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A Midwinter Match

Page 18

by Jane Lovering


  At least I could let a little of that emotional sympathy show to Pri. I thought of the way Zac had stood in my bedroom doorway, carrying hot coffee and leftover pizza. ‘It’s like he’s had “caring” engraved on him at some point.’ I knew which point that would be too – when his mother started showing symptoms, when she became too forgetful. He must have had to learn to take on the running of the household very young. The caring must be more habit now than anything else and I wondered what the inner Zac was like.

  ‘That’s a good thing.’ Priya tugged off gloves and hung up her coat. ‘Do you fancy him? Oh, that’s a stupid question, of course you do.’

  ‘He’s still the opposition,’ I pointed out. ‘Fancying him doesn’t come into the equation.’

  ‘Ah, but he’s a nice guy, I keep telling you, Ruby. You just don’t recognise nice when you see it, that’s why you got caught up with Gareth. You’ve got tied up in the patriarchy, thinking all men have to be macho rugby players, demonstrating the kind of behaviour that we have, thank God, nearly stamped out after fifty years of campaigning.’

  I stared at her. ‘I am not tied up in the patriarchy, whatever that might mean!’

  ‘Oh, come on. Look at the way you defer to Michael. You get all smiley and “Daddy knows best” with him, even though we all know Michael wouldn’t know which way round to put on his trousers if he weren’t married and didn’t have Rachel in the office.’ She was looking at me defiantly. She’d even put her hands on her hips.

  ‘Oh dear Lord, you and Nettie have been talking about me again, haven’t you?’

  ‘Well, it’s true. We have no idea why, because your mum and dad have role reversal down to a tee, except that your mum has to cook because your dad has learned incompetence. Maybe you’re just reacting to that? But you were looking for a man to take control with Gareth, and then when he turned out to be wetter than a towel in a rainstorm, well, you turned into your mum and took over.’

  ‘Has Nettie been letting you loose in the university library or something?’ I was a little bit shocked at Pri’s confrontational attitude.

  ‘I’m just so tired of watching you dwindle down. The way you reacted to Gareth doing the inevitable, it was scary. Watching you fly into pieces, just because that pile of shit behaved exactly the way we’d been predicting he’d behave, it was like telling you the moon was round and then having to pat you gently when you went out one night and had a breakdown at the sight of the full moon! Whereas Zac is really, really kind and a decent guy and yet you don’t even see him because he’s not leering at your bum and chatting up every woman he meets.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want him.’ I was getting a bit sweaty. Maybe it was the heat in this tiny office, or maybe I was getting too much mental exercise trying to avoid Priya’s full-on attack. She had a point, I knew she did, but I really didn’t want to think about it. Zac was, well, he was just Zac. ‘I’ve got to go and do some work.’

  It was difficult, but I didn’t flounce out. Instead, I gave her a cheery wave and took half a bar of fruit and nut chocolate with me in revenge.

  In the office, Zac was sitting at his desk, fiddling with his computer. I watched him for a few moments. Was Priya right? Did I fancy Zac, underneath a whole load of my own baggage and barely being able to see past the fact that he might get the job I needed so badly? Well, he was nicely shaped, I suppose. When his hair wasn’t doing that sticking up thing that made him look like an anaemic Muppet, he looked quite pleasant. He had large, dark eyes. He didn’t suddenly leap up shouting ‘phwooooarrrr!’ as a result of either his team scoring a goal or a nice-looking woman walking past. He’d thought about me to the extent of bringing me my discarded pizza and a cup of coffee.

  Zac looked suddenly away from the cabling and caught me looking at him. ‘Stop it, you’ll go blind,’ he said.

  ‘My eyes have to be pointing somewhere,’ I said, nettled.

  ‘Yes, but you’re staring at me like I’ve turned into Harry Potter or something.’

  ‘Harry Potter?’

  ‘I read it to Mum, when she’s over. She likes Harry Potter. She used to read it to me when I was younger, but she can’t… she can’t concentrate to read any more.’ He looked away now, fiercely tidying the wiring at the back of the computer.

