‘I bet he’s never got his hands dirty in his life,’ Matt said scornfully, after the first time they’d met – awkwardly, on the doorstep, when Matt was dropping Katie home.
‘Maybe he’s never needed to,’ I retorted, regretting it the second it left my lips. Matt’s bright. Maybe not academic, like Simon, but not stupid. He would have stayed on at college if it hadn’t been for me.
I take Simon his tea. He’s already dressed; a pale blue shirt and darker blue suit trousers, the jacket still in the wardrobe. He’ll leave off the tie, in a concession to the Telegraph’s relaxed dress code, but he’s not a chinos kind of man. I check the time and lock myself in the bathroom, hoping the others have left me some hot water; cutting my shower short when I realise they haven’t.
I’m drying myself when there’s a knock on the door.
‘Almost done!’
‘It’s only me. I’m off.’
‘Oh!’ I open the door, towel wrapped around my damp body. ‘I thought we were going in together.’
Simon kisses me. ‘I said I’d be in a bit early today.’
‘We’ll be ready in ten minutes.’
‘Sorry, I really do need to go. I’ll give you a ring later.’
He goes downstairs and I finish drying myself, cross with myself for being disappointed he doesn’t want to walk to the station with me; a teenage girl denied her crush’s football jumper.
Simon used to work shifts, covering earlies and lates in the newsroom, and doing his share of the weekend rota. A few months ago – at the start of August – they changed things at work, putting him on permanent days, Monday to Friday. I thought he’d be pleased, but instead of enjoying more evenings together, he comes home grouchy and depressed.
‘I don’t like change,’ he explained.
‘So ask for your old shifts back.’
‘It doesn’t work like that,’ he said, frustration making him short with me. ‘You don’t understand.’ He was right; I didn’t. Nor can I understand now why he won’t wait ten minutes for Katie and me to be ready.
‘Good luck!’ he calls to Katie, as he heads downstairs. ‘Knock ’em dead!’
‘Are you nervous?’ I ask her, as we walk towards the station. She doesn’t say anything, which is an answer in itself. Under one arm she’s clutching her portfolio, inside which are a dozen 7 × 5 photos that cost a small fortune. In each one Katie’s wearing something different; a new expression on her face. In all of them she’s beautiful. Simon paid for the photos as a surprise for her eighteenth birthday, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so happy.
‘I’m not sure I can take another no,’ she says quietly.
I sigh. ‘It’s a tough business, Katie. You’re going to get a lot of nos, I’m afraid.’
‘Thanks. Nice to know my own mother has faith in me.’ She tosses her hair as though she’d be flouncing off if we weren’t both walking in the same direction.
‘Don’t be like that, Katie. You know what I mean.’ I say hello to the dreadlocked busker standing by the entrance to Crystal Palace station and reach into my coat pocket for one of the coins I keep there. Her name’s Megan, and she’s only a little older than Katie. I know this, because I asked her one day, and she explained that her parents had thrown her out and that she spent her days sofa-surfing, and busking, and queuing up at the Norwood and Brixton food bank.
‘Cold today, isn’t it?’ I throw ten pence into her guitar case where it bounces on top of a handful of others, and she breaks off from her song to thank me, before seamlessly catching up with the lyrics on the next bar.
‘Ten pee isn’t going to get her far, Mum.’
The strains of Megan’s song die away as we walk into the station.
‘Ten pence in the morning; ten on my way home. That’s a pound a week.’ I shrug. ‘Fifty-odd quid a year.’
‘Well, if you put it like that, it’s very generous.’ Katie’s silent for a moment. ‘Why not just chuck in a quid every Friday, though? Or give her a bundle of notes at Christmas?’
We tap our Oysters and push through the barriers towards the Overground.
‘Because it doesn’t feel like I’m giving so much, this way,’ I tell Katie, even though that isn’t the reason. It isn’t the money that matters but the kindness. And this way I give a little kindness every day.
At Waterloo we fight our way on to the platform, and join the thick procession making its way on to the Northern line.
