Stressed

[Brackie]

Rebecca Fitzpatrick's morning was as boring as you could get - she's woken up, she'd pulled her husband out of bed, she'd fixed the netting on the screen door from when Caoihme had been pining to go outside at 4am but been ignored, she'd made coffee and breakfast, she'd showered, and somehow after all that she'd still ended up at work, manning the front desk at Morgan Stanley's head Dublin office as their head secretary.

Every day was mostly the same - Rebecca screened calls to important people, she held people for their meetings or interviews or told them where to go, she made sure the break room wasn't a bloody pigsty, she had lunch (although not too much recently, since she was on a diet, calorie counting and everything). She finished up at the end of the day, she went home, where Conor had his own stories from the day, they made dinner, they watched TV until they were tired, and they went to sleep, repeating the whole process over again tomorrow. It wasn't an exciting life, at least right now, but eventually they'd have enough to move to Málaga and not have to worry about a thing, which of course wouldn't happen for another thirty years but it was still much fun to think about. Of course, if she missed a period then things would complicate a tad, but her birth control had been efficient thus far and Conor wasn't buggering homos down at the dock, like some of her ex-boyfriends had been doing in the middle of their long-term relationship, so she had nothing to worry about.

Jt was nearly lunch time, yet pairs of impeccably dressed people were already exiting the lift. The kinds of people who wore ties to work that wasn't an interview or a hearing, which was all too unfamiliar with Rebecca's family. Although some of them waved slightly at her on their way out the door, Rebecca kept her eyes trained on the computer, deep in business that she'd finished an hour ago. She didn't dislike them, and they never particularly disliked her or looked down on her, far from it, but some days Rebecca felt regretful over her choices and the fact that she was on this floor of the building and they were on another did tend to grate away at her mind. She'd wanted to go to university, to work in finance or computers, but she didn't have that luxury - her mother was sick at the time, and needed taking care of, and damned if her sisters and brothers were going to do it, trouncing off to Ibiza and Mykonos like Dublin was somehow allergenic to them. The benefits eventually became inadequate after a while, of course, and she had to find real work on top of her carer responsibilities, so into the temp bin she went, doing odd jobs all over the city for as long as it took to build up a resume of bosses who paid her more than dust. And then she found Morgan Stanley, and then she met Conor, and then her mother died and left her the house, and the rest was as it was.

Some days Rebecca wished she knew what it was like working as someone who actually did university - applying skills that had taken three years to learn rather than picking them up on the go, or being an important irreplacable part of the inner workings of a company like this, like an advisor or an analyst or something that at the very least sounded important.. But as it was, she was constantly training her inevitable replacements, waiting for the moment she became sick, old, or screwed up, to swoop in and become her. She wished she'd gotten the opportunities they had, the perfect lives of them, people who could come from all over the world and study wherever they wanted, people from London or Scandinavia or Australia or America, but as it was that opportunity was long gone, so all she had was regret and missed connections.

As it was nearing lunch, and she hadn't met someone looking for an appointment in nearly half an hour, Rebecca's eyes shot down to her desk drawer. She pulled the handle, moved some files, and out came her phone, normally a tool at work to track her biscuit intake or how many sugars she should be putting in her tea, but instead going straight to her Facebook. She had no notifications, of course, but it was good for catching up with the news that had happened in the world since morning, and at least it could probably give her something to talk to Conor about that night rather than asking about his own, even more boring work.

While not the most recent event, the first thing that did pop up in her feed was something that seemed all too familiar - another terrorist attack in America. Ever since she was in school, she'd remembered reports of entire classes of kids, just kids not too much younger than her, being abducted from their buses or classes by a group of completely unidentifiable terrorist monsters, forced to fight to the death with bombs around their neck until one lived, and either the next year or the coming years would repeat the process over with new kids. It was one of the only big terrorist attacks on any of their countries since 9/11, although not nearly as horrible as the IRA bombings her own cousins had endured up in Belfast ages ago, and it always plagued Rebecca's mind as to what would happen if these people turned their eyes elsewhere, but as it was they were firmly trained on America, who really could deserve and handle it, so she never had to worry about it. It often gave her her own misgivings about whether or not she was ready to have kids, though - what would happen if she outlived them, through some awful event nobody could stop?

Either way, nothing else of note was on her feed, apart from one of her sister's Ibiza pictures at a small boring club from the previous night, so Rebecca sighed and put her phone back before heading off to the break room.

*

Rebecca had finished her tea and biscuits long before the analysts and bankers made their way back upstairs, but it couldn't have been fifteen minutes past the hour when she suddenly received a phone call from the same floor.

"Hello?"

"Hi, Rebecca? It's Noirin, could you call an ambulance?"

Rebecca's eyes shot open. Noirin, one of the senior analysts from upstairs, needing an ambulance?

"Uhmm, yeah of course, what's going on?"

"Give me a sec."

Rebecca waited a few moments, before hearing a door close and Noirin's voice suddenly hushed.

"It's one of our analysts, she's having a breakdown. We have no idea what's going on, I just had lunch with her and she was absolutely fine, absolute gift of the gab, but then I check in on her for those reports she's been needing to get up to management today and she just starts freaking out! Screaming her lungs out and everything, says she's having a heart attack and people are tryna calm her down but it ain't working, so here I am calling a fucking ambulance!"

Rebecca's mouth sat slightly agape listening to this.

"Who is it? For the ambulance, of course."

"Oh it's that American colleen, ya know? Penny, the one graduated from Trinners not two years ago?"

Rebecca nodded to nobody in particular, before getting back to the subject at hand.

"Right, give me a second and I'll get the ambulance."

She hit the hold button, wanting to get back to that conversation later, before dialing 112 and getting ahold of emergency service, all the while thinking of what she knew of Penny. If it was the one she thought it was, of course, it was probably Penny Huang. She'd never spoken to her, of course, but she'd seen her around and heard her voice in the lobby, who could forget that annoying American accent? She'd heard rumours in the office that the only reason she got a job right after finishing her BEES was because she was having an affair with the CEO, and of course she repeated that to any other lass in the office she could trust. Penny never really struck Rebecca as the type to do that after a while, mostly because she was far too boring for any man in business in their 50s like their bosses would go for, but there was always something about Penny that rubbed Rebecca the wrong way, like she was constantly hiding something or she didn't even want to be there. Rebecca would have killed to have the life that Penny had, so what even was that about?

As she finished the call and the dispatch said the ambulance was on its way, Rebecca returned to her call with Noirin, wanting to find out any other detail she could get out of her one friend from the department. One of the perfect upstairs people wasn't so perfect after all, and she wanted to hear everything she could before the ambulance arrived and made that day just that little more boring again.

At least she'd have an interesting story for Conor that night.