A Midwinter Match

by Jane Lovering

  ‘It’s a bit like nuclear winter, only with more cake,’ I said, as we slithered slowly past a still-open Sainsbury’s, which had piles of Christmas food in the window.

  ‘Yes.’ Zac corrected the natural inclination of the car to bounce gently off the snowbanks lining the road. We were zigzagging our way along a deserted stretch of carriageway, very, very slowly. ‘Not sure I’ll make it back to Leeds tonight.’

  ‘If the guys agree, you can sleep on our sofa.’ I looked out of the window again. ‘It will be warmer than the office and cheaper than a hotel, although we don’t do much in the way of cooked breakfasts.’

  ‘Ah.’ A shuffling pedestrian passed us on the outside, then we hit a patch of grit and managed to overtake them again. ‘Yes. This morning.’

  ‘You don’t have to talk about it, Zac. Honestly.’

  He was a huddled shape behind the steering wheel. Despite the fact that the Discovery was blasting warm air at us, he’d kept his hat on, still pulled low over his forehead. Behind him, the pile of little knitted jumpers swayed and rocked. I didn’t know if I wanted him to talk about this morning or not. Explanations might make it all make sense, but if I knew – then it all became real. ‘If it’s all right with everyone, I would very much appreciate the sofa, thank you. I’m not sure I can keep this level of concentration up for a return journey. My eyes are starting to swivel.’

  I know he looked at me, because I saw his head turn, but it was too dark, even with the snow beaming back every kind of light, to see any expression. I decided not to push it. Besides, I didn’t want him to get annoyed and stop the car, because I was afraid it may never get started again. Even four-wheel-drive was making heavy weather of the snowfall.

  Outside the centre of town, the roads were worse. Only the main roads had been cleared, so side roads were just two lines of barely traversed snow. Some gardens were growing a crop of snowmen and small gangs of snowball fighters, who at least made the dark less empty, even if the soft thud of snowballs hitting the bodywork as we drifted past did carry a slight implicit threat.

  Further out, there was nobody. The streets were dark and empty, only a passing bus, lighting up the snow with its windows, like a mobile advent calendar, showed any sign that people were still moving about. I imagined trying to cycle through this and knew that I’d have ended up walking and pushing the bike. Zac had, at the very least, saved me from that.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, at exactly the same time as he did.

  A confused silence followed.

  ‘Why?’ I asked cautiously, in case we were going to end up speaking at the same time from now on, like some kind of fairy’s curse.

  ‘This morning. And not asking.’

  ‘Oh.’ We were turning, drifting gently over the edge of the pavement which was invisible under the eighteen inches of snow, into my road. I could see the Christmas trees in the windows of the houses, the pinpricks of lights in porches and trees. ‘I was just saying thank you for saving me from trying to cycle home.’

  More uncomfortable silence. Well, relative silence at least, as there was a small, shouty group of local children lined up behind a garden wall, poised and ready to bombard us with snow as soon as we got out of the car. I could see various-sized heads and the tops of bobble hats crouched in the bare undergrowth and hear the whoops and yells of potential horrors to come as we parked on the road outside the house. Sophie’s car was at an angle in the driveway. There was no sign of Ed’s, but I remembered he’d headed out to his parents’ for Christmas yesterday morning. Cav was in the covered side return, with his bike upside down, doing something to the pedals. My car had clearly been towed away by the bus company’s insurers at some point in the day. The snow had obliterated any tracks.

  I gathered my bag to my chest. ‘We’ll have to make a run for it. Those lads out there are armed.’

  ‘It’s unfair. It’s like the Charge of the Light Brigade, only without horses.’ Zac slid the driver’s side window down. ‘I’m arming up.’ He scraped a couple of handfuls of snow from the outside of the car. ‘I’ll cover you.’

  I tore down the driveway and skidded my way into the porch, while Zac pelted snowballs back in the direction of the hiding crew. There was a lot of shrieking and laughing, and I think he deliberately delayed his arrival into the house, because I’d had time to get my coat off, ask Sophie about the sofa and begin the search for some clean coffee mugs before he followed me inside. He was powdered in snow and his cheeks were red.

