‘I guess if we’re both late, there’s not much they can do.’ Zac slowed down. ‘I’d… er… I’d keep your jacket done up if I were you.’
‘That’s not an option.’ I demonstrated.
‘Oh.’ He seemed to lose the power of speech for a moment, then cleared his throat. ‘Okay. Right. Just don’t breathe too heavily then. I’m definitely not looking but those buttons don’t seem that secure.’
‘You aren’t making this any better.’ I took little shallow breaths as we reached the upstairs corridor. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Michael’s office, apparently.’ Zac went even slower. ‘Look, Ruby—’
‘It’s fine. I can talk about my job all day.’ I matched his pace.
‘It’s the way they’ve gone about this. Do you think they deliberately held off emailing you? To put you on the wrong foot?’ He stopped walking and grabbed my arm. ‘I don’t like any of this. I think they’re playing games with us.’
I looked at him sharply. ‘Us? I don’t see you being left at a disadvantage here.’
‘No, but, it’s like Saturday. When they called me in at the weekend to do something that I’m pretty positive could have waited.’
‘Ah, that’s why you were in York.’
‘Priya knew I was in so she asked me to meet up, otherwise I’d have been at a loose end until I went back to Leeds.’ He lowered his voice and his grasp on my arm intensified. ‘They know that weekends can be… difficult for me. Yet they sprang it on me without giving me much time to… to make alternative arrangements. Almost like…’ his voice went down to a whisper. ‘Like they’re testing us.’
‘Isn’t that unethical?’
‘Obviously it is.’
I looked down at his hand on my arm. ‘Well, we’d better get in there before my circulation is compromised any more.’
‘Oh. Sorry. I just… I don’t like any of this, Ruby.’
I took as deep a breath as the over-tight shirt would allow. ‘Well, I need this job. So I guess we just do our best for now, and worry about it later.’
‘I need the job too.’ He spoke quietly, almost as though I wasn’t meant to hear, but I did. And those five words kept repeating in the back of my brain, even when I stood, in the too-tight shirt and jacket, in front of the ‘panel’ – a group of people I’d never seen before. Michael was there, looking uncomfortable as though he was sitting on a hairbrush, with Grey Man and Beehive Woman, whose names I really must find out, and three other people who all had a sort of stunned look about them. I wondered if they really were the people behind YouBack2Work or whether they’d been dragged in off the street, like witnesses at a particularly unfortunate wedding. They all had expressions of people who’d rather be somewhere else. I knew how they felt.
Michael introduced us, and then waved at me to speak first, which made me feel even more at a disadvantage. No preparation time, no warning and an unrehearsed talk about my job? Was it deliberate? None of the watching faces gave anything away as I launched into a brief rundown of my role. ‘Some people aren’t in work, not through laziness or unemployability, but because something is holding them back. Fear, past trauma, an undiagnosed condition – these are often missed in the conventional jobseeker interviews. We give clients the opportunity to receive counselling to get to the bottom of their inability to find employment.’ I added a few pointed remarks about our success levels and sat down to let Zac do his thing.
As I sat, one of the buttons of the front of the shirt popped off and rolled to the floor. My lilac bra with the butterfly embroidery was suddenly front and centre for everyone to see. I could feel the four men on the panel trying not to stare.
‘As Ruby explained, we believe that long-term unemployment isn’t usually a life choice.’ Zac flicked me a quick glance, just in time for button two to part company with the shirt, and quickly looked back at the panel. ‘Clients… err… clients can have many reasons for not… ummm… seeking employment even in fields they seem well qualified in.’ He coughed and turned a little so that I wasn’t in his field of vision.
I could feel my face getting hotter and hotter, the blush extending from the roots of my hair sweatily down my throat, to where it began to clash with the bra. Everyone determinedly kept their eyes on Zac. I wriggled about a bit to try to pull the jacket over the flapping edges of the shirt, but it wouldn’t stretch, not when I was sitting and the third button, the one that had been maintaining my decency, suddenly gave up the ghost and pinged, to quite dramatic effect, from Priya’s shirt, landing at the feet of the Grey Man, who studiously ignored it.
