As I wandered away across the canteen I got shouted across by Ben, Sam and Zak. I hadn’t realised they were there.
“What?” I said defensively.
“Did we just see you hijacking Massa there?” Ben accused. “What was that about?”
I said nothing, just looked warily at them.
“She seemed to be keeping him highly entertained,” Zak observed.
“You didn’t call him Petal, did you?” Sam inquired teasingly.
I carefully screened the conversation back in my head to check.
“That’s a bit damning!” Ben grinned. “She’s having to think carefully about that one!”
I flipped them the finger and walked away.
Later, Alan called me into his office and had a cool word with me about professional behaviour in the workplace. He’d seen me make the rude gesture from the other side of the canteen.
“You’re not in some basic backwater repair garage now, Eve,” he said severely. “We expect higher standards from our workforce.”
My heart sank. I bit my lip. I was the only girl there and I was behaving worse than the men.
“Sorry,” I muttered, lowering my eyes.
He looked long and hard at me for a moment. “I saw you waylaying Massa,” he said at last.
I glanced swiftly at him, expecting now an even worse telling off.
“So I asked him what it was about.”
Boy, they were checking up on me! You couldn’t get away with anything for a second round here.
“He told me you’d ask him to sort out a manager for Gilbraith.”
I kept a tactical silence. I suddenly realised that they might well feel that it wasn’t my place to be doing that. I glanced briefly at Alan’s face to check out the situation. I clocked that he wasn’t sure of his grounds on this one – probably wasn’t quite sure exactly what brief the top bods had given me regarding Nish.
The silence lengthened, and then he dismissed me.
But a couple of weeks later I was hauled back in there in far worse trouble.
It was Duncan. He was a complete pain. Always needling me about Nish. Implying we were at it. Constant methinks the lady doth protest too much sort of remarks. I’d tried to ignore it. I’d tried to deny it. I tried getting angry with him. I’d tried rationally explaining to him. But he just got off on getting at me. And I figured he’d be implying all this to others too, all over the factory. Finally he said something just so out of order that I just saw red, turned round and punched him so hard in the stomach that he doubled over and couldn’t straighten up for a good couple of minutes. The rest of the team stared open mouthed for a moment and then just fell around pissing themselves. Duncan gave me an evil glare and Alan’s office door yanked open.
“In here at once,” Alan snapped at me.
Alan was cold. “I’ve spoken to you about your behaviour before,” he reminded me sharply. “This is going to have to be a verbal warning. We can’t have behaviour like this in our team.”
I controlled my urge to speak. I controlled my breathing.
He glanced under his brows at me. “So what was that about?”
He must have a pretty good idea, surely?
I explained, with extreme politeness and a heavily screened vocabulary that I was at the end of my tether with Duncan’s implications about me and Nish. And I carefully emphasised to Alan that Nish and I were not in a relationship, I was just doing what the management had asked me to do and supporting him in his training regime while he was recovering from his illness, and that we had no intention of ever being in a relationship, and that once Nish had a manager, I would be taking a back seat.
Alan looked me in the eye. “You are going to have to learn to become supremely indifferent to constant rumours about you and Gilbraith and rise above it,” he warned me. “Because they’re not going to go away.” He drummed his fingers thoughtfully on the desk for a moment, then he said to me. “You need to develop a thick skin to it. And you need to imply by every look, word and action that the whole thing is beneath you even responding. Because the moment you react, they know they’ve hooked you…”
I knew he was right but it seemed so unfair that just because I was female I was being subjected to all this! He correctly interpreted my expression. “Don’t worry,” he assured me grimly. “Duncan will be getting a verbal warning too. In fact I shall be telling him in no uncertain times that if he continues with this either to your face or spreading even one sentence of a rumour around the factory or anywhere else, he’ll be out on his ear. We’re under enough pressure in this department without the team being unable to work reliably together because of petty underlying tensions. We haven’t got room for any sort of relationship stress or unhelpful team dynamics here.”
Despite the blot on my copybook and warning on my employment file, I actually left his office feeling fantastically supported. That felt like quite a change for the better.