‘Honestly, Mum, I don’t know how you do this every day.’
‘You get used to it,’ I say, although you don’t so much get used to it as simply put up with it. Standing up on a cramped, malodorous train is part and parcel of working in London.
‘I hate it. It’s bad enough doing it on Wednesday and Saturday night, but to do it at rush hour? God, it would kill me.’
Katie waitresses at a restaurant near Leicester Square. She could find somewhere closer to home, but she likes being in what she calls the ‘heart’ of the city. What she means is that she thinks she’s more likely to meet a film producer or an agent hanging out around Covent Garden and Soho, than in Forest Hill. She’s probably right, although in the eighteen months she’s been there it hasn’t happened yet.
Today Katie isn’t going to the restaurant, though. Today she’s going to an audition, where the next in a long line of theatrical agencies will see her, and – she hopes – agree to take her on. I wish I believed in her as much as she wants me to, but I’m a realist. She’s beautiful, and talented, and she’s a great actress, but she’s a nineteen-year-old girl from Peckham comp, and the chances of her hitting the big time are about as much as me winning the lottery. And I don’t even play it.
‘Promise me that if this one doesn’t work out, you’ll at least consider the secretarial course I told you about.’
Katie looks at me scornfully.
‘As something to fall back on, that’s all.’
‘Thanks for the vote of confidence, Mum.’
Leicester Square station is heaving. We’re separated briefly as we approach the ticket barrier and when I find her again I squeeze her hand.
‘I’m just being practical, that’s all.’
She’s cross with me and I don’t blame her. Why did I have to pick that moment to bring up the secretarial course? I check my watch. ‘You’re not due there for another forty-five minutes. Let me buy you a coffee.’
‘I’d rather be on my own.’
I deserve that, I think, but she catches the hurt in my eyes.
‘To go over my audition piece, that’s all.’
‘Of course. Well, good luck, then. I mean it, Katie. I hope it goes brilliantly.’ I watch her walk away, wishing I could have just been happy for her; cheered her on, the way Simon did before he left for work.
‘It wouldn’t have hurt you to have been a bit more enthusiastic.’ Melissa slathers margarine on to slices of bread, stacking them in pairs, butter-side-in, ready for the lunchtime rush. In the glass-fronted cabinet are tubs of tuna mayonnaise, smoked salmon, grated cheese. The Covent Garden café is called Melissa’s Too. It’s larger than the Anerley Road place, with high seats facing the window, and five or six tables with metal chairs that stack in the corner each night so the cleaner can mop the floor.
‘Lie to her, you mean?’ It’s ten to nine and the café is empty, bar Nigel, whose long grey coat is streaked with grime, and who sends a waft of body odour into the air when he moves. He nurses a pot of tea perched on the high stools in the window, till Melissa shoos him out at ten each morning, telling him he’s bad for the lunch trade. Nigel used to sit on the pavement outside the café, a cap on the ground in front of him, until Melissa took pity on him. She charges him fifty pence, two pounds less than the blackboard price, and he certainly gets his money’s worth.
‘Just support her.’
‘I am supporting her! I took a couple of hours off work so I could travel in with her.’
‘Does she know that?’
I fall s
ilent. I’d been planning to meet her afterwards to see how the audition had gone, but Katie had made it quite clear she didn’t want me hanging around.
‘You should encourage her. When she becomes a Hollywood sensation you don’t want her telling Hello! magazine her mum told her she was no good.’
I laugh. ‘Not you, too. Simon’s convinced she’s going to make it.’
‘Well, then,’ Melissa says, as though that settles it. Her blue hairnet is coming loose, and I tug it forward for her, so she doesn’t have to wash her hands again. Melissa has long, thick glossy dark hair, which she wears in a seemingly complicated knot I’ve seen her create in a matter of seconds. When she’s working she’ll tuck a pen into it, which gives a misleadingly bohemian impression of her. Like most days she’s wearing jeans and ankle boots, with a crisp white shirt, the sleeves rolled to the elbows to expose skin as pale as her husband’s is dark.
‘Thanks.’