Oddly enough, this didn’t spiral me into panic. In fact, it made me want to laugh, despite the horror of the situation. The tiny voice that usually whispered to me through the fractures in my mind-walls was practically shouting ‘Serves them right! If they’d given proper notice, you could have worn your own clothes and not had to perform some weird kind of burlesque show!’
And at least the bra was a nice one, offering a decent amount of coverage, good support and some rather pretty embroidery. Not that I would have worn a plunge push-up bra to the office anyway, but I did own several mixed-wash-accident ones that lent a certain greyness to my chestal area and made me look as though I was wrapped in net curtain left over from an industrial workshop. So things could have been worse. Not much, admittedly, but I would take the small mercies.
The blush gradually subsided. I tried not to breathe too heavily and just listened to Zac finishing his explanation, looking confident and calm in his wonderfully cut black suit and polished shoes. My boots were slightly muddy from my recent trek through the streets of York and I tucked them under the chair, not that anyone was looking in the direction of my feet right now.
‘Well then.’ Michael stood up. ‘Does anyone have any questions?’
All the eyes travelled to my chest and then away again like a flight of panicked birds. All the heads shook, and I had never been so relieved to be dismissed without being able to go into more detail about my work.
Michael went and held the door open for us to go, smiling benignly as we passed him and without looking at me at all, although I could almost hear his eyeballs creaking. The door closed behind us and we heard a burst of voices, followed by a couple of laughs.
Zac took his suit jacket off and handed it to me. ‘I don’t know whether that was a catastrophe or dirty tricks,’ he said. ‘But I have to admit you carried it off.’
Gratefully I clutched the jacket around me as we passed a few of the office staff on the stairs. ‘Definitely not intentional,’ I said. ‘And what else could I do but sit there? Run out in tears?’
‘I wouldn’t run anywhere, if I were you,’ Zac said darkly, then started to laugh. ‘Their faces though. I don’t think anyone listened to a single word I was saying.’
Two of the girls from the main office, who produced CVs and application letters for clients, gave us a strange look as we walked past. To be fair, we must have looked slightly peculiar, Zac in his suit and shirt and me wearing his jacket pulled around me as though he’d just saved me from drowning in a frozen pond. I suspected that the remnants of the intense blush had hung around on my cheeks too, my face still felt hot and uncomfortably tight.
‘You carried it off very well too, I thought,’ I reassured him. ‘Bearing in mind that I was sitting there popping buttons like a cartoon.’
He caught at the jacket and whirled me around, pulling at the same time, until we stood in an alcove off the main corridor, tucked into shadow. ‘Ruby,’ he said, his voice low and slightly hoarse. ‘I meant it, before. I think they’re doing all this deliberately.’
We were squeezed together in a space that had once been a built-in cupboard. Behind us, the wall was still covered in wallpaper that looked as though it were Victorian. Spiky pink flowers coiled in a menacing way out of a dark background.
‘But why would they?’ I hissed back, my eyes unconsciously tracing the mind-bending floral patterns. ‘What would be th
e point?’
Zac looked down at me, slightly pityingly. ‘Well, there wouldn’t be a decision to have to make about who stays and who goes, if one of us resigns. There’d be no redundancy to pay. I think they have some twisted idea that only the strong survive, so if they make it difficult enough, the one who stays must be the “best”. And that’s just what I’ve come up with for starters. There is also the thought that making us compete means they are getting us both to work twice as hard for the same amount of money.’ He stuck his head out of the alcove and scanned the corridor. We didn’t want to emerge into a crowd of IT people, the rumour mill would already be on overtime about our appearance on the stairs. By lunchtime it would be all round the company that we’d been caught shagging in the toilets. ‘They are trying to put pressure on. I reckon that’s why they didn’t let you know about this morning. You could have picked the mail up at home, which would have shown you were working unpaid hours, or you could miss it, like you did, thus pressurising you to perform.’
I stared at him. ‘Michael wouldn’t do that! He’s all soft and wibbly and he forgets my name half the time.’
