A Midwinter Match

by Jane Lovering

  She swung her way out and closed the door.

  ‘The Gay Best Friend is supposed to be a man!’ I yelled after her, my emotions buoyed up and bobbing on a rising tide of someone believing in me. ‘Who gives me fashion advice!’

  ‘That top is horrible!’ she called back and then I heard the sound of her door close. It opened again a second later. ‘And stop wearing leggings!’

  Of course, pep talks were all very well, and during the rational hours of daylight I could convince myself that everything would be all right. When night came, however, it was different.

  Without the external stimulus of other people, without the distractions of work or even TV, when I was closed into my tiny room – that was when the fear came out to play. When I knew that, for all my bolshie talk of not staying with a company who had such dreadful ethics, I’d work there until I retired or they got rid of me. When I was convinced that my qualifications wouldn’t get me anything and I would end up on a permanently renewing temporary contract, no sick pay, no redundancy protection, probably selling skimpy tops to people thinner than me. It was when I absolutely knew that I’d have to move home and cope with Mum and Dad’s misguided kindnesses, Eva’s constant questioning and comparisons, as though she’d won the life lottery by marrying a doctor and producing two badly behaved children.

  I wrapped the duvet round my shoulders and went to sit at the open window. The air in the room was too thick to breathe, too concentrated with regret and self-doubt, and the cold of the outside kept my heart from trying to drill its way through my ribs. I still felt sick and incapable of thinking anything that wasn’t on the circuit of despair and loathing, but at least I knew I wouldn’t suffocate.

  I went through all the exercises my doctor had given me, but none of them helped. Concentrating on my breathing was the worst, it just made me aware of how fast my heart was beating and how likely it was that it would shortly give up and stop altogether. When my phone pinged a message, I was torn between being grateful for the distraction from dying and knowing that it was probably Michael firing me from my job. Somehow, in my head, Michael, at three o’clock in the morning, was aware of my current mental state and was dragging himself from his warm, and no doubt luxuriously oversized, bed, to let me know not to bother coming in tomorrow.

  A brief flash of rationality told me that Michael didn’t know how to text, and it was unlikely that Rachel was sitting at his marital bedside to instruct him. I picked up my phone in my sweaty-palmed hand and turned it over.

  There’s an emergency with Mum. I might not get in tomorrow morning, are you all right to make your own way to the office? I’ll update you when I know more. Zac x

  The sudden inrush of emotional overload made me pull the duvet over my head. So, Zac’s mum was having a three-o’clock-in-the-morning level of emergency. That wasn’t good. He’d thought to let me know he couldn’t give me the planned lift, which made him a good guy. And then he’d finished it with a kiss.

  I shuffled away from the window and flopped onto the bed, falling into a tortoise configuration with my arms and legs tucked in under the carapace of duvet. The weight of it, pressing me into the mattress, was comforting and my heart rate started to steady, which, in turn, stopped the feelings of nausea and the hyperventilating. Slowly, slowly, I returned from that wilderness of panic and back to a place where hope at least had a foothold.

  Zac was a good guy. Priya was right. He seemed to genuinely like me, we had a good working relationship, and we’d saved one another from the worst that management could throw at us. So far. He’d coped with my family, had driven me over when Mum had her accident, and he hadn’t attempted to throw Albie and Xavier in the coal shed and nail the door shut. He was, to all intents and purposes, a nice man.

  And I liked the way he looked. I had to admit that much to myself, even when the admission that he was a nice person made my teeth itch. I liked his leggy, wiry body. I liked his brown eyes and his smile. The hair was something I could work on.

  My heart was going fast again, but without the driving whips of panic behind it now. This time it was the heating effect of lust and that tiny splinter of hope.

  I fell asleep to uneasy dreams of Zac turning up at work with a big bunch of roses which turned into a tent, and him telling me that it was my new home.

  The next morning, despite my sleepless night, I was awake and up early enough to strap on all my luminescence and peel on the leggings again for the ride into work.

