Free This Too Shall Pass by S. J. Finn Page A

complexity isn’t a set proposition of intersecting derivatives. It’s more like a life form that can be working perfectly well one day and after a simple change in its environment, descend into an array of unworkable parts the next.
    There was no room for not taking note. I had to be careful.

TWENTY
    I n any organisation climbing the ladder is not always the best way to learn about core business. Besides, snakes are attracted to those ladders.
    Antwerp saw me in the corridor a few days after Elliot had talked to me. I was rushing to pick up keys for an office car to take me west of west, Werribee – the suburb which was the rather unenviable location of Melbourne’s sewerage treatment farms, a suburb, nonetheless, that now boasted the fastest growing housing boom in the city’s sprawl. I turned the corner around the wide dark corridor. It was approaching thirty-eight degrees outside and the blinds were drawn as an offensive against the heat. Our leader was coming towards me in a dark baggy suit that gave the impression he was floating, as if his angular body was a coathanger, the suit dangling from it. Beside him was Bernadette Granger, the principal of the Marlowe Downs special school.
    â€˜Monty,’ he nodded, between playing niceties with tall, skirt-suited Bernadette.
    â€˜Anton, Bern.’ I smiled.
    â€˜Monty,’ Bernadette said warmly, smiling her huge teeth at me. She hadn’t been in the position long herself and, being at the beginning of her tenure, she was shining with the kind of happiness people have when they recognise someone from a large staff group.
    â€˜Got the nod about you from Elliot,’ Antwerp said, more with the timing of an afterthought, the lilt of a subversive deal, than anything genuine. Antwerp was the sort of man who spoke in pleasantries unless he was unhappy and then you’d get some straightforward nasties from him, nothing softening. Unlike Elliot, his language was plain, but they shared the trait of being hard to follow. I was never quite sure what he was getting at, what he really meant.
    â€˜Yes.’ (Since I’d already walked past them I had to turn around.) ‘Glad of the opportunity.’
    â€˜We’re grafting some very good buds onto the tree.’
    My eyes slid to take in Bernadette, who was smiling even more widely at him.
    â€˜Formula one, we’re going for, formula one,’ she said.
    I dipped my head probably for the second time. ‘I’ll see you then.’
    â€˜In the think tank.’
    I spun away on my heels, wondering if he hadn’t, in fact, been headhunted from one of the big car dealerships and not the hospital system at all. When I turned up at the managers’ meeting the following Wednesday morning I had to make sure I’d rid myself of the smile on my face. I needn’t have worried, it was so easily and deeply lost once I got there that I thought it might be totally irretrievable. The proceedings were nothing like fun.
    Anton – I had to go back to calling him by his proper name because I feared I would slip up and call him Antwerp for real – began the meeting by announcing he had just had confirmation we’d failed the accreditation process and the panel (comprised of important public servants) would be back in six months to give us one last chance to prove ourselves.
    â€˜Otherwise?’ someone asked. Everyone laughed mirthfully and then, faultlessly serious, they looked back at Anton to continue. I didn’t have the guts to ask the question again or to inquire as to what they were laughing at. He ran through the categories, calling out our results as if we were children. It was mind-boggling. The jargon of the categories was enough to ensure a fiasco. Things such as: State of safety net between differential diagnoses and direct treatment of an individual in the case of wrongful diagnosis due to lack of team consolidation and online management consultation.