Chapter 14
Gregory was a retired architect not interested in retiring. He had no children, no hobbies, a wife, shaky hands and bad breath.
When Gregory retired he bought a photocopy and laser print business which, for all I knew was his retirement dream realised, much like other retirees dream of moving to the beach and fishing or playing golf every day for the rest of their lives.
Somewhere along the way, Gregory employed me.
Alpha Copy was my first full-time job. Copying, laminating, binding, scanning and printing files was the majority of my work.
At the copy shop, I worked with Gregory and Anna, a girl in her early twenties who, like me, was unsure what she was going to do with her life.
The copy shop was on the ground floor of a three-storied building in the back streets of central Halstead next door to a car yard and around the corner from an offset printers coincidentally located on the same road as the supermarket and Lady Jane’s Ice-cream Parlour where I had worked as a teenager. I should have seen the copy shop’s proximity as a bad omen.
The copy shop’s location meant we served regular customers from nearby businesses and a few members of the public. Mostly, it wasn’t the kind of place you walked into off the street.
A couple of weeks into the job I was bored. I would lean against the photocopiers and consider how the machines’ electrical circuits might be frying my ovaries or giving me cancer. In order to bring happiness to mind or at least to be cheerful, my thoughts shifted to the Big Plan.
Like a lot of New Zealanders in their early twenties, Ellie and I planned to get a two-year United Kingdom working and holiday visa and travel the world, making our fortunes and launching our careers by exploiting the ample work opportunities in the United Kingdom and central Europe. I hoped to get an intrinsically satisfying job doing something I had not quite imagined.
Working at Alpha Copy was one of those jobs my mother would call “a means to an end”, the end being Ellie and me saving seven-thousand dollars each so we could execute the Big Plan. With both of us working full-time – Ellie as a personal trainer – we continued to live and budget like students. The money accumulated. But before we had enough I had to be patient. In the meantime, I perfected my double-sided photocopying skills and, when Gregory wasn’t around, shredded my mistakes.
When seventy-year-old Gregory wasn’t asking me for the hundredth time to show him how to open a computer file while breathing over my shoulder causing my hair to curl, or I wasn’t idly standing nearby watching him nearly remove his fingers with a craft knife while attempting to trim a sheet of paper with shaky hands, he was in his office sitting at his desk doing whatever business owners do. Out on the floor, Anna and I avoided some of our regular customers.
An unshaven homeless-looking man frequented Alpha Copy and from a plastic supermarket bag would retrieve a pile of pictures of young women posing in underwear ripped from magazines, department store catalogues and leaflets. Sorting through his collection on the counter he would shuffle through the teenagers with admiration selecting his favourites for laminating.
Mr Pervert never made eye contact or gave a hint of embarrassment or self-consciousness, and if another customer came in, he shamelessly continued in his relentless search for his favourite ladies. The repulsed customer would look at Anna or me with pity, and distance themselves from Mr Pervert.
One day I saw Mr Pervert coming so ducked behind a false wall in the shop to make Gregory serve him. Peeking from my vantage point, I observed Gregory and Mr Pervert hardly spoke. All was hushed and still as Gregory spent most of his time stood back from the counter while Mr Pervert made his selections. Teenage girl selected, Gregory would step forward, quickly take the picture of a scantily clad adolescent and laminate it in record time.
As much as I did not want to serve Mr Pervert I felt powerless to say no. I wanted to tell him he was revolting, but I had to adhere to the law of good customer service and the customer always being right; besides, my opposition might have seemed judgmental. There was always the chance I had made an unfair presumption. Perhaps Mr Pervert’s pictures were his grandchildren and he was proud of their modelling careers and he laminated their pictures to wipeable standard so when he opened his family album and someone accidently spilt a cup of tea or their tears of love fell over the photos while in a state of admiration, the photos were protected.
Rather than judging Mr Pervert, maybe I should have been proud he chose our good laminating services. What he was asking was not a crime. Some people collect dogs and dress them in costumes and take photos. That’s not a crime. Some people dress up as cartoon characters and attend comic book exhibitions. That’s not a crime. It’s not a crime to display our eccentricities.
Mr Landscaper was another regular customer. A tutor from a local landscaping school, I helped Mr Landscaper type a list of chattels for division in his upcoming divorce. New to the singles market, the forty-five-year-old used some awful lines about being impressed by the way I served customers and how I worked hard and some other creepy transparent flattery. I guess his newly found freedom brought about his old confidence. Unfortunately, time doesn’t reverse the ravages of age, lack of exercise and poor eating. Over time in many offices and workplaces, I would see and sometimes experience the cliché older man trying it on with a young woman, not thinking the young woman’s mind and self-respect is capable of seeing through his arrogance, desperation and delusion.
And then there were the rude customers, happy to disrespect whoever stood behind the counter because we were there to serve them.
One male customer spent twenty minutes ordering Gregory around, making finicky demands, asking for one of this then one of that, saying he was unhappy with the results and would Gregory recopy something again and again and again.
I watched the scene unfold and, unable to do anything, felt sorry for Gregory who was obviously an old guy out of his league in terms of double siding. What Gregory said to Mr Rude I do not know, but Mr Rude had obviously had enough and raised his voice in frustration. “Well how would you like it to know that your wife was dying of cancer?” Mr Rude asked.
The energy in the room shifted and I felt an internal grin. Holding my breath, I waited for Gregory to speak, knowing what he was about to say.
Gregory froze, then in his own time slowly and calmly placed everything on the counter before staring Mr Rude hard in the eye. “Well I do actually,” Gregory said. “My wife was diagnosed with breast cancer six months ago.”
Coincidence or not, Mr Rude’s demeanour changed dramatically. As if possessed by another person, Mr Rude became gentle, calm and reasonable. In an instant, his photocopying was not only satisfactory but, “This is great. These will do fine. How much do I owe you?”
To think someone would use their dying wife to manipulate an old man into free photocopies amounting to a few dollars was disgraceful.
My working life was teaching me new lows in human behaviour.
Mr Rude hurriedly paid and practically ran from the shop. I joined Gregory in a silent fuck-you victory-moment where Gregory and I stood for a time looking at each other knowingly. Gregory then returned to his office.
After eighteen months at Alpha Copy, my brain having slowed to a not-learnt-anything-for-a-very-long-time-and-forgetting-how-to-learn pace, Ellie and I had enough money to realise the Big Plan. We resigned from our jobs and got on a plane.