The Rival

by Charlotte Duckworth

  Helena’s eyebrows twitch, ever so slightly. She strides towards the coffee bar at one corner of the reception, all neon lights and dark-stained wood, then looks back over her shoulder.

  ‘I’m not sure you’ll last five minutes at Kiss and Make Up without caffeine but I admire your . . .’ She tails off.

  She doesn’t admire me yet, I think. But she will.

  NOW

  Helena

  It’s late. Or early, depending on how you look at it. 2.34 a.m., to be precise. Like most new mothers, it’s not unusual that I’m awake at this time. But of course, I’m not like most new mothers.

  I look over at Jack. He’s sleeping. How he sleeps through the accidents is beyond me. I know he wears earplugs – he has done since the noise of his Fulham Palace Road days – but he complains they fall out. I stroke his back before I climb out of bed, pushing my feet into my slippers and tucking my phone into my pyjama waistband. I tiptoe down the stairs and across the flagstoned hall.

  Tonight I heard the car coming – I was awake, anyway. There was a split second before impact when I thought the driver might make it. Might be lucky, might just miss. But it wasn’t to be.

  Outside, I can see the car sticking up above the wall. It’s twisted slightly, leaning on its side, but it hasn’t flipped over completely. I leave our driveway and walk towards the wreckage. It’s a silver Corsa this time, an old model. Unlike the car, the driver behind the smashed windscreen is young – and not drunk, I don’t think. I steady myself, breathing deeply and squinting the tears away as I open the passenger door and lean into the car. After checking he’s still breathing, I call an ambulance. His wallet is lying on the front seat beside him and I find his driving licence inside. Born in 1994.

  Aaron. His address is on the licence, too – he lives in the next village. He was probably coming back from the pub after lock-in. But if he’s a local, he ought to have known what he was taking on, really. Ought to have been prepared.

  I remember the piggy-eyed estate agent reassuring us that the unbelievable price of our house had nothing to do with the road. That of course it wasn’t dangerous, that the spate of accidents last year happened before the farmer who owns the field opposite had taken down the cobblestone wall, replaced it with wire fencing. That it was perfectly safe now. A wonderful spot to raise a family, he’d said, one eyebrow arching at Jack.

  As I am thinking of him and his lies, the boy regains consciousness, his eyelids fluttering open like a baby waking from a nap.

  ‘Stay still,’ I say, leaning across the passenger seat to squeeze his hand. ‘It’s going to be OK.’

  ‘I want my mum,’ he says, beginning to cry. He starts to jerk about, to try to climb from the car.

  ‘Stay still,’ I say, a little more strictly. ‘You’ll do yourself more damage if you keep moving.’

  ‘Mum . . . please . . . my mum.’

  His mum. I can picture her: plump, cheeks mottled with broken thread veins, bushy eyebrows and a full smile. Proud of her son. He probably has a brother, or perhaps a younger sister. She’s still at school. Aaron. He’s her big brother, her hero. And now he’s lying here, helpless and spotty with shaving rash, a line of blood running down his cheek from underneath his baseball cap. I can’t see what’s under it, what the damage is. His breath is coming fast and shallow now, almost as though he’s sobbing. Like a fish removed from water, desperate for air.

  ‘My mum . . . I want . . . my mum,’ he says, twisting his head to stare at me with eyes that seem both right here and far away at the same time. I shush him, squeeze his hand, tell him to hold on and that the ambulance will be here shortly. I tell him not to worry, say again that he’s going to be OK.

  But how do I know whether he’ll be OK? The last year has shown me how deceptive your health can be. How one minute you can be absolutely fine, and the next . . .

  The ambulance takes longer to come than it should have done. I am timing it on my phone: twelve minutes exactly. A good five minutes over the average response time. I know that Saturday nights are incredibly busy, so I’m not too surprised. But still, it’s not good enough, is it? Imagine how much blood you can lose in twelve minutes.

  They thank me, as they always do. Sometimes I recognize the paramedics, but not tonight. They always look at me with sympathy and confusion. I know what they’re thinking – why does she live here? Why doesn’t she move? Who is she? What’s her story? I wonder if they can tell that I’m younger than I look, that underneath the eye bags there’s ‘something of a beauty, like her mother’, as I once overheard someone say at one of my father’s parties.

