Acts of Kindness

by Heather Barnett

Ben glared at him. ‘Every time. Every single time.’

  ‘That’s not true! Last time I wrote “Help” in the palm of my right hand before I offered it to shake.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Catherine, a hint of disapproval in her tone. ‘I remember that. You were disappointed because Ajay didn’t notice and his hand was so sweaty it rubbed the ink off.’ She shifted round in her seat, eyes scanning the room. ‘There he is.’ She pointed out a man in a checked shirt on a nearby table to Bella. ‘Ajay joined a couple of months ago.’

  Oscar pulled a semi-contrite face. ‘Sorry. Can’t resist. I remember what it was like when I came for my interview. You hear all that stuff about a secret society and you’re convinced you’re going to be brainwashed by Hare Krishnas. Then you have a bit of lunch and find out everyone’s totally normal. Complete anticlimax. So, I like to spice things up a bit. And I’ve never actually put someone off. Have I?’ He frowned and looked over at Ben.

  ‘You’d know if you had.’

  After lunch came a short tour of the beautifully preserved offices before a formal presentation. Ben took her through her role and the organisational structure. Catherine detailed the jaw-dropping package and benefits. Nothing more was said about the OAK Institute. About three o’clock they were wrapping up.

  ‘I think that about sums things up for us,’ said Catherine, disconnecting her laptop from the screen. ‘Obviously, we hope you like what you’ve seen today and that you’ll be joining us as soon as your notice period allows. But you’ll want to think it all over, so I’ll catch up with you on, say, Thursday? Would that be okay?’

  It sounded to Bella – as did a lot of what came out of Catherine’s mouth – like a well-honed spiel. ‘Yes, Thursday should be fine.’

  ‘Good. Do you have any questions for us before we finish for the day?’

  What a ridiculous thing to ask, thought Bella. Who on earth wouldn’t have questions?

  ‘Are you able to tell me anything more about the OAK Institute?’ she asked. ‘I understand that it’s confidential, but…’

  They both smiled. Catherine was about to answer in what Bella could tell would be the negative when Ben cut in.

  ‘Look, think of it this way. Yes, it’s frustrating that there’s this big secret no one’s willing to let you in on. We get that. But all we’re asking you to do is give the place a try for three months. We’re offering a great role on a highly competitive salary. After three months you get to find out what OAK does – and, by the way, what it does is incredible, you won’t be disappointed. But if you decide before the three months are up this place isn’t for you then you walk away. Simple.’

  When he put it like that, it did seem simple.

  Chapter Two

  Bella bombed down the M4, car crammed with all the belongings that wouldn’t fit in the removal van, singing along to her music at full volume. As tower blocks and terraced houses gave way to trees and fields, her best friend’s words echoed in her head. ‘But, Bella, how can you live out of London?’ Zoe had asked, her tone expressing astonishment that any right-thinking person would choose to live anywhere else. Zoe was a born-and-bred Londoner who thought the area around the edge of the Tube map should be marked ‘here be dragons’. ‘You’ll be lonely. Isolated. Sad!’ she’d gone on to insist.

  ‘It’ll be fine, Zoe. I’m going to rent for a bit and see how it goes. I can always come back.’

  She didn’t point out that she was already lonely, isolated and sad. And that had nothing to do with geography. The truth was she desperately needed a change and the job would be the perfect catalyst. It was a time of snap decisions. Her old life was over but the future was fuzzy. If she left herself too much time to think she might stagnate; life would swirl on past her.

  The change made her feel euphoric. It would be transient, she knew, but while it lasted, she revelled in it. She was free and life was full of the unexpected. She gave herself licence to hope. Right up until the moment Ella Fitzgerald came on, singing, ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’.

  With a sudden intake of breath, she was back in the kitchen on Hartley Road with Mark. After an hour’s strangely calm discussion sitting side by side on the living room sofa, they’d got up to make a cup of tea. Something about the normality of turning the kettle on and putting teabags in their usual mugs, contrasted to the life-changing conversation they’d just had, hit them both. She’d felt the tears welling up and his eyes reflected hers. He’d squeezed her hard against his chest but there was no comfort in it, now the gesture wasn’t a promise of love as it always had been. It was like being held by a stranger.

