“But why not?” What on earth could be wrong with well-mannered, polite George?
“He’s not wearing a tie. Fancy turning up here in an open shirt and casual trousers. It’s an insult.”
I stared at my father and then at Mum, who raised her eyes to heaven, knowing he couldn’t see her.
Once again that coil of anger sprang up from my stomach to my mouth. “I’m not telling him. I like George.”
“Don’t you defy me. Tell him to go.”
My father’s voice had risen to a bellow. I heard the front door close. George had made his own decision.
“The sooner I’m out of here, the better,” I said.
I didn’t wait for my father to remonstrate with me about respect. I couldn’t stay in that room one minute longer. I dashed to the front door and out into the street. I looked both ways, but there was no sign of George. He must have run like hell to get away.
At that moment, the hammers began to pound in my head. Within seconds, the full force of another migraine hit. This time, no bile washed up into my mouth. I crawled up to bed.
The pain hit harder. I put a cold, wet flannel on my forehead but it did no good. Only one thing would help. I needed to be sick.
I dragged myself to the bathroom and knelt in front of the toilet, willing myself to throw up. My head pounded harder. I moaned in pain. Fingers down my throat. That’s what I had to do. I’d heard of other migraine sufferers doing it. It helped, they said. I needed to make myself gag. I opened my mouth and, hesitating at first, stuck two fingers as far back as I could. I gagged. Nothing. I tried again. Success.
The pounding eased a little. I crept back to bed.
Half an hour later, I was vomiting again. This time my fingers did their job the first time. Now I knew I could do it.
I filled my days, evenings and weekends with A-level coursework. I knew I must achieve the best of which I was capable, but when one of the banks offered me a job, to start in September, I accepted. Then I had to let the university know. My father wasn’t happy about it, until his usual negative reasoning kicked in.
“It’s probably for the best. You’re never going to achieve those grades anyway, so what’s the point kidding ourselves?”
He’d browbeaten me so much over the years, I agreed with him.
I did have a major consolation, though. One that helped me sleep at night. The job was in Leeds, seventy miles away. I would have my own place to live, be earning my own money and not be dependent on him ever again. I was going to have a life for the first time ever.
The night I completed my last exam, I lay awake, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. I watched the patterns of leaves and branches silhouetted by the clear, full moon. The day had been hot and sticky; the evening, airless. I had thrown off the blanket and just a sheet covered my nightdress-clad body.
When the sheet moved, I assumed Sukie had somehow managed to sneak in and jump on the bed. I was about to sit up and reach for her. But then I stopped. It couldn’t be Sukie. She was let out every night. She had a shelter in the garden.
I lay as still as possible, conscious of how loud my breathing sounded. The patterns on the ceiling merged and changed shape. Branches became cloaked arms. Leaves became long, slender fingers. A familiar face emerged. White, smiling, with dark eyes and lips. My angel floated up there, looking down at me as I watched, too fascinated to be scared. Besides, she had never shown me any harm. She had always looked after me in her unique way. I’d never questioned it, or why no one else seemed to have a dark angel guarding them.
Her voice echoed in my head, Time to move on.
I nodded and tried to sit up. Some invisible force stopped me and I settled back against the pillows. She moved away, the cloak billowing and swirling as if drifting through water. She melted into the shadows, but then her voice rang out, much closer now.
The entry is complete. In your life, you can name three to account for their sins against you. Will he be the first?
“Yes,” I said.
Now she stood next to my bed, a large, black ledger in her hand. The pages turned by themselves until she found the one she was looking for. She took a long, slim, golden pen from within the folds of her cloak.
She wrote for a moment. Then closed the book.
It is done.
Chapter Four
Waiting for vengeance is a strange and sobering experience. You know it’s going to happen, you just don’t know when, where or how. That’s how I felt as the days stretched into weeks, months and even years. Still my father thrived, and I hadn’t seen my angel again.
I began to think she must have been some vision created by my subconscious. Maybe I had outgrown her? Freud would have had a field day with me. I began to wonder if I had been through some sort of madness and was now cured. Whatever the cause, I decided to put the whole thing behind me.
My A-level results left me speechless. I had achieved an A and two Bs, but I told my father it was way too late to reconsider my university application. Besides, I had accepted the bank job. I’d sold him the idea of building a career there, although I possessed precious little enthusiasm for doing so.
Sure enough, I hated the bank. I hated the formality of constantly being called Miss Powell. I hated the work. Half the time the accounts made no sense to me and I’d be hauled over the coals by my boss—an accountant who reminded me too much of what I had left behind.
I found another job. One I wanted. At last, a chance to put my love of writing to profitable use. Of course, it didn’t quite turn out that way, but the change of direction brought me a career I could succeed at.
I went into advertising with a major local newspaper—the Yorkshire Chronicle—and loved it. I rapidly became known for my copywriting skills, and even though the major thrust of the job was telephone selling, I found I could overcome my natural shyness. My customers couldn’t see me. I could imagine myself as a successful, dynamic salesperson and project that over the phone, helping them gain extra business through successful advertising.
