Another standing ovation. Molloy was centre stage, tears in his eyes, hands limp at his sides, while the audience clapped. Jess watched from the back of the auditorium, the applause travelling up her spine. All my words, she thought.
They met in Molloy’s suite after the formal dinner. The new assistant called the speech genius and tried to show Molloy the online reaction, but he waved him away. The assistant turned to Jess, but she didn’t care now the speech was done. She needed to focus on the next one.
“You want to make yourself useful?” Molloy said to the assistant. “Call room service. Get me a burger.”
He nodded, practically bowed. Another acolyte, Jess thought. So eager to be here, fighting the good fight. The previous assistant had called it her life’s honour to work for Molloy. Who even talks like that? Jess never had liked her.
“Look at this,” Molloy said. He reached into his pocket and handed Jess a rosebud, white petals tipped pink.
“It’s a radish, from dinner,” Molloy said. “The main course looked like a fucking corsage. I didn’t know whether to eat it or pin it to my chest and wait to be asked to dance.”
He shook his head at the artistry, or maybe the artifice. Molloy read meaning into food. One trip they were welcomed at the airport with a military brass band and state photographers. But Molloy had returned from lunch with a cloth napkin in his pocket.
“Camel tongue,” he had said, unwrapping an oily disc of meat. “They knew we’d find it repulsive. We may as well fuck off now—they’re going to concede nothing.”
Blisters were forming on Jess’s feet. She pictured the slippers in her room: plush and white in their plastic wrap.
“Do we have the final wording yet?” she asked the assistant.
The finer details of a partnership were being worked through. Jess had written as much as she could of the following morning’s announcement speech, but needed the final text of the agreement to finish it. There were sticking points around the environmental measures Molloy insisted on.
The assistant checked his phone. “Not yet, sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?” Molloy said. “Is it your fault?”
The assistant laughed, apologising for the apology, but Jess saw his jaw was clenched as he turned away. She didn’t know how much he knew. He was hired quickly.
Molloy nodded at her. “Go, relax. He’ll call when I need you.”
*
Before Molloy, Jess worked in a bar. She had a useless grad degree and a prizewinning book of poems called Smile, and Other Advice. The central sequence was crafted from comments she had received from men. It came out right when people were adding #MeToo to all their social posts, and making jokes about men’s splayed legs on public transport. It rode a wave of popularity—insofar as books of poems ever rode waves—and won a national award.
Capturing the zeitgeist had been inadvertent. Jess didn’t know what to write next. She sat at her computer every afternoon, mind blank, waiting for the time she had to leave for her shift. She resisted social media and played solitaire instead. It seemed a nobler form of procrastination. When she did well the pack of cards leapt about the screen to congratulate her. No poem had ever done that. Not even the ones that won the prize.
She knew of Molloy before working for him—everyone did. He used to be famous not for anything he had achieved—something to do with property and offshore investments—but for the wealth he had amassed. He was married, for a while, to a celebrity chef, and implicated in the breakup of a cricketer and soap star. The shift to philanthropy was abrupt. He had always been described as a self-made man, but when he launched the foundation he spoke publicly for the first time about his childhood. The grim timeline of violence and neglect seemed barely believable, but journalists verified it with court reports and old news items.
Jess had started out drafting replies to requests Molloy received for interviews and appearances at events. They were logged in a spreadsheet and Jess was responsible for the ones with a No next to them. She wrote personalised variations on ‘Mr Molloy regretfully declines’. Someone else did the ‘warmly accepts’. She saw Molloy sometimes in the hallway but never spoke to him. The atmosphere was different when he was in the office. Everyone was aware and adjusted a little, like flowers subtly tilting their faces towards the sun.
Jess had been regretfully declining for three months when the speech request came in. She worked late to make the three-hour deadline, emailed it back, and heard nothing more. The following week she gathered with colleagues to watch the livestream.
“Don’t be disappointed,” said the main speechwriter Gavin, a nervy ex-crime reporter, as Molloy came on stage. “He always rewords.”
But as Molloy spoke, it was like hearing someone call lottery numbers that matched her ticket.
“Did you write that bit?” someone asked her, as Molloy paused for a burst of applause.
“I wrote it all so far.”
“All of it?”
“Yeah. Word for word.”
Gavin stalked off and the person next to Jess elbowed her in the side.
“Congrats on the new job.”
“I don’t think it means that.”
“Uh, yeah, it does. Everyone knows he’s been looking to replace Gavin.”
Molloy told her once that the worst mistake a person could make was to surround himself with people who think like him.
“That’s why I need you,” he had said.
*
Jess’s room was at the back of the same hotel. It looked out on a concrete wall and electric cables like jungle vines. She kicked off her shoes and inspected the damage: one heel rubbed raw, the other on its way. New shoes on a trip was a rookie mistake and she should have known better. She slid into the hotel slippers. The first trips she always took the slippers home—hotels throw them away after each guest anyway. But they never felt as comfortable at home.
She looked through the bathroom for something to help the blisters. Nothing. All the little bottles and packages. What was that scent—lychee, grapefruit? She didn’t bother taking them home anymore either.
That morning she had been in Molloy’s car from the airport to run through the day’s speech. It was the scenic route, down state-of-the-art motorways, avoiding the blue tarpaulin settlements. Molloy had been reading the notes aloud when his phone rang.
“Alec,” he said. “Update me.”
