Two Signatures

Bellweather Tower topped out on a Thursday in October, twenty-one months after a woman in a green dress met a stranger at a gallery and told him she would have made him wait his turn for a coffee.

There is a tradition on Australian sites that the last beam goes up with a tree bolted to it. Meera stood on the forty-first floor with her hard hat on and watched a crane operator she had never met place four tonnes of steel to within six millimetres, with a sapling eucalypt zip-tied to one end and the wind coming off the harbour hard enough to make everybody hold their hats.

Faye, beside her, was crying and denying it.

“It’s the wind.”

“It’s absolutely the wind.”

“It’s a very windy day,” Faye said, and blew her nose.

—

The partnership offer came in a meeting Meera had assumed was about fee variations.

The managing partner said a number of generous things, and then said the word partnership, and slid a letter across the table, and Meera, who had rehearsed nothing because she had not known it was coming, heard herself say:

“Can I have it with the review findings attached?”

The managing partner blinked.

“The ethics committee’s finding from October, and the independent surveyor’s procurement report, and the Design Review Panel minutes from March.” Meera kept her hands still. “As annexes to the offer. In the file.”

“Meera, nobody is going to—“

“Somebody is.” She said it without heat. “Not this year. In ten years, when I’m arguing with a client who doesn’t like being told no by me specifically, and somebody in that room has done four minutes of reading about my name. I’d like the answer to be in the same folder as the question.” She pushed the letter back across the table, gently. “It’s not a condition. I’ll sign it either way, and I’d like to sign it today. I’d just rather sign the version with the annexes.”

Odette Frame, at the end of the table, put her pen down and looked at the ceiling for a moment with an expression Meera could not read at all.

“Attach them,” Odette said.

—

Odette caught her in the corridor afterwards.

“I found out who gave it to the journalist,” she said. “It took me rather longer than a fortnight. Do you want it?”

Meera stood in a corridor she had walked down four thousand times and discovered, with some surprise, that she did not.

“No.”

“You’re certain.”

“If you tell me, then every time that person passes my desk for the next twenty years I’ll be doing arithmetic instead of working.” She shifted the folder under her arm. “And if it’s somebody I liked, I’d rather go on having liked them. That’s not forgiveness, it’s economics. I’ve got a building to finish.”

Odette considered her for a moment.

“It was not malicious,” she said. “That’s all I’ll volunteer, and I’d have told you that much whatever you’d answered. It was somebody frightened, being useful to the wrong person. The firm has dealt with it.”

“Good.”

“For what it’s worth,” Odette said, “I asked my own version of that question in 1999 and I did want the name, and I have carried it around ever since like a stone in a coat pocket.” She started back toward her office. “Congratulations, Ms Anand. Don’t be late on Thursday.”

—

She signed it on a Tuesday afternoon with three people watching and a pen that belonged to the firm, and the annexes were in the folder, and the whole thing took about ninety seconds.

Then she went down in the lift and out into the heat and rang Julian, who answered on the second ring, the way he always had.

“Well?”

“Annexed,” Meera said.

There was a sound on the other end that she was fairly sure was a man putting his forehead against a wall.

“You asked for the annexes.”

“I asked for the annexes.”

“God,” Julian said, with enormous feeling. “I have been sitting here for three hours composing sentences I was not going to be allowed to say.”

“You can say one.”

“I’m extremely proud of you, and I had nothing to do with it, and those two facts together are the best thing that has happened to me in five years.”

“That was three sentences in a coat.”

“It was one sentence with structure,” he said. “I’m an investor. We do that.”

—

They had come back together slowly, and badly, and then properly, over fourteen months that Meera would not describe to anybody because the description makes it sound smaller than it was.

There had been a bad February. There had been a session with a woman in Surry Hills who charged two hundred dollars an hour and who, in the fourth week, said, “Mr Harrow, you have answered every question I have asked you accurately and none of them honestly, and I would like you to notice the difference,” which had made Meera laugh out loud and had made Julian go white and had been, they both later agreed, the exact moment it started working.