  He was right. I was looking at him as though he were a different person. Now I knew what lay underneath that ‘complicated’ life; how much he was keeping hidden. How much he probably wasn’t even admitting to himself. I’m sure he knew a thing or two about those walls in the mind that kept the bad things restrained.

  ‘I am now really worried that your benchmark for romantic intentions is a teenage wizard.’ I managed to look away now and back to my bag, where Miriam’s file was threatening to escape and spread discord through the entire office.

  Zac stopped moving. ‘I wasn’t aware that you had romantic intentions, Ruby,’ he said softly.

  The heat flared over me as though I’d been sitting on top of Priya’s radiator. ‘I didn’t mean I… well, I was just… it wasn’t like…’ Unable to justify my slip in any way that could make me feel less pink and mortified, I became very interested in the contents of my desk drawer.

  ‘No, no, you’re fine. After last night’s, um, revelations, I was beginning to worry that you’d had any kind of inclinations in that direction taken out and replaced with paper clips.’ I was studiously avoiding looking even in the direction of his voice, but I noted it had taken on a slightly amused tone. ‘Maybe, when this is all over, we might manage to actually go out together in a non-office mandated way? And I can prove myself to be a decent, upstanding representative of the male gender?’

  ‘When this is all over, Zac, one of us is going to be out of a job,’ I said, waspishly, still backwashed with a pink glow that was even visible in reflection in my computer screen. I wasn’t sure I liked him bringing levity to the situation.

  ‘Out of a job, not chained to a radiator in a basement.’ There was a note of good-natured teasing in his voice now. ‘We’ll still be allowed out.’

  ‘If I can’t pay the bank…’ I trailed off. The walls were threatening to rock, and his certainty that life would be breezily fine was, oddly, not reassuring.

  ‘Yeah, well, I have to pay Mum’s care home fees.’ The words had sounded trawled out, as though he kept them very, very deep down and tried not to think about the implications. ‘But, even if I get redundancy, there will be other jobs. There are other things I can do. This place isn’t the be-all and end-all, is it?’

  But I wouldn’t walk into a job earning what I earn here! I wanted to shout. Not without having to commute to another city! Don’t you think I’ve looked? There ARE other jobs, but they come with more stress, different stress, and I’m not sure that I could cope with learning new routines and new ways of working without the walls buckling and folding. I’d have to go and live with Mum and Dad in my old bedroom surrounded by Madonna posters and my old school textbooks! ‘No,’ was what I actually said, in a tone dull and reverberating with the unspoken.

  ‘Ruby—’

  He was interrupted from whatever he’d been about to say by his phone ringing. It was a very short call, just two ‘yes’es and an ‘okay’ and then he was hanging up and going out of the office, raising an eyebrow at me as he went.

  Released from my obligation to look busy, I slumped back in my chair and tipped my head back to stare at the ceiling. It wasn’t particularly edifying, but it was better than either looking at the space where Zac had been, or my own reflection. Overhead, the foil star glinted, sharp points heading my way whichever direction it revolved in, and from outside my office, occasional bursts of sound came and went as doors were opened and closed, as though someone was turning a radio up and down.

  Okay. Well, I couldn’t sit here all day swivelling and trying to avoid everyone. There was work to do. I got Miriam’s file out and put it on my desk. There had just been that something last night, that feeling that, had I not been interrupted by Zac
and pizza, I was almost getting the point. That there was something – not wrong, but strange, about Miriam’s forms. She’d told me as much anyway, that the answer to getting her back into work was in here, somewhere…

  I shuffled them, in case that helped, then dealt them out, one by one, in all their scribble-written, stapled glory. Ten – no, twelve, separate forms. Some single sheets, some linked by treasury tags, most given a cursory staple.

  Something. There must be something.

  Upstairs, over my head, a door slammed and made me jump. I felt itchy, as though my skin was irritated on the inside and every little annoyance was just making it worse. I needed to shout and run and work the needle-catches of peevishness out of me. There was nothing in these forms. Who was I trying to kid? Miriam had resisted work this long, she may be well disposed towards me, but she wasn’t going to put herself in the way of a job this close to Christmas. Maybe she was just trying to distract me. Make me think she preferred me to Zac, in a sort of ‘divide and rule’ move. Then she could blame falling out with him and falling out with me, and use a failure to get counselling as another way of pushing back the inevitable stopping of her benefit payments. Then what? Another short-lived cash-in-hand job, and then back to the benefits office to apply again?

