‘Ri-ight,’ he said again. ‘Anyway, the point is that I hope you don’t think…I mean, jeez, I hope I haven’t given you…I mean, I hope you didn’t….’
And there was me thinking Americans were such articulate people. I gulped a bit more.
‘Hope I didn’t what?’
‘You know. Take offence. I mean it must have been obvious to you that –’ He stopped again. Why couldn’t he just say it? Then he did. Sort of. ‘– well, you know…. but if I’d known you were married, I wouldn’t have, you know, come on to you the way I did. I’m really not that kind of guy. I just –’
‘Hang on,’ I said, running my tongue over my suddenly dry lips. ‘You didn’t, you know. Not really. I mean, you did, sort of, I suppose, but then, well, you didn’t really. Not to any great extent. I mean I got the impression you would have liked to (my face exploded into a shocking hot blush here)… which was fine, but I thought…well, I assumed you didn’t because I was married. I thought…’
What did I think? What had I thought? What in God’s name was I thinking now? What, more importantly, did he think I’d been thinking? Blimey! Why did I say ‘which was fine’?
‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘It was just, you know, what with my situation and everything. And, well, work. Protocol. I mean, it’s not really appropriate for me to be–’
That word again.
‘Isn’t it?’ I said, for reasons of pique and frustration and with a definite squeak of dismay in my voice. ‘I mean, it’s not as if you’re my boss or anything. It’s –’ God, what was I saying here? ‘No,’ I said, hurriedly. ‘I suppose it isn’t. It’s just that I thought…well. There you go.’
‘Yes.’
‘Right.’
He coughed again. ‘Anyway, so no harm done, then.’
This was not an enquiry.
‘No,’ I agreed limply. ‘No harm done.’
No harm done? No harm done?? NO HARM DONE???? The conversation drew to a juddering, uncomfortable close, and I pressed the end button with shaking fingers and a big fizzle of crossness thrumming between my ears like a plucked banjo string. I got up and stomped around the lawn. No harm done? What was he thinking of? I felt very, very harmed indeed. As if I had been scooped up, shaken about, pummelled and prodded and then thrown down and left for the buzzards and flies. Everything inside me was jangling. I wanted to ring him straight back and tell him that yes, he was right. He had come on to me. Oh, yes, he had come on to me all right. And that even if the whole ‘coming on’ scenario was a naff, blokey thing and entirely the wrong expression to use in that particular circumstance, (the circumstance of us sitting romantically in the moonlight, on a sand dune, and discussing celestial matters and sharing the breathtaking wonder of our first shooting star together) that even if I didn’t know what the female response to ‘coming on’ should be called, that my status was jolly well one of having been come on to, and that it was really, really, really important that he understood that this was not one way traffic to be brushed off, no harm done; that I had all sorts of feelings and emotions about the business of having been come on to by him and that almost none of them were even remotely appropriate, because I really, really, really liked him too. I wanted to send him a text message telling him that I had started thinking about him almost every minute of every day and harbouring wildly unsuitable thoughts about holding him and kissing him and making love to him and having him bloody well finish the conversation he’d started back on that sand dune by taking me in his arms and falling in love with me and telling me he couldn’t live without me, and that it was damn well written in the stars – couldn’t I see that? – and that, sorry, but he couldn’t do a damn thing about it. Like in one of Ruths’ stories. Yes. That was it. Not burble on about apologising and appropriateness and telling me NO HARM DONE.
But I couldn’t do any of that stuff. I was married. I had a husband. I shouldn’t even be going there. I had to sit on my bench and feel all guilty and shaky and guilty and anxious and guilty and stricken. And guilty. Couldn’t. Shouldn’t. Wouldn’t. I downed the last of my Pimms and considered my position. Exceedingly Drunk. So I shuffled off to bed.
I didn’t sleep that night. Not once. Not at all. With the rather unfortunate net result that by the time Kate straggled blearily down to breakfast the next morning, I had done every scrap of washing in the house, including the top she’d been wearing that very evening, which contained the very important hen’s teeth type concert ticket for some evil sounding band she liked, for which she had paid a friend at dance class a whole twenty one pounds fifty and if it wasn’t too much trouble, would I now like to come up with some way to compensate her for her entire life being in tatters around her and the world as we know it having come to a brutal end?