Zac sighed. ‘I’m pretty sure Michael didn’t get where he is in business without cutting a few throats.’
I shivered. ‘Please. That is not a great image. And what if you’re right? What can we do about it, really? If we raise this, they could always sack the pair of us – I’m sure they could find a reason. And I need this, Zac.’
I hadn’t wanted to sound as though I were pleading with him. After all, he was still the enemy, of sorts. But my voice, even in a hissed whisper, sounded desperate, and I could hear that edge of anxiety, the one that kept itself sharp on midnight wakings and bank statements, running underneath my words like a flensing knife under skin.
‘Yeah. Me too.’ His face looked shaded suddenly, hollowed and older. ‘And therein lies the problem, doesn’t it? Only one of us can stay.’
I need this job too, he’d said. And it looked as though he meant it.
I heard a voice raised in complaint and hardly muffled at all by the big doors that led through into the main building. ‘Well, you’d better fuckin’ find her then, hadn’t you? I’ve come in on the bus and I’m not wanderin’ around here like little Miss Fuckin’ Muffet while you prise her arse out of bed!’
A sudden moment of horror made me clutch Zac’s jacket around my throat. ‘Miriam! She’s my half past nine! How long were we in the presentation?’
‘Long enough.’ Zac gave me a little push. ‘Go, Before she blows up.’
I dashed the back way to the interview room, down musty passageways and in and out of offices, like a one-woman French farce, eventually erupting through a pair of seldom-used swing doors into the hall outside, just in time to meet Miriam sauntering in the more conventional way.
She looked me up and down, slowly. ‘Havin’ a shag round the back, were you?’ She eyed Zac’s jacket, which at least matched my trousers by being black, but was several sizes too large to be called a suit. ‘What the hell have you come as, Madonna Nineteen Eighty?’
I ignored her and opened up the interview room. At least Miriam wasn’t smoking today.
Someone had put Miriam’s file on the table in there and switched on the coffee machine. Probably Priya, flapping around inside my cotton top. I picked up the file and sat down, vowing to buy Pri the biggest box of chocolates I could afford and to sew all her buttons back on by the weekend.
Miriam helped herself to coffee and wandered about while I flipped through the file. Most things were computerised, but forms filled in by clients were often in paper format, and we also included any other relevant information printed out. We’d had too many power cuts to rely totally on the computers.
There were several application forms in there. We took copies before we sent them off, so we could go over them with clients if they wanted, at a later date. Miriam had filled in a lot of forms.
‘So. How’s life?’ Miriam said as I laid down her file. Her hand kept twitching towards her bag. ‘I’m not hangin’ round here too long, mind. Yankee Candle are havin’ a pre-Christmas sale.’ She walked some more small circles.
‘Life is fine, thank you.’ I buttoned up the jacket. I didn’t need Miriam’s acerbic views on my underwear. ‘How are the applications going?’
Over the next half an hour, Miriam drank three cups of coffee and complained about the lack of suitable work, the threat of sanctions which still hung over her, and the computer games that her grandchildren played and which gave her a headache. There was absolutely no reason for her to be here at all, as far as I could tell, apart from the expenses-paid shopping trip, which, I suspected, was all the reason she needed.
At last, she put down her coffee cup decisively. ‘Right. I’ve been, I’ve seen you, you can put that in the files.’ She nodded towards the paper file on the desk, her blonde updo bobbed, taut with hairspray. ‘And you can tell ’em I’m tryin’, right?’
‘Right. As long as you are trying.’ I gave her a look, but she just grinned cheerily at me, winding her scarf around her neck and putting her coat back on.
It occurred to me that getting Miriam into work would be such an enormous plus on my side that even the management team couldn’t ignore it. Maybe I’d take her file home and read through it. I might just get some ideas about the ideal placement for her. Even training would count, I would have to see what I could come up with.
‘What’s your dream job, Miriam?’ I asked, walking her through to the back door.
She already had her cigarettes out of her bag. ‘I dunno.’ Before we reached the door, the cigarette was between her lips, and it was lit the second the door opened. ‘Yours?’ She gave me a grin. ‘Or Prime Minister. Reckon I’d do a better job than most of the tosspots in government. But yours looks like a proper doss too.’