  The roads were mostly clear now, and I was only prone to the occasional wobble when I had to ride over heaped and frozen snow that had been piled up on the sides of the road so as not to inconvenience car drivers, but instead massively inconvenienced anyone not in a car.

  Dawn was breaking as I rode through the city, lights on in windows and the early starters trudging along parallel with me, all of us giving one another sympathetic glances. Purple and gold strobed out from between curtains as people turned on their tree lights, countdowns of shopping days until Christmas were emblazoned across lamp posts and swinging in the cold, blue air.

  I still hadn’t got a present for Zac. On impulse, I propped the bike against some railings and threw myself on the mercy of two guys unlocking a menswear shop, waited while they fired up the till and then gift-wrapped my purchase. I stuffed it into my saddle bag in a way that destroyed the whole point of having it professionally wrapped, before hopping back into my pedals and pushing fast though the awakening city to the office.

  Again, I was first in. There was no sign of Zac’s car, and the space looked oddly naked without it. I padlocked the bike, wary of Cav’s wrath should anything happen to it, and hobbled inside, handicapped both by my speedy pedalling on a bike with no discernible saddle and the tightness of the leggings. Neither of these things were conducive to a walk of any grace.

  I changed in our office, which was steaming hot. The radiators only seemed to have two settings, boiling and off, and today it was clearly our turn to roast. Once I’d got respectable clothes on, I did some paperwork and then wandered around the room. I looked again at the photo on Zac’s desk, the smiling, pretty woman and the tall, handsome man, and tried not to see my unslept face reflected back at me from the glass. There were shadows under my eyes and my skin looked dry and tight from the cycle ride in. What the hell could Zac see in me? I wouldn’t date me.

  I heard Priya come in and go straight into her cubby-office, but I didn’t pop out to see her. She’d take one look at me and know I’d had a bad night, and I still felt a kind of shame about it all. I didn’t know why, I couldn’t help it and it wasn’t my fault – nobody would choose to have random anxiety attacks, after all – but there was still a tiny tickle of you aren’t as good or as strong as everyone else fidgeting away in the back of my mind. Priya didn’t have panic attacks. Rachel wasn’t reliant on medication to keep her from catastrophising until she was incapable of movement. Karen didn’t sometimes feel that she just wanted life to stop for a while to let her catch up.

  As far as I knew, anyway. I often reassured myself with this thought. Just as I didn’t have a big arrow on my head that said ‘poor mental health!!!’ neither did anyone else. I probably wasn’t alone. No, I knew I wasn’t alone. There was Zac. And remembering that Zac, who always looked in control and even of temperament, could also have moments of breakdown, of being overwhelmed by life, made me feel better, even though I wished that he didn’t struggle too.

  The door creaked open a slice, letting in a gust of more normal temperatures, and Michael put his head into the room.

  ‘Oh. Ah. No, er, Zac, yet then?’

  ‘He’s… he’s around somewhere.’ Nope, I was not going to choose now to stick the knife in. Zac and I were in this together. ‘I’ll tell him to come and see you when he turns up.’

  Michael swayed, as though his mind had gone visiting elsewhere and his body was just propping his head up. ‘Oh. No need, no need,’ he said vaguely. ‘Just wanted to congratulate him on getting Mrs T
ate onto an education course. Bit of a bane in our stats, that lady.’ Then he smiled at me, slightly sadly. ‘Of course, that means he’s running ahead of you in the employment game, I’m afraid.’ He laughed, and I joined in, although I guessed neither of us knew what we were laughing at.

  ‘I’ve got Bob Lassiter to agree to retraining,’ I said, and I could hear the note of desperation in my voice. ‘He’s been on the books a while too.’

  ‘Mmmm.’ Michael’s head was withdrawing. ‘We will bear that in mind, of course.’ The door closed behind him with a gentle click, and I heard the ghostly sound of his moccasinned feet treading the corridor back towards his office. It was like being haunted by the politest ghost in history.

  ‘Oh bugger.’

