Stop the Clock

by Alison Mercer

  ‘Monday at eleven it is, then,’ she said.

  ‘Looking forward to it.’

  He hung up, and Tina put the phone back and allowed herself to cry.

  She’d known, in principle, when she’d started the Vixen Letters that one day she would finish, just as she’d known, on the first day she’d walked into the offices of the Post, that one day she would pass the other way through the revolving doors and never return . . . and the first time she and Justin had gone up to a hotel room, it had occurred to her that there would be a final rendezvous too.

  You couldn’t let the inevitability of last spoil the sweetness of first, or put you off, or deter you. You could usually forget the conclusion altogether if the beginning was sufficiently seductive. But oh Lord, sometimes, when the ending came into view, it seemed like one hell of a price to pay.

  But feeling sorry for herself wasn’t going to help. She needed to work out whom to ask to look after William on Monday morning.

  She balked at asking her mother, because she didn’t want to have to lie, and she didn’t want to tell the truth either. Up until now, she’d been able to square up to Cecily with her head more or less held high. She kept telling herself, I’ll show them. It’s all going to turn out fine. I don’t need a husband to help me raise this baby, I can support him, I have a job. But if she lost her job, her situation would begin to look as unfortunate in her own eyes as it already did to her parents.

  She decided to call Natalie, though she couldn’t remember whether Natalie worked Mondays or not. As she explained what had happened she was aware that her voice was high and breathless, not far off hysterical.

  ‘OK, Tina, deep breaths,’ Natalie told her. ‘Really – don’t sweat it. You’ll be fine. Bring him round on Monday morning. I’ll be here, and hopefully out of my pyjamas.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Tina said. ‘So . . . are you all right?’

  There was a short, enigmatic silence, and then Natalie said, ‘Everything seems to be shifting, and I don’t know what’s going to happen when it settles. I know that sounds evasive, but I can’t really say much more right now.’

  ‘So if I were to ask you if you and Richard are breaking up, you’d say you couldn’t tell me?’

  ‘That’s about right, yes.’

  ‘You sound as if you’ve made your peace with it anyway, whatever it is that’s happening, or however it’s going to turn out.’

  ‘I don’t know about that. Things seem a bit clearer, maybe. Though possibly only to me.’

  They said goodbye, and Tina went over to the photo montage mounted above the mantelpiece and looked for Richard. There he was, in his wedding suit on the steps outside Marylebone Register Office, next to Natalie in her cream lace prom dress, both laughing as they were pelted with confetti.

  She had known Richard almost as long as she’d known Natalie; they had always seemed so well suited. And yet now it turned out that they had been fundamentally incompatible from the start.

  And as for Lucy and Adam, their wedding had been a much more traditional affair, complete with the big white dress, the July drizzle, the chilly church, the even chillier marquee in the grounds of a country house hotel, and the drunken and marginally inappropriate best man’s speech.

  There had been an undertow of family tension: Hannah had looked much too thin in her strapless bridesmaid’s dress; Lucy’s father had opted to leave straight after the church service to catch a flight back to Spain; and Ellen hadn’t created a scene or anything, but had got so paralytically drunk that Richard had to help her up to bed at the end of the night. Adam’s family, meanwhile, had been conspicuous by its absence; he had no siblings or cousins or uncles or aunts, and his father, the widower, looked frail and lonely.

  Yet Adam and Lucy had been so completely happy. As if nothing could touch them.

  There they were, a gorgeous couple; they could have come straight off the top of the cake. Adam was quietly proud, young love’s dream with those tender eyes and the dark hair and that kissable, sculpted face, and Lucy looked as soft and pretty as a rose in bloom, and as treasured as a princess.

  How could it all have gone so wrong? Damn it, Tina needed to be able to experience companionable love by proxy, if not at first hand . . . Surely somebody’s relationship had to work out?

  If she lost her job, she would sooner or later get another. She imagined that finding love after marriage would be an infinitely tougher challenge, and might bring much less certain rewards.