My Oscar-winning performances helped me achieve targets consistently and endeared me to my bosses. For the first time in my life, people said “well done” to my face. And after overcoming my initial embarrassment, I learned to say “thank you” without blushing.
Needless to say, my change of career didn’t sit well with my father. He said little to me about it, but I went home one weekend to find my mother with two black eyes.
“I tripped in the yard,” she said, avoiding my gaze.
“Yeah. Right,” I said.
Mum turned on me and pointed at her eyes. “If you’d just stayed at the bank, this wouldn’t have happened.”
“If you’d report him to the police, they’d put him behind bars and then none of it would happen again.”
But she wouldn’t. So many battered wives don’t. Especially those of her generation. She felt ashamed, however crazy that may sound. But if you can’t connect with that emotion, you’ve probably never been in her position.
I was also ashamed. Ashamed at my cowardice in not standing up to him and defending her. Ashamed at leaving her alone with him every time I returned to my happy life in Leeds.
One weekend, two years later, Sukie gazed up at me with her stunning emerald eyes and, somehow, I knew it would be the last time I saw her. She gave me a little cracked meow and pushed her silky face into my hand. I stroked her, then bent and picked her up, cuddling her close. I heard and felt her contented, rumbling purr and tears streamed down my face. They seemed to come from nowhere, but our bond was so strong I knew what was happening. In her own way, she was saying goodbye. She was sixteen years old and could no longer hear. She had also grown thin as her appetite waned. The vet said she was fine. Just old. But I knew she was winding down.
She died two weeks later.
I wept for the little animal who had been c
loser to me than any human, apart from my mother—and in some ways, even closer. Sukie, the little cat who had let me cry into her fur and never complained. The gentle little soul who had curled up on my lap and purred her little heart out to make me feel better.
Mum broke the news to me over the phone. Liver failure took her in the end. Mum had to take my little cat, alone, on that last trip to the vet. She said my father had told her she was stupid to be so upset.
“It’s only a cat,” he’d said.
Unfeeling bastard.
My angel returned to me as I spent a sleepless night, my eyes still smarting from all my earlier crying. My bedroom was still and quiet, except for my snuffling. I blew my nose and tossed the tissue into the wastebin by my bed.
A sudden heavy atmosphere filled the room. I looked for her in the shadows, but still jumped as she moved. She held the ledger in one hand and her pen in the other.
I rubbed my eyes. “When will he pay?”
Soon. But it is not yet time.
“It’s been so long since you wrote him in your ledger. Please tell me when.”
But she faded from my sight, and left me alone again. She seemed to be waiting. Or maybe he never would pay for his sins. Maybe this was all in my head.
Something glinted on the carpet, illuminated by the moonlight which filtered in under the curtain.
I got out of bed and picked it up. A shiny, gold pen lay in my hand, freezing cold to the touch. I set it down on the bedside table.
In the morning it was gone.
Chapter Five
I had friends, but boyfriends didn’t fare so well. By 1979, at the age of twenty-five, I had a string of failed relationships behind me. I knew the fault was mainly mine. The main problem lay in my inability to believe any man could love me. If they said they did or behaved as if they did, I had to find fault with everything, pick away and pick away until they eventually gave up, dumped me and moved on. There, you see, told you I wasn’t worth loving.
Andy, Lee, Patrick and Graham. Wonder whatever happened to them. All decent enough. Treated me far better than I deserved. I hope they all met the right girl, settled down and had lovely lives.
Mirrors were always my enemy. No matter which fad diet I went on, I never seemed to look any slimmer. Fat, plain Jane. Even starving myself and making myself sick didn’t seem to get the weight off.
As for my angel. Since Sukie died, she had shown up once or twice. After a particularly messy breakup with Graham, she even brought her ledger, but I declined. I didn’t want to waste one of my three on him. Besides, I already knew I had caused most of the problems with my insane jealousy.
I’d managed to drive him into the arms of a beautiful and talented actress. Until I accused him of having an affair, he barely knew the woman. She had a small part, soon to be enhanced—along with her tits—in a popular TV soap. Graham was an assistant to the producer on the show.
Poor Graham protested his innocence, but I railed at him until he stayed out all one night and then the next. He phoned me to say he had decided if he was going to be accused of sleeping with Melody anyway, he might as well do it. I bawled my eyes out and called him a bastard. He could have called me a bitch, but he didn’t. I heard they spilt up soon after, but I never heard from him again. Don’t blame him.
I had a group of four close friends, all work colleagues, all single females. We became sales trainers—junior managers—at roughly the same time. Each of us managed a group of telephone-sales people. The department was highly target driven and provided around 85 percent of the newspaper’s revenue, so the work was pressurized, but we had fun too. None of the four of us was particularly in to nightclubs, but we enjoyed going to the pub together after work on Fridays and round to each other’s homes for meals, drinks and a chat.
We were also all ambitious—even me, with my newfound yet still-fragile confidence—and egged each other on. Which is why, within a space of three weeks, each of us had found another job elsewhere. For all of us, it represented promotion.
