by Adele Parks
‘Let’s see what you’ve got,’ said Brian wearily.
For a moment Kirsten thought he was asking to see a glimpse of her stockings or something but then he reached for her laptop and she understood.
‘Fucking hell. You idiot!’ he yelled the moment he read a paragraph of her notes.
‘Excuse me!’ Kirsten replied indignantly.
‘You fucking idiot,’ he added, for clarity. ‘Is this all you took down? In over an hour? You haven’t got any of the salient points. In fact you haven’t got any points at all, this is total crap.’
Kirsten didn’t understand why Brian was getting so worked up. He was at the meeting, he knew what had been said, even if she didn’t. He could just tell her and she’d write it down now. Or better yet he could just write it himself and she could get back to her desk, she fancied doing a little online shopping.
‘Don’t shout at me. I’ve never taken down notes before,’ she pleaded. She mustered the pout that she’d been practising in the mirror this morning, she knew it made her look adorable, she was sure to win him over.
‘No, it’s not notes you’re known for taking down, is it?’ muttered Brian nastily.
‘What do you mean by that?’ She wasn’t thick. They always made the mistake of thinking she was so thick that she didn’t even know when she was being insulted. But she wasn’t thick.
‘This was a fucking important meeting, Kirsten. Why can’t you just do your job?’
Kirsten thought Brian was the thick one. He, more than most, was aware of her skill set; if the meeting was so damned important he should have asked Rosie to take notes. She glared at him. He glowered back. Suddenly she noticed something very cold and hard in his eyes that she’d never noticed before. She’d always thought of him as such a teddy bear but now he looked like a hungry Rottweiler, straining at his leash. All at once, Kirsten felt quite vulnerable. A scary thought flashed into her mind – she was out of her depth.
The last time she’d felt this vulnerable was a few weeks back, when she’d let Mark tie her, spreadeagled, to a four-poster bed. She hadn’t really been too comfortable with doing that. Mark was always going on about the fact that what he liked about her was that she was so adventurous and daring, and it was nice to be appreciated, so in the end she’d agreed to him tying her up. She’d asked him to use bows rather than knots though, so she could get away if she wanted to. He’d laughed and said that was defeating the purpose. He’d pulled very hard on the straps, she’d tried to joke that he must have been a good Boy Scout and earned loads of badges as a kid with knot-tying skills like his. He’d said that there was nothing Boy Scout about him. This was true. Sometimes, she did just wish that they could have straight forward sex with kissing and hugging and stuff. Even with Brian it always had to be an athletic sprint through the entire Kama Sutra. He said that he could get that boring stuff at home, which was fair enough, she supposed. She wasn’t the woman who had to visit the in-laws or even discuss whether the insulation in the loft was sufficient, she was the woman who had to do it doggy style and talk dirty.
Mark hadn’t hurt her. She wasn’t saying that. It was quite exciting really, in a scary sort of way. All the way through she’d had to keep reminding herself that she’d agreed to do it, he hadn’t forced her. It was exactly like going on a loop-the-loop – terrifying but thrilling. She’d stood in the queue, got on the fairground attraction, and belted herself in for the ride. Once she’d given in to it, she got into it and she had to give in to it because when she struggled, the straps tightened and hurt her ankles and wrists more.
Kirsten felt similarly vulnerable and trapped now, but there was none of the excitement.
‘Look, shouting at me isn’t going to fix things,’ Kirsten pointed out to Brian. ‘Can’t you help me write the minutes?’
‘I’m not a fucking secretary,’ he yelled. Then, muttering under his breath, he added, ‘I should fire you over this.’
Kirsten heard him. The shock of the threat reverberated through her body. How could he be talking of sacking her? It was Monday, his night. They were supposed to be going to a lovely restaurant. They would drink wine that cost thirty quid a bottle, he’d probably have bought her that gorgeous top from Karen Millen that she’d been hinting at and they’d have sex in the sort of hotel that puts chocolates on your pillow. There should be no talk of her being fired, she was protected from that sort of thing. She was fast track, in her own way. She needed to remind him.
Icily, Kirsten commented, ‘You might not be a fucking secretary but you are fucking a secretary so if you try to fire me I’ll go straight to HR and tell them what we’ve been up to.’
‘Kirsten, you’re the office bike, no one will give a toss what you say,’ replied Brian coldly. He did not seem at all affected by her threat, he swatted it away as though she was a filthy, annoying fly and turned back to her laptop. ‘Go back to the phones. Send Rosie in here at once. She’ll be able to sort your mess out. I should have asked her to do the job in the first place.’
Kirsten felt whipped. He’d said she was incompetent at her job; she wasn’t incompetent, she was adequate. That’s the grade she’d been awarded in her six-month appraisal. He’d called her the office bike. She wasn’t! OK, so maybe she had a few boyfriends in the office but that didn’t make her a bike. Kirsten hunted around her head for something hurtful to throw at Brian.
Nothing. A total blank. She never thought of really good insults until ages after she needed one.
‘Yes, maybe you should have asked Rosie. I don’t need this sort of hassle,’ spat Kirsten as she flounced out of the boardroom. But even to her own ears, she sounded pathetic and childish.