  On Monday morning Tina got William fed and dressed, showered, put on her new Magic Knickers and squeezed into a navy-blue skirt suit, blouse, the obligatory tights and high heels.

  She checked her foundation, mascara and lip gloss, and spritzed herself with perfume. Classic Chanel, nothing too sexy. What a palaver! How had she ever managed to do all this and get to her desk for 9.00 a.m.? How was she ever going to do it again? Every weekday and occasional weekends and Bank Holidays? And why did anyone say that motherhood made you glow? She wasn’t glowing. She looked extinguished. And what was happening to her hair? She hadn’t had it cut for ages – how was she ever going to make time to have it cut again? – and now it was coming out in handfuls every time she washed it.

  Where once she’d been lean, fit and hungry, now she was exhausted, terrified and soft. She was in no fit shape to fight for her professional life.

  She carried William downstairs at arm’s length so he wouldn’t sick up on her suit. She drove to Natalie’s, and after she had dropped William off she nipped to the newsagent’s across the road to bag a copy of that day’s Post. Then she joined the post-rush-hour traffic, praying she’d be able to find a space in the Post’s small and oversubscribed underground car park.

  It turned out that staff losses had an upside; she was able to park almost straight away. She was half an hour early. Just right. She’d wait in the car: it would be too painful to sit in reception, as if she was a potential tryout invited for interview.

  If Dan had been in, she might have gone up to say hello, but he’d just flown out to interview a famously sexy actress, known for being significantly nicer to male journalists than to women, on the set of her latest film. Admittedly the film was being shot in the Scottish Highlands rather than somewhere hot and sunny, but still . . . hardly a chore.

  Poor Dan, he’d spent hours talking her down, reassuring her that neither of them were going to lose their jobs, that she wouldn’t be forced to crawl to her parents for a handout, that she wouldn’t end up on the breadline. There was no one else whose desk she would feel welcome to loiter at for any length of time, in the absence of having her own.

  This was not how she had wanted to come back. Now that Dan’s paternity was out in the open, she’d been planning to bring William in sometime, show him off, the way other mothers did with their new babies. It would have been much too weird to do it before, but now Dan could come and join in receiving the congratulations, it might be kind of fun. But this . . . this was excruciating – and totally surreal. It was almost enough to make her question if she still belonged here.

  She put on the overhead light, opened the paper and started flicking through it, looking for the article Dan had told her was going in that day. He’d said it was something about becoming a dad, and his own father, and had asked her if she’d like to read it before he submitted it, but she’d been much too busy flapping about the prospect of redundancy to bother, and anyway, it had sounded pretty innocuous. She was much more interested in what he was planning to ask the man-eating actress.

  There it was! Nice big photo – he looked pretty good. He was wearing the new jacket she’d encouraged him to buy when they’d gone mooching round the fag end of the sales; it was dark blue, well cut, but unobtrusive, and had the effect of making him look a bit more formal and high-minded than usual.

  Next to the photo of Dan was a small black-and-white inset of an old chap standing barefoot on a beach, his trousers rolled to the knee, gazing at the camera with a rueful, absent-m
inded smile.

  Why I’ll Never Be a Match for My Father

  by Dan Cargill

  These days I find myself thinking about my own father in a fresh light. He never made much money; he worked as a hospital porter, and my mother was furious when she found out that he regularly donated small amounts of his modest salary to a range of charities, but he was a good man, fond of a pint, regarded with affection, loved by everyone who knew him. He had an otherworldly aura that comes across even in photographs – like the framed holiday snap that has place of honour at my bedside, joined, now, by a picture of my infant son, who, in this image at least, has much the same air of quiet, inexpressible knowingness.