“Did you get a padded envelope through the post this morning?” Nish asked with a grin as he sat down beside me in the canteen.
“Yeah,” I agreed laughing. “I let out a right squawk, I can tell you, when I saw what they’d written in the credits!”
I’d opened the envelope to find a copy of Full Frontal’s latest CD, with – Thanks, Jamie – scrawled on the front. In the credits for the song they’d written while at Nish’s, he’d put Earsplitting Squawk courtesy of Eve McGinty. He’d also credited Nish with a couple of the arrangements, and Nish with saxophone on the same song that I was on.
“You wait till you hear the finished version…” He smiled mischievously at me.
“I don’t have anything to play a CD on,” I admitted.
He rolled his eyes. “Don’t you possess anything at all?” He exclaimed impatiently. “Come round to mine tonight and I’ll play it for you.”
When I arrived after work and he opened the door to me, his whole face was lit up.
“What?” I demanded. I could see he was really made up about something.
“Felipe just rang me…” He revealed, walking ahead of me back into the living room. In these dark raw evenings his living room always seemed spacious and warmly welcoming.
I held my breath.
“He says he’s found me a manager and he’s asked me to come to a meeting with him next week.”
“Wow!” I responded. “That’s great Nish!”
Nish smiled an uncomplicated smile. “Yes, it is, isn’t it?”
I was so relieved. He was obviously completely ready for it.
He fed the CD into his massive sound system and flung himself down on the sofa.
I sat down at the other end and he casually put his legs up along the gap between us and rested his bare feet in my lap. I looked down at the awful scars that circled his ankles.
“They’re not going to go away, are they?” I commented.
He ruefully put his similarly scarred wrists out for me to see and pulled a face. “Don’t know how I’m going to get a girlfriend now – all the girls will imagine I’m into serious S‘n’M!”
I laughed. “Or else you’ll attract the wrong sort that might be really disappointed with what actually turns out to be on offer!”
Nish eyed me a bit askance. “That sounded a bit…”
I smiled. “Well I’m not in a position to judge, am I?” I pointed out. I rested my hand on the sole of his foot. “Would you like me to give you a foot massage while we listen to the CD?”
He raised his eyebrows. “That sounds nice…” He reached for the remote and pointed it at the system and pressed ‘play’.
I began to knead into the sole of his foot and he groaned with pleasure. “That’s amazing Eve, why have you never done this before?”
Quinn’s voice suddenly started soaring above us which was a bit disorientating.
I shrugged, and started doing each toe in turn. “I suppose this means they’re back from America?”
“Yes, they are, Quinn texted me when he got b
ack,” Nish told me.
“Quinn texted you?” I established, feeling a bit aggrieved.
Nish looked in an amused way at me. “Oo, look at that jealous expression! Hasn’t he texted you?”
I tried to look like I didn’t care. “Did he say how the tour went?” Shortly after Quinn had left, I’d realised that he must have been needing to get ready to go, as they’d flown out only five days later.
“Sounded really positive…” Nish reported, stretching his other foot forward and flopping it into my lap. I obediently fielded it and began to work on it. He sighed and wriggled into a more comfortable position with his eyes closed. “This is bliss, Eve…”
We listened to four tracks which were all rather good to my own untutored ears and then Nish opened his eyes and darted me a look and grinned. “This is it… Are you ready for it?”
He laughed his head off as I leapt a mile when they started out with my scream and then there was Quinn’s voice scoffing, ‘Blimey Ginty! That could crack glass!’ And then they plunged into the song. Nish’s sax was weaving in and out, Nish’s voice and Quinn’s were effortlessly soaring and sliding, my squawk randomly punctuated loudly and discordantly over the top, and Quinn occasionally responded with ‘That could crack glass!’ And they finally finished on the splintering sound of a piece of glass exploding.
Nish was almost wheezing with laughter at my expression by the end. He pulled back his feet, sat on the edge of the sofa, bent over and just howled. I folded my arms and glared at him which made him just laugh all the harder. He wiped helplessly at his eyes. “Your face! It was priceless!”
