by D J Harrison
‘Oh dear!’ He looks crestfallen, my meaning beginning to dawn. ‘Was it the meal, something you ate?’ He just has to check to make sure.
‘No, no.’ I speak softly, as if sharing a secret. ‘Nothing I ate, it’s just something we women get, you should be glad it doesn’t happen to men.’ I give a weak smile and he responds by losing all interest in paperwork.
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ I bet he is. ‘You get some rest, Jenny, we’ll meet for breakfast and discuss things then.’
I leave him with his fresh bottle of wine and as I walk past table after table occupied by solitary business itinerants I see one or two who might find Paul’s invitation more attractive than I do.
Safely back in my room, I lock the door and put on the chain. Trembling slightly, I unzip the case and take out its contents and arrange them neatly on the desk. There are no documents, only twenty pound notes, used ones. These are held in bundles by elastic bands. There are ten bundles, one hundred notes in a bundle. Twenty thousand pounds – freedom or death.
4
Tim is doing his abandoned schoolboy impression, hurt that I left him and wanting all my attention now I’m back. The house looks as if it’s been ransacked by hungry burglars, the kitchen is strewn with soiled pots, spilled food, mess everywhere. I start to load the dishwasher before I realise it hasn’t been emptied and now the dirty and clean sit enmeshed. Tim sits among the devastation, completely oblivious, anxious to engage in conversation for which I’ve no need or energy.
‘What did you get up to last night?’ he asks, not for the first time.
I feel irritated enough to tell him that his worst fears came true, that I got myself laid and that yes, I enjoyed it more than doing it with him. But even that wouldn’t have got him off his arse and helping to clean up the mess he’d made, though it might give me a momentary stab of satisfaction.
‘Nothing,’ I mutter. ‘I was dog tired, just as tired as I am now. Can’t you clear the table for me?’
He would be very interested to hear about my visit from Casagrande and the small bonus of a case full of twenty pound notes which now lies concealed safely, I hope, under the shoe boxes at the bottom of my wardrobe.
As I work and ignore Tim’s bleatings, I consider the money. I should never have taken it in the first place but I had little choice. There was Casagrande, all charm and impeccable manners, uttering the most serious threats as if it were an everyday thing for him. To refuse the case would have caused offence and signalled my rejection of his request. For all his smoothness there was an air about him that makes me sure that he would take that very personally and very seriously.
A sudden insight into his behaviour grabs hold of me. He was describing his own position as well as mine. The people he was referring to had obviously asked him to make sure the acquisition went through and the consequences of failure would apply equally to him. Casagrande might not have been making threats, only passing them on. Now I realise just how high the stakes must be for a man in his position to be so in fear of his life that he resorts to bribery in a desperate attempt to save it. My blood freezes at the revelation.
Giving back the money wouldn’t help either of us. If the deal goes through I don’t expect to see the man ever again. If it doesn’t, well – it absolutely has to. It must, and there is some comfort in knowing that Casagrande will be doing everything he can to make sure of it.
5
I close my eyes and breathe in deeply, then exhale slowly. The walls around me dissolve and I am sitting high above Manchester. To my left is the top-heavy slice of the Hilton, in front of me the glass apartments lean expectantly over the black waters of the Irwell. I relax to allow the urine to stream out, feeling the sensation as it passes through my body. Breathing softly, I allow its release until it trickles to completion and I reach down to gently dab away the drops clinging to my hairs with the wad of tissue.
As I do so a faint tingle of arousal reminds me of Martin’s sensitive fingers there. This is quickly replaced by an uncomfortable stinging, courtesy of Tim’s unwelcome thrusting. My eyes open to the pale grey cubicle, I smooth down my skirt and prepare to face another day at Landers Hoffman, Accountants.
As I slump back gratefully into my chair Emma arrives in a cloud of optimism. Emma always seems positive, she radiates bright energy and her conversation is sprinkled with shoes, handbags, dresses and guinea pigs.