Alec, his lawyer. Also his friend.
“Cannot happen,” Molloy said. “Do you hear me? Make her stop.”
He’d hung up and leaned back against the headrest.
“That stupid girl,” he had said. “If she isn’t careful she’s going to wreck everything.”
Jess had looked out the window. They were on a colonial avenue by then. Buildings ornate as wedding cakes. She didn’t need to be told who he was talking about.
If asked, Jess could honestly say she hadn’t had much to do with the previous assistant. Day-to-day emails, a few meetings through the week. It wasn’t like they were friends. Jess wasn’t her confidante. First Jess knew she’d left was when she emailed her and got an auto-reply saying she no longer worked there.
Molloy always called the assistant ‘girl’. Ask the girl. Get the girl to do it. He used the same arch tone when he called Jess ‘our poet’, or Anton in the marketing team ‘the yeti’. He had pushed the assistant hard. Long hours, exacting tasks. But Molloy pushed everyone hard.
The hotel window opened only wrist wide. The night air was warm and thick, like dipping her hand into soup. In the dark alley below she could just make out someone curled up asleep in the shadows near an overflowing rubbish skip. Rats moved about their feet. She willed the sleeper to wake but they kept lying there. No point calling reception—someone would take out another bag of rubbish soon enough, and hotel security would force them to leave. The police would likely do worse.
Her phone pinged. She hoped it was the final wording for her, but no.
Hey love, how’s it going? Rob, up early.
Usual circus xx, she wrote.
No need to say she was still working. It was a sore point: Rob thought the job was too punishing, even though he was the one who had suggested she apply. Maybe it would even help her poetry, he had said, like it was a chronic condition.
Jess realised she had nodded off when her phone hummed against her neck on the pillow.
“Done,” the assistant said. “I’m emailing you the final version. Molloy needs the speech finished, like, now.” Not so chirpy when the boss isn’t around, Jess noted.
Jess filled in the gaps in the speech, adjusted the opening and the end, and sent it. She washed her face, put on lipstick and the painful shoes.
Back in his suite, Molloy paced, reading the speech aloud to commit it to memory—he never used notes on stage. Jess prompted him when he faltered. The assistant listened in, planning the 10-second soundbites for social. Once Molloy mostly had the speech, he and Jess practised for the panel discussion that would follow it.
“The citizens—”
“Communities, not citizens,” Jess said.
“Girls and boys around the world deserve—”
“Children. It’s better, non-binary.”
“Climate change—”
“Crisis, not change. Always, always, climate crisis.”
When the assistant was distracted she asked Molloy, “Any word? On the other thing, from the car.”
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing and so we go on.”
*
If anyone asked Jess later whether she saw anything, she didn’t have much to tell.
There was the conference on the island, where Molloy was keynote speaker.
The assistant hadn’t been around most of the day, blaming food poisoning. But that evening she was at the bar with everyone, pale and tense, sipping soda water.
“This isn’t compulsory, you know. You can leave,” Jess had said. The assistant had looked to Molloy as if for permission, but he was talking to someone else. She was still there when Jess left to go to bed.
Sometimes Jess knocked on Molloy’s door, and he said to come in, but when he saw her he said, “Oh, it’s you,” neither pleased nor displeased, but like he was rearranging his face, his manner, and it was obvious he had been expecting someone and something else.
And there was one time in the bathroom at work. It was late, hardly anyone about, and the assistant mustn’t have known Jess was in the stall. Jess came out to find her at the basin, crying, doing something with a paper towel up her skirt. She dropped the skirt, scrunched the towel in her hand, wouldn’t meet Jess’s eyes in the mirror.
“Everything okay?”
“Fine,” she had snapped.
Jess didn’t see her again after that.
*
Jess was sleeping when Molloy called. She sat up.
“It’s confirmed,” he said. “The girl’s pressing charges. The whole lot. We’re leaving early, so be ready straight after the speech.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve been warned that police will be meeting the plane. Beyond that, I don’t know, but there’ll no doubt be media, cameras. And they know you, so—”
“So I need to be prepared. I assumed as much.”
“You’ll be all right?”
“I’ll have to be.”
“And for work, I mean? My engagements will be cancelled for the foreseeable, and I’ll understand if you choose to move on.”
“I’ll find something.”
He sighed. “What the fuck am I going to say?”
Jess hung up. He was on his own for that.
If anyone asked Jess, what about you, did he ever …?, she could honestly say never. That wasn’t defending him. It didn’t mean anything. The remarkable thing, Jess thought, was not that men like Molloy kept doing it, but that anyone ever thought they would stop.
She got out of bed, opened the curtains. Dawn. The sky would have been pink if it weren’t for the pollution. She should call Rob to tell him. Looking down, she could see now that it hadn’t been a person sleeping in the alley at all, but bags of rubbish. Rats or dogs had strewn the contents everywhere. Her bleeding heels had left marks like kisses on the sheets. The radish rose was on the windowsill, wilting just like a real one.
Should she try to find meaning in these things? Wasn’t that what a poet would do?
She called Molloy back. He answered on the first ring.
“Woman, not girl,” she said. “When you talk about her, never call her girl.”
Taken with kind permission from the latest issue of New Zealand’s most distinguished and forever interesting literary journal Landfall 246: Spring 2023, edited by Lynley Edmeades (Otago University Press, $30), available in bookstores nationwide.
Superb story.