I allowed a bit of a smile to crack my physog.
One day later that week, Nish and I stopped briefly off at my flat for me to pick up my spare head torch, having annoyingly mislaid my good one. I was rummaging around in the chest of drawers in my bedroom looking for it, when he took the opportunity to wander in behind me and glance around. He’d never made it as far as my bedroom before. “You don’t own much do you?” He observed.
“I own two F2 stocks,” I reminded him. “And share a half ownership of two more that we use for the business…”
His eyes fell on the pair of skis that had been stood up in the corner of the room for the past five months as I had nowhere else to put them. The bed had a solid base so you couldn’t shove stuff under it.
He looked surprised. “Do you ski?” He asked.
“Yeah – at least, I did while I was in Italy working with Ferrari last winter…” I confirmed, straightening up with the head torch in my hands and alternately yanking and feeding the webbing of head band through the tri-glide buckle to lengthen it out.
“Ferrari…” He echoed vaguely as though he hadn’t ever clocked before now that I’d come to Williams via Ferrari. Suddenly he said in positive tones. “Let’s go skiing at New Year! I have to go home at Christmas – I can’t really avoid that with it being the first year since Dad died, even though it’s going to be awful…” He looked gloomy for a moment. “But if we book a week over New Year then we’ll both have something to look forward to, won’t we?”
I thought of the awful Christmas of my own that I’d be facing, which I also felt obliged to attend for the sake of my own still living father, with my stepmother trying desperately to be jolly, and my stepbrother Ethan sitting like an expressionless cabbage in the corner. “I wish I could,” I sighed wistfully, “but I can’t afford it.”
He rolled his eyes and looked irritable. “Everything I ever suggest you say you can’t afford!”
“I’m just an intern, Nish,” I reminded him crossly. “I don’t get paid very much you know! By the time I’ve covered the rent and the bills and my fuel for the bike and the upkeep of the stocks and so forth, I’m pretty much cleaned out every month!”
“How much do you get paid for goodness sake?” He snapped.
I named the figure and he stared at me. “Oh,” he backed off, “right…” Then he exclaimed a bit irascibly. “That’s more like slave labour, isn’t it? They’re making sure they’re getting their money’s worth out of you, aren’t they!”
“I’m an unknown quantity, Nish, they’re taking a risk and they’re having to train me up at their own expense…”
“I’ll pay for you, Eve,” he offered suddenly. He grabbed my shoulders. “Come out with me at New Year and I’ll cover it.”
I glanced briefly up at his dark intense eyes looking down at me. Then I pulled away and hunched a shoulder. “I can’t do that, Nish, you know that.”
He looked disappointed. “I don’t see why not…”
“You know why not!” I had to turn sharply away. I so much wanted to go skiing. It would be so brilliant. I really needed a break. I’d really need cheering up after Christmas. And I had an instinct that it would be really good fun with him. “You’ll find someone else,” I said abruptly. “Sappho and some of her friends maybe?” I suggested.
He looked cross and didn’t answer.
The following Monday, Alan informed me that Mr. Heskett wanted to see me, so I made my way up to his office. It had been a while since I’d been up there.
“Nish has now got himself a manager,” he told me. Then he smiled at me. “Well done!”
I smiled too. “Yes, he seems really positive about everything at last.”
“We’re getting pretty hopeful about his chances of being ready for the season,” Heskett agreed. “What do you think?”
I nodded. “Yes, he’s getting really strong now. He’s even talking enthusiastically about going skiing.”
Heskett looked thoughtful.
I sighed. “He keeps asking me to go with him, but I can’t afford it and then he offers to pay for me to come, but he must know that I can’t accept that…”
Heskett shrugged, “I wouldn’t worry about it, Eve. His family are loaded, and he’s not short of a bob or two. It’s just pocket money to him… Just go with him.”
I was a bit surprised by his attitude. “Really?” I said uncertainly. “But won’t it cause even more comment? I’m in enough trouble as it is.”
