Such a vivid memory, suddenly. (‘Cheers, Roy!’). I was standing in the playground at St Bede’s; it was the evening of the parent–teacher meetings, and I was waiting for Richard. Winter. It must have been because all the commuting fathers, who had come straight from the station, were hurrying in with their thick dark coats and their briefcases. Each man stopped to ask me where they might find their child’s classroom. They knew the name of their kid – hey, credit where it’s due! – but, generally, that was the limit of their knowledge. They didn’t know who the child’s teacher was, sometimes didn’t even know what year group they were in. They had no clue where the little coats and bags were hung up, or what was in those bags. And I stood there in that cold, dark playground thinking, how could this ever possibly be fair? How could a woman compete when men were allowed to be so oblivious? One parent not knowing who the teacher was, not knowing what went in the lunchbox, not knowing which child in the class had the nut allergy, not knowing where the PE bag was, or which stinky little socks needed washing. OK, one parent could be oblivious. But not two. One parent has to carry the puzzle of family life in their head, and mostly, let’s face it, it’s still the mum. Professionally, back then I was competing with men whose minds were clear of all the stuff that small children bring. I used to envy them once; now I feel only pity.
Anyway, it was definitely the right call to go to the concert, and Richard really missed out. In the middle of ‘Jingle Bells’, our boy did an amazing solo on percussion which, in typical Ben fashion, he had forgotten to mention. You know those moments when you see your child in a whole new light? Well, this was one of them. That sulky, hoodied creature who grumps and slumps around the house was transformed into a glorious young musician moving deftly from drums to cymbal, while clearly enjoying himself. His syncopated sleigh bells nearly brought the house down.
Now, we are having tea and mince pies in the hall.
‘You look pretty, Mum,’ says Ben, separating himself from friends in the jazz ensemble and coming over to say hello.
‘New hair.’
I even get a hug, well, an awkward sideways clasp, more like a collision than a hug, but I’m not complaining.
‘Oh, hello, Kate.’ I turn to see the oppressively elegant figure of Cynthia Knowles, who is holding a box of mince pies. ‘It’s fine to donate these mince pies, Kate,’ Cynthia says with a tinkling laugh. ‘No one cares that you haven’t made your own any more. Do you remember that loony woman we read about who distressed supermarket mince pies, took them to a school carol concert and pretended she made them herself?’ Oh, yes, think I vaguely remember her. (Roy?)
9.29 pm: The office party is in Shoreditch. Of course it is. Any district of London that I took care to avoid when I first came to London aged twenty-two is now, by definition, the place to be. How does a wasteland become a hotspot? Property prices, for a start, as people retreat further from the hub until they find a zone they can just about afford. Then they make a hub of their own, and wait for the service industries to follow. Easier these days, of course, since you don’t take a wreck of an old warehouse and tart it up. You barely tart at all. You sweep it and rewire it and throw out all the junk but keep the bare brick walls and the naked piping. Ventilators are very à la mode. First you install wifi and a coffee machine the size of a fairground booth. Then you buy a job lot of Formica tables and rutted wooden benches and clanky metal chairs from a school that just closed down. Lastly, you hire a brace of blokes called Thaddeus and Job with beards that hint, incorrectly, at a long and distinguished career in the merchant navy. Voila. You have a café.
The party is in a place called The Place. Or, to be precise, ‘#thepl@ce’. That’s what it said on the email. It was going to be at somewhere even more brutal by the name of Number Forty7, which is, needless to say, located at number 103 on some grotty side street, until one of the company directors looked it up and saw the words ‘Grime crews’. Which, again, sounds like something to do with the merchant navy, but apparently refers to the kind of music that makes your brain rattle around your skull like a pea in a whistle. So that was out.
