A Midwinter Match

by Jane Lovering

  The car looked dark, cold and deserted. So at least he wasn’t living in there, which had been a thought which had crossed my mind. ‘It’s complicated,’ he’d said. I had allowed myself to conjure him an imaginary life, which had consisted of sleeping in his car, using the facilities in the offices, and eating breakfast in the next-door café before turning in to work.

  Or, he could just be getting the bus.

  I looked down at the sweaty handlebars of the bike. ‘Very sensible,’ I muttered. Then it occurred to me that Zac wouldn’t need to sleep in the car, he could have slept in the office, or the interview room, in the warm, so all that half-dreaming thought of him curled in the back of the Discovery had been total fantasy.

  I distracted myself from feeling sorry for Zac by turning off the million points of halogen light from my jacket and locking the bike to a downpipe with the space-age padlock that Cav had made me promise to use.

  I suppressed the urge to write an obscenity in the snow on Zac’s windscreen with difficulty; after the bike ride, my inner fourteen-year-old wanted to come to the fore. Instead, I settled for peering through the windows, just on the off chance that he was lying, wrapped in a sleeping bag, on the back seat. He wasn’t. There was nothing on the seats apart from a tangle of what looked like scarves and jumpers, all in that same hand-knitted pattern that he’d been wearing in the café, all heaped together in one corner, like a woolly sulk. The jumpers looked child-sized, and I wondered again about Zac’s home life.

  Reassured, if a little annoyed, that he wasn’t frozen to death in his own vehicle – even if it would have solved the ‘who gets the job’ problem – I used my key fob to open the side door into our corridor. Only the doors bore alarms. There was no point in running an alarm system through the whole building, so Michael had said. The downstairs windows were barred anyway, so we were safe from any burglars who didn’t have ladders or helicopters and it gave the place the look of a genteel workhouse.

  All this meant that I could stride through the darkened building without being disturbed, and it was rather pleasant, even though it was ridiculously early, hearing only my footsteps, soft in the trainers, squeaking along the boards. No background hush of machinery or muffled phones ringing. Just the slightly dusty dark, lit by the multicoloured glint of illuminations reflecting off snow and shredded by the window bars onto the floor in front of me.

  Down the old-tobacco smell of the hallway, turn right up the two steps past IT and their cheese-and-onion scented office. I could have found my way through the building using only my nose. Now I was outside the interview room, where the smell changed to cheap polish and air freshener overlying that faint whisper of retouched paintwork. I hoisted my bag higher onto my shoulder. I was going to change in the interview room, with a huge mug of very strong coffee and, I looked at my phone clock, possibly a nap.

  Under the door to our office, there was a faint glimmer. Not strong enough to be our overhead light, more like the blueish light from a computer screen. There was also a strong smell of coffee. I tiptoed up, pushed the door with a fingertip, and jumped.

  In the middle of the floor was a hunched shape. Illuminated only by the light from a screen saver, it resembled nothing so much as a pile of clothes that had been formed into the rough approximation of a human form. Adrenaline flashed through me, then died on wondering why someone would want to scare me, then seared back into my veins again when the huddled shape moved.

  ‘Zac?’ I dropped my bag.

  The shape went still. I could see now that it was Zac, hair flattened to his head and his face on his knees, sitting on the floor with his big coat drawn up over him. He looked as though he’d walked in and collapsed, huddled down on the rough-weave flooring.

  ‘Zac?’ I said again, more gently now. I took two steps towards him and kicked over a mug of coffee that had been sitting on the floor near his hunched shape. It spread a cold pool out over assorted papers and the carpet and the mug clanged away into the darkness beneath the desks, but neither of us remarked on it. ‘Has something happened? Are you all right?’

  At the back of my mind, a tiny flag waved in triumph for a second – he’s not perfect. He’s not always the cheery, upbeat in control person you see every day! – but I shot it down. This wasn’t the kind of advantage I was looking for.

  ‘Hey.’ Zac’s voice sounded tired. Lost. ‘You’re early.’