Then she gave me a cheerful wave and walked off into the sharp sunshine, leaving a smoke trail behind her like a vanishing demon.
Oh, if only she knew.
9
That evening I sat with Miriam’s file on my lap, half under my duvet. The central heating was playing up again and our landlord was not as prompt as he could be with repairs – one of the reasons this house was cheap. Another reason my rent was cheap was that I slept in the room that would have been the nursery, had the house had more conventional occupants, and a single bed plus my small chest of drawers occupied all the floor space. I had to get out of bed off the end.
Ed was thumping, mysteriously, in his room next door. Packing, probably, to head home to his parents in Glasgow for Christmas. I certainly hoped that was what the noise was. Sophie was downstairs on the phone and Cav was out on the bike, despite it being several degrees below zero, and dark.
From my window, I could see the houses up and down the street now sported Christmas trees, in windows, in front gardens or further in the house, with the lights twinkling out through the dark. I wondered what I would do for Christmas.
Last year, of course, it had been Gareth and I, and our first Christmas alone in our new house. We hadn’t quite got the heating sorted and the oven was broken, but none of it seemed to matter; we’d stayed in bed and then I’d cooked – at Gareth’s insistence – an approximation of Christmas dinner on the gas hob, and we’d drunk too much and played some stupid game. The worst of it was I’d wondered, secretly, in a well-hidden place in my heart, whether he would propose.
He hadn’t. At least, not to me.
And now I remembered washing up alone while he phoned his brother for an hour’s chat and I planned the colour scheme for the kitchen, and wondered if I could afford new tiles for the splashback.
This year… I stared, unseeing at Miriam’s files. I could go to Eva’s, of course, with Mum and Dad. She and Didier always laid on a good dinner, and I’d referee the boys, while Mum helped cook and Dad and Didier talked work.
I slammed a sudden fist into the mattress beside me. It wasn’t fair! I’d had the house and the boyfriend and th
e plans and now – I looked around the slightly bleak little room. We weren’t allowed to hang pictures, so the only ornamentation on the walls was a mirror, supposedly designed to make the room look bigger, but in reality it just reflected three walls simultaneously and enhanced how tiny it was. The magnolia colour scheme made it look chilly and the narrow bed emphasised my single status.
I punched the mattress again. I didn’t mind the being single part. In fact, the further I got from Gareth, the more I realised what a chauvinistic, undomesticated pig he’d really been. He was just interested in sex and food in that order and had absolutely no desire to be an equal partner. He’d had no interest in the house or what needed doing to it.
I felt a flame of horrified realisation burn its way up my face. Gareth hadn’t really wanted to buy a house. He’d been happy with a peripatetic renting lifestyle, moving every year of the three that I’d known him, keeping all his possessions in a huge old army kitbag that had belonged to his dad. He had gone along with my desire to buy, my love for the little terraced house on the edge of the city, my desire to decorate and make the place ours. I had, in effect, talked him into the purchase. He must have known, even then, that it wasn’t for keeps. He was always on the lookout for something, someone better. Thinner, prettier, blonder, more acquiescent.
If I’d had anything to throw, I would have thrown it, but the bed was too small for anything other than me and a hot-water bottle, so I kicked that instead, and it fell off the end of the bed and onto the floor with the sound of a hundred empty stomachs sloshing.
‘Gareth, you bastard!’ I shouted, at the chintz curtains.
The house went suddenly quiet. Ed stopped thumping and, after a second, Sophie’s voice drifted up the stairs. ‘You all right, hun?’
‘I’m fine!’ I called back. ‘Just thinking.’
‘I hope he gets syphilis and his willy rots off!’ Sophie called back cheerily, and went back to her phone call. She only knew the outline details about my break-up, but she was still prepared to swear that Gareth had been ‘a nobber’ and was fully on my side, which was encouraging. Although it was beginning to dawn on me that the relationship had been, pretty much, all on my side.
A Midwinter Match Page 11