A Midwinter Match

by Jane Lovering

  I did a quick mental audit of the state of those walls which kept my feelings in check. I relied on them to keep my emotions from spilling out and overwhelming me, shored up with the medication my doctor had prescribed. I sometimes pictured those emotions as towering blocks of stone, threatening to become ruinous but kept propped into walls by huge white buttresses. They seemed firm.

  Miriam’s buff file was spread on the duvet in front of me. It was against policy to take files home, for confidentiality reasons, but I figured that, after yesterday’s late email, they thought I should be working from home, so I would. And it wasn’t as though I had anyone else in here who was going to see it, was it?

  The file was rucked and tattered at the edges. It had clearly been in circulation for some time at Back To Employment in Leeds, and sending it over when Miriam continued with us hadn’t done its cardboard outer layer any favours. It was mostly full of photocopies of handwritten application forms. Every shop, it would seem, in Leeds. Some supermarkets. A couple of cleaning agencies. Schools and a bus depot and the local council offices. I flicked through, my mind only half on the task as I now started to wonder about what Zac had said. Were they deliberately trying to make one of us look bad? And, most importantly, what if it was only me they were trying to sabotage?

  I couldn’t ignore the fact that the email telling me about the presentation had come in long after I’d left work. Deliberate, or just bad timing? Surely not calculated, surely not.

  Then the horror of unemployment crept up my spine. I was qualified. I was experienced. But that word ‘cutbacks’ whispered itself into my ear, and my mind started to whirl with images of unpaid loans, of phone calls and desperate attempts to pay; men turning up on the doorstep to take away everything I owned…

  I gave an unintended snort of laughter. All I owned right now was some furniture, currently in my parents’ garage, and a ten-year-old Skoda. Good luck, bailiffs, with getting much for that lot.

  Quick check – walls, shaky, but holding.

  I couldn’t help but wonder about that look on Zac’s face, that lonely, shadowed look when he said he needed the job too. How desperate could he be, compared to me? Surely, if he needed out of his marriage, he could move in with friends? My need was greater.

  I tried to focus, but the thoughts wouldn’t go away. Did I have that same, haunted look? The anxiety had given my eyes a slightly hooded look and the medication made my skin break out in dry patches now and then, but – did I? Did that fear that the worst was bound to happen, that fear that stopped the breath in my throat and pulled the air from my lungs, show on my face?

  Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

  I needed a distraction. In the absence of anything useful in here, apart from Miriam’s overworked buff file, I went downstairs and helped Sophie tidy the kitchen.

  10

  A few days later, Michael caught up with me as I escorted Samantha into the office to fill in her application for funding for her Domestic Budgeting course.

  ‘Ah, Ruby!’ He always seemed so surprised to see me, as though I hadn’t worked here in a decade and was just visiting. ‘A word, if I may?’

  ‘All right, Michael.’ I waited. The offices were busy, everywhere seemed to be full of people buzzing with activity and I wondered what the sudden rush was, until I realised that it was probably the presence of Michael and the possibility of having your job rationalised out of existence.

  ‘Ah. In my, er, office, if you would. Finish seeing to your client first, of course.’ Michael turned his smile on Samantha, who, despite having sworn off all things male in front me, many times, turned pink and giggled. In comparison I felt pale and mirthless. Being called to the office never boded well.

  I took Samantha through and left her with Sally, who was accurate and never sent forms to the wrong address, wrongly completed and with, sometimes, the incorrect contact information. I’d been here long enough to know who was reliable, although, looking around the office, most of those whose performance had been less than optimal seemed to no longer be here. It gave me a chilly feeling in the pit of my stomach. As though we were being picked off, one by one, vanishing one day never to be seen again. It was either a ruthless management style at work or ritual sacrifice.

  Michael’s office was small and guarded by his fierce PA, but she wasn’t at her desk when I went through, and there was no sign of activity in the outer office.

  ‘Where’s Rachel?’ I asked casually, sitting in the chair Michael indicated. ‘Is she having a day off?’