  Idealistic men do not always make good fathers, but my father was naturally interested in how children saw the world, and he seemed to enjoy playing with us as much as we loved playing with him. It wasn’t all building dens, planting cress and floating paper boats on the pond, though. My mother worked full-time as a secretary and, as far as he was concerned, that meant shirking household duties wasn’t an option – an attitude he got some stick for, both from his friends and from my grandparents. But he shrugged off their teasing. He cooked, cleaned, made up bottles of formula and changed nappies. His cooking was a bit hit and miss, but you can’t have everything, and I don’t think my mother will hold it against me if I point out that hers is the same.

  I always thought that, at some point in the future – when I grew up – I would be as good a dad as Dad. And now I’m not, and never will be. You know what fathers of small babies look like: exhausted, but proud. My nights aren’t broken by my son crying – he’s yet to stay overnight – but still, oddly, I find it hard to sleep. I often wake with a start and wonder if it’s because he has, if we are unconsciously connected. I think about him all the time, wondering what he is doing, and in place of pride, I have the sad, tired, niggling sensation of separation and loss.

  This is what happens when you have distance where intimacy should be. I think this is what heartache feels like, and I’ve never known anything like it. It’s different from grief, because the loss is not complete, but just like grief, it’s a process of learning to live with what’s not there.

  My father died two and a half years ago. Afterwards, I threw myself into work; I guess I was belatedly trying to prove something to him. I still defer to his advice on difficult predicaments, and I’ve thought a lot about what he would have said to me about my current situation. I think it would probably have boiled down to: What can’t be cured must be endured. I’m an absentee father. I have to accept it, make the best of it, and stick with it. There will be an answer. Dad was boundlessly optimistic, and often that’s more helpful than looking ahead and seeing only gloom and doom.

  My mother is going to meet her new grandson for the first time next weekend. I’m very grateful to my ex for facilitating this. Now she’s a mother herself I think she knows how much it means.

  I hope this means my ex and I can find a way to be a family, even if we can’t be a couple. After all, marriages come and go, but she’ll always be the mother of my child. So this Mother’s Day, I’ll be drinking a toast to mothers everywhere, and I’d urge everyone to do the same. But spare a thought for fathers, too.

  Tina folded the newspaper and dabbed her eyes with a tissue. God! Crying again.

  She checked her make-up in the rear-view mirror, turned off the light, got out of the car, remembered to lock it, smoothed her skirt and walked towards the lift. Her heels tapped smartly on the concrete. She’d spent months in slippers or trainers; it had been so long since she’d worn proper shoes that she felt like a little girl dressing up.

  The interview, if you could call it that, took place in a small office with no window apart from a glass wall thoughtfully exposing whoever was in it to the scrutiny of passers-by. It was as if Tina had been summoned to take part in a non-optional reality TV show, and she half expected an authoritative regional voiceover to cut in and provide a commentary, making pseudo-scientific observations about her body language and speech patterns.

  There were three of them present: herself, Jeremy and an HR woman called Frances, all sitting at one end of a long table that took up most of the space in the room. Frances looked exhausted, and had evidently done more of these sessions than was good for her; Jeremy looked well, but bored and restless. Tina took that as a good sign. If he had been poised to oust her she thought he would have looked marginally more engaged.

  It quickly became apparent that this was more an information session than a sacking, and that Jeremy regarded it as a tedious formality. He treated Frances with barely disguised contempt, and Tina remembered that he had always thought the HR department was superfluous. Jeremy reckoned editors should be able to hire and fire as they chose, unencumbered by internal bureaucracy and the patsies who administered it.

  As Frances explained what Tina might be entitled to should she choose to leave she felt her breasts prickling and knew she was oozing milk. She didn’t dare glance down to see if any of it had come through. It was hot in the little goldfish bowl of an office and she would have quite liked to take her jacket off, but she didn’t dare do that either. She would just have to hope her breast pads were still in place. She could smell the sickly sweet odour of her deodorant, rising to combat the fresh reek of fear. She imagined herself looking redder and redder.

  At last Frances glanced at Jeremy and said, ‘I think that’s everything, isn’t it? Thank you for coming in, Tina. We’ll let you get back to your baby now.’

