Life Changing

CHAPTER 1

LIFE CHANGING

CHAPTER ONE

The summons came, as usual, in a curt email. See me!

Mr. Lester Brewster Kaide loved exclamation points almost as much as he loved yellow mustard, the kind that added colour and texture to the broad ties he insisted on wearing most of the time. Palmer Pallister dreaded such messages, most of all since he would have to look at Mr. Kaide and his tie.

Palmer could count on the sight being the same day after day, hour after excruciating hour.

Lester Kaide was overweight in the careless, dishevelled manner of men who cared nothing for others' tolerance of unhygienic ugliness. The man would have stood several inches under six feet if he ever stood. For most of his time in his office, he sprawled. His broad butt would be planted in the huge, brown leather chair behind his large wood desk. His legs, the size of limbs from a hundred-year-old oak tree, extended out from the chair across about a yard of green carpet worn by the constant back and forth of the heels of his scuffed Oxfords. At the moment, he was pushed back against the sloping back of the chair, torso bulging in front like a quarter of a ton of cooked porridge wrapped in a sweat-stained cream shirt decorated by a mustard-dotted wide tie.

Kaide's head rose from the mount of bulging suet. It was thinly topped with brown and gray hair that he often and annoyingly patted into place. Spittle sprayed from his mouth when he spoke, grunted or yawned, which was the reason why most of his visitors bumped their chairs back from the desk as much as possible or simply stood just inside the doorway of the room when summoned. No one with any sense entered this room without being commanded.

The boss's face was lumpy and had a greenish sheen. Palmer used to be forgiving enough to assume the green tinge was merely a reflection of the bilious carpeting over the floor of Mr. Kaide's office. Now, Palmer believed the green hue was the given colour of this man's flesh. Kaide's nose sported several lumps with a large, red-tinted end.

Thrown together as it was, Kaide's face was even more disturbingly unpalatable than his body. Kaide was, simply, a disgusting-looking man who, just as simply, didn't give a damn.

"Wait there." Kaide's voice reminded Palmer of the flushing of his neighbour's toilet through the paper walls of his small apartment. Kaide was pointing with his stubby, fat finger at the place where Palmer had come to a halt about three feet inside the office. Palmer stood, like a soldier at ease, looking over Kaide's head at the top shelf of the book rack. The shelf held nothing but dust and a small porcelain horse that Kaide had stolen from a stand at a country fair he attended years before.

Palmer hated, not just the boss at the Association of Independent Immigration Advisors, but this office and the air within that smelled like unwashed socks. He hated, even more, the way he waited like the porcelain, dusty horse on that shelf for this disaster of a man to determine the next hours of Palmer's existence. There was another person Palmer hated, almost as much as his boss, and that person entered the office behind him.

"Move, will you," the harridan whispered into his ear. He felt the bony elbow jab into his side, forcing him to take a step to the left so she could pass by him and take the lone chair on this side of that big desk.

Mavis Thorpe settled onto the padded seat of the wooden visitor's chair. She was a tall woman constructed from skin-covered metal of some sort, all taut wires and sharp edges. Palmer imagined a mad sculptor working frenetically to craft this robotic woman. Physically, she was the opposite of the bulbous man who sat on the other side of the desk, all angles and corners in a form that weighed about the same as a handful of shaving lather.