‘But then he’s also convinced he’s going to be a bestselling author.’ I grin, but even though I’m joking I feel instantly disloyal.
‘Doesn’t that involve actually writing something?’
‘He is writing,’ I say, redressing the balance by leaping to Simon’s defence. ‘He’s had masses of research to do first, and it’s hard finding the time around a full-time job.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘Some sort of espionage thriller, I think. You know me, it’s not really my sort of book. Give me a Maeve Binchy any day.’ I haven’t read any of Simon’s novel. He wants to wait until it’s finished before I see it, and I’m fine with that, because the truth is, I’m nervous. I worry I won’t know what to say about it; that I’m not qualified even to know if it’s good or not. I’m sure it’ll be good. Simon writes beautifully. He’s one of the most senior journalists at the Telegraph, and he’s been working on his book ever since I met him.
The door opens and a man in a suit comes in. He greets Melissa by name and they chat about the weather as she makes his coffee, adding milk and sugar without needing to ask.
There’s a copy of Friday’s Metro in the rack on the wall, and I pull it out while Melissa rings up the sale. Whoever was reading it has left it folded on a page headed ‘Underground Crime Soars’, and even though there’s no one near me I instinctively move my arm over my handbag, the strap worn across my chest in a habit years old. There’s a photo of a lad around Justin’s age, his face badly beaten, and a woman with a rucksack open on her lap, looking like she’s about to cry. I scan the article but it’s nothing new; advice about keeping your belongings close to you, travelling in pairs late at night. Nothing I haven’t told Katie, time and time again.
‘Justin said your manager went home sick yesterday,’ I say, when we’re on our own again.
‘She’s off today, as well, hence …’ She gestures to the blue hairnet. ‘I bet Richard Branson didn’t have these problems when he was building his empire.’
‘I bet he did. I’m not sure you can call two cafés,’ I catch Melissa’s glower, ‘two brilliant cafés an empire, though.’
Melissa looks shifty. ‘Three.’
I raise an eyebrow and wait for more.
‘Clerkenwell. Don’t look at me like that. You have to speculate to accumulate.’
‘But—’ I stop before I cross a line I can’t return from. Taking on a third café when my second was foundering would terrify me, but I guess that’s why Melissa’s in business, and I’m not. When I moved in next door to Melissa and Neil I was doing a bookkeeping course through the Adult Education programme. I’d been rubbish at maths at school, but Matt only had the kids on Wednesday evenings, which meant it was that or upholstery, and I couldn’t see me making a living from re-covering chairs. Melissa was my first client.
‘I’ve done the business accounts myself up till now,’ she said, when I told her I’d signed up for the course, ‘but I’ve taken on new premises in Covent Garden, and I could do with freeing up some time. It’ll be payroll and receipts – nothing too complicated.’ I jumped at the chance. And although it was only a year before another client – Graham Hallow – offered me a permanent job, I’ve carried on doing the books for Melissa’s and Melissa’s Too.
‘Melissa’s Three?’ I ask now. She laughs.
‘And four, and five … the sky’s the limit!’
I’m not due into work until lunchtime, but when I arrive at eleven Graham makes a show of looking at his watch.
‘Good of you to come in today, Zoe.’ As always, he’s wearing a three-piece suit, with an actual pocket watch tucked into his waistcoat. ‘Professionalism breeds confidence,’ he explained to me once, perhaps in an attempt to encourage me out of my M&S trousers and into something similarly old-fashioned.
I don’t rise to it. My two hours’ leave was authorised and signed off by Graham himself before I left on Friday. ‘Would you like me to make you a coffee?’ I say, having learned a long time ago that the best way to extinguish Graham is by being unfailingly polite.
‘That would be most welcome, thank you. Did you have a good weekend?’
‘Not bad.’ I don’t offer any detail, and he doesn’t ask. I keep my personal life to myself, nowadays. When Simon and I first got together, Graham dared to suggest it was inappropriate for me to date someone I’d met through work, even though it had been months since he’d come into the office, enquiring about commercial rental rates for a piece he was writing.