  They strap him up, and put him on a stretcher. They don’t remove his baseball cap, so I’ll never know what was going on underneath it. I hear them muttering something about his leg. I hadn’t noticed his leg; I was too taken with the blood running down his cheek. I wait while they load him into the ambulance, squeezing his hand one last time as they take him away. The police are busy making notes; I tell them what I know. It’s cold and I’m only wearing a thin hoodie, grabbed from the rack by the door. I want to get back inside.

  As I turn to leave, one of the policewomen asks me if I’m all right. I tell her I’m fine. Because I am. Because, upsetting though it always is, nothing will ever be as upsetting as when I lost her.

  *

  I’m back in my office now.

  It’s called my office, but I don’t do any work in here, so really it’s just a sanctuary; a place to hide from the world. Jack decorated it for me, as a surprise, filling it with mid-century furniture – a rosewood desk, an original Arne Jacobsen chair, an Anglepoise, String shelving. The walls are lined in a deep brown grasscloth, the carpet a sludge green, thick pile. At the window hang slatted vertical blinds, the kind that gather dust in NHS dentists’ waiting rooms and that most people rip out, nowadays. But the scheme works. It hangs together.

  When I’m tucked away in here, Jack will sometimes pop his head round the door unexpectedly and catch me, poring over a spreadsheet. He’ll wink, smile with forced cheeriness and say something like, ‘I knew it, world domination – Round Two – not far off, then!’ and I’ll grin and nod back and wish he’d disappear.

  Jack.

  What can I say about Jack? We haven’t slept together for more than a year. He’s more interested in the rugby, now, than in sex. He has no idea how to help me. He’s kind. He liked me better when I was working.

  None of it is his fault. I can tell I’m an inconvenience now: like an ageing relative he must take care of, someone he views with nostalgic affection but at the same time wishes would hurry up and die. I’ve thought about it, a bit. Dying, I mean. But I’m a coward. Maybe if they could find a totally painless way to do it, maybe then I’d consider it. But deep down, there’s still that flame, flickering in my heart. Just a tiny amount of hope. That things will get better. That things can get better. That’s the most torturous thing of all.

  I don’t do any work in here, but I do keep track of things. Someone has to, and seeing as I’m closest to it . . . Something has to be done about the road, and I’m determined to force the Council into action. There’s a calendar pinned on the back of my door. Each day there’s an accident I mark the calendar with an A. In red if there’s been a fatality.

  I won’t have long before Jack comes to find me, so I make tonight’s notes in my file. Aaron Turner. He’s the first for three weeks. It’s been a peaceful three weeks. October has crept in with a gentle sweep, rather than a dramatic downturn. It’s still mild during the day, and the only chill is first thing in the morning – a pleasing, crisp bite that makes the air feel fresher. The winter will be worse. There’ll be more to come in the following weeks.

  From my desk I can see where Aaron’s life changed forever. I make a note of his words to me, his expression, what he was wearing, all the little pieces of his story.

  And then, pricked by shame, I take out my sketchbook and begin to draw. It’s the only way; by tomorrow, I will have forgott
en the details. Those eyes, asking for his mum. I want to remember them.

  THEN

  Ash

  I’m aware that it’s not the done thing, when you’re new, to interrupt your manager in full flow. But still. When someone is so wrong, what are you supposed to do?

  ‘I think,’ I say, my voice louder than intended as it cuts across the discussion, ‘you’ll find that Instagram works much better when it’s more off the cuff.’

  Helena looks at me, her eyes hardening, but not unkindly – more with surprise.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Instagram,’ I reply, swallowing back my nerves. ‘Scheduling it will look flat, lifeless. It’s more important that it seems spontaneous, natural. And technically, you can’t schedule posts, anyway – they don’t let you. It’s nothing like Twitter.’ I’ve warmed up now. ‘And you certainly can’t try to ram a corporate message into each caption. A sure-fire way to fail. People don’t engage with that, they slag it off.’