‘Jenny, they’ve started fighting again,’ Emma announces as if this were a news bulletin I’ve been anxiously awaiting. ‘We’ve had to split them up.’
Emma and I have adjacent work stations. I would like to describe them as desks but what I have in reality is half a desk. Emma sits diagonally across, occupying the other half. In this way the large square office can accommodate twenty-two hard-working souls while the two outside walls provide windowed offices for the more senior staff. Their translucent partitions at least let in some daylight, even if we do get it second-hand.
Emma is still talking, still describing the idiosyncrasies of guinea pigs and I’m wishing I had her vitality and the undoubted luxury of being able to worry about minor guinea pig activities. My worries crowd in on me, stifle my breath, rob me of energy and threaten to crush my spirit.
Toby was ill again this morning; he was throwing up in the car on the way to nursery. At the time I managed to get a coveted place for him at Sunny Trees they made me sign a long form which promised, among many other things, that I would never under pain of dire consequences present them with a sick child. No coughs, runny noses, sickness, diarrhoea, rashes, temperatures, conjunctivitis: the list went on and on. All these ailments are forbidden by the nursery but seem endemic to my little Toby. There is hardly a day goes by when he doesn’t exhibit at least three of the forbidden symptoms and he often manages the entire list.
Every day I turn up hoping nobody will notice his snotty nose and hand him firmly back to me, the consequences of which would indeed be dire. I have to work to pay our mortgage. Tim’s wages are less than mine and believe me, mine are nothing to be proud of. There is another reason I need to work and to progress my career. I want to be able to afford to get a nice place just for Toby and me. I want to be independent. I want to have a life of my own.
Emma pushes a piece of paper across the desk. It has an intricate lattice work diagram with arrows, annotations, labels and two big-eyed animals staring out at me.
‘That’s the cage I’m building,’ she proudly indicates. ‘There’s a separate downstairs and upstairs for each of them, a little stairway and a place they can sit together. The wires will stop them biting, I’m sure they’ll be really happy. I’ve worked out the living area and they both have more space than you need for half a dozen guinea pigs.’
I return the diagram and make some positive noises. ‘Brilliant, I’m amazed, what a super cage.’
I look across to the corner office and I can see that it’s still empty. Martin has the best office with windows on two sides overlooking the city. I worry again at his continued absence, for selfish reasons, too; if he’s not here then the slim chance of us stealing an hour together at his apartment is lost. He doesn’t feature in my long term plans, nor I in his. He will never give up his Cheshire wife, Cheshire house, Cheshire kids and Cheshire lifestyle. Short-term, though, I need the things he provides, the oases of pleasure in my desert of toil and self-sacrifice: I need the way he makes me feel. It’s worth all the guilt and more besides.
Emma’s excitement has changed to softness, a caring concerned manner as she somehow detects my inner distress.
‘Are you all right, Jenny?’ she asks.
I automatically reply, ‘Yes, fine,’ before I can stop myself. ‘Actually I’m not great,’ I admit, ‘I seem to have wasted my life.’
Emma wrinkles her nose as if failing to understand my contradictory answers.
‘I’ve wasted my life,’ I repeat and see her wince as she takes it in. ‘Where’s it gone? I’m thirty-four now, I’ll be forty before I
know it and soon after that I’ll be old and useless. Where did my twenties go? The best years of my life vanished in a haze of pointlessness. I swear I spent ten years either drunk or getting drunk. Now look at me.’ I spread my arms to encompass the black shirt, white top, black tights, black shoes, the uniform I wear every working day.
‘What do I look like, Emma? Greasy hair, bad skin, big bum. Look at me, where has all my fire gone? You’ll never believe it but I was once the life and soul of every party. Now I’m a boring mother, over-worked and over-stressed. The last two years have been all about Toby and never about me.’
‘Rubbish.’ Emma speaks with a false joviality that fails to hide her discomfort. ‘You’re great, you have done well, you are doing well. You’ve got a lovely little boy, a good job, you’re ever so well thought of and most women would die for your slim figure. All the men here fancy you like mad.’
