章 5: Chapter 5: Betrayed By Fate
Cynthia POV.
“I need to find a job. Now. I’ll take anything at this point.”
I had been staring at the TV screen intermittently for the last couple of days, watching the same images and videos of me and Sinacore leaving the hotel playing on a loop. I had no idea how he had taken to this salacious bit of gossip and invasion of privacy. There was no way to get in touch with him.
Not after the way he left without allowing me to explain myself.
I couldn’t put the entire blame on him, though, for the coldness and indifference he showed when he got into the cab, or the bitter accusations he leveled at me inside the hotel room. A part of me wanted to believe I was to share the blame equally. He was disoriented and zoned out. I was not.
I should have known better before jumping into bed with him.
The least I could do now was stay away from him and keep my distance. I had to put that incident on my birthday and that night behind me. I needed to move on.
I needed to find a job.
Blair had been very generous to me by opening her house to me. But something deep inside kept reminding me I should not be a burden on her anymore. That there is a limit to generosity, and that line should never be crossed.
And therein lay the dilemma of my life. How to land a job—not just any job, but one that pays well, especially with my level of education. I never finished college. Not that I didn’t want to, but because fate had other plans.
My high school GPA scores were good. At 3.6, they were higher than the national average but slightly below the absolute best. My teachers said I had a bright future ahead of me. All I needed to do was maintain my focus and keep slogging at it. How wrong they turned out to be.
Little did I know that my dream of graduating from college would turn out to be an illusion.
I grew up dirt poor. If my childhood could be described in one phrase, it would be ‘poverty-stricken’. If my family’s living conditions could be described in one word, it would be ‘impoverished’. Food, clothes, necessities, shelter, books, and even toys were in constant short supply all through my growing-up years.
While most kids I grew up with learned how to play with and break toys, I learned how to put them back together again with glue so I could play with them instead once they were discarded by those ‘fortunate’ kids.
Life sucked. Dreams sucked more.
Life was not just dull, it was gloomy. Pathetic even. My mother was an alcoholic. She would grab the bottle at sunrise and keep it down at sunset, only to pick up another one. My stepfather was a compulsive gambler. He was my Mom’s second husband. He would gamble away whatever little money we had, and then pawn off our modest belongings. The TV set was the first to go to the pawn shop, followed by the rickety pickup truck. Next to go was the furniture in the living room, the furniture in the bedroom, my bike, and finally, Mom’s earrings. Her only pair of earrings. Gone in a flash one dark and gloomy morning, never to be seen again.
But the worst was yet to come.
I learned in school that adversity builds character. How much of it applied to my case is debatable. What is undisputed, however, is the fact that I learned to be self-reliant at a very young age.
I would ride my bike to school every morning and ride it home, too. The school bus was not for me. It cost money. When my bike was pawned off by my stepfather, I would walk to school and back. Five miles each way. Lunchtime was spent hiding my modest lunch of a stale sandwich usually leftover from a day or two before, and a banana. Buying from the school canteen seemed like a luxury. Hell, even buying my school books would involve great discord and debate with my parents.
By the time I was seventeen, I was doing odd jobs after school hours to earn and save money. Flipping burgers, waiting tables, and doing dishes at neighborhood cafes became the most important part of my life. These generated a paltry income which I would save down to the last penny. I was saving money to pay for my college tuition.
It wasn’t much, but a couple of years of savings helped me get admission to the most affordable college in Crystal Town. It was not the best college, I was not ecstatic, but happy. Happy in the knowledge I had a future to look forward to. A future I would now be building brick by brick, one day at a time. Happy in the hope that I would finally be able to get out of my wretched existence soon enough.
That was when the worst that could have possibly happened to me, happened.
After returning from college one evening, I noticed the door of my cupboard open. Items inside had been ransacked, strewn all over, rummaged through. My heart stopped once I discovered the shoe box containing all my saved money was missing. Gone!
I stood horrified. Speechless. Trembling.
I ran out of my room once I regained composure and knocked on my Mom’s door. Loudly. It was not uncommon to find her door locked from inside at that hour. She would usually be in the middle of a drinking binge at that time of day.
“Mom! Open the door!” I barked loudly. “Where’s my money?”
“What money? Whose money?” came a faint response from inside.
“My money, Mom. My savings. The money I was saving for tuition fees. It’s gone! Where is it?” I yelled through the door.
“Not sure what you are talking about, sweetheart,” another feeble reply came from inside. “What money? Where would you get money from? Since when do we have money at the house?”
Talking to her was pointless. Expecting an explanation was futile. I had a feeling who might have stolen the cash. I made a run for the clandestine gambling den that operated inside the closed-down lime quarry.
