THE KEEPER
By Krishan Coupland

She loves him enough to ask no questions. When he leaves the office for his break she slips inside and cleans up what mess the morning has generated: she sweeps the crumbs from his desk, wipes away the sweat on the wristplate of his computer. She empties the bin, pinches lost hairs from the headrest of his chair, opens the window to disseminate the faint smell of urine. When the men come for meetings in the afternoon at least he will be respectable.

Jill, he calls her; the name of the woman who was secretary before her. Not-Jill doesn't mind. She pities him and she loves him. She loves him because he is fragile: his breath wheezes, his heart is weak. He is huge, bloated, huffing and sweating through his walk from the car park, briefcase clutched against his chest like a ventilator. Gentle as a tapir, a baby elephant, a fainting goat; some mammal that moves too slow to kill. He is a good man — a father, she thinks, though she knows nothing of his family — but old enough to be her father. A kind and weak and struggling man. She wants to keep him, save him, protect him from the indignities of old age: the sweat and the creeping incontinence. She worries: what if one day he falls on the stairs? What if his heart gives up on him? What if, what if.

All day she sits outside his office, takes his memos, corrects the letters he sends out to clients, does the work he is no longer competent enough to do. She commutes from her tiny bedsit eight stops down the line, travelling each morning with two lunches stacked in Tupperware boxes on her lap. His and hers. She knows the things he likes to eat: cold pasta with salt, cheese and onion crisps, a peeled orange wrapped in cling film. She watches from the window as he sits and eats on the bench across the street, fearful that teens will harass him.

His hair is thinning to grey, his gait slowing, his sight turning glaucous. One day soon his heart will fail. He is dying, Not-Jill thinks. He is dying and will die before she is middle-aged.

Meetings, that afternoon. She waits in the corridor outside for the call she knows will come. "Jill." His voice scared and pleading. He is having trouble running the slideshow, hunched frowning above a keyboard he can barely see while the men seated about the room stare. Watching him like preying animals; they would laugh if they were out of earshot. She ignores them and goes to the front of the room. Leaning across the desk she feels the whistle of his breath on her ear. With little gestures and whispered words she goads the mouse pointer across the screen. _Here, no, just here, see, where it says okay._