  She took her hand from the steering wheel to grab a tissue, her shoulders shaking with sobs. A sign loomed up for motorway services and she took the exit, pulled up in the car park, and let her emotion wear itself out. When would she be safe from these emotional ambushes? She could go two or three weeks without getting upset. Then she’d stumble into an unseen trap and the pain would shoot straight through her, raw and devastating.

  The sight of her new home brought a smile to her face. She had rented a house in a group of converted barns by a river: an idyllic spot with Waitrose and a cosy gastropub five minutes away. Before she’d even located the teabags, neighbours – Angela; an elegant, bohemian-looking woman in her early fifties and married couple David and Pauline; early sixties, both rather red-faced and scruffy – had popped round with wine and welcoming words. Ha! That’d show her friends back in London. Most of them wouldn’t recognise a neighbour if they bashed them over the head with a cup of sugar.

  A couple of nights settling in with the help of her parents, some revitalising walks in the countryside and her spirits remained high. On the Sunday evening, after her parents had left, she began to feel nervous at the prospect of her first day at work. Pouring herself a glass of red wine, she reheated the casserole her mum had left and settled down to eat it off a tray. The room was cosy with the glow of the wood-burner and candles on the mantelpiece. Midsomer Murders was on the telly. All was peaceful.

  Someone rapped on the door.

  Bella considered ignoring it for a split second before What Others Might Think of Her raised his shaggy head. What Others Might Think of Her was her constant companion, and the impetus behind many of her actions. She put the tray aside.

  A woman holding a brown paper bag stood on the doorstep, the porch light picking out a halo of wild blonde hairs. She looked at Bella through smeary glasses and said nothing.

  ‘Hello,’ Bella said. ‘You must be from…?’ Number 3? Number 7? A secure mental health unit?

  ‘Knickers!’ said the woman.

  Bella froze.

  ‘Knickers!’ the woman repeated, thrusting the bag at her. ‘When you move into a new house you can never find a pair of clean knickers on the first morning. That’s why I give them as a gift.’

  What, even to the men? thought Bella. Out loud she said, ‘Oh! What a clever idea. Thank you. It’s not actually my first night, but…’

  The woman pushed past her without waiting to be invited in. Bella followed her down the hall and into the living room.

  ‘Lovely,’ declared the woman. ‘Cosy.’ She looked at the tray of food and waved Bella towards it. ‘Carry on! Nothing worse than letting your tea go cold.’ She sat down on an armchair, rested her chin in her hand and prepared to enjoy the spectacle of Bella eating casserole.

  Half the enjoyment of eating the casserole came from doing it alone, off a tray, in front of the telly. Bella had no desire to put on a performance. ‘Don’t worry, I can warm it up later. Sorry, I didn’t catch which house is yours? I’ve met Angela from next door and the couple from number five so far.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t live here, dear.’

  It dawned on Bella, with a feeling akin to cold porridge sliding down her back, that she had let a complete stranger into her house who carried bags of knickers around as gifts. Her glance fell on the poker by the fireplace.

  ‘No,’ the woman continued, ‘I live over the
other side of the village. But I like to welcome all newcomers, you see.’

  Bella was still weighing up blunt objects. ‘You must get through a lot of knickers,’ she said, mechanically.

  ‘Small sacrifice to make new neighbours welcome. Where have you come from, dear?’

  ‘Acton, West London.’

  ‘Well. London’s a nice place as long as you like noise and foreigners. That’s what I always say. Do you like noise and foreigners?’ Before Bella could answer the woman gave a chirruping laugh. ‘Of course you don’t, dear, seeing as you’ve moved out. Quite right. And do you work?’

  Bella admitted that yes, she did work; half expecting to be told that work was nice if you liked taking jobs off men.

  ‘Lovely, dear. Got a job here in the area? All lined up?’

  ‘I don’t know if you’ll have heard of it. It’s a place called Acorn Consulting, over near Halfway.’

  The smile dropped like a shutter.