  The car. The cold coffee. ‘Have you been here all night?’ I bent down to sit beside him, my body lights clattering against one another like chattering teeth.

  ‘I…’ he tailed off and slumped further forward, cheek against his knees as though he lacked the strength to raise his head. ‘Complicated,’ he muttered.

  I shouldn’t touch him. I was well aware of staff policies and the possibility of accusations. But he looked so lost, so forlorn and empty, with his back against the legs of his desk and the spilled coffee like a lake of blood at his feet, so I put an arm around him. He was shivering.

  ‘Zac.’ I did the brisk arm-rub thing, showing no sexual intent, just an innocent desire to warm him up. ‘You’re freezing.’

  He laughed, a throaty, almost swallowed laugh that turned into sobs. And then his head was down on his knees and he was sobbing, proper, heavy sobs that sounded as though they’d come from his soul, and I was hugging him tight.

  ‘Zac.’ It was all I could say. I would try to use his name to keep him anchored. I’d been here, this awful sadness that felt as though it was all-encompassing, when the world flew to pieces around your ears and you couldn’t focus on anything except the misery. ‘Zac. Listen. Whatever this is, we can work on it, okay?’

  My mind was running the possibilities. Was he being fired? Some gross misconduct? No, someone would have given me a heads-up. Gossip ran through this place like norovirus. Not work then. Some personal tragedy? But the Zac I knew, the contained and measured Zac, would have phoned in on compassionate grounds, taken time off to deal with it. This had all the hallmarks of an emotional overload, finally coming to a head.

  The sobs stopped being audible and mutated into sudden jerks of his shoulders. Then a muffled ‘sorry’. A deep intake of breath. ‘This isn’t me. This isn’t me!’

  I knew that feeling too. When the emotions and the fear and the hopelessness overwhelmed you and you felt as though you existed as a tiny seed of your original self, buried deep under the mourning and the grief and the awful, awful despair. As though anguish laid thickly over the top of the real you, wearing your face and using your words, imitating you without letting you out to speak.

  ‘No.’ I held him tighter. ‘But if you let this go, you will come to the surface, eventually.’ Tears of sympathy threatened behind my eyeballs. I’ve been here. I know how this feels. ‘Breathe.’

  So I held on. Slowly the sobs became the occasional twitch of his body and the deep involuntary indrawn breaths. The tension ebbed and even the air in the office seemed to become warmer, but then I realised that was because Maintenance had turned the heating on. People were arriving for work. Far down the hallways, there was clattering, voices, a half-laugh cut off by a closing door.

  Suddenly, and without warning, the door to the office flew open and a dark shape hurtled inside, then stopped. ‘Oh.’ A bit of a pause. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Can you come back later, Sam?’ I didn’t even look up. Caretakers tended to fly around the building in these before-work hours, tweaking heating systems and mending torn carpets; it was rarely urgent.

  ‘I been told to bleed the radiators.’

  ‘Can you bleed them tonight?’

  I could feel Sam’s baffled gaze travelling from Zac to me and back again.

  ‘Why are you on the floor?’

  Zac gave a shaky, almost-laugh. I could feel his breathing returning to a steadier state, with the odd gasp. I kept my arm around his shoulders.

  ‘It’s nothing, Sam. Just come back later, okay?’

  ‘Weeeellll…’ When I half-glanced up, Sam was scratc
hing his scalp and wrinkling his face. ‘I dunno. I’m supposed to bleed them radiators today. That’s what it said on the calendar, “bleed radiators”, so here I am.’

  ‘Can you cross it out and write it in again for tomorrow?’ I chanced a quick look at Zac and was reassured to see that he’d drawn his head up from his knees a fraction. ‘The radiators will still be here.’

  ‘S’pose.’ Sam gathered his brown janitorial overall around him, like an evil villain about to make a cape-twirling exit. Sam could be nearly as single minded as Cav, but with variable focuses.

  ‘But I’m supposed to do it today.’

  ‘We won’t tell if you don’t.’ I gave him a grin, which wasn’t returned, but at least he went out.