There had been the Saturday in June when his mother came to lunch, and looked at the drawings on Meera’s wall for a long time, and said, “He sends me photographs of the site, you know. Every week. He thinks I don’t know what he’s doing.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Showing me something he’s made that isn’t a document,” Elspeth Harrow had said, and helped herself to more bread.

—

The ordinary part took longer to trust than any of it.

There was a Wednesday in August when Meera came home at nine, having lost an argument about a lift lobby, and said so, and Julian said, “That’s a shame,” and went back to the thing he was reading.

She stood in the doorway with her coat half off.

“That’s it?”

“Did you want something else?”

“I want—“ She stopped, and considered it properly, and found she did not know. “I think I was braced for you to fix it.”

“I did think about it.” He turned a page. “There’s a man on that contractor’s board I’ve known for years and I had the whole sentence composed by about the third thing you said. Then I thought: she lost an argument about a lift lobby. People lose arguments about lift lobbies. If I make this one go away she will never again be able to tell me about a bad Wednesday without wondering what I’m going to do about it.”

“So you said that’s a shame.”

“I said that’s a shame,” Julian agreed, “and it took approximately everything I have.”

Meera finished taking off her coat and came and sat down next to him, and put her feet on his lap, and told him the entire stupid story of the lift lobby for twenty minutes, and he listened to all of it and asked two questions and solved nothing whatsoever.

—

The lease on the terrace house in Erskineville was seven pages long and neither of them read it properly, which Meera privately considered a milestone.

“It wants two signatures,” she said, at the kitchen table, on a Sunday, with the estate agent’s envelope open between them and a pen that neither of them was reaching for yet.

Julian looked at it.

“The first document you and I have ever both signed,” he said, “that isn’t designed to stop something happening.”

“There’s an indemnity clause on page five that would make Edwina cry.”

“Edwina would say the indemnity clause is the only honest part of the document.”

“Edwina is coming to dinner on the fourteenth and you can tell her yourself.”

He picked up the pen, and then he did not sign, and she watched him not sign it for long enough to become interested.

“Say it,” she said.

“I’m frightened,” Julian said, “and I’m telling you because it is completely useless information and you told me once that you had wanted one of those for months.”

Meera reached over and took the pen out of his hand and signed her own name first, because somebody had to and she had spent two years learning that it might as well be her.

Then she gave him the pen back.

“Your turn,” she said.

—

The tower opened to the public on a Saturday in March, two years and one month after the day she had stood over a balsa model with a coffee going cold in her hand, telling herself that the planter beds on the northeast corner were not crooked.

They were crooked. Faye had been right. Meera had corrected them on the drawings and left them crooked on the model, and the model now stood in a glass case in the ground-floor lobby with a small label that gave the names of everyone who had worked on it, in alphabetical order, at Meera’s insistence, so that hers was fourth.

She went up to the roof at six in the evening when the crowds had gone, and the light was doing what she had spent four years promising the council it would do, coming down through the timber structure onto the north terrace in long soft bars.

The grasses were the expensive ones. They had survived their first winter.

Julian came up ten minutes later with two paper cups of terrible coffee from the machine in the lobby, and handed her one, and stood beside her at the rail without saying anything for a while, which he had learned, and which had taken him the better part of a year.

“You know what the strangest part is,” Meera said eventually.

“Tell me.”

“Nobody up here knows who paid for it.” She turned her cup around. “Four hundred people came through the lobby today and read a label with fourteen names on it and not one of those names was yours. You could stand in this building for an hour and nobody would know you from anyone else in the queue.”

Julian laughed — the real one, the rare one, the one that had cost him something the first time she heard it and cost him nothing now.

“That’s the whole of it,” he said. “That’s what I was always after and I couldn’t have told you why.”

“I know,” Meera said. “I built it.”

And they stood there on the roof of the thing they had both, in their entirely different and mutually inconvenient ways, made possible, until the light went and somebody from building management came up and politely asked them to leave.