Wounded, rather than wounding.
9
After a rather damp and chill start to the day, the sun had battered the solid layer of grey clouds until they’d lost the will, fallen apart and disintegrated into picturesque, white, bite-size clouds that looked like blobs of cotton stuck on the blue, just the way children drew them on pictures. Now the sun had taken rightful possession of the sky, the streets appeared litter-free, the leaves on trees were as vitally green as it was possible to be and the women who drove their four-by-fours were managing to park and smile rather than stare one another down as they raced for the spaces closest to the school gate. Pip thought the clement weather was an acknowledgement of her glorious luck, or better yet, a sign of more good things to come. She mentally hugged herself.
Pip had always loved spring. It was her favourite season, it was more than pleasant in its own right but also full of promise and expectancy about what would come next. A season full of hope and second chances, something Pip firmly believed in (some might say clung to). To her shame, she had barely noticed spring for the last two years. She was so deep in the doldrums of despair that the tight buds bravely pushing their way through the still nippy mornings had not caused her to smile. She hadn’t bothered to chop up apples for the birds that had babies in their nests, as she’d done practically every year of her life since she was seven, even though she knew that garden birds depended on this sort of consideration during spring. She hadn’t even found the energy to take Chloe to the working farm along the road, where kids were encouraged to ride ponies and feed goats. Since before Chloe could have any understanding of what was going on, Pip and Steph had taken the children to the farm to see baby chicks hatch and lambs birth. OK, the process was all a bit bloodier than Pip had envisaged and it led to more questions from Chloe than she was ready to handle.
‘What’s that thing hanging out of—’
‘Should we go and get a teacake and perhaps a glass of orange juice?’ Pip had interrupted.
Yes, bloodier, but even so Pip enjoyed the event. Birth was a marvellous thing to witness. She’d enjoyed feeling part of new beginnings. In farms, fertility hung in the air, was lodged under her fingernails and sailed on the wind, lifting her hair and causing her heart to quicken. She liked being close to the land, savouring the smell of mud and grass
and animals. Living in a town it was easy to feel removed from the seasons, the passing of time became marked with nothing more sensational than turning over the calendar that hung on the wall. So visiting the farm in springtime had become a tradition, a ritual. But after Dylan left the country, all normal practice was abandoned.
Robbie Donaldson’s face loomed into Pip’s consciousness. She playfully batted it away. Best not to get too excited, she told herself, although she wasn’t listening – not really. She thought of his grin, it was heartfelt and sincere but it was more than that, it was cheeky, almost mucky. Pip trembled with a rare and virtually forgotten sense of anticipation.
‘You’re very cheerful today,’ commented Angie, mum of Toby, a precocious, freckled kid in Chloe’s class.
‘I am,’ agreed Pip. Angie smiled but didn’t ask any questions. The mums at the gate were generally fairly nosy but they were also invariably totally distracted. Angie started to discuss the chances of Toby emerging from school with his waterproof jacket.
‘We couldn’t find it this morning. He said it was on his peg but they say that, don’t they, when they don’t want to say they’ve lost it. I do hope he’s got it because it’s meant to pour down again tonight and he’s lost the hood off his other coat and we’ve got to get to the swimming baths by four and then on to his music tutor by six. Plus, I have to get Evie to trampoline club, not to mention homework. Note to self, don’t buy a detachable hood. I think he left his other coat in Bude. We were there at the weekend, to surf. Did I mention that my mother-in-law has a place there and she likes us to use it whenever we can?’
Angie had mentioned the cottage in Bude, Cornwall, to Pip several times, actually. When she first did so Pip had thought the information might precede an invite but it hadn’t. Soon, Pip gathered that Angie simply liked to drop into conversation the existence of the Bude cottage in order to inflame a little envy amongst the mums clustered at the school gate. She mentioned her children’s packed extra-curricular agendas for the same reason. The galling thing was her technique worked, Pip was usually a little envious. She thought it must be wonderful to take your daughter and son (the salt and pepper set) every other weekend to paddle in the rock pools that frame the sandy Cornwall beaches, to let your Labrador pound along the vast expanses, dashing in and out of the foam, to have a husband clambering on the romantic, craggy rocks in search of whelks to amuse the children. Of course she was envious of any woman who had the whole shebang. She and Chloe often seemed fractured when compared to such sketches of domestic bliss. Plus, Pip didn’t have the cash to enrol Chloe in endless after-school activities, the way so many of the parents did. But today Angie’s words slipped like butter off Teflon. Today, Pip had her contract with Selfridges to shore her up and her date with Robbie, the fertility nurse, to look forward to. Soon she would be bringing in regular extra cash and, if the mood struck her, Chloe could join a trampoline club, ballet club, pony club, ninja arts club or a Morris dancing class for that matter.
And who knew, maybe Robbie the fertility nurse had a mother who also had a cottage in Cornwall and it was that woman’s greatest dream to throw open the doors of said cottage to a single mother Robbie had met on the train. Pip let the thought skitter through her head. Immediately her new and fragile confidence faltered.
Get real. There were higher odds of Chloe wanting to join a Morris dancing class.
