SEVEN DAYS

by Silence Welder

  Sexy, she thought. Go on, give yourself that.

  She gave herself a twirl.

  You look sexy.

  Thanks to her play in the shower, she felt sexy too. His timing was good.

  She ran down the stairs and then slowed herself to a measured walk in case he could hear her feet on the steps.

  She looked through the peephole, but Mark wasn't standing on the other side.

  When Judy opened the door, Lisa, her neighbour, was standing with her palms upraised and a look of shock on her face.

  “You let him go!?” said Lisa.

  “Who?” said Judy.

  “What do you mean 'who'!?” She had a strong, Eastern-European accent and launched her words at Judy like missiles. “The guy! The guy on your doorstep! I was watching. You let him go!”

  “Yes,” said Judy. “I let him go. He wasn't a puppy. He was a man.”

  “He certainly was.”

  “So?” Judy said, playing stupid in the hope that Lisa would let her off the hook. Always a mistake.

  He was sitting on your step for twenty minutes and so I opened my door and I said—I'm sorry, Judy - but you know I cannot help myself—I said: 'You can wait in the warm if you like, I'm sure she will be back soon', hoping—I'm sorry, Judy—that you wouldn't be back at all. You know what he said?”

  “No.” She attempted to sound disinterested. Failed. “What did he say?”

  Lisa imitated Mark's smooth voice. “He said: 'That's very kind, but I want to be here when Judy arrives'.”

  “That was nice,” admitted Judy.

  “Nice!? I was wearing this!” she indicated her short, silver dress that accentuated her hourglass figure. It was a large hourglass, but that only made her sexier. Her breasts were enormous and Judy could be sure that she had made sure Mark got a good look at her cleavage. Her lips were reddened with lipstick and her eyes blackened with mascara.

  Comparing herself to Lisa, Judy reconsidered her sexy status. Standing next to her neighbour, she looked as if she'd thrown something on so she could clean the bathroom.

  “I sent him away,” Judy said.

  “He was gorgeous and he waited for you in the rain and the cold for an hour and you told him to go away? What were you thinking?”

  “He was a liar,” Judy said weakly.

  “So are you!” Lisa told her. “You lie to yourself. You say that there are no good men and then you push them away.”

  “What do you know about it?”

  “Only what you tell me. You push the good ones away. You go for men that are not worthy of you. Like Peter.”

  “I don't want to talk about Peter,” said Judy.

  “You're like a train, always keeping to the tracks. You should take some risks. What did he lie about?”

  “He pretended to be something he’s not.”

  “Why?”

  “To impress me.”

  “And? The problem is...?”

  They shared a silence.

  “Oh Lisa, what have I done? Would you like to come upstairs for a drink?” Judy asked hopefully.

  “No,” Lisa said. “You said that very sweetly, but you’re an hour too late and you’re asking the wrong person.”

  Chapter Three: Open With Care

  Albert Camus: “A work of art is a confession.”

  At the end of the following work week, Judy sat at her workstation, which was no different to any other workstation in her office, even though she was the leader of her team, responsible for supplies and communication between the warehouse and the sales office.

  “Communication,” she muttered. “I'm terrible at communication. How the hell did I get this job?”

  She’d worked for it, was the answer, and she'd worked hard. There were some men who thought she was given the job, because she had flashed her legs. Not true, and not least of all because she normally wore trousers to work and tops with sleeves and buttons. Even in summer.

  This was not a catwalk, it was an office, and she often visited the warehouse. Despite what they seemed to think, she didn't want men leering at her. She didn't 'like it really'. And she had to be able to lift boxes as well as the best of them, because, like almost every business these days, they were understaffed.

  She got the job because she had worked harder and longer than anybody else. But she couldn't remember why.

  In her imagination, she batted the subject around with Mark, sure that he would have an interesting take on her situation. At the Tate, he had been like a hawk soaring above, gliding on invisible currents, while she had been lost in the maize.

  He had lifted her up, opened her eyes and then dumped her right back into the corn again.

  Maybe it would have been better not to remember how exciting life could feel. She hadn't been exactly happy this time last week, but this morning she was miserable.

  Ignorance, she thought. Give me ignorance. Forty milligrams. Morning, afternoon and night.

  She stared at her screen. She had twelve browser windows open and she could neither remember why nor which one she had been on. It reminded her of a comment Mark had made in passing about being a young man on the internet, stuck in a porn loop, attempting to close browser windows faster than they could open, torn between closing the session and losing all the legitimate work he had been doing, shutting off the computer's volume or pulling up his trousers. They all had to be done. It was just a question of in which order.

  She laughed out loud now and people looked. So much for open plan offices. She had been a fan once, but now she didn't feel as though they were open at all. The openness was an illusion. The walls were there and they had eyes.

  Over the course of only a weekend, she had forgotten how to fit in.

  Get a grip, she told herself, and instantly she was blushing, thinking of him again, imagining what she might have done if she hadn't sent him packing on Saturday night, imagining herself reaching down between his legs and looking him in the eye, getting a good grip.

  “Judy!”