  ‘No. Er.’ Michael looked a little shamefaced. ‘I made a good case, of course, but, well, it’s been decided to drop her hours. She’s only in three times a week now.’ He looked, almost wistfully, at the door between his office and Rachel’s. ‘She makes the most marvellous coffee,’ he said, longingly. ‘But, apparently, well, cost-cutting, you know the drill. And,’ he added with an audible touch of pride, ‘I can send my own emails now.’

  That chill in my stomach solidified, as though glaciers were moving in my abdomen. Rachel had been forced to go part-time. She’d run the office and Michael like some kind of military project for years, and I would have sworn that he wouldn’t even know how to take his coat off without Rachel’s detailed step-by-step guide. Things were bad. It could explain the late email about the presentation, though. It may have taken Michael all day to type and work out how to send.

  Michael looked at his fingers for a while. Finally I had to say something. ‘Michael? What did you want to see me about? Only I’ve got a few phone calls to make, another couple of training courses to set up for some clients…’ I tailed off, hoping that he’d pick up the hint that I was working, I was Being Successful. The implication that I was outperforming Zac hung woven through my words like the paper chains that Michael had wound around his office ceiling.

  That would have been Rachel too. Michael didn’t really notice that sort of thing.

  ‘Ah. Yes. Little bit, um, awkward.’

  Another pause while my stomach sank even lower. My knees had started to shake and those walls in my head were ready to go if given a hefty enough push. Or, possibly, a slight poke. They were beginning to feel more like soggy cardboard than York stone.

  ‘It’s, well, look, it’s like this. You and Zac Drewe, you’re up for the same position in our new, affiliated company, yes?’

  I couldn’t speak. My mouth had gone dry and I would have given anything for Rachel to have come stalking through with her tray of coffee and the superior biscuits that lurked in the tin up here. I just nodded.

  ‘I have to tell you, um, Ruby, that Mr Drewe is edging slightly to the fore on this particular one, I’m afraid.’ Michael went back to looking at his fingers, which seemed to have taken on a life of their own and be twiddling away on the edge of his desk. With the way he was watching them, I half expected them to crawl away independently into a corner.

  ‘Oh,’ was all I could say.

  ‘But obviously, Ruby, obviously I would prefer to keep you on. Your work has always been – well, apart from your extended leave last spring – you’ve always been reliable and efficient and your results are top-notch.’ Such a long run of words seemed to exhaust him and he lapsed back into the detailed hand study again. I began to realise how essential the coffee was.

  My whole job relied on me being positive. Enthusiastic. I fixed a smile across my mouth that was so broad it brought my cheeks into my line of vision. ‘I’ve got a couple of excellent prospects for getting two very long-termers into work or training,’ I said in a tone so brilliant that it had facets.

  ‘Good, good.’ Michael sounded vague, as though he was not listening. ‘It’s just that, well, obviously, I’d prefer to keep you on, but other forces are at play here and they are keen on keeping Mr Drewe in his position.’ He glanced, almost involuntarily, upwards. I wondered if the mothership was hovering. ‘So I wondered,’ he dropped his voice to a murmur, ‘if there was anything you could do.’

  For one, tiny, almost
jaw-dropping moment, I wondered if he meant that if I slept with him he could keep my job for me, then I looked at Michael and dismissed it. He had all the sex appeal of a Golden Retriever and, I suspected, a similar attitude to the act, plus a very lovely young wife. ‘What do you mean?’

  Michael leaned forward so that only a small strip of desk separated us. ‘I wondered,’ and his voice was almost inaudible now, ‘if you could, you know, get any inside information on Mr Drewe. Anything we could use to help our case? I mean, obviously the other lot,’ another glance upwards, ‘know things about him, but they are going to brush any indiscretions under the carpet, aren’t they? If there’s anything you can find out and bring to me that I can use to gain leverage for you over him, well…’ He sat back and nodded speculatively. ‘It could only be to the good,’ he finished.