Like, now?
This was better. This was normality. This was my life. I could cope.
I could cope.
‘Blimey!’ bellowed Ruth, when I arrived at work at twenty to eight with eyes like a pair of canapé eclairs and a critical mass of nasty tastes in my mouth. ‘Have the clocks gone back or something?’
And a banging headache. Must not drink in the week. ‘Oh, ha ha,’ I said, almost as surprised as she was by my ability to pretend that everything was just rosy. ‘No. I’m just showing willing. I had to leave early yesterday, so I thought I’d forestall any frowns of disapproval by coming in early and cracking on with some work. You look nice.’
She did, too. She was wearing a flowery summer dress with a bit of braid round the hemline, and a bodice that was threaded with a run of pink ribbon, which gathered up her excess of boobs. I imagined Nick Brown’s face buried between them. I thought I was going to be sick.
‘Well of course I look nice,’ she rattled on, swooshing her hips about and fiddling with the little bow at the front. ‘I’ve spent half the night getting ready.’ She looked down at herself. ‘Though I’m still not sure about this. Too demure, you think? My satin hipsters seemed too in-yer-face at seven.’ I imagined them in Nick’s face. I imagined Nick’s face in her crotch. Between courses, perhaps. Under the table.
Ruth seemed not to notice that I was turning grey. ‘And, well, lunch, you know. Daylight. There’s an uphill struggle and a half for you. I generally like them to get a glimmer of my sparkling personality before they get a full on dekko at the grim reality.’ Christ – what had she in mind? Sex in the cab? ‘But I bought my black vest and those pink pedal pushers, just in case. What d’ya think? I don’t want to send out the wrong signals.’
Well, now, I thought. There’s an expression. But flowery dress, ribbons, the fresh bloom in her cheeks. She looked, God – really, really pretty. I decided I hated her. For this morning, at any rate.
‘I think you look just right,’ I cooed.
When he arrived, a little before twelve thirty, I was out on the shop floor, explaining to the elderly lady I’d just tested that wearing varifocal lenses did not mean you could only see distant things from the kneecaps up. He nodded at me as he passed and indicated that he’d like a word before he went off-a-trysting with Ruth.
I realised with alarm that every time I saw him now, my pulse speeded up and my stomach did a pirouette.
‘Just a quick one,’ he said briskly as I fetched up, all a quiver, at the counter. He had one hand on the computer mouse and was scrolling through a list of what looked like sales figures on the screen. That done, he glanced up at me and smiled. ‘You OK?’
I was fully aware I looked revolting, so the tiny enquiring furrow that appeared on his forehead was entirely superfluous.
‘I’m fine,’ I said, hugging my clipboard to my chest.
‘I just wanted to –’ The phone on the desk started ringing. ‘Oh, hang on –’He picked it up, smiling at me while he listened. ‘Yep. Yep. Sure. Yep. Shoot. Uh-huh. No problem. Tell you what. I’m not the best person to deal with this, I don’t think. Let me put you on to one of the Optometrists, OK – ‘He put his hand over the receiver.
‘Secretary to a Dr Falstaff? Wants to talk to someone about some guy who was in here Tuesday? Glaucoma?’ I nodded.
‘I remember. It was me that tested him.’
He passed me the phone. I could smell his aftershave on it. ‘Catch you after lunch, then. Yes?’
*
He didn’t catch me after lunch, as it turned out, because he was not seen in Optometry again that day. Which, were it the product of foresight, would have been a very shrewd move, because Ruth might have laid waste to him if he had.
‘I cannot believe it! The bastard!’ was almost the very first thing she said to me when she burst into my testing room a little before three. The first thing she’d said had been ‘don’t ask’, so, naturally, I had.
‘Oh dear,’ I said, gesturing for her to sit down before she took out my desk fan with her angry flailing. ‘Lunch not an unqualified success, then?’