  Jeremy stood up and leaned across the table to shake Tina’s hand. He said, ‘Thank God that’s over. For a minute back then I thought you were going to blub. You look all hot and bothered. It isn’t hormones, is it?’

  ‘No,’ Tina said, ‘you need to turn the heating down. It’s not like it’s the depths of winter any more. Save the planet and cut costs at one fell stroke.’

  ‘You hear that, Frances?’ Jeremy said. ‘See, my writers do care about the bottom line.’

  Frances raised her eyebrows at Jeremy to indicate that she wasn’t done with him yet. Jeremy scowled and sat down again and Tina went out and took the lift without bumping into anybody.

  She got out at the ground floor to go to the ladies’. Only sales, circulation and partworks down here, so no one she knew well, and less risk of having to make conversation.

  She changed her breast pads. Sopping wet, and there were spots of damp on her blouse, so it was just as well she’d kept the jacket on. She was already looking forward passionately to collecting William. Thank God for Natalie: dear, kind, steadfast Natalie . . . who had plenty of problems of her own.

  Someone came into the stall next to her and began to pee. Tina was reminded of the awkwardness of sharing toilet facilities with people at work; one minute you were excreting next to someone, the next you were trying to psych them out with your professionalism.

  The woman next to her flushed and continued to rustle. Changing tights? Tina decided to make a run for it. There was a social code for these occasions: high-ups usually preferred to pretend they hadn’t seen you, equals and allies might chat, and underlings could be briefly acknowledged. But easiest of all was to avoid contact altogether.

  She let herself out and washed her hands. God! She had an inch’s worth of roots, and there was white at her temples – veritable white!

  The door of the other stall opened and Julia McMahon came out, clocked Tina’s reflection in the mirror and stomped up to the basin next to her.

  ‘Hello, Julia,’ Tina said. Oh God – could it be any worse? She took a paper towel and dried her hands. Quicker than the blower. She could be out of here in three seconds flat.

  ‘What are you doing skulking round down here?’ Julia asked, and Tina wished she’d gone for the dryer after all. She could have pretended not to hear.

  She mumbled something about having popped in for a quick meeting with Jeremy, and Julia said, ‘Ah. Yes. That meeting.’ She looked at Tina more closely. ‘Ar
e you all right? You’ve gone very red in the face.’

  ‘Yes, well, I’m the single parent of a nine-week-old baby and I’ve just had it explained to me that if I don’t offer myself up for voluntary redundancy I’ll probably have to reapply for my job and might end up losing it. I’ve had better days,’ Tina said, dropping the paper towel in the bin. ‘Still, it’s a tough time for everybody, isn’t it? I don’t imagine morale is particularly high.’

  Julia shrugged. ‘I guess with any change there are winners and losers.’

  ‘Oh come on. If a fifth of us are fired, who is that good news for? There’s still the same amount of paper to fill. Those who are left will just have to work harder than ever.’

  Julia hit the button on the blower and said loudly over the noise, ‘Some of us don’t mind hard work. Putting in the extra hours. Networking. I guess it’s a lot easier when you don’t have to rush back to do the pick-up from nursery. But then, maybe Dan will be willing to share that with you. If you’re both still here.’

  The dryer stopped.

  Tina said, ‘You seem very confident that you’re going to be all right.’

  Julia said, ‘What can I say? Watch this space. The more senior you are, the more expensive you are. But I’m cheap and I’m good, and I’m willing to step up. Disaster’s always an opportunity for somebody. You know that as well as I do.’ She pushed past Tina and let the door bang shut in her face.

  Tina decided to leave it a couple of minutes, let Julia get well on her way to wherever she was going. Then she spotted the pink mobile phone sitting on the shelf above the basin.

  Hah! So Julia wasn’t quite so smart as she thought she was. Not too clever, really, to leave something like that in the loo with someone you’d been picking a fight with.

  She hesitated, but only for a moment. And then she grabbed the phone and hurried out and along the corridor.

  ‘Julia?’