I start to smile back at her but just then Paul Unsworth calls me into a meeting room, a pokey box with one square window looking out on the slab-sided neighbour that was built in a time long past, when concrete was considered chic.
Paul appears nervous. As he speaks his eyes flicker between my chest area and a piece of wall behind my left shoulder, as if looking into my eyes might turn him into stone. He’s explaining the situation in his own roundabout way and I’m thinking of Toby’s sickness and worrying if he’s kept down his morning milk.
‘While Martin’s off, there’s a lot of extra work to be covered. I really can’t believe he would leave us all in the lurch like this while he gets his end away.’ Paul continues to dribble out words, noticing nothing beyond the unchanging pattern on the walls or the shapes beneath my blouse.
I sit quietly while he slowly reveals the point of the conversation by circling around it, heading off in several unpromising directions then settling gently on to it. While I wait, I feel a rising anxiety about Martin, about the seemingly universal acceptance that he has gone off with his mistress, about the fact that I know for sure he hasn’t, about the awkward situation that means I can’t tell anybody.
I am sure that neither the bumbling incoherent Paul nor anyone else possesses any inkling about my relationship with Martin. This conversation is merely a prelude to him passing over some work that he can’t be bothered to do himself. Paul proves me right when he nods to a stack of fat ring-binders on his table.
‘That looks like an awful lot,’ I say. ‘I won’t be able to do anything with it for a few days, I’ve still got some of the Manchester United players to sort out. There’s a large payment for a suite at the Hilton in one of the player’s accounts but the hotel bill has the name Chen Xi and a company, Chengdu Industries. There’s obviously been a mistake, I’ve asked the hotel for more information and I’ve arranged to talk to the player at Carrington tomorrow.’
‘Oh. Eric likes to deal with that sort of thing himself, anything involving Man U players. Give him that file.’ He looks at his watch. ‘This other stuff has to have priority, Jenny.’ He taps the binders. ‘I’m way behind on it, what with having to do the due diligence report on Associated Composites.’ He leans forward and whispers loudly, ‘Eric was very pleased with the job we did down there.’
I’m unimpressed but very relieved. I even meekly accept the pile of work Paul is dumping on me. It’s a small price to pay for his compliance.
Martin’s absence is beginning to worry me more and more. Where is he, why would he just up and leave? My heart gives a small jump and sends extra blood thudding to my head. What if he really has left his wife to be with me? Almost as soon as this thought surfaces I dismiss it. Martin has been almost too honest with me in that respect and I can’t believe anything has changed. No, whatever his wife might surmise, Martin has not left her for another woman.
My heart sinks and my eyes brim with tears as the realisation washes over me that Martin might be dead.
6
As soon as I can reasonably leave my desk for the lunch break I hurry outside and walk quickly to the flat. Martin bought four of these, ‘off plan’ as he described it. His idea was to sell them at a profit as soon as they were ready. People were doing this all the time, he said, and there was good money to be made. It seems that this business didn’t work out in the way he intended and he was left with the choice of selling at a huge loss or putting them out to rent.
The one we used was the show flat, slickly decorated and tastefully furnished in order to demonstrate what a Manchester apartment should look like. I suspect he kept this one off the market just for us, it being less than a five minute walk from the office.
As I click the key in the lock and let myself in, I suddenly feel a pang of fear and uncertainty. What if Martin is here, dead and rotting away? There’s no smell of putrefaction in the air but I proceed nervously, scared of what I might find and at the same time fearful of discovery. I can think of no credible excuse for my being here and my ears strain for any sounds of occupation. There is nobody here, dead or alive. The flat is exactly as I left it ten days ago. The bed is in a state of wanton abandonment and the teacups are stained with brown rings.
Without Martin here, without my usual state of excitement and adventure, the place is seedy and depressing; a glorified hotel room for two selfish adulterers to take sexual pleasure from one another. I sit down on the side of the bed, suddenly bone-weary with the whole situation. I risk so much for so little and now I can’t believe I acted so stupidly. Whatever Martin’s fate, I cannot afford to be found out. Tim might be laid back and easygoing, but the discovery that his wife, the mother of his son, has been regularly screwing another man would soon change that.