I enter #thepl@ce trying not to feel like a total #pr@t. The lighting is of that wintry dimness which would have my mother fussing around the room, switching on every lamp and muttering, ‘You’d think somebody had died.’ Personally, I blame it on all those Nordic thrillers on TV. None of the detectives would dream of using anything brighter than a torch to inspect the latest corpse. And where else is any self-respecting serial killer meant to lurk, if not in a swathe of shadow? I feel I should be wearing a homely knitted sweater, with my hair scraped back, and maybe a pair of rubber gloves to pick up crucial clues. Rather than what I am wearing, which is my lovely, black satin Dolce & Gabbana dress, ten years old and still going strong. It hikes the right bits up and holds the wrong bits in: job done. Completely wasted here, of course, given the neo-Finnish gloom. From more than two yards away I might as well be dressed in a bin liner. Monica Bellucci could walk by, in nothing but her smallest pair of knickers, and hardly anyone would notice. She would be little more than a fragrant blur.
I really really don’t want to be here – all this pretending to be someone I’m not just to make myself acceptable to these people. Beyond a certain age, you don’t want to stand on the edge of a party, plucking up courage to dive in. I need a drink. A waiter stalks past, with no hair on his head, his chin, his upper lip, his eyebrows, or, I shudder to imagine, anywhere else at all. But he does have a tray in his hand.
‘Erm.’
‘Yes?’ he says, swivelling round and looking cross.
‘Sorry, excuse me, but would it be possible to have one of those?’ A very modern encounter, this: the anxious, old-school middle class apologising to the robotic new age for having done nothing wrong. He frowns, still peeved by the interruption. A waiter who does not want to wait. His tray is triangular.
‘Castro. Or Gangnam,’ he says.
I have nothing to say. No words will meet the case. Come on, Kate, at least try.
‘Oh! What’s in the Gangnam?’
‘Glencarraghieclaghanbrae. Garam masala. Stout.’
‘I think I’ll try a Castro, please.’
The man-machine hands me my drink and marches off, barely able to restrain his wrath. My cocktail is in a jam jar, obviously. Much more cutting-edge than a cocktail glass, though it’s hard for your mouth to get any purchase on the screw-top rim, and the probability that it will have an actual cutting edge is ominously high. Holding it, I sense an overwhelming urge to run off and collect tadpoles with a net. Or a dotted cloud of frogspawn, so that you can watch them hatch.
‘Kate.’
Now it is my turn to swivel.
‘Jay-B! Hello.’
‘Kate, can I introduce our chairman, Harvey Boothby-Moore. Harvey, this is our new recruit, Kate Reddy, from Marketing.’
The chairman looms up, coming close, then closer still. Either he’s trying to get the measure of me, in the deep twilight, or I’ve caught him in the middle of a game of hide and seek. I can see him thinking, ‘Warmer. Warmer …’
At last he stops. His gaze rakes me up and down, as if I were in the paddock at Ascot. Long time since I had my fetlocks inspected. At least my flanks are pretty good after doing nine thousand squats with Conor.
‘Good to have you on board, young lady,’ he says. ‘Heard great things about you. Keep it up!’
Young lady, eh? OK, it’s dark here, but I’ll take that.
‘I shall, thank you.’ I take a sip of my Castro. If someone could distil those blue sanitising blocks that you hang under the rim of the toilet, this is what they would taste like.
Harvey backs away, ready to move on, then pauses. ‘Well done with the Russkies,’ he says. ‘Buggers are rolling in the stuff, but it’s not always easy to make them cough up. Trouble is they know their own bank balance, but not their own minds. If they have any, hrump-a-hrump.’ I can’t swear, but I think that was the Boothby-Moore idea of a lau
gh. Like a bullfrog trying and failing to suppress a burp.
‘Well, actually, I found them surprisingly amenable to our ideas,’ I say, lapsing with ease into fluent corporate blah. Another slug of loo cleaner, to get my courage up. Ouch. Bloody jam jar. ‘Especially if one tries to engage them at the personal level.’
Harvey smiles.
‘I bet one does. Hrump. Isn’t that right, Roy?’
‘Troy, sir.’
‘Toy? As in boy?’
‘Troy.’
I hadn’t noticed that Troy had joined our group, sidling out of the murk and hovering expectantly just behind my left shoulder.
‘Like the war,’ says Harvey. ‘Hrumpa. Don’t you agree, young Troy? Kate here did a good job with our Russian friends?’
‘Of course. That’s what I said at the time,’ Troy replies. He said nothing of the sort, the creep. Did everything he could to mess it up. Is he still bent on revenge?