  There’s a pause. The digital bigwigs – I haven’t quite worked out yet what they are about but they are certainly more senior than I am, and they have flown over from the US for a week of ‘onboarding’ of the new staff – stare at me as though I have interrupted them on the toilet. They’ve never even seen Instagram, let alone used it. Why the hell are they in this meeting, anyway?

  ‘Well,’ Helena replies, noting the bigwigs’ response. ‘I think, you’ll find there’s not a great deal of point in having a corporate Instagram account if we don’t use it to some extent to promote the core values—’

  ‘Core values?’ I interrupt.

  ‘I appreciate your input . . .’ Helena begins.

  ‘Listen, I don’t want to seem rude but, well, you’ve hired me for my social media expertise, right? I know what I’m talking about. I’ve curated a personal account of more than three thousand followers with barely any money, glamour or excitement in my life. Not that I don’t find my life exciting but . . . what I’m saying is: trust me. I know what I’m talking about. This is make-up. We don’t want just boring conventional pack shots borrowed from our suppliers. We need something fun, something inspirational – something about the brand, behind the scenes . . .’

  I’m in full flow, what Gran describes as ‘on a mission’, and nothing and nobody is going to stop me.

  ‘Jesus, this is London! This is the glamour capital of the world.’ I’ve never been to Paris, so it’s probably true. I stand up. I read somewhere that standing gives your message gravitas, and I gesture towards the floor-to-ceiling windows, sweeping my arm across the view. ‘Look at this place! It’s so . . . cool. People think we’re cool. We’re the coolest website for cool people and our followers are cool. We need to reflect that by being cool ourselves. You know, shots of the roof terrace with our staff drinking champagne before a night out . . .’

  The bigwigs raise their eyebrows but I ignore them.

  ‘Shots inside our own personal make-up bags . . . competitions . . . oh, you know the sort of thing . . . boyfriend does my make-up, that stuff!’

  ‘Boyfriend does my make-up?’

  ‘Yes, it’s when you get your boyfriend to do your make-up for you. And you film the results. It’s huge with YouTubers.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Helena, her voice tight. ‘Thanks, Ashley, for your input. It’s appreciated, and I do see your point.’ Her tone is clear: it’s your first day, shut up and sit down.

  I cross my arms and sit, sulkily, back in my chair. I don’t care that this isn’t the ‘done thing’. What does it matter what the done thing is, if it’s so bloody wrong?

  There’s a silence that seems to stretch and stretch until it finally snaps, with Helena and one of the bigwigs both speaking at the same time.

  ‘Well, this has been . . .’ he says.

  ‘I think, perhaps . . .’ Helena says.

  The bigwig tails off.

  ‘I think, perhaps,’ Helena repeats, ‘Ashley has a point. We did, indeed, hire her for her knowledge of this sector – of our core audience. I’d like to put together some proposals for you.’ There’s a pause and she glances across at me, then back at the suits. They’re not wearing suits, of course, but they might as well be. Dinosaurs. ‘If I may. Some mock-ups of the sort of thing that I think Ashley is referring to. We can work on them together, OK, Ashley? I’ll send them over first thing in the morning, for you to see. If you think we’re on to something, we can take it from there?’

  One of the VIPs starts fiddling with his BlackBerry. A BlackBerry, for fuck’s sake. Just shows how out of touch he is. He looks up when Helena finishes.

  ‘Yes, OK, sounds great,’ he says, his voice monotone.

  ‘Excellent,’ Helena replies.

  Stalemate.

  The tension is relieved by the sound of the glass door creaking open. We all look up as a man walks in. He’s somewhere in his early forties, with perfectly preened black hair, and the kind of deep tan you get from years of holidaying in the Caribbean. Even if I didn’t know who he was already, I’d be able to tell that he is important from his perfectly white teeth, his perfectly rolled-up shirtsleeves revealing a big-faced watch, and the way Helena and the other men look at him.

  ‘David!’ Helena says, and there’s something in her voice, not nerves exactly, but excitement. From the flash of trepidation in her eyes, she clearly thinks a lot of him. ‘Thanks for popping by!’

  She turns to me.

  ‘Ashley, I’d like you to meet David. He’s the CEO for KAMU UK.’