  He closed the door carefully behind him, but I couldn’t tell if he’d gone. He was surprisingly quiet-footed, and we’d not heard him arrive.

  ‘Do you want to go home?’ I asked Zac gently. ‘I can cover for—’

  ‘No.’ The words were sudden, snapped out. ‘No. I’ve got Bob at nine o’clock.’

  We fell into silence again, but the emotion was gone. Zac was returning to himself.

  ‘I’ll make some coffee then.’ I gradually eased myself away from him. ‘And I’d better get changed. I look like a Christmas tree.’

  He raised his head. ‘You do, a bit. Why the…?’ He waved a hand at my peculiar clothing choices. ‘Leggings? It must be bad.’

  Yes, Zac was back. Whatever had caused the misery, the momentary lapse in his normal cheerful self, was gone. Pushed back. I didn’t kid myself that it had vanished, I knew too well how this sort of thing worked. You could keep it underground, but it would burst up at every point of weakness. This kind of thing was like playing Whack-A-Mole without a mallet.

  We both stood up. Without acknowledging it, Zac peeled his coat off and hung it on the hook, then began collecting up the coffee-splattered papers from the floor.

  ‘Sorry about that.’ I nodded towards the soaked-in stain. ‘Didn’t see the mug.’

  Zac stopped for a second, frozen in the act of piling papers back up onto the corner of his desk. ‘I’ll clean it up properly.’

  ‘Can’t we just cover it over with another rug? That’s pretty much standard behaviour for this place. Or we let the sheer volume of paper drift over it. I think that’s how glaciers form, you know.’

  ‘By someone spilling a cup of coffee?’ We were both injecting so much lightness into our voices that it was going to sound like a helium party soon.

  ‘Layers forming.’ I watched him stack those papers and then tap the corners so they were precise. Distraction technique. ‘Anyway. I’d better get changed.’

  I didn’t want to be caught looking like a Glo-stick. It hadn’t bothered me when it was just Zac, but some of the office staff would tease me into the New Year about this jacket and the associated lamps. I didn’t want to think what they’d say about the leggings.

  ‘Yes. I ought to get ready for my nine o’clock.’

  Fine. Clearly we weren’t going to talk about it. I supposed that was probably for the best. I’d been within a breath of telling him I knew how he was feeling, but it was information I didn’t want him to have about me. Or – I shut the door to the interview room and began to change out of my cycling clothes – did I? It had helped me to know that other people suffered General Anxiety Disorder too. To know that all those people I passed in the street, laughing, chatting, holding their lovers’ hand and looking as though they led charmed and perfect lives, could also have episodes where the world seemed too much.

  But if I told Zac that, he had ammunition. Although, I thought, peeling off that awful jacket and stuffing it into my bag, now, so did I.

  The morning was busy, with lots of courses closing for the Christmas break, so phone calls to make to clients to check that they’d be attending in January; new courses would be starting up so there was much form filling to get people moved onto them. Stuff to check, chasing up to do, and I was grateful for it, because it kept me from thinking too hard.

  Outside, apparently, it was still snowing. Staff from outlying regions, and some of the Leeds contingent, went home early. Roads were closing over the moors and high hills, trains were affected and nobody wanted to be trapped in the office by snowdrifts and nightfall. So, by lunchtime, the place was relatively quiet.

  Priya brought her sandwiches into our office to eat. ‘Hmm. Hummus, mung beans and something,’ she said, peeling back the top layer of bread. ‘Nettie made lunch this morning and she doesn’t believe in peanut butter and chocolate spread.’

  Zac barely looked up. ‘How can she not believe in them?’

  ‘Oh, she knows about their existence. She just doesn’t believe their place is together between two slices of bread. They’re an ingredient, apparently, not a standalone substance.’ She looked sadly once more upon the damply green filling in her sandwich. ‘Love her to bits, but she’s a barbarian about food.’

  Priya sat on the end of my desk. I usually popped to the café next door for lunch but it was closed due to the snow at the moment, so I was making do with a KitKat and coffee. Zac wasn’t eating at all, I noticed. He was working normally but there was a jerkiness to his movements that told me he was running on empty and the reflection of the snow through the window was giving his skin a yellowish tinge.

