ORE
Afternoons at their company was Ore’s favourite time of day. Maybe it was because there was the subconscious countdown to the end of the workday so everyone was feeling less pressured and more inclined to joke and linger in the lunch room.
As the Human Resource person at the company, her role was sensitive but she believed she had managed to build friendships at the office without compromising confidential information about her fellow colleagues. There was something about being the keeper of “confidences” that made Ore feel powerful when she thought about it.
Human Relations was an aspect she had stumbled upon when she was trying to figure out what she wanted to study at the university. Her first choice had been law, but she’d realized early that a big reader she was not, plus she found their court regalia slightly boring and unnecessary. She had leaned towards English next, but as much as she liked hanging out with children, she didn’t quite see herself working in the school system and being forced to navigate parents, students and administration.
Human relations had not been on her radar until she heard an old friend of her mother’s, talk about it and how much she enjoyed studying human behaviors and interactions within the workplace. Ore’s interest was piqued because as a young girl, she’d always been interested in human behaviors but had been too lazy to consider Psychology. She wanted to interface with humans but she wasn’t sure she had the emotional capacity to handle humans and their psychological problems daily, plus she knew that she was vulnerable. What if one day she met a patient whose life resonated so much with hers that she ended up breaking down during the session? How unprofessional. How totally unexpected.
There was something vulnerable about being a psychologist, she thought. It was like looking in several mirrors daily and eventually finding one that fit your reflection, bizarre as that sounded.
With being an HR personnel, she felt more powerful than vulnerable. She was the one people came to if they felt uncomfortable with their supervisor. Like the time Omolara, one of their brilliant Young engineers believed she was being gaslit by her direct supervisor because he would change things in the project she was working on without telling her and then when she spoke up, he would claim he told her about it. It had been almost personal for Ore because it seemed like the kind of thing Ramsey would do however in a more domestic context. Ore had found herself crossing a professional line as she spoke to Omolola and told her to “leave if he’s making you question your sanity.”
Omolola had looked at her unsure and slightly uncomfortable but she had nodded, stood and smoothed her pencil skirt and muttered a thank you before leaving Ore’s office.
Ore had almost scrambled after her, regretting her rash words and hoping she could convince Omolola to forget she said them. She sat in her chair, ashamed that she had let her personal life interfere with her professional one. Leave? How could she advise someone to leave, when she could not?
Everyone knew that finding well-paying jobs in prestigious companies like theirs was a chore in Nigeria now, so people were more willing to stick it out than walk away because wasn’t life one big inconvenience? Why leave when you have no idea what’s waiting for you out there?
It was the same with marriage. Everyone said you should leave, but no one tells you what happens after you do. People forget that life as one knew it changed when you got married, you practically rearranged your life to accommodate another human, and then what? You were expected to walk away when things got tough? Basically, rearranging your life again but this time you didn’t know what you were going back to. You weren’t going back to being single as you knew it. You were no longer just single, you were single and divorced, a tag that you carried around with you whether or not you wanted to.
It was all so exhausting and Ore preferred to avoid anything that seemed exhausting.
Anyway. Omolola didn’t take her advice. She stayed, and Ore couldn’t help wondering what price she was consistently paying to remain at the company.
Her desk phone rang as she lounged in her chair, scrolling through her Facebook page on her computer.
“Ore speaking,” she said.
“Hi Ore, this is Justina from front desk. I just wanted to let you know your husband is here.”
Ore felt the ice crawl up her spine. Ramsey was here?
She’d thought they were out of this phase – this randomly-stopping-by-her-office-to-check-on-her stage.
He used to do it a lot when they just started dating and it had seemed like such a romantic thing that Ore had closed her eyes to the fact that he never called to let her know he was coming. It was as if he hoped to catch her unawares, doing something she shouldn’t be doing. He would bring lunch or offer to take her out to lunch on those random visits and she’d awwwwwwwed at his “thoughtfulness”.
When they had gotten married, the visits took on a more sinister outlook. He dropped by the office and if he saw her with a male coworker, he questioned her about him until she snapped. Then he began to drop hints that she would be better off working in his company, hints that Ore had managed to ignore and avert for three years now.
He’d stopped showing up unannounced for months and she’d been able to breathe easy believing that things were getting better. And now here he was.
Ore debated whether to have him brought to her office or whether to meet him in the lobby to keep the visit short. He wouldn’t want to make a scene in the lobby, but he might make her pay for it in some way later. If she brought him into her office, he was unpredictable behind closed doors. She didn’t want or need his drama.
She glanced at her wristwatch. It was 2:20 pm, more than an hour after her lunch break but perhaps she could still work something out.
“Hi Justina, I’ll be right down,” she said.
She grabbed her handbag and stepped out of her office. Peeping into Anthony’s office next door, she said:
“I’m just stepping out for half an hour. I don’t have any appointments booked for the rest of the afternoon, so we’re good. Cover for me, please?”
Anthony, a bald man with a baritone that rocked many women’s worlds, gave her a thumbs up. He was her male counterpart; male coworkers with personal or human relations problems went to him for advice and support, while the women came to her.
He was a good person and they got along well together, rubbing minds whenever a knotty problem came up.
With that sorted, she hurried to the elevator knowing that the longer Ramsey waited, the more paranoid he became.
She arrived in the lobby two minutes later and she arranged her features into an excited and grateful smile for her husband
“Baby,” she said, reaching forward to throw her arms around him.
He leaned into her embrace stiffly and she tried to gauge how he was feeling.
“Thank you for letting me know my darling husband was here, Justi,” she said turning to Justina the front desk woman, a gangly woman in her forties.
Ore linked her arm through her husband’s, steering him toward the exit.
“Where are we going?” Ramsey asked, through clenched teeth.
“I thought you wanted us to go out for lunch,” Ore said.
“So that’s why you kept me waiting for nearly ten minutes? In the lobby? Me?”
“Come on babe,” Ore lowered her voice. “I had some paperwork to wrap up. I’m sorry.”
“Or is there someone you don’t want me to see in that office?” there was a meanness creeping into his voice.
“Babe, I’m saying I cleared my schedule so we could go to lunch with you and you’re bothered about some nonexistent person?”
“I’m not stupid,” he said.
“No, that, you are not. Which is why you should take me to that amazing seafood place you took me last time and let’s get out of here before my coworkers begin to look at us weird.”
That did it. Ramsey was more about appearances than she could ever be. He turned to her, letting his lips soften to smile at her – a smile that stopped before it could get to his eyes. Then he kissed her on the lips right there in a way that would have turned her on, if she wasn’t embarrassed.
“Babe, stop. Nobody’s going to respect me now,” she pulled away with a smile.
“Good. At least they will know you’re mine,” this time his smile reached his eyes.
Ore felt the bile rise in her throat even as she nodded.
“Let’s get lunch,” Ramsey said, taking her hand in his.
She nodded again, not bothering to tell him she’d just had lunch an hour and a half ago and she was not hungry.
As she followed him to the car, she thought about Omolola and her advice to her. Leave.
But to what?
She thought about her mother who had tried to leave once when Ore was eight. She’d stood with her brothers watching her mother trying to decide if her life was worth more than her children’s. Ore remembered crying, remembered wanting her mother to choose them. She hadn’t understood then what her father was and what he did to her mother, all she’d known was that she couldn’t bear to live without the woman who loved them so much.
“Go,” she heard her brother Deji say. “Go, mummy.”
Benjy had stood, stoic, holding Ore’s hand. Ore wondered if he wanted their mother to go too. She hated Deji for encouraging it, perhaps that was why she was the one who told their father when he got back about their mother leaving with their uncle.
