Angela’s Mac said ‘Oops!’ loudly. The machines were all equipped with irritating noises that advertised your every mistake, your movement to a new document or your opening of an e-mail.
‘Fuck, it’s crashed,’ panicked Angela, hammering the space bar with one finger.
‘Let me.’ Pauline sprang forward like a darting eel and pressed the restart button on Angela’s keyboard.
‘Thanks,’ smiled Angela. Officious cow! She’d been about to press the restart button herself.
‘It’s never a good idea to bash one key like that,’ said Pauline, still staring. Then she twisted round to accost Marla, who was frowning over folio sheets spread on top of a metal cabinet. ‘Marla, d’you think we should send Angela on a Mac refresher course?’
Do you think Angela would like to be asked, muttered Angela silently.
Marla looked up, still frowning. ‘I understood Angela was conversant with Macs and the software we use.’
‘Angela is,’ said Angela, with a humble, ingratiating smile, the one she’d have to wear for at least a month until she could safely mothball it and reserve it for the elite who had to be humoured on a permanent basis. Butt out and stop showing me up, she silently addressed Pauline’s chestnut cowlick.
Peering at the words onscreen, Angela surreptitiously enlarged them. Her Deirdre glasses were crap. Her ailing contact lenses had refused to go in at a quarter to seven that morning, so she was saving them for a midweek entrée to the office.
At eleven o’clock, she decided to risk a coffee. ‘Anyone for a drink?’ she asked brightly, knowing that the quickest route to ingratiation was to volunteer for active service on beverage and snack runs. A chorus of ‘Ooh, yes please,’ went up, and team Goss! offered up their dirty mugs for her to rinse and replenish.
The kitchenette was a biohazard area. Five women lounging round the fridge broke off a heated discussion as Angela clattered in with her cups. ‘So I said,’ resumed one of the five, ‘say that again to me, you dirt bird, and I’ll knock your fucking molars through the back of your turkey-veined neck.’
‘I’d have said the same,’ nodded a fellow-hag.
‘Excuse me,’ said a third, as Angela burrowed in the fridge for milk. ‘You are going to use your own departmental milk, aren’t you?’
‘That’s the idea,’ grinned Angela, extracting a carton that lacked possessive markings of any kind. Fuck knew which department owned it. Silently, the fetid five watched her splash microscopic amounts of milk into each mug. Angela tensed, waiting to be physically assaulted, trussed up and cast out into corporate darkness, via a liftshaft.
‘Anyway,’ resumed she of teeth-bashing tendencies, ‘I told loverboy he was welcome to her, told, him I wouldn’t touch hers with a ten-foot willy dipped in Dettol.’
Angela staggered out with her tray of mugs. What a place! She obviously just wasn’t ballsy enough for a world that had coarsened so noticeably in her four-year absence. Should she hand in her notice today or wait till the end of the week?
‘Verdict on your first day?’ asked Val kindly, as they travelled down in the lift together at five-thirty.
The urge to blab was too much. ‘I don’t know if I’ll hack it,’ blabbed Angela. ‘I read somewhere that it takes up to six months to settle into a job, longer if you’ve been out of circulation.’ This was an appeal to Val to confirm her long-term prospects if she didn’t cut the mustard within a week. She was slow at editing pages, she knew that. Painfully slow. She kept apologising to Marla when Pauline was away from her desk, and Marla kept conjuring a smile out of her perpetual careworn frown, and saying she’d get the hang of it, and no one expected miracles on her first day. But what about her second?
‘You’ve nothing to worry about,’ Val assured her, hurrying with her to Victoria station. ‘We’ve had complete dorks in freelancing while they advertised your job, and none of them got the push.’
This was only vaguely comforting.
‘One thing though,’ said Val, turning to her at the station entrance, ‘tread carefully with Pauline. You may have noticed, she’s a bit intense.’
Angela nodded eagerly. She wanted the full low-down on Pauline, but realised she’d have to make do with a whetted appetite, as Val had a train to catch. ‘Just watch your back,’ advised Val, poised to rush. ‘She’s one of those people who takes for or against you, five seconds after meeting. No second chances given. She’s been here for aeons, so doesn’t suffer fools gladly and can’t remember what new job nerves are like.’
