by Jason Ayres
“Do you mind?” protested Kay. “I’m trying to get to my flat.”
“So that’s what the fishy smell was in the pub earlier,” said the blond man. “Dave here said he thought it was your fanny.”
“Go on, Dave, give her one,” shouted another of the horrible men. “Maybe you’ll get crabs – this is a fish and chips shop after all.”
“Why don’t you get her to give you a blowie, Dave?” shouted out yet another. “She’ll probably be really good at it with no teeth to get in the way. I can’t stand a woman that bites, can you?”
Laughter rang out all around, and not just from the men. The other customers were joining in, too. Her humiliation was well and truly complete. Finally locating her key, she forced her way through them and with relief managed to get the key to turn in the lock.
“The dentist isn’t that way, love,” said the blond man. “They’re two doors down.”
Everyone was laughing now, even the workers behind the counter. Not a single person in the shop had stood up for her. They had been like a baying pack of wolves, picking on the weakest.
She opened the door and rapidly closed it behind her. Then she staggered up the stairs, desperate to put distance between her and the sound of the men’s laughter, still ringing in her ears. Entering the one-room bedsit, Kay sank down on her bed and wept. How could the men have been so cruel? How could her life have gone so wrong? She had never felt so alone.
She reached for the half-empty vodka bottle by her bed and took a swig. It was the only way she knew to blot out the misery.
Later, drugged by the massive amount of alcohol she had consumed, she slept. It was poor-quality sleep that would only leave her feeling worse in the morning.
She may have felt alone, but she was not unobserved. As she slept, there was a presence in the room, unseen and undetected by her. A spirit, one that another of the town’s residents had once called an angel, had been watching over her.
Kay needed help, and the following day her angel would be waiting to start her on the road to recovery.
Chapter Two
December 2018
When she awoke she was cold from having kicked off the quilt. Her dreams had been vivid, haunted by the injustices of her past life. The last moments before she had woken up remained briefly imprinted on her mind. Her ex-husband and his dizzy, raven-headed girlfriend were laughing at her, just as the horrible men had done in the shop the previous evening.
“What did you ever see in her?” said Lucy, her hated ginger curls, which framed a pale, youthful complexion, cascading down around her shoulders.
“Stupid cow,” said Alan, putting his arm around the girl who had replaced Kay, laughing as he did so.
It took a couple of seconds of consciousness for Kay to realise it was only a dream as her mind clicked back into the real world. A dream it may have been, but its origins were very much grounded in reality.
The last time she had seen Alan with Lucy had been in the street some weeks before. As soon as they had clocked her they had crossed the road, pretending they hadn’t seen her. It was obvious that they had, as they made a big show of the fact they were holding hands, also turning to give each other an affectionate peck on the lips which they knew Kay couldn’t fail to spot. Once they were past her, they burst into giggles, no doubt sharing some cruel joke at her expense.
The hurt Kay felt from her dream merely compounded the misery of the events of the previous evening. Thankfully, as her eyes adjusted to the dim light of the room and her hangover began to kick in, the memories, so vivid just a few moments before, swiftly burnt themselves out.
A grey light filtered through the partially closed curtains, illuminating her sad and dismal little room. She pulled the dirty and stained quilt back over herself in a forlorn attempt to get warm, but it was to no avail. She was still wearing the leopard skin top and knickers she had been dressed in the previous night, but even with them and the quilt she felt much colder than usual. She looked across at her cheap digital clock radio, recently bought off the market. It was nearly half past eight and she was due in work at nine.
The flat she lived in consisted of one average-sized room and not a lot more. Her bed doubled as her sofa, and the remainder of her small living space was taken up by the kitchen, if it could be called that. The cooking facilities amounted to two single electric rings with about a square metre of surface space on either side. There were two small cupboards above these two spaces, one of which was missing its door.
There was also a small sink taking up the space below the filthy window. It was so tiny, she couldn’t even fit a washing-up bowl into it. When she had complained to Mr McVie about it, he had just laughed.
“What do you need to cook for when you’ve got a perfectly good chip shop downstairs?” he had said in his broad Glaswegian accent.
That was pretty much par for the course where McVie was concerned. She had quickly learnt that it was pointless complaining to him about anything. He never fixed anything.
The only other notable piece of furniture was an aging MFI chest of drawers that she had bought second-hand from a charity shop. All of her clothes were stuffed into the three small drawers, two of which were sagging as the wafer-thin pieces of baseboard collapsed under the weight. She had tried supergluing the boards back in place, but they soon came unstuck again. Most of the fake wood veneer had peeled off the top. It was amazing it had lasted as long as it had, which was more than could be said for the company that had made it.
As for washing her clothes, that was out of the question. Her flat hadn’t come equipped with a washing machine, and even if she had been able to afford one, there was nowhere to fit it. So she had to go to the launderette, up on one of the rough estates in the older part of town.