  ‘Well, that was fun,’ he said. ‘Two of them have got a hell of a reach on them, but I’ve got years of experience on my side. Plus an adult’s innate cunning, and a really stupid hat.’

  ‘Sophie says you’re fine to have the sofa for tonight.’ I carried on shifting stuff in the cupboard. The dishwasher was full and actually going, and there weren’t many clean mugs hanging around.

  ‘That’s really very kind of all of you.’

  ‘She hasn’t started on “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem” yet,’ I said darkly. ‘You may regret staying over, unless you’ve got very good earplugs.’

  My rummaging paid off in the form of two very old and slightly chipped mugs hidden deep in the back of the cupboard where the dried pasta lay, dusty, untouched and unloved. None of us really liked pasta, but we kept buying it for some reason. I began to make coffee.

  ‘Do you mind if I get these wet things off?’ Zac asked.

  ‘Downstairs bathroom, through there.’ I nodded towards the door, but didn’t see him go, as Cav burst in to ask the whereabouts of his second-best bike and then behaved as though I’d performed unanaesthetised surgery on his firstborn when I told him it was sitting in the back of the Discovery with its wheels off. He dashed back out, no doubt to sit and wait for Zac to open the vehicle, murmuring soft words of reassurance through the windows in the meantime.

  When Zac came back in, he had changed out of the damp work clothes he’d been snowballed in and into some loose cotton trousers and a sweatshirt.

  I stared at him.

  ‘You carry a change of clothes in your work bag?’ It was all he had with him, apart from those tiny jumpers in the back of his car.

  ‘Yup, it’s just sensible.’ He indicated the brightly lit, and somewhat messy, kitchen. ‘You never know when you may be stranded by apocalyptic weather conditions in a cross between a squat and a kindergarten.’ A hand waved towards the tray of Rudolph biscuits, complete with red cherry noses, that Sophie had cooling on the work surface.

  ‘Sophie’s a primary school teacher,’ I explained. ‘It’s the school Christmas party tomorrow. There’s probably a load of marshmallow snow bunnies in the – ah, yes, here they are.’ I closed the cupboard door again. ‘And I wouldn’t be rude about the place, because it’s this or you’re sleeping in the Discovery.’

  Zac looked suddenly abashed. More so than I would have expected my jocular tone to have evoked. ‘Yeah, sorry, I really am grateful for the sofa offer. It’s still coming down out there. Do you think we should send out for supplies or a takeaway or something?’

  ‘Already ordered.’ Cav’s voice drifted in from the hallway, where he was now in the shelter of the house but still watching the Discovery, presumably in case Rannulph Fiennes decided to come by and turn to bike theft. ‘As long as you eat pizza, you’re covered.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you.’

  ‘Can you unlock the car now?’ Cav was almost rotating with impatience. ‘I need to check the bike over.’

  ‘He’s a bit… single-minded,’ I explained, as Zac clicked the key button through the window, very wisely choosing not to venture back outside, and Cav took off through the front door like a terrier sighting next door’s cat.

  ‘Are you and he…?’ Zac looked from me to the shrouded form of Cav, who was gently stroking the bike as he slid it carefully from the Discovery’s boot. ‘Only Priya said…’

  ‘Priya once spent twenty minutes trying to persuade me that Cav would make a great boyfriend,’ I said,
tightly.

  ‘Only twenty minutes? That’s not like Priya, she’s usually a touch more persistent than that. What happened?’

  ‘She actually met Cav,’ I said tightly. ‘After half an hour of him explaining to her how to strip-clean the gears of his bike, she reported back that he was only suitable to date if you’d already won the Tour de France and, apparently, it’s a terrible waste.’ Then I rounded on him. ‘What do you mean, she’s persistent?’

  ‘She, er, she, well, you must have noticed. She keeps trying to set us up?’

  ‘Oh, don’t take it personally. She tries to set me up with any available single man. She thinks I just need to meet someone to help me get over—’ I stopped. The whole Gareth thing was none of his business. ‘She’s happily coupled up and not so much smug as totally self-satisfied. She wants a partner in complacency.’