  I stirred the papers with a finger. Footsteps were banging their way down the upstairs corridor now, and I could hear each angry stride distinctly, the concomitant complaints of the boards. Someone was angry and in a hurry.

  I’d just gathered all the forms back up together again and was about to sheave them against my computer screen, when the owner of the angry feet crashed into the office, sending the door flying back to smack into the coat rack.

  It was Zac. His hair was so high that it was a wonder he’d got through the door and his shoulders were set in a kind of half shrug that made his head look as though it had sunk into his chest.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked, swivelling to face him, but he ignored me.

  He dragged his coat down off the rack, which tipped and spilled my jacket, discarded and forgotten scarves and umbrellas and an old cardigan which had belonged to someone who’d possessed the office before even I had arrived. Zac ignored the mess too. He pulled his coat over his arms, turning as he did so, so that the mass of tangled outerwear swirled around his feet like multicoloured surf on a knitwear beach.

  ‘Zac?’ I half stood. ‘What’s happened?’

  He stopped now, hand on the door edge, and looked at me. His jaw was set with anger, but there was another, different expression in his eyes. They looked on the point of tears. ‘I would have thought you’d have known,’ he said.

  With a quick twist of his wrist to open the door, he was gone, still struggling into his coat, and I heard the outer door bang as he went outside.

  I stood up and followed a few strides, enough to see him through the barred corridor window, striding out across the cornflake-crunch of the snow. He clearly hadn’t taken his car keys, because he faltered momentarily by the Discovery, hand groping in a pocket, then shrugged and slammed a hand against the bonnet, dislodging a crust of snow.

  His head dropped and I watched him stand. Two heartbeats, no more. Then he was off again, shuffling the snow aside and moving his shoulders so that the collar of his coat rose almost to his ears.

  I should let him go. I knew that. Sometimes, emotional turmoil was best dealt with alone, and the way he was walking, as though the snow was a personal irritant sent just to aggrieve him, I could see there was anger that needed to be worked through.

  But it was Zac. And the way he’d said that I should have known what was upsetting him, that look in his eyes, that had all held the sharpness of unfinished business. He was angry about something that I had done, when, as far as I knew, I was innocent.

  I grabbed my coat from the floor and, calling a ‘just popping out!’ through Priya’s door as I went, I set off after him.

  It was snowing again. Huge tufts of snow the size of duck feathers floated down around me, as though some celestial duvet was being plumped onto a bed, and the streets were almost empty. Zac was easy to track, his new footprints lay crisply imprinted, stamped down hard onto the previous snow. He was clearly very, very angry because he’d kicked the head off a small snowman that a shop owner had built out of the snow cleared from their doorway, and the remnants lay in a frozen massacre across the path.

  Zac didn’t seem to be heading for anywhere specific. I’d thought he would perhaps be making his way to the station, catching a train bound for Leeds. Back to his chilly, old-fashioned house, with the ancient sofa and all the things his mother had surrounded herself with as a newly-wed, as a new mother. Everything held in a stasis from a time she felt she could hold on to.

  But Zac wasn’t held in a stasis, was he? Poor Zac was ageing in front of her, unrecognised. She talked, apparently, to him, about her son, little Zacchary, who was ‘out playing’ or ‘at school’, whilst she knitted and knitted those small sweaters in intricate patterns that her fingers remembered while her mind forgot the death of her husband, her son’s twenty-first birthday, his graduation, his passed driving test…

  He had told me that sometimes she’d knit a sweater for the man he was. Proudly presenting him with it, ‘for his help’. A sweater knitted not with love, but with duty. Her love went into the jumpers that lay piled in his car, that he couldn’t bear to get rid of. Those jumpers he wore occasionally, even though they were so small they bordered on the ridiculous.