  David walks towards me with an outstretched hand and I stand up and shake it. The skin on his palm is smooth and his grip the perfect strength. But I see something else glinting on his other hand. Something my Google searches didn’t tell me. Of course he’s taken. I imagine his wife, always waiting for him at home as he toils at the digital coalface. Spending a life surrounded by Jo Malone candles. She’s probably called Claudia, her defining features being her long blonde hair and fabulous friends. And, of course, there’ll be two children dressed head to toe in Boden, all loose ponytails and wide toothy grins.

  ‘Great to meet you,’ he says, and he sounds like he means it. ‘Helena was very pleased to have you on board, says you’re quite the trailblazer. We’re all very excited to see what you can bring to the company.’

  ‘I’m very excited to see what the company can bring to me,’ I say, and they all laugh, as though I’ve made a really clever joke.

  He turns to the bigwigs. ‘Listen, guys, I’m pleased I caught you. We’ve had some feedback from the developers . . . coffee?’

  And in that moment, his charm dissipates. Helena and I no longer exist. We have been dismissed and it’s time to disappear.

  Helena pushes her chair back, stands up and closes her notebook. She clears her throat loudly and makes a big show of checking her iPhone.

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ David says. ‘How rude of me. Had you finished?’ He gives her a full smile, his eyes sweeping over her face in a manner that could almost be seen as loving, but she’s having none of it. He thinks he’s nurtured her, I realize. Taken her under his wing, made her what she is today.

  ‘Yes, just about,’ she says, her voice just a tiny bit too loud, just a tiny bit rude, summoning everyone’s attention again. ‘We’ll get off and get on with that, then. Pick this up again tomorrow.’

  So much power play in one tiny meeting. But I’m pleased that Helena has put them all in their place – surprised but pleased. Perhaps I’ve underestimated her.

  ‘Ashley?’ Helena says, glancing sideways at me.

  ‘Sure. Let’s head,’ I reply, and I don’t know where this alien business jargon has come from. It’s certainly not something I’ve ever said before, but it slips out so easily and I want to smile with self-satisfaction.

  We leave the meeting room without saying goodbye. It’s a small thing – perhaps no one even notices – but it feels rude and it feels defiant and it feels good.

  *

  You have to visualize a goal to
achieve it. It’s 9.30 p.m. I waited until everyone had left before going home for the day. Even David left before me, coming out of his glass cube and waving at me from across the empty desks as he whistled his way towards the lift. He’ll remember that I was still there, he’ll appreciate my working late on my first day. But what he won’t know is that my reluctance to leave wasn’t just to impress him.

  I double-check the maths on the train home. My new salary will cover the rent; it’ll be tight, but I can do it, and Maria has already said I can continue doing shifts at the shop on Saturdays, which will give me an extra £300 or so per month. My feet are heavy as they take me closer to the inevitable conversation and its inevitable messy ending.

  Gary.

  I always get myself into these situations, I only have myself to blame. It’s such a shame. And Gran will be so upset; the fallout will last for weeks. I run through all the possible methods of getting it done, but, like ripping off a plaster, there’s no easy or painless way to do it. I steel myself, remembering last Saturday when he rolled in at 3 a.m. and vomited all over the side of the bath, then bought me a box of Quality Street from the off-licence as some kind of apology. I deserve better.

  Any woman deserves better. Gran will understand. Eventually.

  ‘Listen. There’s no easy way to say this but . . . it’s not working,’ I say, once I’ve pulled off my coat and dumped it on the arm of the sofa. Gary is sitting, as usual, in his pyjama bottoms in front of the TV. ‘I think one of us should move out.’

  ‘You’re funny,’ he says.

  I sit next to him, resting my hands on my knees, and lean towards him. I adopt my most sympathetic voice – imagining that I am telling him his puppy needs to be put down.

  ‘Let’s be honest here,’ I say, softly. ‘We’re drifting apart. We’re not making each other happy.’

  ‘What are you going on about?’ he says, slumping back on the sofa. ‘It’s 10.30 p.m., where have you been, anyway? It was your first day at work – I’ve been waiting for you to come home. I even got us Domino’s. Ham and pineapple, no cheese.’ He gestures for me to turn round. ‘They’ll be cold now.’ He actually sounds upset about that.