Page 52 of The Compound

We kept to ourselves for most of the morning, Tom in the gray room and me loitering outside. I was bringing things into the house as covertly as I could, glancing at the door to the gray room in trepidation. In the afternoon, I knocked onit.

“Enter,” he said.

He had taken the rug from the living room and put it in the gray room, his room.

The nice lamp that had been in the boys’ dressing room was in there too, black and brass.

It clashed with everything else he kept there, but I could see why he wanted it: it was the nicest light in the house by far.

He had found accoutrements to put on his desk to disguise the fact that the desk had no purpose: he had no laptop or writing materials or books, but he had a map of a distant territory.

With some bitterness I reflected that Tom, like Mia, would be bringing home with him not just his own rewards, but things we had gotten from Communal Tasks.

He was strong enough, too: he would be able to carry twice as much as I could, maybe more.

He looked at me expectantly.

“If I cook dinner,” I said, “will you fix the window that Sam broke?” Sam had covered it with a tarp, but it needed to be properly fixed.

“I don’t have the right materials. There’s no glass to replace it,” he said.

I waited, shifting my weight from left foot to right foot.

“But, I suppose I could board it up,” he said.

“It wouldn’t look great, but it’d be better than nothing.

” He threw an irritated look out the window.

“All of my Personal Tasks recently have been related to renovation or construction. It’s starting to annoy me. ”

That surprised me a little. Tom wasn’t particularly good at construction.

Nearly all of my Personal Tasks had involved me speaking to someone, and generally making a fool of myself, or doing silly things that I didn’t want to do.

I wondered if people wanted to see Tom at work, and to see me humiliated.

He thought for a few more moments. “What will you make?”

“Steak,” I said. “You can have it when you’re done.”

—

We had been saving the steaks for a special occasion.

They would have been nicer on the barbecue, but it no longer worked after the fire.

There were ten steaks; I cooked two and put the rest back in the fridge.

While Tom banged away at the window—even I knew that he was taking too long to do a relatively simple job—I made potatoes, salad, and coleslaw, using some of the fresh produce that had just come in one of our recent deliveries.

I used the nicest dishes, folded napkins in the waterfall style, and, in the absence of flowers, took the plastic plant I had won as a reward and placed it on the table outside.

I knew that he was done because I had seen him go out a couple of times to admire his work from a different angle. He came into the kitchen and offered to take the food out, but I told him I could do it. He looked pleased.

I couldn’t help but feel pleased too, as I laid everything out on the table.

For the last couple of weeks we had been eating the simplest of foods: noodles, pasta, sandwiches.

It felt like a luxury to do it right. Tom sat down, and then stood a moment later, saying, “Just a minute.” While I waited for him to come back, I had the urge, for the first time in a long time, to take a picture.

The table looked so good: the steak, the salad, the glasses with perfect cubes of ice.

I poured pepper sauce over my meat but waited for Tom before eating.

He returned with a bottle of champagne and two glasses.

“Personal Task,” he said. “I got it a couple of weeks ago. I was going to wait until I made it until the end, but might as well have it now.”

He ripped off the gold foil with his teeth, quickly and methodically. Then he removed the cork, the pop like gunfire, champagne at once spilling over and onto the table. In a businesslike manner he wiped the excess off the table and filled our glasses. “To teamwork,” he said.

I clinked my glass against his and drank. It was warm, but everything was warm.

“You should have put it in the fridge,” I said.

“Couldn’t do that, could I? You don’t have a good record for sharing.” He wasn’t smiling, and his tone was admonishing, but I think he was trying at banter.

I piled salad onto his plate. There was a faint wind, pleasant and smelling richly of the desert. “I’m sharing now, aren’tI?”

He smiled, looking over my head, at the landscape beyond him.

He smiled like it pleased him, though I can’t imagine what there was to see.

For my own part, only the pool inspired some reaction in me, aesthetically.

It had been filled again, sometime during the night.

The pond, too, was full, and new fish swam happily in its depths.

I ate my steak with relish. Tom moved his food around on his plate for a few moments.

“Worried it’s poisoned?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I know you wouldn’t poison me. I’m more worried that you’re a terrible cook.”

“How can you be sure I wouldn’t?”