The sun splattered down on to the school tarmac and Pip listened to the song of kids chattering excitedly as they exploded through the school door like bubbles from a fizzy drink after the can has been shaken. Then, in that instant, Pip spotted Chloe standing by the school doors. She was standing on tiptoes and craning her neck trying to spot her mum in amongst the hordes of mothers and other carers. Even to the most affectionate eye, Chloe looked distinctly gangly and scruffy. Her silky hair had worked its way out of the plaits that Pip had conscientiously knitted together that morning. Pip noticed that Chloe wasn’t wearing a pullover, even though she set off with one – missing in action then, she assumed. The little girl’s socks had run down her legs and taken refuge by her ankles. She was struggling with a PE kitbag that was about twice her size. Pip grinned and started to wave both her hands above her head in order to flag her daughter. Chloe beamed, a gap-toothed smile, when she spotted Pip waving so heartily. To Pip, Chloe was the most beautiful thing in the world and she wouldn’t swap being her mum and everything that came with it (including an unreliable bastard of an ex being the dad) for a lifetime at a Thai spa, let alone a weekend in Cornwall.
Pip suddenly but quite firmly had an overwhelming sense that all was well with the world. Everything was one hundred per cent perfect.
10
Stephanie could not focus. She’d checked her watch ten or more times in just fifteen minutes but still couldn’t quite plot the evening. Normally, she was so organised but then nothing was normal. Her world was irredeemably, irreversibly changed. There was then, a time when she’d been happy, content and able. And there was now, when everything was ruined. Everything was soiled.
She’d managed to collect the boys (three different pick-up times, two different schools). She’d remembered that Harry had a tennis lesson after school and that Alfie needed to bring home his cello to practise for the concert this Thursday. Doing just this much required such effort. Her feet, her arms and her stomach felt like clay. She dragged her reluctant body from place to place but they drove home in silence as Steph simply could not muster the energy to talk to them about their days as she usually did. Even if she had found a way to subdue the nasty, filthy fears and accusations that were flinging themselves around her head in order to feign an interest in what they had for lunch or who they’d played with at breaktime, her efforts would most likely have gone unrewarded. The boys were all sulking because she’d forgotten to bring their afternoon snacks. Normally, she arrived at the school gate furnished with ham sandwiches and apples, but the needs of their constantly rumbling bellies had washed from her mind.
Kiss.
Lick.
Cock.
Fuck.
The alien words of the texts kept leaping into her mind like gunshots.
Now, she had to oversee their homework. Harry had some serious-looking geography worksheets and half a dozen maths problems to complete, so she told him to log on to Google. He scampered off, not needing to be asked twice, delighted that his mother hadn’t insisted that his first reference point had to be the dusty encyclopedia that she normally favoured. He sensed her distraction and wondered if she’d notice if he logged on to Warhammer instead.
Alfie’s assignment was writing a letter of complaint. He told his mother that he was going to write to his hairdresser and tell her that he didn’t like his latest cut.
‘Don’t you think it might be more appropriate if you wrote to a toy manufacturer and said you’d received a toy for your birthday that had a piece broken?’ she asked with a sigh.
‘But I didn’t,’ said Alfie. ‘That’s not true.’
‘No. But this letter-writing is an exercise in imagination and Mrs Young might be more interested in a letter to a toy manufacturer.’
‘But I don’t like my haircut, not at all,’ said Alfie firmly.
Sod it, thought Steph. She was taken aback by the curse erupting in her head but really – sod it. What did it matter if Alfie wrote about his haircut or a broken toy? What did it matter if the children impressed their teachers? If they got good grades, went to university, met nice women, married them, had children? What did any of it matter? It might all disappear anyway. It might all be faulty, no matter how much effort she put in.
Steph started to sway. She felt dangerously adrift. Lost. She needed to sit down. She realised she was probably still in shock.
Freddie needed to practise his reading.
Her body had switched to some sort of automatic emergency programme but she felt like a robot with a broken control panel. All day she’d managed to lumber on, following a pre-set pattern, yet
sparks were flying through her system – nasty, sharp jolts that burnt her and were undoubtedly flagging alarming short circuits and, possibly, an impending explosion. Somehow or other Steph stumbled through teatime, bathtime and bedtime. She only broke down crying once but explained it away by saying that she’d burnt her hand on the oven. She had burnt her hand on the oven, she also dropped a bowl of peas and she’d allowed the children to watch TV for far longer than the usual weekday quota but she couldn’t bring herself to regard these things as disasters. They were simply consequences of the one enormous, overwhelming disaster.
When Julian walked through the door, Steph gasped dramatically. She was annoyed with herself for doing so, that wasn’t her plan. Her plan was to behave exactly as normal, no hysterics, no fuss or commotion. She was not going to yell accusations or feverishly demand a divorce, God forbid. She wanted to try to regain some sort of control or at the very least offer up the semblance of it. She needed time to think clearly. Carefully. To work out what she could do for the best.
She had gasped because he was the same. Illogically, she’d expected some outward change. A manifestation of the horror that she’d discovered. Of course, that was nonsense. This Jekyll and Hyde did not physically morph to conveniently flag his diabolical, altered status.