‘Oh God!’ panicked Angela. ‘She’s been throwing me killer looks all day. What shall I …?’
‘Not to worry,’ sang Val, taking off for platform three. ‘See you at the coal-face tomorrow. Byee!’
Angela reached home, exhausted. It was half seven and she’d been up since half six. She’d have time to eat, bathe, catch the headlines on News at Ten, and fall into bed comatose, before rejoining the treadmill for day two of the rest of her life.
The morning and evening commuter rush were as scary as she remembered. It had been almost surreal, hurrying across the footbridge that morning in a silent phalanx of train-catchers, their uniform the belted mac, their shields the tablets and iPads they raised defensively once sitting or standing on the train.
The only saving grace was working so close to Victoria. As long as she left work dead on five-thirty, it looked as if she’d bag a seat on the five-fifty-three to Wilmesbury, without having to run all the way to Victoria and get a stitch.
The first thing Angela did when she got home was unplug the phone, switch off her mobile and decide she was not on-call to anyone. She couldn’t cope with Sadie or Rachel ringing for news of her first day.
It was Sadie she really feared. She’d end up blabbing about Pauline and the kitchen coven and crashing the machine ‒ all negative things, rooted in worry about her fitness for the job ‒ and Sadie would make things worse by observing, ‘You’re so paranoid, lovey. It’s perfectly simple. If you’re nice to people, they’re nice to you. Any other outcome involves contributory negligence on your part.’
Sadie put the phone down. It was ringing at Angela’s end, but she must’ve unplugged it for the night.
Halfway up the stairs, on her way to run a bath, Sadie paused to regain her strength. She gazed up at the remaining treads. She could swear her staircase was actively steepening, rising millimetre by millimetre, week by week, with the incremental stealth of a suspension bridge.
She loved her narrow, high-ceilinged, terraced house, but it offered an increasingly cold shoulder. Doorknobs slithered away from her grasp. The kitchen units were creeping higher up the wall to join elusive cobwebs.
Rationally, she knew the problem was her arthritis. It forced her to concentrate on reaching, grasping and retaining wall and door projections that had once rushed to fit snugly in her hand.
Loneliness compounded the bothersome onset of infirmity. She had Binky of course, but he was a pensioner in his own right, with joints and a temper that stiffened in the damp. When Binky went to the great litter tray in the sky, Sadie doubted she’d have the heart to start over with a new, frisky incumbent.
Perched on the edge of the bath, leaning in to check water temperature, a flame of hot arthritic pain (she called them twinges) shot up her leg and into her pelvis. Moodily, she stared into the swirling water, waiting for the pain to pass, like a labour contraction. Arthritis was a bugger. It crept up on an otherwise healthy body, crabbing and twisting it into blasted tree formation, while inside, your perfectly spry mind cried out not to be judged on appearances.
Sadie had tried copper bracelets and heat pads on her wrists and insteps. She’d given up ambitious gardening (anything that involved bending or hunkering) and now passed desultory days hoeing weeds from a great height. Her rose arbour and vegetable patch had reverted to a boring hanky of manageable lawn, attracting sympathetic comment from spryer neighbours over both bordering fences. The local consensus was, ‘Poor old gel isn’t up to
it any more.’ Which was why Sadie still made such an effort to keep the grass mown and the weeds hemmed back to the edge of the trellis, sulkily intent on encroachment but not yet daring to try.
She also sensed that her tip-foraging days were numbered. Even her part-time job at the newsagent’s (which she loved) was becoming a strain; all that scrabbling change out of the till and clawing penny chews out of bottomless jars.
Naturally, being Sadie, she’d hidden the true extent of her pain from Angela.
But since Robert’s death and especially since Christmas Day, Sadie had dared to think the unthinkable. Should the widows cranky live together? Would Angela cope better if she, Sadie, was on the spot?
Though frankly, Sadie had felt worse than inadequate on Christmas Day, rocking Angela in her arms, aware of Angela’s embarrassment battling with her desolation. Even as a child, Angela had never been cuddly. If Sadie had picked her up and tried to cuddle her, she’d squirmed away like an impatient cat.
So Angela wept in Sadie’s arms on Christmas Day, but hated herself for it, and resented Sadie for seeing her like that. Words of comfort had stuck in Sadie’s throat like a boiled sweet swallowed too soon. What could she say? She’d too often damned the living Robert with faint praise.