  ‘And you’re not so keen?’

  ‘Aversion therapy is a powerful thing.’ That was all I was going to say on the subject, so I was extremely happy to see the pizza delivery van slide gently past the house and finally bump to a stop three doors down. ‘Food is coming.’

  We ate in the living room, pizza boxes on the coffee table. Sophie took a plate of slices up to her room, as she had marking to do. Cav sat with us for a while, but when Zac couldn’t take part in any bike-based chat, he sloped back off to twiddle with his pedals outside the kitchen door again. It left Zac and I on our own, amid the discarded pizza and general household detritus.

  We ate in silence. Well, almost silence, Sophie was singing softly to herself upstairs over our heads. At least, she may have intended singing softly, but as it was mostly off-key it came over as louder than she presumably thought.

  ‘Pizza. Not the best food to eat if you’re trying to impress someone.’ Zac jerked his chin upwards and a string of cheese stretched to accommodate the movement.

  ‘Better than spaghetti bolognaise.’ I was sitting on the beanbag. I didn’t want to sit next to him, it felt unnecessarily intimate and this wasn’t, after all, a date, but eating pizza whilst sitting on a surface that is slowly collapsing under your weight was not turning out to be a great move. The plate was virtually under my chin, as were my knees. ‘And we don’t have to impress anyone, do we? We’re just refuelling. Doesn’t matter what we look like.’

  ‘You could be right.’ Zac licked his fingers and put the plate down. ‘Maybe that’s it. Maybe we should all care a bit less what people think of us.’

  ‘Is that your excuse for the hat? And the jumpers you wear that don’t quite fit?’ I meant it to be light-hearted, but I heard it come across as accusatory, and concentrated really hard on my pizza so I didn’t have to look at his face.

  ‘No. The jumpers are… Look, Ruby. We really need to talk about—’

  I knew he was right, but I just couldn’t. While we hadn’t discussed his breakdown this morning, I could still kid myself that it was glossed over. Like that chunk in the skirting board that my eyes suddenly found really fascinating, where we’d taken a slice out of the wood moving the sofa and painted over it, pretending that it was invisible, that nothing had ever happened. If we talked about it – then I had to face up to either using it against him, or trying to work out why I didn’t want to use it against him.

  ‘Look, I’ve got some work to do. I’ll take it upstairs. While I’m up there, I’ll sort you out a spare duvet and a pillow, we tend to go to bed quite early in this house because everyone has to be up at the crack of dawn.’

  I rushed the words out, giving him no chance to insert so much as a comma between them, and, by the time I’d finished speaking, I was already out of the door and in the hallway, grabbing my work bag and abandoning the pizza. Zac had barely moved.

  Up the stairs I went, where I could hear Sophie more clearly, but I was prepared to take that in order to get away, and then into my tiny room, where I changed into fleecy pyjamas and lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling and ignoring the sheaves of paper which protruded, wrinkle-edged with damp, from my bag.

  Why didn’t I want to hear what he had to say?

  But I knew. Deep down. If Zac told me what it was, between the wedding photograph and the small jumpers in the back of his car, between the never going home and the being unable to move from Leeds – it would make it real. It would make his problems something concrete and definite. It would make him a real person.

  And if I had to think of Zac as a real, whole person, then I had to stare the competition for my job full in the face. At the moment, I could still just about kid myself that it was never going to happen. That some fluke would mean we would both be kept on and I wouldn’t have to peer at the reality of working for an unethical company in a job I was no longer sure was doing any good at all.

  Then the thought of having to find myself another job reared into the back of my mind. Interviews. Assessments. Stuff that would stress me into another breakdown, if I wasn’t careful. I had to stay where I was.

  You’re fine, Ruby.

  My heart rate began to slow again and my hands relaxed from their tight fists.

  Now I wanted to go back down and finish the pizza, but I didn’t dare.

