of doing fire drills, now that I thought about it. I grabbed the laptop and my handbag, raced for the door and pushed it. It didn’t open.
“What the . . .” I pushed again, but the door banged against something hard. “. . . hell?” I banged it over and over again, trying to push whatever was there . . . the filing cabinet! They had put the filing cabinet right outside my door, as if they didn’t know that someone was in here. Was I that invisible to everyone?
“Help! Help!” I shouted, banging on the door. I could hear my banging and my shouting echoing down the hall, but no one shouted back. No one came for me.
“No, no, no!” I looked around the room in a total panic. What if there was a real fire? What if this wasn’t a drill and I was trapped and I was going to burn alive? Do you know how painful being burnt alive is? I called out for help again, but still didn’t get a response. I finally looked up at the tiny window at the top of the wall. It was my only escape. But how the hell was I going to squeeze through it?
CHAPTER 38
“Zenobia? Zenobia?” my boss called, looking out over the crowd assembled in front of him in the parking lot.
“Zenobia?” He said the name as if he’d never heard it before. The way his mouth formed and wrapped around the letters sounded strange. As if this specific group of letters and syllables was totally foreign to him and this was the first time his mouth was making them.
“Zeeenobiaaaaa,” he said again, stretching all the letters out as his mouth began getting comfortable with the sounds. I watched as people started looking at each other, shaking their heads. A murmur started. I could make out snippets of what was being said as I hung halfway out the window. I’d had to pull boxes of files out and make a tower in order to get high enough to reach it and climb through.
“I don’t think a Zenobia works here?” Angi said. How the hell did Angi not know who I was? I knew almost everything about her. I had read her personal file. She was twenty-five; this was her first job out of college, where she’d come top of her class in animation graphics!
“Didn’t she work here once, and then leave?” Ed from the IT department said, which I could not believe. He’d come around only a month ago to fix my computer! How did he not know who I was? We’d even had a conversation while he was there in which we’d established that he hated rainy weather and would rather it be sunny.
Someone must know who the fuck I was! Someone. Anyone.
And then, to my relief, Cynthia stepped forward. “Zen works in the room at the end of the basement passage. She does our timesheets,” she said. Everyone turned around and looked at her blankly.
“Well, I think she does. I know she does the job bags, though. I just assumed she does the timesheets because that’s where we hand them in.”
“Aaaaahhh!” Another murmur rose up from the crowd, as people suddenly started to click. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen who works in there,” someone else said. I craned my neck to see who was talking, while still trying to pull my body fully through the window. It was Sello. The cool strategist. The guy that everyone looked up to and wanted to be, even though he was always the last one in the office in the morning and the first one to leave in the evenings and probably did the least amount of work.
A few “me neither”s rang out, a lot of head-shaking and general face-scrunching took place, and that’s when it happened. Like something uncontrollable. Something inside me snapped. I could simplify this all by saying it must have been the champagne, I mean, who drinks three glasses of champagne before coming to work? That was surely the reason it happened. I could maybe even say that being psychosomatically burnt alive might have also contributed to this. But that would all be a lie. That explanation would be far too simplistic for what happened next. Because I knew that this had nothing to do with the champagne or the imagined flames. This was a feeling that had been much, much, much longer in the making. This was a feeling that I’d been sitting with