  It was Barry, a big guy whose head was inversely-proportionate to the size of his neat, designer glasses. In the corporate hierarchy, she was answerable directly to him, which was great, because he was generally a nice guy and his management style involved letting her get on with her job without interfering. As long as she put the figures in and made orders on time, he had no reason to talk to her.

  Today, however, Judy sensed that something was wrong. The fact that he was interrupting her at her desk, raising his voice, in the middle of the morning, just after his meeting, didn't bode well.

  “I've noticed that you haven't taken any holiday this year,” he began.

  “That's right,” she said.

  “And that you haven't booked any either.”

  “Haven't I?” she said innocently.

  “No.”

  “I guess I don't have any plans,” she said. “I hadn't thought about it.”

  “I'd like you think about it,” he said. “I'd like you to put in for some holiday as soon as possible.”

  “Well, it will be difficult now, because it's already booked up and I can't possibly leave when we're on a skeleton staff in mid-summer.”

  “You can,” Barry told her.

  “I might be able to take a few days in December,” she suggested. “Or, you could pay me instead of making me take holiday, like last year, and the year before that.”

  “Not this time,” Barry said. “I'd like you to take some leave.”

  Judy swivelled her chair so that her entire body was directed towards him.

  “Are you telling me or asking me?” she said.

  “I'm asking you, as your friend,” he said, which was the first time he'd referred to himself as such. It surprised her. “But if you need more encouragement, I'll tell you as your boss.”

  “You can't make me do that,” she said.

  “And you can't hand in figures like this,” he said, dumping a folder on her table, “and expect me to think that your mind's on the
job.”

  She picked up the folder and flicked through the pages. When her face remained blank, Barry pointed out boxes, rows and columns that were also blank or otherwise incorrect. There were entire reports that she had marked as complete, but had not been filled in.

  She swallowed hard and glanced at her screen. Her email inbox was overflowing with unopened correspondence. Her hand snaked across the desk towards the mouse, aiming to left click on the minimise button.

  “Don't bother,” Barry said. “I know you've developed a backlog. If you'd read your emails we'd have had this discussion in my office, at ten am, yesterday.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes. You're normally on top of all this, so I don't think it will last, but I've noticed...” he gestured to the meeting room “...we've noticed that you seem to have lost your spark. You're off your game at the moment.”

  “It's been one week,” Judy said, exasperated.

  “I think there's been something wrong for more than a week,” he said and he squatted beside her, his voice low. “You can fool yourself, but you can't fool me. I want you to be happy. I want you to take a break. Then I want the old Judy back.”

  The old Judy is dead, she thought, she's not coming back. The old Judy took the overhead line from Walthamstow to Liverpool Street every weekday morning. Dead. She read the free newspapers, because they were free. Dead. She bought a cappuccino with chocolate but no sugar during the walk to work, usually two mornings a week, but never more than three times. Dead. Dead. Dead. The new Judy wants to live, she just doesn't know how yet, and you're not helping.

  “Look,” Barry said, sliding her yet more papers.

  Judy skimmed the documents.

  “Memos,” she said, failing to see the significance. “I wrote them myself.”

  “Who is this one addressed to?” Barry asked.

  “Giles Patterson,” she said, from memory.

  “Look at it,” said Barry, losing patience.

  She looked again and saw what she had typed instead of Giles Patterson.

  “As far as I'm aware,” Barry said, “there is no Mark Nightingale working for this company or any other company with which we're involved.”

  “Correct,” admitted Judy.

  “The name Mark also appears here.” Another document. “And here.” Barry sighed. “And here. And here it just says Nightingale.”

  “I'm so sorry.”

  “I spoke to Peter earlier in the week...”

  Uh-oh.

  “...and he said in passing that he noticed you weren't your old self either.”

  I bet, Judy thought, and she buried her face in her hands. She wondered how much Peter had told Barry about their last evening together and how she had failed tragically to transform their friendship into intimacy. She wondered how much of that Barry had already shared with the rest of the office.

  She should have known better than to sleep with an ex-colleague. It was always going to get back here at some point. It wouldn't have been so bad if she's actually got somewhere with him. As it was, the news that Peter had turned down a relationship, not once but twice, would be on every floor of the office. The warehouse lads were not beyond writing limericks on toilet walls.

  She was steeling herself for the revelation of this imaginary poem, seeking words that rhymed with ‘Judy’ and ‘dumped’, when Barry said:

  “I don't know who this Mark is and it's no business of mine...”

  “No, it's not.”

  “...but when it gets in the way of your work, it does concern me.”

  She was about to say something that she might regret.

  The old Judy would have smiled now and told him that he was absolutely right.

  The new Judy, whoever she was, was about to say the first thing to come into her head. The new Judy terrified her.

  “If I'd written the name Peter instead of Mark,” she said, “you wouldn't have minded. You'd have thought it was sweet. I know that you're a little bit in love with Peter and that you want to protect him from getting hurt. It's admirable. Rest assured that I care about him a great deal too and I wasn't toying with his emotions. Not that it's any business of yours.”