‘Anyway,’ says Harvey, summing up, as dominant males like to do, with a single, sonorous clap of the hands. ‘Well done, you lot. Happy Christmas and all that. Don’t get too plastered if you can help it. Need to hit the New Year running. Hrump-a-hrump.’ He moves on, with Jay-B as his wingman, steadily working his way around the party and bringing one conversation after another to an awkward halt.
‘Champagne?’ Troy is offering me a glass.
‘God, an actual drink in a proper glass. Thank you. Is there anywhere I can put this, um …’
He takes my jam jar and puts it on the lid of a closed grand piano. That will not end well.
‘What have you got there?’ I ask. He is nursing something brown and sticky, in a chemical flask.
‘Gangnam. My fourth. Does the business.’
‘I’m sure it does.’ There is a pause.
‘Cheers, Kate. Happy Christmas!’
‘Cheers.’
We sip in silence, while the music hums around us, overlaid with the horn section of human laughter. ‘Love that dress,’ Troy says.
‘My trusty old Dolce & Gabbana.’
‘Those Italians, they know how to make the most of a woman’s figure. Not that you need much help in that department, Kate.’
Christ. The bastard just flicked the flirting switch. Watch out. Operation Screw the Old Lady, the one he plotted with Lech Hatch, is clearly under way. Thank you, dear Alice, for tipping me off.
‘Be perfectly honest with you, I noticed it the first time you walked into the office.’
‘That’s kind of you, Troy. Bit nerve-racking coming back to work after time out. Glad you thought I looked OK.’
Troy moves closer. Close enough to feel his curry breath on my neck. He squeezes his eyes and licks his lips.
What he does next I still can’t quite believe. Puts down his drink, lowers his head towards me, as if to impart a confidential secret, and murmurs: ‘You know what time it is?’
‘Sorry, no.’
‘It’s the time that, ten years ago, you’d know you’d pulled.’
It takes me a couple of seconds to understand. Oh, I see. This acned urchin would be taking me home to bed around now, if I were a decade younger and still worthy of being fancied. The calculating swipe at my age is clearly designed to wound, and, dammit, it does. That’s what I mind most: not the insult itself but the fact that, as the c-word himself would say, it does the business. A knife slipped in between the ribs and given a twist. Not that I’ll give him the satisfaction of seeing how mortifying it is.
‘In your dreams, Toy,’ I say, trying to stay as cool and as level as I can. ‘Or is it Boy?’
With that, I carefully pour the rest of my champagne into his Gangnam, missing not a drop. He stands there, numb and dumb, a rich mahogany froth rising in the flask and spilling over the edge. Then, I carefully position one heel on top of his shoe, followed by the whole of my body weight. Troy lets out an extremely satisfying yelp.
‘Give my love to Grant,’ I say. The yelp stops. Then I turn, not too fast, and walk away. Time to get out of here.
‘Kate?’ I stop. There is no escape. There is never any escape.
‘Alice, hi,’ I say. She is wearing a Santa-red dress, of a length that was insanely fashionable around Christmas 1922. It looks astounding on her.
‘Wow. You. In that. Wow!’ My powers of speech have yet to recover from Troy’s cruel jibe.
‘I was a bit worried I looked like a prezzie under the tree.’ Her cheekbones glitter as she catches what little light there is.
‘What’s wrong with that? Who doesn’t want a prezzie?’
‘Max for one. Not tonight.’
‘What?’
‘He said he would come with me, come here, meet you and everyone else. Then he cried off at the last minute. Sent me a text saying he had some work thing of his own. But he doesn’t have a job. There’s a waitress he likes at the tennis club.’ She tips her head back. ‘I feel like such a flapper.’ Tears are gathering, and she doesn’t want them to brim over and ruin her make-up.
I can’t think of much to tell her, so I take her hand. ‘Men,’ I say at last.
‘I know.’ She sniffs and laughs at the same time, and it comes out in a small explosion: a snarf? I dig into my bag for a tissue. Help. The last packet got used up in a single wodge, when Lenny came back from the bottom of the garden having rolled in something unspeakable. Fox poo, probably. Ah. One left, strangely unused.
‘Thanks,’ she says. ‘Kate, can you stay here a minute or two? I just need the loo, back as soon as I can, promise. Don’t go anywhere. I only want to talk to you. Not guys. If you see any more champagne or anything, grab it for both of us, OK?’