  I left Michael’s office feeling simultaneously terrified – Zac was ahead of me in the job; mildly elated – Michael wanted to keep me; and slightly appalled – surely this was a ‘dirty tricks’ campaign. But overall I settled on a feeling of hopelessness. Zac hadn’t let any sign of weakness slip. He arrived early and left late, he was reliable, friendly, approachable. The only thing I could possibly raise against him was the fact that he had a tendency to be a little bit harsh with some of his clients. But then, he thought I was too soft on mine.

  The awful, horrible creeping started around the back of my neck, as though I were wearing an itchy scarf. What if his bosses had asked him for inside information about me?

  I mentally audited as many of our conversations as I could remember. I’d always been bright, sparky, positive, hadn’t I? Forward-thinking, upbeat, bordering on the jolly at times. And then, crashing into my head came the memory of the café when Zac had walked in to hear me talking to Priya about the anxiety and depression.

  I broke my determined stride towards the office and wheeled around into the ladies’ toilet behind Reception, where I could lock myself in a cubicle and rest my forehead against the cool wall.

  Shit. Of course, management would have all my records, but all those showed was a three-week absence, taken as sick leave. Apart from that first day, when I’d tried to come in fresh from the screaming argument with Gareth, and Priya had had to lock us both in the interview room for two hours and then take me home, I was pristine. I had come back to work, firing on all cylinders and so overly cheery to make up for my one-day lapse that I had heard it rumoured around the main office that I’d won the lottery.

  And three weeks sick was nothing, was it? Could have been – I dunno, shingles?

  My medication, the fact that it kept the walls from caving in on me and the terror and fear from cascading over me like someone dropping liquid lead on my head, that was my own private affair. Only known to myself and Priya.

  And, now possibly, Zac.

  Or maybe he hadn’t heard? Or hadn’t picked up that I was talking about myself. Yes, it had been noisy in that café, and he’d only just arrived, Pri and I could have been discussing anything.

  But then I’d walked out, hadn’t I? I had had to get away from the crowding and the influx of sensation into the fresh air and quiet. Was it possible that Zac would have put two and two together?

  I headed back to our shared office, determined to give absolutely no hint of any kind of negativity. I brightened my eyes, nailed on a grin and thought ‘sparkle, sparkle’ to myself all the way down the corridor and in through the narrow doorway.

  I needn’t have bothered, Zac didn’t even look up as I went in. ‘She’s running rings around you,’ he said, hidden away behind his keyboard.

  ‘Who?’ Everything I had was focused on Michael and his words. I’d almost forgotten that I had an actual job.

  ‘Your last client.’

  ‘What, Samantha? She’s just a bit lost and confused. She was married and dependent on her husband for a long time; it’s natural that she feels cast adrift and out of her depth.’

  Zac jerked his head up so he could see me over his laptop. ‘She’s using you as cheap therapy,’ he said. ‘I can hear it when you’re in there.’ Another jerk of his head, towards the interview room this time. ‘All she seems to want to talk about is how crap and untrustworthy men are.’

  I stared over at where he sat, my sparkle slowly fading from me, like a fire having water thrown on it. ‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘Counselling is why we’re here, isn’t it?’ I could feel my grin starting to slide and nailed it more rigidly back into place. ‘That’s our brief. To get to the bottom of why clients feel they can’t get back into the workplace long term?’

  Zac harrumphed. Michael’s words about Zac edging ahead in the job competition stakes repeated in the back of my head, and I wondered what it was that he was doing to gain that edge. Apart from never going home, he and I seemed pretty even in the number of clients, time we spent with them and the number getting back into work. What did he have that I didn’t, apart from a Land Rover Discovery and a proper parking space?

  ‘Sometimes it really isn’t about the jobs, it’s about them,’ I said, although I wasn’t sure why. This was the 101 of our job; that people were sometimes kept from working by personal hang-ups and fears. ‘They’ve had years of being told they’re stupid or incapable or badly organised or whatever, usually through someone else’s sense of inadequacy or need to feel superior. Some people have to hand that kind of crap down and down and the people we see are like Patient Zero, the ones that all the crap has landed on, who don’t have the tools necessary to shrug it off or say “bugger you, I’m going to succeed anyway”.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Zac rattled the keyboard a bit more. ‘And yes, you’re right in some cases. It doesn’t explain Miriam though.’