And it was not a wild guess either.
There he was, sitting with his head down, all alone, with a dejected and forlorn look on his face. A broken man with a broken spirit who had nothing better to do than steal my savings and break my future in the process.
The shoebox lay by his side, empty.
“Where’s the money, Dad?” I shouted at him. “Where’s MY money?”
He slowly moved his head in my direction. His deep-set eyes said it all. He didn’t need to utter a word.
“Where is it? That was my college tuition fees, you moron!” I screamed in agony and despair. “Bring it back. I want it back.”
He moved his head away again. Didn’t react. Didn’t twitch. Didn’t even offer an excuse. Just sat in stone-deaf silence.
I was crushed. Not just my dreams, or hopes, but a part of my soul got crushed that day. It was the end of my education. It was the end of my aspirations.
I grew up by ten years that day. I also moved out of that wretched house that day. Never to look back again.
Since then, life had been a never-ending cycle of applying for jobs and getting rejected. A painful saga of being humiliated and ridiculed at every job interview. I was a college dropout, a failure, and not good enough. I was reminded of those harsh facts day after day by interviewers, sometimes with a dose of sympathy or a heap of scorn.
This week was no exception, either.
I had knocked on a dozen doors, and applied to a bunch of jobs, all to no avail. I was not considered good enough for any of those. The only decent job I was deemed to be fit for was the one I lost on my birthday. My savings, modest as they were, had run out by now, and I was sure Blair’s generosity would run out too, soon enough.
Today, I found myself applying for the front office desk job at the local tennis club. Crystal Town Tennis Academy. I noticed the ad online last night and hoped against hope I would get it.
It was a now-or-never situation.
“Miss Knightley,” the HR executive remarked with a stupid grin on his face while going through my CV. “I’m afraid you are not qualified enough for this position.”
“Sir, the position is that of a customer service executive at the front desk,” I replied hesitantly but firmly. “My lack of a college degree notwithstanding, I believe I can handle customers, sir. This is a tennis club after all.”
“A tennis club, yes, but not an ordinary lowbrow one,” he continued speaking with that stupid grin. “Our customers are sophisticated and from the upper strata of society. We cannot have a…college dropout interact with them and handle their requirements. We need someone who talks like them, acts like them, and thinks like them. I hope you understand.”
I did understand. But my situation didn’t. I had to make another effort. A last-ditch one.
“Sir, I need a job. Desperately. I have financial constraints. I am ready to do any job. Anything. Just don’t turn me away.”
My pleas worked. He put down my CV and stared right into my eyes.
“The only position we can offer you at this time, and it’s available right now if you want it…is that of a cleaner. You will be required to clean and sweep the dressing room of the players, the pantry, the guest house, the locker area, and the washrooms. You can start from today itself if you—”
“Yes,” I blurted out. “Yes, sir. I will do it. Right from this moment. Thank you!”
I shook his hand and forced a smile on my lips. A cleaner’s job was better than having no job. I had to grin and bear it. I was not destiny’s child. I was abandoned by it.
And the cleaner’s uniform I was now putting on was a testament to that reality.
***
Sinacore POV.
A week had gone by since I had locked myself up in my apartment. Not only to avoid the glare of the media who were parked right in front of my gate, but also to get back to normalcy.
Today was the first time I ventured out of home in a week. Through the rear exit, to escape potential harassment at the hands of the media, and drove to my usual practice venue. Crystal Town Tennis Academy.
But I was in for a shock. Not one, but two.
As soon as I drove into the club’s driveway, I noticed a mob of reporters running toward me with cameras and microphones in hand. It seemed there was no respite from them, neither at home nor at the academy. Like death and taxes, they were an unavoidable part of my life.
Impossible to outrun.
Left with no option, I parked my car in the middle of the driveway and ran toward the back entrance of the club. This was used by the staff and workers employed by the academy. I figured this would be the easiest way to evade the media mob and access the practice courts.
That was when I received the second shock.
As I made my way to the practice courts through the back alleys and corridors, I bumped into someone—a cleaning lady. She was dragging a huge black bag of trash across the corridor. I was in a hurry, and she had not seen me coming. We bumped into each other.
“Sorry,” I apologized instinctively and was about to brush past her when I happened to lift my head. Just by chance, a pure coincidence. And my gaze fell on her face.
It was the woman from the hotel. The one who slept with me. The one who framed me. The one who was responsible for the harrowing ordeal I was going through the past seven days.
That woman stood before me now, in a cleaning lady’s uniform, with a giant bag of trash in her hand and a stunned look in her eyes.
What the fuck!
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