  Actually, oh bugger didn’t even begin to cover it, but this constant high-level uncertainty, calculated, as I was almost sure it was, to unsettle us both, had ground away at me for so long that I had no vacillation left. I’d swayed so much between the ‘everything will be all right’ and catastrophising that I’d be living on the streets by summer, that I had nothing left to give.

  I could smash up the office and storm up into Michael’s, full of fire and sparks, tell them all to sack me now, I could do better than this. I could walk out into the snow, get on Cav’s bike and ride away into the distance; start again. But the down-to-earth thought that Cav would hunt me down to get his bike back made me giggle and grounded me. I would do none of those things. I’d get my head down and work sensibly and cheerfully until I was told the worst was actually happening. Then I’d deal with it.

  Zac came in around lunchtime, looking pale and strained.

  ‘How’s your mum?’ I was eating a slice of Christmas cake, baked by Karen and brought round by one of the girls from the main office. She’d been wearing an elf outfit and I didn’t know whether it cheered me up or made me more depressed.

  Zac sighed and flopped into his chair, then shook his head. ‘I dunno. She’d got out of her room without anyone seeing her and she was out in the grounds half the night. No one knows how she got past the alarms, she must have followed someone out.’ He sighed again. ‘She was hypothermic when they found her, just sitting in the snow. She was waiting for me to come out of school, apparently.’

  My heart squeezed with concern. ‘That’s heart-breaking on so many levels.’

  ‘I know.’ He dropped his face into his hands. ‘I know.’ Another huge sigh that sounded as though it caught on words he wanted to say.

  I got up and went over to him. ‘Hey.’ I touched his shoulder. ‘Michael came to congratulate you on getting Miriam off our books. Looks like you win the “job” competition.’

  Without looking at me, he put his hand over mine where it lay on his arm. ‘There’s just so much going on in my head,’ he said. ‘They’re going to move Mum to a more… secure place. Still within the care home, of course, but she’ll get some extra funding. She’s not going to be able to come home at weekends any more though, I can’t keep the place secure enough.’ He flashed up a quick look. ‘So now I need to sell the house, find a place to live, work out how to keep seeing Mum, all whilst working somewhere that seems to set Taskmaster challenges just to make me keep my job.’

  I couldn’t think of anything to say. Hoping he would take my physical presence as reassurance, I turned my hand and interlaced my fingers with his and squeezed gently.

  Zac took another deep breath and raised his head. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay. We can do this, Ruby. We really can. I think I might have a plan.’

  ‘A man with a plan.’ His level tone and the way he squeezed my hand in return was hopeful. ‘If you’ve also got a van, I think Doctor Seuss may want a word.’

  ‘Would you… would you come with me to visit Mum tonight?’ The question was hesitant, as though he thought he would be tearing me away from a night of threesomes with the Hemsworth brothers after drinking champagne and dancing in some exotic club.

  ‘Of course I will, if you’d like me to.’

  He stood up sudden and tall, smelling of damp wool and antiseptic. I found myself in an embrace, his face against my hair, and realised that I quite liked it. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, Ruby,’ he said. ‘You’re so wonderfully sensible, it’s very grounding.’

  ‘I have my non-sensible moments too.’ I relaxed into his hold. ‘Don’t forget that. Anxiety isn’t always great for being sensible.’

  The hold around me tightened. ‘I know. I know. But knowing you’re fighting your own demons and yet you can seem so together; it gives me hope.’

  I didn’t like to say that I’d been thinking the same about him. Were we just two fragile people, both believing that the other one was going to save us? Were we clinging onto one another in the lifeboat as the ship went down?

  ‘I don’t just like you because you’re suffering along with me, by the way.’ He gave me a little squeeze. ‘I like you because you’re a genuinely nice person.’

  ‘You’re not privy to what I’d like to do to my sister,’ I said, slightly muffled because he was very close up against me. ‘I’m not that nice.’

  ‘I’ve seen you, you really like helping people. You glow when you’ve made a difference to someone’s life. It’s really lovely. I’m more worried about what you could ever see in me.’

  I took a half-step back, forcing him to move his head, and I looked up into his face. ‘Well, you’re tall,’ I said. ‘And that’s always a good thing.’

