[ON HOLD] LOVE ME LIKE ART

10

IT IS A MONDAY. A bleak, colourless grey one at that.

Benna winds his head through my office door, catching me in an inspecting posture. I push the stub of my biro pen against my chin, as my focus is arrested by this brief. The same brief that I was supposed to regard and annotate during the weekend, before the calvary descended, before the ship's keel was cuffed by a nearby rock.

It's a tangled web of tricky correspondence, an incendiary fire that almost can't be contained, as I read it over and over, to try to understand the optics.

To find an angle to best argue.

I usually render this to a willing junior solicitor on a secondment or to Maggie but this divorce is unlike any other I've handled. It is handing out scalps, leaving behind a burrow of fire, smouldering with black smoke. This mordant divorce somehow feels like it means more.

It almost feels era-defining. Significant.

The truth feels like a burning wreath, a straw-torn star at the summit of the tree. Except, those that look upon it aren't bewitched by it, but are struck by its destruction and collapse. Beneath it all, it feels like a calculated game with a winner and loser, except whoever is the latter... will lose infinitely more.

And I need to make sure Mrs Rolt doesn't fall into those jaws.

"Zu." Benna in a film black suit, calls out my name. "Morning and all 'dat shit." His suit is as neat as a pin, but the rest of him is windblown. I curl my lips at the dichotomy he brings, "What you saying?"

I point towards the brief splayed in front of me. "I'm working on this brief."

"Ain't you got a paralegal on deck you can palm that shit to?" Benna slips into the opposite seat, the colour of his own brown eyes–harrowing. He asks plainly, as if this is a case without consequence and without jeopardy.

The jeopardy in his own roost differs from mine. His jeopardy is in company restructuring with CEOs who want more and intend to make more whilst I stand on the edge of a cliff, one wrong step and I could blow someone's sense of security into pebbles of dust. That is too much risk to try and play with.

"With Mrs Rolt breathing down my neck? I'm not trying to submit my junior solicitor to that baptism of fire." I tell him, because even though it might feel like a prototypical, mordant divorce... it isn't. Mrs Rolt and her emotions are scattergun, and understandably so, one minute she's this tornado of searing rage and the next, she's drowning in pools and pools of her own sadness.

"How do you know if they can sink or swim though?"

"I've got other ways. Happy Monday though, chief."

His eyes look at me like he's lost his light, like something outside of himself has punctured his beam. I study how his body melts into the black leather seat and how his collapse into the chair strikes a supple drumbeat, like I can hear the crashing symbol in my own head. 

"Ain't shit good about today." He cradles his forehead like that can stave his hangover from pouring in. He daps me then return to his body-in-a-slump. "I'm still fucking hanging from Friday. My head's pounding."

"I feel for your liver." I drop a boisterous note, remembering how there was never a point in the night that Tobenna didn't have a drink in his hand.

If it wasn't Stella, it was a Jack 'n coke.

If it wasn't whiskey, it was shots of dirty tequila—drinking Tem, Hamza, Tino and I under the table.

"I feel for it too, g. I was out there doing the fucking most." His lips intone, like it isn't his greatest feat but one he is more embarrassed by.