Truth be known, I had decided to give myself a good shaking over the matter of my feelings about her lunch with Nick Brown. Decided to give myself a good shaking generally. I had been off to Waterstones during my break and bought a book; ‘Infinite Choices – a thinking woman’s guide to fulfilment in the middle years’, which I had flicked through in the shop and which promised such encouraging chapters as ‘partner fatigue; reassessing your life-needs”, and ‘the fallow years – relighting your marital fire’. Depressing, then, that so far it had failed me. I tried to affect a look of anxious concern.
‘Lunch an unqualified disaster, as it happens,’ she growled at me. ‘Bastard. And Ruth Preston an unqualified twit. God, Sal, how could I have been such a prat?’ She plucked a tissue from my box.
‘So what happened, Ruth?’
‘Huh! He’s dumped me, the bastard! Dumped me! Just like that! Can you believe it?’
I felt the word dumped was a little histrionic seeing as how he’d not actually even been seeing her in the first place. But then again, perhaps theirs had been but a brief affair. Just a starter and main course romance.
‘Dumped you?’ I parroted back. ‘What do you mean, dumped you?’
‘Are you deaf!’ she squawked. ‘What I say! God, I am such a dim-wit!’
I wasn’t sure quite where to take the conversation next, so I said ‘no, you’re not,’ to be soothing.
‘Oh, I am. Thirty two sodding years on the planet and I still can’t see higher than a man’s dick. I need my head sticking in a bucket of whitebait. I am a brainless, stupid, libidinous fool!’ She plucked a whole handful of tissues from the box now and trumpeted extravagantly into them.
‘No you’re not,’ I said again, edging the refractor head away from her a little and thinking how rude the word libidinous sounded. Was that my problem? Was I just feeling libidinous? I must check out my book a bit more. ‘Look, Ruth. I know he’s nice and everything – ‘
‘No he’s not. He’s a slimy bastard.’
‘–and I know you like – liked him, but was he really the man for you? I mean, as you say, you’re only thirty two, you have everything to look forward to, and you –’
Her eyeballs had expanded so much by now that I thought they might just ping from their sockets and bounce off the walls like a couple of superballs.
‘Whaaattt?’ she shrieked. ‘Not dumped, you dozy cow! Hah! I should be so fucking lucky! Dumped, you fool! As in Dumped! As in Discarded. As in Made Redundant. Comprendez? Dumped. Bugger liking him. He’s a bastard. A devious bastard as well.’
I blinked hard to stop my own eyeballs flying out. ‘What? You’re kidding!’
‘I am not kidding Sal. I do not kid about matters this serious. I do not jest about losing my job. ’
My concern was now genuine. ‘But why? How? For what reason? When?’
She spread her hands and then dumped then in her lap. The pretty dress now made her seem vulnerable and young. ‘Because my job is about to be done by a computer, basically.’ She threw her head back, and laughed a humourless cackle of a laugh. ‘It’s such a bloody cliché it would be funny if it wasn’t me, wouldn’t it? Rationalization. That’s the word he used. Rationalization in that just as soon as Drug U Like can get all their super duper new system fucking fandango in place, they will no longer need people like me in the branches, basically. Everything will be done centrally. By machines. Tick tock. And call centres, which amount to pretty much the same thing. Therefore –’
‘But they can’t just make you redundant, can they? Not just like that.’
‘Oh, I think they can. But it wouldn’t look so good if they did, I guess. Not so hot for morale. So they don’t actually use the word redundant, of course. He’s offered me another job instead.’
A glimmer of hope, then. ‘Which is?’
‘Which is contact lens dispensing in West Worthing,’ she spat. ‘Frankly, I would rather be dead.’
But he did catch me. In the end, he did.
I was in the staff car park, having waved a still tearful Ruth off, and rummaging in my bag for my keys.
‘Sally,’ he called. He was standing in the shadows a few cars away from me. I shovelled all my stuff in the back while he walked over. ‘Is Ruth OK?’ he asked, his keys swinging from his hand. He had a hands free mobile dangly bit clipped to his shirt front. ‘She didn’t seem to take things very well.’
