Happily Ever After_ - Benison Anne O'Reilly [55]
January 30th was D-day. By this time Melanie and I had become firm friends with Karen, a gorgeous Chinese-Australian girl in her late twenties. She is impossibly elegant in her clothes and manner, but after scratching that immaculate surface Melanie and I discovered that she is also great fun, with a wicked sense of humour. Whilst we were all a bit dubious about our new product responsibility, it did provide us with endless fodder for ribald jokes and smutty innuendo and that’s always a good thing. We mightily enjoyed that first month together and were not keen for another spoilsport boss to come along and wreck the party.
Edward called Melanie and Karen into my office first thing to meet Alex. Well he certainly didn’t look Nordic. As a matter of fact he was dark-skinned, not black but really quite dark, suggesting some exotic parentage - South American? He was not especially tall, an inch or so under six feet, and lean and fit looking - a runner’s build. I would have estimated him to be about my age but more likely a year or two younger. He had pleasant, even features and straight black hair that flopped over one eye when he leaned forward to shake our hands. Overall you would have described him as a nice looking young man, if not for those eyes of his - they were green like a cat’s and a shade or two lighter than his skin tone. The whole effect was…well Melanie summed it up best.
After our introductions, Edward ushered Alex out of my office to take him down to Human Resources.
We were silent for a few seconds before she said, ‘Okay well I suppose it would be polite to put my tongue back in now.’
And with that we fell about laughing like a bunch of silly school girls. I suspect he might have heard us, but I also suspect that Alex Andersen had heard it all before.
10
The mysterious stranger
Being of a naturally scientific bent, I like to look at the world in a scientific way and sometimes this involves devising formulae to explain natural phenomena. One formula that my brother David (who has his own wicked streak) and I devised - and be prepared as it’s horribly politically incorrect - is as follows:
The average size of a woman’s arse in centimetres = m x n
Where m = unknown coefficient and n = distance of woman’s residence in kilometres from the central business district (CBD) of the nearest large city.
Now this is not a perfect formula. For a start if you happen to live a long way from the CBD and have a very petite backside you are probably feeling quite offended right now, but remember we are talking averages here. There will always be some people who don’t fit the norm - in statistical terms these are called outliers. I was an outlier myself when I was pregnant with Issy, as I was actually living quite close to the CBD at the time and my arse was HUGE. Also it doesn’t work well for immediately north and south of my home city, as these are Sydney beach suburbs and having to spend six months of the year in a bikini does provide residents with strong incentive to keep their backsides reasonably trim. However, if you go west of Sydney, the formula is almost foolproof. I’m sure you can see the internal logic. All the hip and trendy young things live close to the city where all the action is, whereas out in the ’burbs, and even worse in the country, there is little else to do but eat. The place I expect this formula works best in is New York City, as, as far as I’m aware, no-one has a bottom in Manhattan but move away from the city centre and well, different story.
David and I never got around