less and less hopeful, increasingly empty of optimism, until the last ever entry he penned in January 2001:
“January 12th 2001: I’m going to be a solicitor in London.”
He remembered that day well. You never forget the day your dreams finally die and you realise that your fate is to represent the very people you wanted to fight; that your life will be spent brokering corporate deals and writing contracts for faceless multinational empires; perhaps in the end representing the very oppressors you originally wanted to challenge.
That is exactly what Jonathan had become, he realised now. With a jolt and a sick feeling he remembered what his next job was to be. After the completion of the mobile phone deal, he was to draft the contracts for the merger of two giants of the construction world. There was a problem, though: there were squatters in one of the buildings that were going to be transferred in the deal. His nineteen year old self would have joined them in their squat, would have argued that to throw them out is to make them homeless and really, you big corporations are already quite rich, so you don’t exactly need to evict them do you? Yet he was now thirty one and it was his job to make sure the deal went ahead. The squatters were a problem that he would have to solve. And by ‘solve’, he would clearly have to be the one to evict them, or at least to organise their eviction.
Nicky walked in.
“Dinner’s ready,” she announced.
Dinner: the pie had cost £5 from Waitrose; the peas and potatoes also £5. They were expensive, special, luxury items: the peas were hand-picked from the finest British farms; the chicken in the pie had been organically reared and fed on the most nutritious seeds available.
Jonathan was only half-listening. His mind had seemingly flipped, his worldview momentarily transformed and he felt his younger self, his idealistic, hopeful, revolutionary younger self, emerging from the dust in the pit of his stomach. And he was angry. He was angry at what Jonathan had become; angry that he had sold out on his dreams and settled for second best; angry that instead of representing the oppressed, he was now the lacky of the oppressors.
A decision was made in Jonathan’s mind. It was instantaneous, involuntary, and unignorable. The pit in his stomach had exploded on reading his diary and questions flooded through: what would my student self think if he could see me now?, he thought. Would he be proud, or ashamed? He knew the answer, and he didn’t like it. It was screaming at him from his oesophagus as the ghost of his aggrieved youth came up through his body like some malevolent possession.
Yet hope accompanied the pain. His ghost was admonishing him, reminding him of his youthful idealism. He remembered his drive, his energy, his passion, his determination and the one reason he had decided to study law in the first place. The subject had never interested him, but its uses had. He had seen injustice and poverty on the television and in the street, and he had seen the law as a tool he could use to fight it. His life was therefore a failure. He had the well-paid job, the glamorous wife, the expensive car: to the world, he was successful. To himself, though, he was not. He had sold his soul for the sake of cash. He had given up.
So the conclusion said itself: “Tomorrow I’m going to quit my job.”
Nicky was gobsmacked. “What?” she yelled in horror. The tray in her hand crashed to the floor as she dropped it in shock, sending tea spilling all over the carpet.
“I’ve read the diary you found, and it reminded me of who I was. Of who I am. I’m not meant to be this, to be doing this. I’m not meant to be merging and breaking up companies for a living. I have no interest in that. It makes my life soulless, mindless drudgery. Sure, we have money, but look at us! Are we happy? You’re bored, I’m tired; our life is monotonous and just plain wrong.”
His wife didn’t know what to say. She just stood there for a moment, speechless. The two of them had only met five years previously, by which time Jonathan had already invested himself into the corporate career ladder. She had never met this naïve idiot- as she saw it- who was now standing before her.
“You’re rambling,” she said eventually. “And over-thinking. This- this is a mid-life crisis, just a little bit early. What do you want? Go and buy a car or something. That usually does it.”
“Oh, I’m not thinking at all!” he practically shouted. “For once, I’m ready to live! Nicky, think of it: I’ll quit my job and find a new one, at a different firm. It’ll mean a lower salary, sure, but I’ll be doing the work I love. I’ll actually be making a difference to the world, fighting for the rights of the poor and defending the weak from those more powerful than them. Those oppressing them. We only get one life on this planet- why waste it doing something you hate?”
“But- the house! The mortgage! The- money!” she stammered. “Jonathan, this is just selfish!”
“Don’t you see?” he implored her. “None of those things matter. Our life has become so artificial, defined by how much we earn and how much we spend. It’s not how we’re meant to live. It doesn’t make us happy.”
“You’re being ridiculous,” she yelled, before storming out. Yet his mind was made up. He costed everything up in his head:
His job: worth £600,000 a year.
His house: worth £1,000,000, with two years left on the mortgage.
His possessions: he had no idea, but they must have cost him several thousand pounds at least.
His wife: again, he had no idea the exact figure, but she definitely cost him a similar figure.
All of this added up to a hefty sum. Yet he was willing to give it all away because there’s one thing he still had left to consider.
The cost of giving up on his dreams and compromising his one shot at life: priceless.
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