Chapter 69 Cause, you lied!

Chapter 69 Cause, you lied!
Callum is standing at the edge of the square looking at the fountain with his notebook still closed.

"I told you." he rolls his eyes.
"I will share it when it is developed."

"We're not in the working room." I begin.

"We came out here to think together. That requires sharing thoughts while they are still thoughts, not waiting until they are finished and presenting them as conclusions. No-one is stealing your ideas."

"That is how I work." he says.

"That is how you work alone." I say. "This is a group."

"A group that caused me to be penalised me this morning." he says.

I hear the sharp harshness in his voice that is followed by annoyance with everything in nature.
Or maybe the square continues exactly as it was, the fountain running and the pigeons existing and the Tuesday afternoon doing its thing, but the space between the three of us goes quiet in a way that is distinct from the ambient noise around it.

"Nobody penalised you." Roe says, his pen resting on the open page.

"Dr. Fontaine penalised all three of us equally. The same half point each, which, for the record, I received for standing in a corridor minding my own business so the distribution of justice in this situation is something I have strong feelings about."

"The incident would not have happened without this morning's conversation." Callum says. He is still looking at the fountain.

His voice has the quality it gets when he has decided on a version of events and is committed to it.

"I was having a professional conversation with colleagues and was publicly contradicted."

"You were publicly corrected." I say.
"There is a difference."

"You embarrassed me." he says.

" 'Cause, you lied! You misrepresented the work in front of other architects. In a competition where the work is all we have. You stood in a corridor and you told two people from another group that the central thread of our Stage 3 submission was yours. It was not yours. I said it first. Roe and I developed it. You contributed to it and your contribution mattered and was used and was credited in the room when it happened. But the central thread was not yours."

"Sera, what do you mean that I contributed ...."

"You contributed a line." I interrupt him, my voice firmer than the growing anxiety in my head.
"One line. About what the garden means in your personal design process. It truly was a genuine and useful line and which the group acknowledged and built from because that is how collaboration works. But one line is not the central thread. And standing in a corridortrying to take credit for a work you did less than two percent of, is not a misremembering. It is thievery."

Callum turns.

He looks at me.

"You have a lot to say." he snaps.
"For someone who spent years not saying anything."

The fountain runs.

The pigeons exist.

I look at him.

"That's because I've been focused on doing them." I say. "You have not been listening. There is a difference."

"I'm not bringing ideas into a group that does not respect my contribution." he says. "That is my position. When the dynamic changes, my approach will change."

"The dynamic will not change." I say.
"Because the dynamic is a direct result of your behaviour and your behaviour is a direct result of the fact that you believe the rules of collaboration apply to everyone except you. You believe that you can take credit for other people's thinking and that when they object, the problem is their lack of respect rather than your taking. That is not a dynamic issue. That is a you issue."

I take a deep breath in.

Oh my God!!
I just called Callum Weston out!
This is my freaking dream!!
Time to break his wings into pieces once and for all!

"Sera." Roe calls gently.

"I am not finished." I say.

"I know." Roe says.
"I know you are not finished. I am simply pointing out that we are in a public square and there are people, who are looking at us like their next source of entertainment."

There are people.

Three elderly people on the bench across the fountain who arrived sometime in the last five minutes and are watching us with excited interest of people who have lived long enough to find public disagreements more entertaining than alarming.

Callum looks at them.

He looks at me.

"You have been doing this since California." he says.
"This performance. This version of yourself that contradicts everything, that makes everything a statement. It is exhausting and it is not who you are and at some point you are going to have to stop performing and go back to ...."

"To what?" I interrupt again.

He stops.

"To what, Callum?" I warn quietly.
"Finish the sentence."

I don't know why God decided to give Callum wisdom now, because...
He does not finish the sentence.

Because finishing the sentence would require him to say out loud the thing that the sentence is pointing at, which is the version of me that stayed quiet, that swallowed things, that made herself small enough to be manageable, and saying that out loud in a Paris square in front of Roe and three elderly strangers and the pigeons is a thing even Callum Weston is not willing to do.

"Forget it." he says.

I scoff.
I've suffered too much to let this go, but my adrenaline is running out, so I might as well keep my mouth shut.

He sits down on a bench.

He opens his notebook.

He begins to write.

Whether he is writing about Quintessentialism or about something else entirely I do not know and I decide I do not need to know right now.

I sit back down next to Roe.

Roe is looking at his drawing of the fountain.

I sigh loudly.

This is going to be a long architectural competition.

Do I get paid at least for my deteriorating mental condition?