He’d been scared of her forthrightness, for which she’d despised and bullied him a bit, using humour as her cover. She’d poked gentle but relentless fun at his golf jumpers, spare tyre, and his dun-coloured hair brushed so carefully away from a side parting. He’d taken such pride in his ordinariness, it had irked her.
‘I can’t suggest living together now,’ she reasoned with Binky, who’d strolled into the bathroom. ‘Supposing this Conor bloke has real potential? A live-in mother-in-law might scare him away. Remember all those Les Dawson jokes?’
She nodded sagely at Binky, mindful of where duty and sacrifice lay. ‘Anyway, which house would we settle on? Angela wouldn’t want to live back here.’
Sadie’s terraced home, humble as it was, still had the cachet of being larger and more valuable than Angela’s semi-detached hut. Sadie’s house was turn-of-the-century stolid redbrick, built before boxy dimensions and cheek-by-jowl living became the suburban norm. But Angela’s hut was centrally heated, closer to town and easier to get around. The stairs were less steep, for a start.
‘It’s all academic,’ she told Binky, rising carefully from the side of the bath. ‘I have to wait and see how things develop with Conor. And if all goes well on that front, an old battle-axe like me can’t be putting obstacles in the way.’
Quickly, Conor McGinlay shut his wardrobe door. He’d been beaten back by an onslaught of hairy tweed and mildewed mothballs. Scratching an itchy armpit, he strode into the bathroom and dived without preamble into the linen basket.
It was Shane’s turn to load the washing machine, which explained why the basket was still full.
Conor emerged clutching a pale apricot cotton shirt. He sniffed it from a distance and then bravely snuffled the armpit. Next came the wrinkle inspection.
Shane loped into the bathroom, wearing his iPod. He eyed the shirt.
‘Looks a bit past it.’
Conor lowered the shirt. ‘Looks can be deceptive. It was your turn this week to load the machine, chuck in a couple of detergent scoops and turn the knob. Not too much to ask, is it? Mrs T still does the tricky bits ‒ unloading, sorting, ironing and magically redistributing.’
‘Didn’t know it was my turn,’ shrugged Shane.
‘Ignorance is no defence,’ frowned Conor.
‘Ye wot?’ Shane lengthened his jaw for that village idiot look that irritated (and didn’t fool) Conor.
‘D’you think I need to iron this shirt?’ he asked, going for manly solidarity.
‘Don’t even try, Dad. You could burn your ear if the phone rings.’
‘Is that a Dad joke or an Irish joke?’ asked Conor dangerously.
‘It’s an old joke,’ replied Shane sweetly, and staggered out of the bathroom.
He wasn’t drunk or stoned, as Conor had first feared when he’d noticed how much staggering about Shane did. Uncoordinated lurching, exaggerated by army-sized backpacks of schoolbooks, was the perambulatory norm for Shane and his peers.
Conor decided the shirt would do. For some unfathomable reason, he felt guilty about what he was embarking on ‒ or at least, planning to embark on.
He almost felt as if he was cheating on his son. A ridiculous notion, given Shane’s supreme indifference to his comings and goings for work. But then again ‒ what did he expect? He came and went so often that both he and Shane would be wrecks by now if his son was at all needy and clingy by nature.
He was not a skilled father. Guilt made him overcompensate for his absences with lavishly indiscriminate amounts of pocket money and gifts (bribes, Kate called them). Still, Kate paid her own blood money and spoilt Shane with his latest heart’s desire. Thank God he wasn’t a scheming child, playing them off against each other. Shane would return home from Kate’s New York loft, laden with trainers (soon forgotten about), softball racquets (never used) and fleece-lined jackets (lost within a week). He wasn’t overly acquisitive. He accepted parental largesse with a certain amount of well-bred embarrassment.
Returning to his bedroom, Conor hung the shirt on the back of his wardrobe door. It smelt OK. If in doubt later, he could slosh a bit of aftershave over key areas. He wondered, with a brief flicker of panic, if he’d become a total barbarian since Kate left, a raging troglodyte in matters of etiquette, cleanliness and civility. Sometimes, he caught Mrs Turner looking at him in astonishment as he polished off a KFC chicken bucket after living on nettle soup up some godforsaken mountain for a week. And Angela Carbery had thought him a pig on the flight from Morocco.