“Yes, I heard about your disciplinary,” he agreed severely. Then his lips twitched. Then he coughed. Then he got out a hanky and blew his nose vigorously. And I suddenly realised he was trying his hardest not to burst out laughing.
I grinned at him. “You’re allowed to laugh. Everyone else was pissing themselves.”
He wiped at his eyes but also gave me a reproving look.
“Sorry,” I sighed and self-corrected. “I know – language – not professional…”
“Yes,” he reproved with a frown. “You are going to have to learn to rigorously watch your tongue. We’re constantly in the glare of the media here and the slightest thing will get picked up on.” He sat back in his chair and stared abstractedly at the wall for a moment then he looked back at me. “I’m thinking now that doing some training at altitude would be just the thing to get Gilbraith to peak fitness. So I’m thinking it would be really helpful if you’d go with him skiing. Tell him to book a place in a resort at the highest altitude he can possibly find in the Alps, and then I’ll contact his new manager and get him to organise three weeks or so at a high altitude sports training facility somewhere in Europe to start immediately afterwards. So your job will be just to enable him to have some fun and unwind while physically acclimatising to the altitude, and get him into a really positive frame of mind before we set him to serious work on his fitness.” He paused and looked at me. “Are you ok with that?”
Yeah, I was. Now I could go with Nish but tell him and everyone else that it was an assignment from Heskett.
We walked into the small apartment in the resort on the 30th of December. Nish threw his bags down on the bed, then went back outside to lug in the skis and boots that we’d left propped against the wall in the corridor. I looked dubiously at the bed, then glanced around looking for other rooms. Nope. Just one big room with one big double bed, a half wall semi division to a tiny kitchenette
and the door to the shower and toilet.
“I’m starving!” Nish announced. He was having to watch his diet now, and keep down to a racing weight. They got weighed like jockeys. Not that I’d ever seen him eating unhealthily – but now he had to watch every calorie and nutrient. His manager, Royce, (I mean – come on – tell me now – who on earth is called Royce?) had immediately hired Nish a personal trainer who had him on such a rigorous twenty-four hour regime that I’d barely seen the poor sod for weeks now. Nish was acting like a guy who’d been suddenly let off the leash.
“I’m going to eat what I like and do what I like, whenever I like,” he’d announced bolshily to me at the airport.
Now he picked me up by the waist and swung me around. “We’re here!” He exclaimed triumphantly. Then he put me down. “Come on now!” He grabbed me by the wrist and towed me after him.
Outside it was snowing, big flat slow flakes.
“New snow!” He exulted. “Perfect!”
I smiled. He’d indicated, without going into details, that he’d had a fairly shite time over Christmas. It was going to be miserable whatever, the first Christmas after your dad’s died. But I’d sort of got a handle now that none of the rest of the family were the least bit interested in the racing aspect of Nish’s life, which now, of course, was the whole of it. It had been a special thing between Nish and his dad, and maybe had been splitting the family for years with the others being jealous of the intensity of attention that Nish’s dad had put into it. And all the recent revelations about their Mother’s side of the family didn’t help the mood either, especially as his Mother was apparently just so enraged that they could barely get anything out of her, and when they did, it was wrapped in such violent emotions that she made them feel that they were assaulting her even by just asking her anything at all.
We had a raclette - basically just as much toasted melted cheese as you like tipped on top of potatoes with some salad. You got to do your own toasting of the cheese in little spades under a grill. Nish was grinning. He’d never be allowed this by Niall. I drank a couple of glasses of red wine. Nish never drank. It had taken me ages to notice that we never went down the pub or had a bottle back at his flat. He said he’d made a policy of it, and felt better for it, and it was just easier to be completely teetotal because then no-one ever tried to press you – it just became a non-subject. He said with a grimace that most people assumed he was a Muslim when he said he didn’t drink, and that he used to try to explain but now he just left them to it. “If they think you’re doing it because of some religious practice or other then they just shut-up, and that’s just so much more relaxing.”
The Way Back (Not Quite Eden Book 6) Page 20