She was forever running out of clean clothes and had lowered her standards considerably. Now she wore underwear two days in a row, tops for three or four, and jeans for up to two weeks at a time. She figured the longer she could eke her clothes out, the less money and time she would have to spend in the launderette which doubled as the town’s main drug-dealing hub. She hated going there.
For someone who had once taken such pride in her appearance, it was a shocking state of affairs. It was all down to one simple problem: lack of money.
She knew she was in a mess but with the current financial situation she just didn’t know how she was going to drag herself out of it. If she could have weaned herself off the fags and booze it would have made a significant difference to her finances, but she just didn’t have the willpower or the inclination to break those habits at present. Life had become so intolerable she needed to drown her sorrows in the pub every night just to keep going.
As she lay in bed this Saturday morning, wrapping the quilt around her in a tight cocoon, she thought about the situation she was in and what had led her there. Should she be trying to work out where she had gone wrong and what she could do to change things, or was she being harsh blaming it all on herself? Should she instead be focusing her thoughts on who else had played a part?
She didn’t think of herself as a bitter and twisted woman, blaming everyone else for her own shortcomings, but it was hard not to point the finger when she thought about her ex-husband, Alan Phipps. How she wished she had never met him. How much different would her life have been without him? Much better, undoubtedly.
But wishing she had never met him was a double-edged sword. If she hadn’t, then she wouldn’t have her daughter. She may have married someone else and had other children, but they wouldn’t be Maddie. Other children were an abstract concept: doubtless she would have loved them, but they weren’t real. Maddie was: she was flesh and blood, made uniquely out of bits of her, and Alan and she couldn’t bear the thought of being without her.
But the sad reality of the current situation was that she was without her. It was less than a week until Christmas and Kay hadn’t heard from Maddie since late-September when term had started at Durham University.
Why hadn’t she heard from Maddie? For the same reason she hadn’t heard from many other people in the family. Alan had poisoned her mind against her. He was very good at doing that.
Kay had seen domestic violence portrayed on television, but Alan was far more subtle than that. He had never laid a finger on her, but bit by bit over time he had ground her down into submission. A little put-down there, a little bit of freedom taken away there: gradually and almost imperceptibly, he had whittled away her personality and her strength.
Eventually, when he had no more use for her, he had tossed her aside like half an orange, every last drop of juice sucked out of her. She hadn’t even realised it was happening until it was too late. It was only now, in hindsight, that she could see exactly what he had done to her.
If she had been the victim of domestic violence, at least she could have done something about it. She could have gone to the police and got him locked up. But the types of wounds Alan inflicted left no scars – none that could be seen, anyway. Nobody else could see what he had done to her, which quickly became apparent during the break-up.
After he had kicked her out of the marital home, she had tried to confide in one of her friends, the wife of another couple that the two of them sometimes socialised with. It was quickly obvious that the woman was only paying lip-service to her grievances. She clearly didn’t believe what Kay was saying, and why would she? Alan was always so charming and so reasonable with everyone he met. He dressed smartly and always said and did the right thing. It was an act he put on for the world and one he had long ago perfected. No one saw what really went on behind closed doors.
Kay was determined to try and make sense of it all in her mind. She was never going to sort herself out until she could come to terms with how she had ended up in this situation in the first place. She thought back, far back into the past, to the time just before she had met Alan. What had led her to be so easily taken in by him?
She had met him in the spring of 1995 when she was nineteen years old and on her gap year while she decided which university she was going to. She had a number of offers on the table. With her grades and sparkling recommendation from the school, they were all happy to defer her entry for a year.
She never made it. A chain of seemingly random events and decisions over the preceding months had led her to fall into a relationship with Alan. From then on he had ensured that the door leading to higher education was slowly and quietly closed.
Around the time she had left school the previous summer she had lost her virginity with a Jack the Lad character called Glen. He turned out to be her first, but certainly not the last, seriously bad choice of man.
She hadn’t really wanted to go out with him in the first place, much preferring his friend Richard, but Glen had told her that Richard was gay and muscled his way in instead. What he had said about Richard was eventually revealed to have been a lie, many years later.
Before long, she had good reason to seriously regret getting involved with Glen. Before Christmas of the same year she had fallen pregnant. A few weeks after they had been going out, Glen refused to use condoms anymore, claiming that he was allergic to them. He insisted that she go on the Pill instead. Somehow during the crossover period she had conceived.
Far from being supportive, Glen had ordered her to “get rid of it”, informing her that he had no intention of becoming a dad at his age. She was left in no doubt whatsoever as to the ultimatum she was facing – it was him or the kid.
He was no help to her whatsoever during the whole process. Then, once her baby was dead, he promptly turned around and dumped her anyway. Not long after that she discovered he had been sleeping with at least two other girls behind her back for months. This included the very day when she was having the abortion, when he had claimed he couldn’t get the day off work. She later found out that he had actually been busy in bed with a barmaid from Ye Olde Chapel, no doubt spinning the same bullshit about being allergic to latex.