  ‘Acorns? You’re going to work at Acorns?’ The woman regarded Bella through narrowed eyes. ‘You do know about Acorns, don’t you?’

  Bella raised her eyebrows.

  ‘I don’t want to worry you, sweetheart,’ the woman continued, ‘but something’s not right there.’

  ‘Something – what do you mean, something’s not right?’

  The woman jumped up, as if a buzzer had gone off in her pocket.

  ‘Well it’s been lovely chatting, dear, but I have to go now. Goodnight. I’ll see myself out.’

  And she was gone, so abruptly that it took Bella a moment to realise that she’d plucked the paper bag out of her hands on the way past. Which she was rather put out about, as she’d been curious about those knickers. Her bet would have been size sixteen with polka dots, but equally, she wouldn’t have been surprised to find a pair of lacy crotchless numbers.

  Now she wasn’t sure if there had been knickers in the bag at all.

  Bella had been found wandering in increasing desperation around entirely the wrong part of the building on her second morning, suffering flashbacks to the time she’d been trapped in Hampton Court maze for the best part of three hours. Monday had been fine because Kelly had escorted her to her office, but left to her own devices on Tuesday, she’d gone astray. At the sight of Catherine rounding a corner ahead, Bella had hailed her in the manner of a stranded Londoner spotting a taxi with its light on.

  ‘Catherine! Hi! I can’t find my office, am I going in the right direction?’

  Catherine had blinked once, Bella wasn’t sure whether in disdain or disbelief, before pasting a good impression of a sympathetic smile on her face and striding down the corridor towards her.

  ‘You’re miles out, Bella. Directions not your strong point?’

  When they reached the marketing department, Catherine handed her over to Oscar with instructions to show Bella the way in future.

  ‘Perhaps you two could meet in the lobby in the mornings?’

  Bella wanted the ground to swallow her up. ‘Please, there’s no need, I’m sure I’ll work it out.’

  ‘No, no!’ Oscar insisted, waggling a finger at her. ‘I couldn’t have it on my conscience, the thought of poor old you going round and round in circles, scratching your last message to the world on the wall in biro. Surviving off scraps donated by passers-by. Doesn’t bear thinking about.’

  The next morning, he was waiting for her as promised, tapping away on his phone in one of the gilt chairs in the entrance hall. Another colleague from the marketing team, Lauren, a shy woman in her late twenties, arrived at the same time and as she chatted to Oscar, Bella hung back and surreptitiously snapped pictures of landmarks along the route. By Friday she was confident enough to declare that she could find her way alone and, barring one wrong turn, she did.

  There had been several meetings during the week: inductions with other departments, team meetings and one office-wide briefing. So, when everyone started to get up at ten o’clock that Friday morning, Bella did the same, even though she hadn’t seen a meeting request in her calendar.

  ‘You’re not on the attendee list for this, Bella,’ Ben said. ‘It’s an OAK meeting. It’ll be a couple of hours; we’ll see you at lunch. Sit tight.’

  They all filed out and the room was silent. Right. This felt a little odd. A couple of other things had happened during the week to remind her of OAK’s existence. Oscar turning on his screensaver when she propelled herself across the office in her chair to ask him a question. Folders on the network she couldn’t access. But this was the first time anyone had mentioned it by name. After a few minutes, Bella realised she’d read the same paragraph several times without taking it in. She might as well go and get a cup of coffee. Ben had said ‘sit tight’ but she could pop out of their room for a drink, surely? The corridor was quiet. She went to the vending machine which was hidden in a large oak cabinet between two windows. Then paused. There was no law against her going to another vending machine. She turned right and headed down the long corridor that ran all the way along that wing of the building. Still no noise, no people. As she continued through the building, meeting no one, her confidence grew. She listened at the door of the main conference room where they’d had the office briefing earlier in the week. Empty. She went up a couple of floors and peeped into rooms. Nothing. Then right up to the attic floor. Some of the doors up here were locked, but there was silence behind them. Back downstairs she peered into the main entrance hall: even Kelly wasn’t at her desk. Where on earth did OAK business happen, then – and more to the point, what the hell was it?