“Because then you’d be on your own. And you wouldn’t fare well on your own.

You know that, too, I think.” I kept my eyes on my food.

I knew Tom’s weaknesses, but he knew mine, too.

He cut his meat into small pieces, his fork scraping against the plate, and ate.

He chewed slowly and gave no indication whether he liked it or not.

I wasn’t a good cook, Tom was right. It was overdone, but I still thought it was nice.

“I’ll fix the fence soon enough,” he said. “I’ve become quite handy. Did you see the window?”

I’d inspected it while he washed up for dinner. It was boarded well enough: from the outside it looked smooth and sleek, but from the inside it was a mess of nails and overlapping wood.

“I did. Where did you get the wood?”

“I broke apart one of the unused beds. No use for ten beds now that there’s only two of us.”

“Three,” I said. “Andrew will be back soon. Probably tomorrow.”

“Right. We’ll save him a good cut of meat.”

We ate for a few minutes in silence. The evening cold hadn’t yet set in, but the temperature was dropping bit by bit.

“What is it you do, again? Something in finance?”

He flicked a look at me, as though checking to see if I was serious. “I’m a financial analyst.”

“Right.”

“It’s a big job. A lot of responsibility. It’s too complicated to explain, so I won’t bother.”

“Do you miss it?” I persisted.

He kept eating, methodically, not lookingup.

“I miss it a great deal.”

“Will you go back there, when you leave?”

“What’s with the interrogation?” he asked, waspishly.

“Just trying to get along.”

When he was finished, I cleared the table and brought out dessert, a bowl of strawberries, blueberries, sliced apple and pear, mango and raspberries. I had a separate bowl of cream, freshly whipped, and a tub of ice cream.

“This is nice, Lily,” Tom said. He was more relaxed now, trying, I think, to be pleasant.

“Thanks,” I said. “There’s too much fruit for only two people, anyway. It’ll go bad in a day or two.”

I ladled fruit into his bowl, and then offered the cream and ice cream.

“Usually I wouldn’t,” he said. “Very fattening. But we’re having a nice night, aren’t we? The final two.”

“Final three,” I corrected, and added a generous portion of both cream and ice cream over his fruit. For myself, I picked only the strawberries and raspberries out of the bowl, alongside a mountain of ice cream.

“I got fired from my job,” he said. “After working there for eight years.”

I picked a strawberry from my bowl. “What happened?”

He moved his shoulders in a gesture of discomfort.

“There was an issue—anger management, you could say. I’d networked extensively, and when I lost my job, I got in touch with my contacts.

Well, word had got out, or someone had bad-mouthed me, had deliberately spread damaging information, and there was no one who would hire me.

I went to my friend who I had gone to university with, Leo.

We’d lived together for three years, and had been friends for longer.

He had a high-up position at a company similar to mine.

He could have got me a job, easy. He had told me, not long before, that they were looking for someone.

We had lunch, our favorite place, and he told me that the job wasn’t available anymore.

It was bullshit. We both knew that it was bullshit.

Even my best friend wouldn’t help me out.

” He put his fork down. “Christ, I’d like a cigarette. ”

“What happened next, then?”

I didn’t expect him to continue, but he said, “I didn’t have as much to do with my days as I would have liked.

I decided to visit my girlfriend, Amy. Ex-girlfriend.

She had depended on me a lot. She always needed someone to change her tires, or to fix the leak in the sink, or to put up a shelf or something.

So I dropped in to see if she needed help.

I know how she struggled to get things done. ”

“And then?”

“And then she filed a restraining order. Then I applied to be on the show. I was here a month later.”

I glanced at the sky above me. It was darkening, but not yet dark. I needed more time.

“I was nearly fired from my job, too,” I said. It occurred to me, with a drum of sadness, that I would tell Tom this story, but had never told Sam. In some ways, however, it was easier. Tom already knew the worst parts of me; I suspected he had seen them before anything else.

“You’re a—hairdresser or something, right?”

“Shop assistant in a department store. Makeup section.”

“Right. You like it?”

“I mean, I did. Until I thought I was getting fired. I haven’t really enjoyed it since then.”

I could tell that Tom was struggling between being polite and telling me he didn’t care. He made a gesture with his hand, which I took as a signal to keep going.