‘No and no,’ I answered, reflecting that a large part of the anger I now felt was due to the fact that he could still have such a disabling effect on me, when he’d just dis-employed my best friend. I spotted his car. Another Mercedes. His company car then, presumably. He was being pretty well rewarded for putting people out of work. ‘And I can’t say I’m surprised, frankly. I mean, she had no idea. You could have given her some warning, couldn’t you?’ I wondered if he had the first idea what her real expectations of their meeting had been. Probably not, I decided. ‘I mean,’ I went on ‘It’s not every day people turn up for work and find themselves being made redundant out of the blue now, is it?’
‘Redundant? Since when was she being made redundant?’ He looked genuinely surprised.
I raised my eyebrows. ‘Well, isn’t she? To all intents and purposes? Isn’t she? You can use all the corporate jargon you want, but whichever way you dress it up, she’s lost her job, hasn’t she? Which in my book amounts to pretty much the same thing.’
He opened his mouth as if to start to deny it, but then stopped.
‘Listen,’ he said, pushing one hand through his hair and grimacing. He looked pretty tired himself, I thought. Perhaps we should compare our latest insomnia remedies. Or perhaps not. He deserved not to sleep. ‘It really wouldn’t be appropriate for me to discuss this with you. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have mentioned it at all. I was just a bit concerned. That was all. Truth is, I hadn’t expected Ruth to be quite so negative – ‘
‘Not be quite so negative? You mean you expected her to leap on the table and say “yeehah! I lost my job! Well, dang, if I don’t just feel like giving y’all a quick rendition of the Star Spangled Banner!” Really?’ I took a breath to stop any more gushing out and my P45 riding on the crest of it. Then I said, ‘Come on. I mean, Worthing? She lives in Godstone, for God’s sake!’ His mouth had the temerity to twitch a bit at this unintentional alliteration, which made me feel intensely irritable with him. I was tired. I had had no lunch, and most of all I was frustrated by my inability to stand and have a conversation with him without wanting to leap on him in a bestial way. Even though I was so cross with him. How could that be? Was I ill?
I folded my arms and glared at him instead.
‘Look, Sally,’ he said. ‘I don’t really want to go here with you right now, but, you know, things aren’t that straightforward. There are personnel changes that have to be made and right now I’m the guy who’s got to implement them. I thought we’d done OK by Ruth – she’s a lovely girl and we want to offer her something that’ll exploit her skills. If she feels that negative about it, there’s little I can do, is there? Hey, I don�
�t run the company, you know.’
I nearly said ‘oh, yes? And which skills would those be, exactly?’ But I stopped myself. He looked genuinely concerned and I suddenly felt chastened. It couldn’t have been one of the highlights of his job, I supposed, being charged with having to prise people out of jobs they’d (naively?) assumed were theirs in perpetuity, any more than it was one of mine to tell people they were losing their sight. But even so, was it really necessary? Was this really progress? How soon before the likes of me got replaced by some computer program? That the patients got their eyes tested by an MRI scanner? Or had to plop them out and send them off in jiffy bags by second class post? I wished he wasn’t staring at me so earnestly. It made me want to flop against him and groan into his shirt. Must Not Drink In The Week. Must NOT.
‘Me next, then, is it?’ I snapped instead.
He lifted an arm up then dropped it again. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘you know you’re secure here.’
I got into my car. ‘Oh, good.’ I replied, shutting the door and rolling down the window. ‘As long as I’m OK.’ I whizzed the window back up again. ‘No harm done, then, eh? Goodbye!’
*
I watched him through the rear view mirror as I left the car park. He was three cars behind me and talking to someone on his mobile phone. But the hands free kit made it look like he was simply a mad person talking to himself. I realised I knew almost nothing about him. That he could be a mad person. He could certainly be a bastard. Was a bastard, according to Ruth. Yet, no matter how sorry I felt for Ruth at that moment, I knew she was wrong about that . Dear oh dear. I must be ill, mustn’t I? Ill and cross.
I stopped to get petrol and stuffed down a king size Twix, which improved my temper a little. Actually, I thought, he was right. It wasn’t his fault. Perhaps I should send him a text message later, to apologise for ranting at him. And maybe I could tell him about the onion cure I’d picked up from the new insomnia site I’d found on the internet, and maybe I could see how his rib was doing, and …..
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