  I hauled a spare duvet from under the bed, which was the only storage space in the room, and flung it down the stairs, where it landed in the hallway with a soft ‘flump’. ‘Duvet!’ I called, and then pushed my door almost closed again.

  To distract myself, I pulled the file from my bag. I’d forgotten what I’d brought with me from the office, so the scruffy, handwritten sheets were almost a surprise. They were Miriam’s photocopied application forms and they contained something she thought would give me the edge over Zac. Find Miriam’s secret, get her into work – that ought to count so highly in my favour that I’d never even need to think about Zac’s tears, the hopelessness and defeat in every angle of his body…

  Yeah. I was thinking about it way too much for something I didn’t want to think about.

  I switched on my bedside lamp and tilted the papers to throw more light onto those black lined forms.

  Date of Birth: 1979

  I sat back, hitting my head on the lamp as I went. I’d pegged Miriam a good ten years older.

  Qualifications: None

  I knew she’d left school early, pregnant with her eldest son, so that wasn’t a complete surprise. She’d had no time to take exams, and then, with a small baby to care for and no real help, no wonder she’d slid through the cracks.

  Experience: see following:

  A list of jobs, all temporary, all very short-lived. Cleaning, mostly. Well, that was fine, if I could get her a small job with a cleaning agency, it would get her off our books and she’d still receive some benefit money to top up her earnings.

  I tilted the pages again and felt a little dig of sadness under my ribs. These few scratched markings on the form, that was all Miriam had to show for her life. No qualifications, four children. A council house on an estate in Leeds, where she shared a bedroom with her smallest granddaughter.

  I gave a short, hollow laugh and looked around my own, four squeezed walls. I may be many years behind and several qualifications ahead, but my life wasn’t exactly where I’d planned it either, was it? I couldn’t fault Miriam, because I knew how things didn’t always turn out the way we wanted. Then I gave a little shudder. Sometimes these thoughts spiralled. This might not be where I thought I should be, but there was always further down to go. Huge debts. Mounting repayments. Bailiffs and homelessness and job loss and…

  Breathe.

  Miriam’s life was not, thankfully, mine.

  So, what did she think I would see? I spread the forms out across the bed and moved from one to the next and then the next. All of them gave more or less the same information. I could see where details had been slightly altered, dates truncated or elongated, experience talked up a little, but nothing that would give me pause for thought.

  Nothing that would actually tell me anything.

  But if I didn’t fin
d whatever she’d been alluding to, then that only left me with the dirty tricks campaign. I put my face in my hands. I didn’t need this kind of moral conundrum. Be nice, be moral, versus play the game and keep my office. Was I the kind of person who would hang on to my job at all costs? Or was I nice?

  Oh, this was horrible.

  I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands, making the neutral paintwork blur and slide. The knock on the door meant that I pressed too hard and nearly blinded myself and jumped so hard that papers slid off the bed and sprawled onto the floor in an untidy ruckus, with yesterday’s socks and old magazines.

  ‘Ruby? I made you a coffee and brought the rest of the pizza. You didn’t get to finish yours and—’

  I cut Zac off by flinging open the already partly open door. I must have looked ferocious, because he took half a step back and collided with the banister rail. ‘You,’ I said sternly but mainly focusing on the pizza box in his hand, because, damn him, he was right and I was still hungry, ‘are treading on my boundaries, Zac.’

  He made a face. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to. I don’t want to come in. I just thought you might like coffee and pizza. You know. Because I’m a guest and it’s your house and everything.’

  He looked out of place, my work colleague standing on the landing in non-office clothing. Unsettled, with his hair flattened by the wearing of the strange knitted hat. Cheery, normal, an easy-going and approachable man with no worries other than how we were going to get the Discovery out of its snow bank in the morning.

  ‘Michael has asked me to tell him if there’s any reason I can find that you shouldn’t get to keep the job.’ The words fell out of me. They’d been so uppermost in my mind, so on-the-tip-of-my-tongue for so long now that I was almost unaware that I’d said them aloud.

  ‘Ah.’ Zac shifted his weight.

  ‘Have they asked you to do the same about me?’