  Bella had had many dreams about the OAK Institute. A particularly vivid one involved the discovery that Isadora Faye was actually her mum. She still looked like Isadora, but she was definitely Mum. Mum lived on the roof of the Acorn Consulting building and they had played chess with a giant chess set until Bella remembered she didn’t know how to play chess, and became very anxious. She’d woken up with a niggling feeling of disquiet which had lasted into the morning. In another dream, she’d opened an Alice-in-Wonderland-style tiny door behind Oscar’s desk and found herself on the stage of an empty theatre. She was back at university, about to play Juliet in the end of term production, but they’d forgotten to turn the stage lights on and she was wearing nothing from the waist down. That time she found she’d been dreaming with her eyes open, sitting bolt upright in the dark.

  She stood, undecided, in the corridor. Her eye rested on a small round hole in the cornice. That wasn’t like them, they kept everything in such good repair. She looked more closely.

  Her heart in her mouth she turned and almost ran back to her office. What an idiot. Of course there would be security cameras, hidden like everything else modern in this building. For the next hour and a half, she worked without a break, one-half of her mind wondering what would happen when they came back. Would Ben give her a bollocking for trying to spy on OAK before her probation was up?

  At midday, no one had returned and she went to the dining hall. She was the first one in but after a couple of minutes, people started arriving in dribs and drabs. Lauren joined her at her table, where she was trying to force a salad down her dry throat.

  ‘Hiya. You all right?’

  Bella nodded. ‘Mmm. Fine. Fine, thanks.’

  ‘We have that meeting every month. You’ll come too, once your three months are up.’

  All through lunch everything seemed normal. The same the rest of the afternoon: it seemed she’d got away with it. As she set off home that evening, she vowed to restrain her curiosity in future.

  Chapter Three

  That weekend her friend Zoe came to stay. As they were finishing up a takeaway curry, Zoe wanted to hear more about Oscar and Ben.

  ‘These work colleagues of yours sound interesting, Bel. Ben and… Ollie was it?’

  ‘Honestly, Zoe, there’s no romantic potential there. Oscar is hilarious but I don’t fancy him, and Ben is slightly scary because he’s so… competent.’ She faltered.

 
; ‘…but you do fancy him,’ Zoe finished for her.

  ‘No! No, I don’t.’ She was firm. ‘Anyway, I don’t think I’m ready to be looking around for prospective boyfriends. At the moment my main criteria for a man would be that he has to be the exact opposite of Mark. Which can’t be a sensible approach.’

  Zoe took a swig of her beer. ‘Jesus, I’m not saying go looking for a second husband. Have some fun. Sleep with some unsuitable people. Make the most of being free to flirt again.’

  Bella started clearing away the plates. ‘Not sure that’s a good idea to put into practice with work colleagues. Which just leaves the neighbours. I mean – I suppose, to be fair, Mr Price would fit under your heading of unsuitable people.’

  ‘I’m guessing, from your strangely smug tone, that Mr Price is the guy on the Zimmer frame we passed on the way to the Indian?’

  Bella smiled her confirmation and disappeared with the plates into the kitchen. Zoe was about to follow her in with the empty takeaway pots when there was a knock at the door.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ she yelled. ‘It could be Mr Price!’ She was still giggling as she opened the door and found herself swept aside by a blonde, middle-aged woman who dripped all down the corridor and into the living room.

  ‘Bella! You’ve got a visitor.’

  Bella hurried into the living room, wiping her hands on a tea towel.

  ‘Hello, dear.’ The woman was drenched, hair plastered to her head. ‘I thought I’d pop by. You forgot to take your knickers.’ She pushed the sopping wet paper bag into Bella’s hands. ‘I won’t sit down. I’m a little damp. It’s raining.’

  ‘Yes,’ Bella agreed. She glanced at Zoe long enough to establish that her friend had identified this woman as being the same nutter that Bella had already told her about.

  ‘Well,’ said Bella. ‘Er… thanks for the knickers, but…’

  ‘And I wanted to check how you were getting on at Acorns.’ The woman sat down absent-mindedly and helped herself to a banana from the fruit bowl.