‘OK.’ All I want to do is go home, take this stupid dress off, raid the fridge, make a hot drink, give Lenny a cuddle and watch some property porn on TV. ‘I’ll be right here.’
I look around. Harvey the Hrump is in a distant corner, clapping his hands, Jay-B bobbing at his side. Troy, though limping, is dancing with the only black woman in the firm, leaning in to talk to her, in intimate roars, against the thump of the music. What can he possibly be saying to her that is not altogether embarrassing? I wouldn’t put it past him to congratulate her on her natural rhythm, in which case she will take a step backwards and slap him in the chops. You go, girl.
I feel very lost, suddenly, in this dark place, thronged with people younger than me, their bodies uneroded by the years, their energies consistent, their memories sharp, their hopes so ridiculously high. Come on, Alice, where are you? How long does it take to have a pee and dry your crying eyes?
‘Kate?’ Oh God, not another one. Can I please be left alone? Just this once?
‘Kate.’ A touch on my arm. Wearily, I turn.
You?
And, with that, dear reader, I do something rather impressive. Something I don’t recall doing ever since I was waiting for a vaccination, at school, aged nine, and Karen Milburn did it first, and then my best friend Susan next to her, then the girl after Susan, then me, then Carol Dunster, and so on, like a row of dominoes.
I faint. That’s right, a true, honest-to-God, swirling-mist, Disney-princess swoon. Only this time I don’t wake up on the floor of the gym, with Mr Plender the PE teacher leaning over me in a tracksuit, looking annoyed. I wake up still upright, or almost upright, gently held in the crook of one arm by a man I thought I would never see again in this world or the next. And the first thing I say, God help me, is: ‘How long was I gone?’
Jack Abelhammer considers. ‘About seven years, I make it. Give or take a week.’
‘No, silly, now. How long did I black out for?’
‘Seconds. Don’t worry, silly, I caught you. Nobody noticed. You’re fine. Are you fine?’
‘You sound as if this sort of thing happens to you all the time. Women fainting in your arms.’
‘It’s true. They keel over as I walk down the street.’
‘I hate you.’
‘It’s great to see you too.’
For a moment, I stay there
, not wanting to move.
‘Please release me.’
‘That’s what Elvis said. Can you stand?’
‘I think so.’ Slowly, bracing against his grasp, I manoeuvre myself back to the perpendicular. The room still swims a little.
‘Drink this.’ He offers me a tumbler. I sniff. Proper alcohol, not a cocktail. Down it goes in one.
‘Aaah.’
‘Better now?’
I stand back, wavering a touch, and look at him. Damn the man, why did time have to leave him alone and trash the rest of us?
‘Much better, thank you.’ I try to sound prim. It doesn’t work. ‘Jack, I’m terribly sorry, I don’t mean to be nosy, but what precisely the fuck are you doing here? At my Christmas party?’
‘Oh, it’s your party, is it? Do you want me to leave?’
‘No,’ I say, looking down, ‘I want you to stay.’
‘So, I went to your office, and—’
‘You what?’
‘Your office. The place you work. Come on, even you must go there sometimes.’
‘But nobody told—’
‘You weren’t there. You were out with a client. So I made enquiries, and the very nice lady on reception said—’
‘Dolores. Downstairs.’
‘Dolores. A treasure.’
‘A battle-axe. How did you get anything out of her?’
‘I have my methods, Watson. So I said I was your date for the Christmas party, and I’d forgotten—’
‘How did you know about the Christmas party?’
‘Dolores told me.’
‘My date? After seven years, you just show up and you’re my date? Come to that, why didn’t you reply to my bloody email?’
‘I thought what I needed to tell you should be said in person.’
‘Kate.’ Another voice. Oh dear God.
‘Alice. How was the, the—’
‘The ladies’ loo? It was fine, thanks. Like a loo. For ladies. Hello,’ she says, turning to Jack and holding out a scarlet-nailed hand. ‘I’m Alice.’
‘Alice. I’m Jack.’ He takes her one hand in both of his. I merely swooned, but she melts, as if next to a naked flame.
How Hard Can It Be? Page 31