  I got up and went into Priya’s office. The confectionary cupboard was still as well stocked as ever, despite the fact that we’d been grazing our way through it for weeks. Priya was evidently restocking, there were two boxes of mince pies that hadn’t been there a few days ago. Perhaps she was afraid that Nettie was going to start a healthy-eating regime, and these were defensive baked goods? I chose a box and went back into our office, where Zac was talking to Priya about the weather forecast.

  ‘Supposed to snow right up to Christmas,’ he said. I wondered if he was talking about normal, routine, down-to-earth things, to stop darker thoughts from breaking through.

  ‘Oh great.’ Priya munched at her sandwich, which did, I had to admit, look pretty boring. ‘I’ll have to get the bus tomorrow then. If it turns up. The roads were bad this morning. How the hell did you get in on a bike, Rubes?’

  ‘Carefully. Very carefully.’

  Zac stared at me.

  I held out the box of mince pies. ‘Here. We may as well get seasonal.’

  He took two and gave me a faint smile. ‘Thanks. I didn’t think about – I mean, I’ve not had anything yet today. You came on a bike?’

  ‘You didn’t think that there was absolutely no other reason in the world that I would have dressed like that? I mean, leggings?’

  ‘I wasn’t—’ he broke off. What had he been about to say, that he wasn’t in any state to notice how I was dressed or wonder about why? ‘I just thought it was your version of snow wear.’

  I told him about the car. I’d already had a lengthy discussion with Priya about it, in case she had an obvious solution to my getting-to-work problem, but she didn’t. It looked as though the bike and I were going to be an item. Going forward, as Michael would have said.

  ‘That’s a bit of a bugger.’ He stuffed a mince pie into his mouth, whole. ‘Do you want a lift home? The bike will go in the back of the Discovery if we take the front wheel off.’

  I hadn’t even thought about the journey home yet. Every time I peered out of the window, the landscape looked more Siberian and even the pigeons which usually flocked and pecked around the area outside the Minster steps were sitting on the statue of Constantine, who, in consequence, looked as though he were wearing a cloak of fluffed up feathers and misery. It also occurred to me that getting Zac to drive me home would mean he’d need to leave the car park and therefore might not end up spending all night in the office.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘That would be great.’

  ‘No problem.’ He ate another mince pie. Whole. ‘I owe you one anyway.’

  I looked up sharply, to meet his eye. He wasn’t going to talk about
earlier, was he? With Priya here?

  ‘For bringing the mince pies.’ He raised one to me. ‘I was seasonally starving.’

  But there was a darkness behind the words, a weight that Priya wouldn’t have noticed, but I did.

  11

  The office emptied even more during the afternoon. Michael actually ventured out of his office and stalked the corridors, popping his head round doors, seemingly astonished to find a workforce still there and still actively working.

  ‘Not all gone home yet, then?’ he asked jovially to the general office at large, whilst I was in there photocopying some paperwork.

  ‘No,’ came the dull assent. Nobody was brave enough to point out that, with jobs on the line, many people would stay until the last possible minute.

  ‘And you’re still here, Ruby.’ Michael sauntered up to me with the confidence of one who drives a 4x4 vehicle and can afford a hotel room in one of the best establishments, should the snow worsen.

  ‘Apparently.’ I hugged the machine-warmed paperwork to my chest like a flimsy hot-water bottle.

  ‘Ah. On your way back to the office?’ He fell into step beside me. The draught caused by all the eyebrows in the room raising at once, made the paper chains swing. ‘I’ll accompany you, if I may.’

  Oh great, I thought, clutching my bundle like my firstborn and being forced to pass through the door he held open for me. Now what?

  We got as far as the first set of doors before Michael’s motivations became clear. ‘Any, ah, any follow-up to our conversation the other day?’ He had his hands behind his back and a fixed geniality to his expression. ‘About our Mr Drewe?’

  I made a business of pushing open the door, juggling my paperwork and pretending to slip on the polished boards a little, to give me thinking time.