At such times, Conor had the grace to blush. But he was a man ‒ a man who had to shave twice a day to look human ‒ and as such, he had to grunt his way out of embarrassment, dismissing and deflecting all put-downs. If there was a more civilised approach to life, he longed to find it, or find someone who’d point him in the right direction.
It was Friday. At the end of Angela’s first week, she was still doing the eleven-o’clock beverage run. But she didn’t really mind. She could escape from her desk and daydream by the kettle for a few minutes. She tried hard not to wonder about Conor McGinlay. Maybe, if she’d been nicer to him, sparkled with a bit of feminine gratitude for taking up his time … if she’d made an effort to give him her phone number properly.
Luckily, she’d been too whacked to see Sadie in person during the week. By tactical skill, she’d kept Sadie’s midweek phone call within the parameters of her first week at Goss!
Braving the office kitchen no longer fazed her. The kitchen coven had crystallised into individuals, one of whom was Mandy of admin fame. Angela now realised they were far less threatening than she’d first thought. They were simply bored women having a raucous laugh.
Cradling her noon mug of coffee (she’d already done the group beverage run), she tip-toed back to her desk. She didn’t look at Pauline, in case she blushed at being caught with a unilateral beverage.
Val looked up from a proof and gazed past Angela, puffing down her nose like a horse on a frosty morning. ‘Who,’ she whinnied, ‘is that?’
Angela and Pauline turned.
Angela’s heart squeezed into a ball that hurt her chest.
Conor McGinlay was ambling through the open-plan office like a bull in search of a thirty-two-piece dinner set. His thick hair gleamed a foxy red under the strip lights. He wore a surprisingly attractive dark linen suit. He was clutching a small bunch of freesias to a crumpled shirt-front the colour of a mango mousse (though it was probably called something manly like ‘sandstorm’ on the label). Aware of being gawped at, his expression was one of pained fury.
Finally spotting Angela, he cantered over like a mettlesome charger. ‘I’ve had to donate a kidney at reception to get into this place,’ he announced, thrusting the freesias towards her
nose.
Angela fought back tickly petals and took a deep breath. ‘How did you know I worked here?’
He shrugged. ‘Rang a few magazine publishing outfits and asked to speak to you. Came up trumps fourth time lucky.’
Angela blushed with wild joy at his persistence.
‘Angela?’ Marla bore down. ‘Perhaps your friend could wait down in the lobby for you? It’s not policy to let civilians roam at large in the corridors of power.’ She beamed at Conor, a smile infused with authoritarian good humour.
Conor grunted. ‘Can you come to lunch now then, Angela? I’m parked on double yellow.’
Angela looked quickly at Marla.
‘Yes, yes!’ shooed Marla. ‘Off you go, the pair of you.’
Watchful eyes followed them to the lift. Angela studied the carpet, the freesias carried upright in one sweaty hand, like a talisman. He said nothing to her. She felt perturbed that he’d spilt her life so publicly all over the workplace. She was also thrilled that he’d bothered.
In the lift, she realised they were about the same height. Well, she was tall for a woman, and he was stocky.
‘I like your shoulder bag,’ he said. ‘It’s very ‒ you.’
Angela clutched her bag protectively. A twenty-first birthday present from Rachel, its faded orange cotton was decorated with tap-dancing frogs. Hardly a byword for sophistication. ‘Thanks for the flowers. I should’ve left them on my desk. They’ll get droopy now.’
‘We’ll stick them in the back of the car.’ His voice sounded thick, and he sprang out of the lift the minute the doors opened. If she hadn’t seen at first hand how growly and forceful he was, Angela would almost have thought him shy.
His four-wheel drive was in the process of being ticketed. ‘Errand of mercy,’ he told the grizzled traffic warden, and smiled a smile that would’ve stopped invading Barbarians in their tracks. Angela was trapped by chance in its ray of blazing tenderness. How could such a macho face smile like that ‒ like a mother looking into a crib?
‘Not my problem, mate,’ snapped the unappeased male traffic warden, tearing the ticket off his pad. ‘I don’t care if your girlfriend was having triplets under the dashboard.’
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