  I was tracking him like a bloodhound, keeping my eyes down on the snow. Seeing where he’d hesitated, walked a small circle – was he lost? – and then headed down one of the small lanes that wove their cave-like way between the old buildings, which arched overhead. Past puddles of golden light from shopfronts, through the blue-shadowed darkness of closed businesses, down Low Petergate, under the unlit illuminations gathering snow like uncared-for laundry on a line, through the square and down to the entrance to the Shambles, where he’d stopped.

  I knew he’d stopped because I walked right into him. He was standing, staring down the tunnel of buildings which seemed to be huddling together for protection from the falling snow and I’d been so intent on tracking his footprints that I didn’t realise it was him until he spoke.

  ‘You’ve got some front, I’ll give you that.’

  Automatically, stupidly, I looked down. ‘No, it’s just my coat doubled over… Oh.’

  He didn’t seem to know what he wanted to do. As though he was torn between walking off and staying to let his anger out at me. He was circling, circling, round and round me, treading his emotions into the snow, while more snow fell around us, enclosing us in our own personal blizzard.

  ‘Why did you come?’

  ‘Why did you walk off?’ I countered. ‘You seemed upset.’ I shivered now, realising how cold the air was out here now that I’d stopped walking.

  ‘Upset!’ Flakes, turning to water and flew as he threw his hands in the air. ‘Didn’t you think I’d be upset? Alison and Peter called me up to the offices to “have a word” about my…’ he stopped. ‘About yesterday morning,’ he went on. ‘About me possibly not being able to cope with the stress of the job.’

  I stared at him, his outline shattered into fragments by the falling snow. The implication behind his words sent a little spurt of heat through my veins. ‘What? But I never said… It wasn’t me! I would never have told them.’

  But he was on a roll. ‘I mean, they already know about Mum as I had to tell them ages ago when I needed time to help her get to appointments, when I needed time off to move her into the home. And they know about the weekends, when she comes home, I can’t just… I can’t just work at the drop of a hat.’ He was rotating now, pacing, pacing, tiny circles, like a caged animal. ‘And they’ve always done that “sympathy” thing – “if you need time off, just tell us,” but I’ve never taken it. Never dared. Because I knew they’d hold it against me. I always kept as much as I could away from them.’ Ther
e was a break in his voice. The words catching on his breath. ‘They didn’t know. They didn’t know.’ He raised his face to the sky and the flakes seemed to divert themselves around him, as though his emotion was a force field, shutting him off from the world.

  ‘It wasn’t me, Zac,’ I said, carefully factual. Emotion wouldn’t get through. Only pure rationality could puncture the walls, when they were resisting sense as strongly as his were. ‘I thought about it, but I wouldn’t do it.’

  The snow muffled the sound. Everything was slowed and silenced by those huge falling flakes that brushed like the kisses of the dead.

  He didn’t look at me, just continued talking to the sky, to the falling snow. ‘Well, who then? Nobody else knows. Only you, Ruby.’ He lowered his head, so that he met my eyes. ‘Only you,’ he repeated softly.

  Somewhere far down the row of bent and shuffled buildings, a door opened. A burst of Christmas music rang out and was cut off again. ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ Then just the silence again, and us, and the snow.

  I shook my head. ‘No.’

  ‘Well, WHO then?’ Zac shouted, and the words went up the walls, falling back down onto us as echoes.

  ‘I dunno, maybe Sam? He walked in on us, remember?’

  Zac went very still. Then he crumpled, leaning back against the conveniently bow-fronted shop behind him. His head dropped to his chest and he dragged his hands up over his hair. ‘Oh bugger,’ he said. ‘Bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger.’

  A coldness crept up my spine, edging its way through my ribcage to my heart and drying my mouth. There was such an air of defeat in his words that I feared the worst. ‘Did you… I mean, I’d understand if you had, but, oh God, Zac, you didn’t tell them about me, did you?’

  He snorted into his lapels. ‘No, Ruby, I did not. Two wrongs do not make a right.’ His head came up and he was looking at me and his eyes burned through the snow. ‘Is that what you think of me? That I’d play a tit-for-tat game like that? Shit, I’ve really done a number on you, haven’t I?’

 

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