‘But it wouldn’t have been inappropriate for me to date my boss?’ I responded, folding my arms and looking him straight in the eye. Because six weeks after I’d found out about Matt’s affair, when I was a quivering mess and didn’t know which way was up, Graham Hallow had asked me out, and I’d said no.
‘I felt sorry for you,’ he said, when I challenged him all those years later. ‘I thought you needed cheering up.’
‘Right. Thanks.’
‘Maybe that’s what this new bloke thinks, too.’
I didn’t take the bait. I knew Simon didn’t feel sorry for me. He adored me. He bought me flowers, took me to nice restaurants, and kissed me in a way that made my knees buckle. We’d only been seeing each other for a few weeks, but I knew. I just knew. Maybe Graham had felt sorry for me, but he never quite forgave me for turning him down. No more letting me leave early if the kids were unwell, or cutting me some slack if the trains were late. From that moment he played by the book, and I needed the job too much to risk breaking the rules.
Graham drinks his coffee, then puts on his coat and disappears. There’s nothing in the diary, but he mutters something about seeing a man about a dog, and frankly I’m just glad to be on my own. The office is unusually quiet for a Monday, so I start a long overdue spring clean, feeding papers through the shredder and moving ancient spider plants to dust behind them.
My phone beeps, and I pick up a text from Matt.
KT okay?
He shortens everyone’s names like that. Katie is KT, Justin Jus, and I’m only ever Zoe when we’re arguing.
I suppose Simon would be Si, if they had that sort of relationship.
Haven’t heard from her, I reply. Not sure if that’s a good sign or not!
Did she feel confident?
I think for a second. Optimistic, I put.
How about you? x
I register the kiss and ignore it. I leave the conversation hanging, carrying on with my dusting, and a few minutes later he phones.
‘You did it again, didn’t you?’
‘Did what?’ I say, knowing full well what he means.
‘You put a downer on her audition.’ His consonants are muffled and I know it’s because he’s put a cigarette between his lips. Sure enough, I hear the metallic snap of a lighter, and he takes a long drag. It’s been almost twenty years since I smoked, but I feel a physical pull as he inhales.
‘I didn’t,’ I start, but Matt knows me too well. ‘I didn’t mean to, anyway.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I just m
entioned that secretarial course I told you about.’
‘Zo …’
‘What? You said yourself it would be perfect for her.’ I hear the sound of traffic in the background, and know that Matt is parked at a rank, leaning against the cab.
‘You’ve got to go gentle with her. Push her too hard in one direction and she’ll only run faster the other way.’
‘Acting isn’t a proper job,’ I say, because disagreeing with Matt is a habit that’s hard to break. ‘She needs something to fall back on.’
‘She’ll find that out herself soon enough. And when she does, we’ll be there.’
I finish dusting the main room, and move on to Graham’s office. His desk is twice the size of mine, but almost as neat. It’s one of the few things we have in common. A calendar sits parallel to the edge of the desk, today’s motivational quote urging me to do something today my future self will thank me for. On the opposite side of the desk are three in-trays, stacked on top of each other and labelled incoming; pending; post. In front of them is a stack of newspapers. Today’s London Gazette is on top.
Nothing unusual in that. You’d be hard pressed to find an office in London without a copy of the Gazette knocking about. I pick up the first issue, telling myself I’m still tidying, and see the paper beneath it is the London Gazette, too. As is the one beneath that; and the one beneath that. A dozen or more copies, neatly stacked. I glance at the door then sit down in Graham’s leather chair and pick up the top copy. I scan the first couple of pages, but I can’t stop myself from turning to the classifieds.
And then I feel a tightening around my chest, and the palms of my hands grow damp. Because on the last page of the newspaper in my hand – a newspaper dated several days previously is a woman I’ve seen before.
We are all creatures of habit.
Even you.
You reach for the same coat each day; leave home at the same time every morning. You have a favourite seat on the bus or the train; you know precisely which escalator moves the fastest, which ticket barrier to use, which kiosk has the shortest queue.
I See You Page 5