  I tried to imagine anyone calling Miriam stupid or incapable and could only conjure up images of the resultant bloodbath. Miriam would not take that kind of talk from anyone. ‘Maybe not. But Samantha, Grace, Krystoff, Taylor – all those clients, they’ve all got backstories that would make your hair curl. And sometimes they just need someone to believe in them.’

  ‘And some of them are only coming so they don’t get their benefits sanctioned, and they reckon talking to us means they can get at least another year of not having to apply for anything.’ He sounded odd. Sceptical. I knew Zac was less inclined to get involved with clients than I was, he didn’t see them out of hours, for example. But maybe it was just that he had clients who didn’t have emergencies like Taylor had had.

  ‘Maybe. A few. But in the scheme of things, not that many.’ I was having to fight really hard for my sparkle to reignite in the face of his utter pragmatism. ‘What’s the matter, did someone send you a copy of the Daily Mail or something?’

  Zac sighed. ‘I’ve just had half an hour of Bob trying to wangle his way out of an interview. They’re opening a paint factory over near him, lots of new, non-specialist jobs and he’s pleading some kind of mental health crisis.’

  Sweat sprang into my palms and I sat down rather hard behind my desk. ‘Maybe it’s real,’ I said, and my voice sounded a bit hoarse.

  Zac snorted. ‘Nah. Bob plays the “mental health” card whenever he wants to get out of doing something. And, of course, it’s impossible to prove, all he has to say is that he’s got “anxiety” and that’s it, we can’t touch him.’

  My hands were now so wet that I couldn’t type. In contrast, my mouth was dry. ‘If he has a diagnosis…’ I managed to force out.

  ‘Once. Years ago. He’s not currently on medication and he hasn’t seen a doctor in months. But the diagnosis stands forever, apparently.’ Zac sounded bitter.

  I wasn’t totally surprised. I’d met this kind of prejudice before. I’d even carried it, slightly, myself, prior to my own breakdown. But now, with my first-hand knowledge, I could safely say that, yes, anxiety, panic attacks, were real. They were awful. And they could strike out of nowhere when you felt perfectly all right. That was the really scary thing. Plus, they were invisible. So many of us carried this fear, like an invisible we
ight strapped to our backs. The fear that we might suddenly be overwhelmed and carried away on that unreasoning tide.

  Of course, I couldn’t explain any of this to Zac. Not without handing him the agency of my own destruction.

  ‘I think, possibly, you are being a bit harsh,’ I said, carefully. ‘Depression isn’t a life choice, you know.’

  Zac kept his head down. Kept typing. As though my words were just bouncing off him, unheard.

  I stood up, hoping that my chair made enough noise that it would indicate my opposition to his opinion and stalked off into Priya’s office because otherwise I was afraid that I might throw something at him.

  The next day, it snowed. And the day after that. And the day after that.

  The novelty wore off very fast. At first, it was very Christmassy, walking in to work through streets made clean by the recent fall and with outlines fuzzed by the current one. I was in early, mindful of Michael’s words, and also because parking was becoming a nightmare and getting in an hour early was the only way I could ensure I could park within walking distance of the office.

  Shop lights beamed out, colouring the snow heaped outside their doors and making the offerings inside their windows look mysterious and enticing. I crunched my way down Petergate and there was the Minster, looking even bulkier rising out of a snowbank, like a large man getting out of an untidy bed. Lights played over the medieval stonework and glinted off the snowfall that was settling in nooks and statues. Several gargoyles wore jaunty caps of snow and the whole building looked complacent, solid amid the blizzard’s impermanence.

  Inside, our offices were hushed and steamy. People were ringing in to work from home, unable to get through the resulting traffic chaos or, in some cases, out of the villages where they lived. For all that we got a fair bit of snow in winter, the infrastructure still seemed to collapse every time. Karen was fielding calls whilst shrugging out of her enormous coat and unzipping boots, and every corridor I walked down echoed to the sound of unanswered calls from the outside world.