When the advertisement manager from the Baileyborough Evening Telegraph phoned to offer me the job as his deputy, I thought I’d misheard him. I accepted and squashed down my apprehension. I told myself I was just afraid of the unknown. I’d moved before. I’d changed jobs before. I could do it again. Start over. Strange town. Strange job. Quantum leap forward and embrace a different method of doing things. But I could do that now, couldn’t I?
Then why did it feel so wrong? If only I’d listened to my inner voice, I’d never have left Leeds. I would have stayed where I knew happiness and job security because, there, I was good at my job. Senior managers thought well of me. I knew success and recognition for the first time in my life.
So, naturally, I had to go and destroy it, didn’t I? Because I wasn’t worthy of it. I would have to tear everything down I had worked so hard to build. And all it took was a letter of resignation and an unscrupulous, dishonest advertising man called Stuart Campbell.
Baileyborough is one of those new towns built in the 1960s. Roads and infrastructure were well planned and executed, but the housing consisted of massive estates which all looked the same. Like that song—“Little Boxes”. Most of them looked as if one strong gale would blow the roof off.
At around five foot nine, Stuart Campbell was a little taller than me. He spoke with a slight Canadian twang, the result of a combination of a couple of years spent living there and an affectation. Stuart had a few affectations. One included wearing a monocle. I never saw him actually use it. It just hung around his neck on a long, gold chain and provided a focal point. I don’t think anyone actually commented on it, but you couldn’t fail to notice it and you could tell he liked that.
Stuart also affected a beard, with a moustache that twirled upward. Whether he waxed it or it just naturally grew that way, I haven’t a clue, but the beard covered half his face, and a multitude of sins, no doubt.
As for my new role. Total culture shock. I was used to a massive open-plan office with sixty telephone-sales people, plus administrators and classified advertisement field-sales representatives. Phones rang constantly, buzzing and flashing when the number of calls waiting hit twenty. Managers shouted over tannoys for people to take calls. Everyone rushed about. A real newspaper. Noisy. Busy. Busy. Busy.
In contrast, the Baileyborough Evening Telegraph boasted just twelve telephone-sales people and four field-sales representatives who sold both display and classified advertising. I had been trained purely in classified—the advertisements that appeared toward the back of the newspaper. Display covered the generally much larger advertisements appearing among the news and sports sections. This was a world of a totally different set of field-sales representatives with whom, in my previous job, classified had competed. I knew nothing of the technicalities of display and had told Stuart so in the interview.
“Oh, don’t worry about that, Jane. You’ll soon pick it up.”
His confidence and flashing, white smile had reassured me then.
Now, on my first day, the same smile did nothing to raise my spirits as he told me what he’d done.
“A couple of the sales reps thought your job should have been theirs, so you may have some problems with them. Rick and Steve have been with the paper for a few years and they’re both a bit old-fashioned. They weren’t happy when I told them I’d decided to appoint someone from outside, and they were even less happy when they knew it was a woman.” He laughed.
I squirmed in my seat. Great. Now I’d have a couple of chauvinists with chips on their shoulders. But worse was to follow.
“If I’d also told them you had no experience in display advertising, they’d probably have gone ballistic. So I told them you had.”
“Pardon?”
“I told them you’d worked in display.”
My head began to pound. “But I haven’t. I don’t drive yet, so I c
ouldn’t possibly have been a rep.”
“I know. I told them you were learning to drive and had been office based. You are learning, aren’t you? There’s a company car waiting for you when you pass your test.”
I nodded. I needed to get myself an instructor. Three lessons in Leeds hadn’t endeared me to life behind the wheel, but the idea of driving a brand-new car appealed to me, along with the independence it would give me.
“I want you to back me up on this, Jane.”
I stared at him. No boss had ever expected me to lie for them before. I registered the wall clock behind him. Nine fifteen. I’d been here fifteen minutes and already I was embroiled in a stupid, senseless lie, just to make his life easier. What the hell had I come to? A pang of homesickness for Leeds and the chaotic but familiar Chronicle stabbed me. But Stuart had already moved on.
“I’ll take you round to meet everyone in a few minutes. Just before we do, though, you’ll have seen already that this is a relatively small office. The administration manager is another Jane. Jane Marshall. That’s going to be confusing.”
“What is?”
“You both have the same name.”
So what? At the Yorkshire Chronicle, there had frequently been three or even four Janes. No one, to the best of my knowledge, got confused. Why would they?
“Jane has been with us ten years now, so I can hardly ask her to change her name, can I? It wouldn’t be fair, so I’d like you to change yours. I thought Fizz might be appropriate.”
By now, I began to think I’d wandered into a badly scripted farce. “Sorry?”
“Fizz. You know. Bubbly, lively, effervescent. Gives out all the right signals.”
I continued to stare at him as a voice screamed inside my head to get out of there.
“Are you serious?”
The smile vanished, and for the first time, I saw the other side of Stuart Campbell. “Most definitely. I can’t have two Janes in my department and that’s it. If you don’t like Fizz, then come back to me by nine o’clock tomorrow with another name. But you must change it. Understand?”
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