Losing a baby and being let down at such a tender age hit Kay hard. The feeling of invincibility that her youth and early academic success had given her was stripped away by the whole sordid state of affairs. Real life had come right up in front of her and well and truly slapped her in the face.
In the dark winter months of early 1995, she sank into her first and only bout of teenage depression. She had been working flat out in the weeks leading up to Christmas in a temporary job at the local sorting office, but it was only seasonal work. Once all the Christmas post was sorted and sent she was no longer needed. Now she found herself lacking the desire to seek more work and barely left the house in January and February.
As the nights drew out and the weather got warmer, she picked herself up and dusted herself down. She was determined not to waste the rest of her year off. With Glen out of the way, she could at least now revisit her earlier plans to go travelling. But not earning any money for the first two months of the year had put a dent in her finances.
Needing to earn some decent money to finance her plans, she decided to sign up with a temp agency for a few months. If she got enough money together she could head off in June and still be away for over three months. That was not as long as she had originally planned, but even so, there was plenty she could do in three months.
There were a number of temp agencies for her to choose from, offering different types of work. She decided to go for one that specialised in office work. Working in an office was not something she aspired to, but she didn’t think it would do any harm to get a couple of months’ experience in that sphere. It would be something she could stick onto the CV after university. Competition for jobs at the BBC and Channel 4 would be fierce. She needed to give herself the best possible chance if she was to get to where she wanted to be.
This seemingly unimportant choice of agency at the time was one of many minor decisions that had led her to where she was today. Kay reflected that life was probably like that for most people, their whole lives mapped out via a series of random events and choices.
The first, and as it turned out the only, place the agency sent her was a large, grey building on the outskirts of Oxford. It was the head office of one of Britain’s largest supermarket chains, and she was to provide maternity cover for a clerk in the accounts department.
It was a dull, repetitive job which reaffirmed her desire to make something of herself. She could face a few weeks of doing this sort of work, but to do it for a whole lifetime would have been soul-destroying.
Part of her job involved cashing cheques for staff. This was still a popular way of paying for things, as well as acquiring currency back in those days. This meant she came into contact with a lot of people in the business, especially toward the end of the month. Then everyone started cashing cheques a couple of days before payday, knowing they wouldn’t reach their accounts before their wages went in.
Her pretty looks didn’t go unnoticed and she frequently found herself being chatted up by the male employees. They were delighted to find an attractive nineteen-year-old girl manning the desk. Kay didn’t know it, but she was a popular topic of conversation among the men in the office who referred to her as “fresh meat”, some even placing bets on who could bed her first.
One man in particular seemed smitten by her, which was pretty obvious from the number of visits he made to the accounts department. By the end of her second week he was visiting the desk to cash small cheques on a daily basis.
She didn’t know it then, but this man was to become her future husband. Alan was much older than her, just turned thirty and a rising star within the organisation. He had just been part of the marketing team that had successfully launched the chain’s first loyalty card scheme, giving points to shoppers for their food purchases. As a result, he had been rewarded with a new role as a buyer in the wi
ne department.
He was smart, attractive and confident. He was also a great deal more mature than some of the younger lads in the office who had made clumsy attempts to ask her out. When he asked her if she would like to come out for lunch with him, it seemed almost rude to say no. She also couldn’t deny that she was flattered by his charm and interest in her.
Lunch led on to dinner dates, and a host of other romantic gestures. When he told her he was going to France for a few days on a wine buying trip and asked if she would like to accompany him as his assistant, she leapt at the chance.
They spent three wonderful days in the Champagne region in the spring sunshine, all expenses paid, during which they inevitably became lovers. And what a lover he turned out to be – accomplished, confident and generous in bed, a million miles away from Glen’s clumsy and selfish fumbling. She was well and truly smitten.
When they returned to the UK he asked her to move in with him. Her parents were opposed to the idea, but she was lovestruck and ignored them. What did they know? Just six weeks after meeting Alan, she packed a suitcase full of clothes and moved in with him.
Nearly a quarter of a century later she would find herself packing a suitcase again, but this time it was when he was showing her the door. There were no parents to run back to by then: they were both dead. Meanwhile, he was moving Lucy in – another young employee. The wheel had turned full circle.
Those first few months living with Alan were blissful. He was clearly doing very well for himself, living already in a spacious semi-detached house. In those early days they spent every waking hour together. He drove her into work every day in his company Volvo, then they met for lunch, sometimes sneaking off to Shotover, a local beauty spot, for a bit of naughty fun in the car.
In the evening he would drive her home again. They would prepare gourmet meals together in the kitchen, washing them down with the fine wines that he acquired as a perk of his job. Later they would watch movies and make love on the sofa. He had all the satellite channels, something she had never had at home. Her parents were of a generation who considered that four TV channels was quite sufficient.