  Barry's mouth hung open, reminding her of something she had once seen in a travelling circus. There, squirting water from a pistol into the open mouth won you a prize. Here, it would get you the sack.

  She didn't feel afraid of losing her job, though.

  She felt impervious.

  Perhaps, she thought, this is what righteous anger feels like.

  Barry composed himself, barely.

  “I'm not in love with Peter,” he said, reddening. “I'm merely looking out for the interests of our team and the company.”

  “What do you want me to do, Barry?”

  “I want you to put in for holiday by the end of the week and I want you to take it.”

  “We'll see about that.”

  “And I want you to go home. Now. Get some sleep. I'll see you in the morning.”

  “I can't go home,” Judy laughed. “It's not even lunchtime.”

  “We'll get by without you,” Barry said.

  She didn't like the way he said that.

  She looked around her cubicle and a few pairs of eyes averted themselves from hers.

  “Fine,” she said. “I'll go.”

  She swept her papers up into a pile and opened up her bag to dump them inside.

  “Leave them,” Barry said.

  “These orders need verifying,” she said, indignant.

  “The only orders you need to concern yourself with our mine. Go.”

  She was about to protest, when a sadness came over his face and he practically pleaded with her:

  “Enjoy it,” he said.

  She closed her bag. Without the folders and half a ream of paper from the archive files, it felt pointless to carry it home.

  “I might leave this here,” she said.

  “It will be here tomorrow,” Barry said. “I promise.”

  She noted that he didn't say anything about her job being there too.

  * * * *

  She almost considered getting off the train a stop early and popping into the William Morris gallery on her way home, but that would have been salting her wounds. It would be a while before she could enter any gallery without thinking of her experience with Mark.

  “It's a good thing we didn't go on a date,” she told herself. “I'd be suicidal by now.”

  Although she was alone, she found herself moving through the flat as though somebody was asleep. She tip-toed from room to room, afraid of echoes. Echoes reminded her how alone she was.

  She flicked on the television for company. There was a nature program about nightingales on BBC1, alongside a history of Mark Twain on BBC2. ITV had a news item about this year's examination marks and Channel 4 seemed safe until it turned out to be a show for young people called On Your Marks.

  She flicked to Channel 5. Two lovers were in the midst of a passionate embrace. He was shoving her against the kitchen cabinet and she was rushing to unbutton his shirt, sliding it over his shoulders and her hands over his chest, their lips locked together as though being one person was not enough.

  Lucky girl, Judy thought. She'd have been satisfied to be part of one and a half people right now.

  The scene transferred the couple to the bedroom. A close up. First the pillow and then her head hitting it, her blonde hair perfect and wavy beneath her. She was starry-eyed as her beau descended from the top of the shot and they gazed into each other's eyes.

  Slowly, her lips parted and she hitched a breath and then they were moving subtly, together, matching rhythm with rhythm. Kissing. In love.

  “Isn't it a bit early for this?” she said to the television, but there was no answer aside from groans and gasps and then the hum of the TV going off and the clack of the remote control hitting a wall.

  She stood in the middle of the lounge, at a loss without her bag of official-looking papers to busy hers
elf with. There had been evenings when she had spread the papers all over the floor and had spent a couple of hours with a few glasses of white wine and a folder, organising everything into chronological order or alphabetical order or both, the important word being 'order'. She derived pleasure from bringing order to chaos, and that was why there was little housework left to occupy herself with either.

  She nudged her coffee table back into the exact middle of the room and straightened the coasters.

  There really was nothing to do.

  The walls were decorated with a calendar featuring countryside landscapes and she had three paintings, also landscapes, or rather three sections of the same scene, separated by eight inches of eggshell wall paint and bold, matching frames.

  At first, she had liked the rustic images in their own right. They depicted a young man beseeching an unknown woman for some favour—money, forgiveness, a second chance?—and rows of gentle trees and a hedgerow, waning light tinting the clouds over the hills and the remains of an old barn, almost silhouetted against the setting sun.

  Unlike many of Mark's favourite paintings and installations, these paintings had required skill to execute. People didn't learn to paint with this sensitivity or realism overnight. And the scenes were representations of something. They weren't just ideas thrown onto a wall. You didn't need to read three paragraphs to find out what the hell you were supposed to be feeling. That was why she liked these. They were solid. They were real. Dependable.

  And yet, she often found herself wondering what it was that the man was asking for. There was no expression on their faces. Close inspection reminded her that they had no faces. Their heads were bowed and her face in particular was heavily shadowed.

  She thought that he was begging her for something, because he was wringing his cap in his hands and looking at the ground, but maybe he had not spoken at all. Maybe she was chastising him.

  In that moment, she realised how much the implicit story depended upon the viewer.

  In that moment, she saw a man pleading for fairness and a woman as cruel as the approaching winter.

  Mark had suggested that the viewer meets the artist halfway. Maybe he was right about that. She felt that she had never really seen these paintings before, even though they had been on her walls for a year. She had bought them in an over-priced gallery near the river, because she wanted to treat herself.