  Zac laughed. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘This isn’t the time or place for this kind of introspection.’

  The door opened and Priya was standing there holding a tray of steaming mince pies. ‘Brought these over from the café,’ she said, then noticed us. ‘Oh. It’s like that, is it?’

  Zac and I stepped further apart. ‘It’s been a bit of a day,’ he said.

  ‘And we’re looking down the barrel of Michael and the Aliens making their decision as to who stays and who goes tomorrow,’ I added. ‘We’re feeling a bit highly strung.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Priya came into the room. The smell of hot pastry and steaming raisins was mouth-watering. ‘But if you could unstring yourselves to give me a hand with eating these? The café is closing early today and these were left over, so they’ve given them to us. And if I eat them all I’ll never get into my sexy reindeer outfit for tomorrow.’ She looked at our blank expressions. ‘Last day before we close for Christmas? Wear your Christmas outfit? Did all joy to the world and seasons greetings pass you two by?’

  ‘Sorry.’ I took a mince pie. ‘It’s been…’

  ‘… A bit of a day, yes, I heard.’ She put the tray down. ‘By the way, you two make a great couple. Just thought I’d throw that one out there. And now I’m leaving you with the calorific baked goods and going to finish clearing my workload.’

  Primly, like an understairs maid, Priya turned and walked out, leaving Zac and I staring at one another.

  ‘Clear her workload!’ I snorted. ‘She’s gone to phone Nettie and tell her the gossip.’

  ‘What does she do, exactly?’ Zac was staring at the carefully closed door.

  ‘I’m not completely sure.’ I ate another mince pie. ‘Something they can’t get rid of, obviously. Do you think she’s right? Do we make a good couple?’

  ‘I don’t see why not, do you?’ Zac took a pie in each hand. ‘They’ve been trying to force us into competition all this time, but we’ve resisted. That and me being tall, it’s got to mean something.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to concentrate on “clearing my workload”,’ I said. ‘Because tomorrow the news is going to be bad for one of us, whichever way things go, and if it’s me, I don’t want to leave you with a scrabbled mess of files and half-completed notes. Actually, no, that’s not true, nothing would delight me more than to walk out of here and leave ineligible stuff for everyone to sort, but as the person doing the sorting would be you and I… quite like you, I shan’t.’

  ‘Then I suppose I should dit
to.’ Zac looked at his computer screen and sighed. ‘But if one of us goes, we can still see each other, can’t we? I mean, we can go out and all that?’

  Solemnly, I screwed up some spare pieces of paper. They didn’t even have writing on, but I wanted to make a point. ‘Your presence will probably be the only brightness in what will be an otherwise pretty pointless existence,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t overdramatise.’ He didn’t even look up.

  ‘Well, I’ll probably be living in Scarborough—’

  ‘I like Scarborough. Now I’ve met it.’ He was typing, one-fingered, which, as I knew he could touch-type, was being done for as much effect as me screwing up the blank papers.

  ‘With my parents.’

  ‘I like your parents too. Your family life is a nice counterpoint to mine.’ He said it with no inflection, but I instantly felt bad.

  ‘Sorry, yes. I didn’t mean…’

  ‘I know you didn’t, Ruby.’ He flashed a smile in my direction. ‘Honestly. If we really want to, we can make it work. If people only ever dated people they worked with, then institutions everywhere would become one huge incestuous mass of no work ever getting done and a lot of shouting. Other people manage to meet and form relationships with people at a distance. We will be fine.’

  I kept my head down over my desk and didn’t continue the conversation. I was still a little bit concerned about getting into anything with someone who lived and had ties nearly seventy miles away, particularly when I had no car and there wouldn’t be the money for train fares. And I definitely didn’t think I’d be cadging lifts off my dad at weekends, those days were twenty years behind me. I needed independence. And money, obviously, but the two were practically synonymous.

  Plus, he’d be doing my job, I’d probably be selling ice cream from a handcart, and the temptation to push him into the sea might get too much for me.