I take a couple of Tesco bags out of a kitchen drawer. These were once used to carry in food for our illicit lunches, treats for post-coital consumption. Now I need them to secrete anything that might betray my presence. She may turn up here at any time; the cynical eyes of a suspicious wife are something I have to guard against.
Pulling out the top drawer of the bedside cabinet I pour its contents into a bag. A large plastic penis, used only once with disappointing results, flops soggily into the bag, followed by an assortment of vibrators and several pots of lubricant. I hide them by squashing in a cheap dressing gown bought at Marks & Spencer’s during a cold snap. I can’t think of anything else that needs to be removed but, nevertheless, methodically open each drawer and cupboard and peer in with Martin’s wife’s eyes. All clear, only the bed in its magnificent disarray stands testament to the activities it accommodated. There are semen stains on the sheets, if you know where to look.
I’m considering stripping the bed and taking away the soiled items when I hear the sound of a key scraping in the lock and the front door opening.
7
My heart stops, my breath catches in my throat, I am frozen with terror and indecision. In the twenty or so times I was here before, nobody ever knocked on the door let alone entered the flat. Apart from Martin, of course.
I hear footsteps, the noise of something being dragged, a clunking noise and the door swinging back violently and hitting the wall.
My panic pitches me headlong into the bathroom where I lock the door and listen to the pounding of blood in my ears. I’m trapped, there is no way out of this now without revealing my guilt and my shame. Tim will find out, Toby will be taken from me; I will be cast out of Landers Hoffman. My life is at an end.
I should never have taken the chance involved in coming here.
I look around me to discover that this is a really horrible little bathroom with no external wall to provide a window and some natural light. I never realised it before, having used it only for a quick pee and a wipe-down before scurrying back to the office. It’s built like a hotel bathroom, as small as possible and just as tacky. There’s a small hand basin that presses against my thigh, a mirror that reveals a gaunt woman and a bath shrouded by a curtain.
Beneath the bass drum in my ears, I hear someone banging around in the bedroom I only just escaped from. Keepin
g deathly still, I pray that whoever is out there will go away and leave me undetected. Leaning against the thin white door, I try to locate noises, strain to hear where they are, hope they will recede. There is a moment of silence when I lose touch with the movement coming from outside, then the door handle next to my right arm clicks as it receives a heavy twist. The whole door shakes as if a heavy sack has been thrown against it. An involuntary screech leaves my throat and echoes around the bathroom despite all my efforts to retrieve it.
A female voice responds, betraying equal alarm.
‘Hello?’ A thick foreign accent scrambles the remainder of the query into an indecipherable babble. I breathe again, thankful for the cool air returning to my starving lungs, grateful that there is no plummy Cheshire voice, steadied by realisation of what the commotion has been all about.
‘Who is it?’ I hear my voice several pitches above its normal tone. ‘What do you want?’ I ask the questions I am now convinced I can already answer myself.
‘Sorry, thought nobody here. We cleaning.’
‘Well go away and clean some other time,’ I shout, releasing some of my tension in anger.
In defiant confirmation of my sudden change in status, I walk boldly over to flush the toilet, run the taps in the basin then wait for a few minutes before sliding back the bolt and walking purposefully out of my hiding place.
There is nobody left in the flat, the cleaner has disappeared as quickly as she came. And without catching sight of me. My position remains uncompromised, there is no witness to my clandestine activities.
I sit on the bed and try to quiet my trembling nerves. Of course there had to be a cleaner, Martin would hardly have done it himself and couldn’t afford to let his wife even know he had this place.
My sin turns from despair to presumption.
Now that I have managed to concentrate on my breathing for a few seconds, I feel myself becoming calm, almost relaxed. The crisis is over; I have been spooked by a cleaning lady, no harm done, no need to panic. In fact, I handled it perfectly, if I ignore the emotional aspects.