by Terry Tyler
Will had arrived to plunge us back into the real world.
I was never sorry to see Will, but I didn’t welcome his visit that night. Erin didn’t need Lanchester Estates, she needed time out. But he was there, so we poured him a glass of wine and steeled ourselves for his news.
Isabella had appointed a chap called George Bowes to take over at Lanchester Estates North, he said, and Jim Dudley had employed some amazing new PR girl called Raine Grey who’d been introduced to them all that afternoon. She would start work the following Monday, the week before Isabella was due to return to Head Office.
“She’s quite something,” Will said. “Amazing credentials, he reckons she’s going to turn the place around, really spruce up our image—though I have to say I was a bit surprised that he’s made this move at such a late stage in the proceedings. I mean, as he’s not officially the decision maker anymore.” He coughed; he looked as though he was uncomfortable about this development. “Erin, did you know about this? In your role as head of Human Resources, I mean. I thought he would have asked you to come in today to meet her. Will Isabella be okay with it?”
I could tell she was in the process of composing herself, very carefully.
“Jim told me before—well, you know,” she said. “I knew, yes, but I’d forgotten. No, I don’t think Isabella knows, but I’m sure Jim’s made the right decision for the company. I expect he thought it was best not to bother me with something like this at the moment.” Hint hint, I thought. She picked up her glass of wine, drank it down in one, and refilled it. The atmosphere of the evening was ruined. Will broke the awkward silence with a nervous half laugh.
“You ought to see this Raine,” he said, “she’s as bright and shiny as a new pin, and as sharp as Jim, too; certainly seems to know what she’s talking about.” He smiled at Erin. “A bit like your mother when she first came to work for us, sweetheart.” He was just trying to soften the mood; I knew he realised he’d chosen a bad time.
“Did she seem nice?” I asked, to make him feel less awkward.
“Yes,” said Will. “She was super professional and friendly, but it was odd; I felt almost as if they were co-conspirators, or something; Jim presented her as if she was his secret weapon. I got the impression he knows her quite well; perhaps she’s an ex-girlfriend of Rob’s.”
“She’s not,” Erin said, sharply.
“What does she look like, then?” I asked, though of course I already knew.
“Oh, blonde, slim, immaculate, you know the type! Probably playing at PR until she gets married to some stuffed shirt in the city.” He smiled, and I wondered what would happen when Isabella found out that Lanchester Estates’ new PR supergirl was Jim Dudley’s mistress.
So now I had some thinking to do. Should I reveal Raine Grey’s relationship with the Man in Black, or not?
Chapter Four
RAINE
August 2010 (and before)
I worked at Lanchester Estates for nine days, and those nine days wrecked my confidence, set my career back several years, and broke my heart.
I did it all for Jim, because I thought I was making a huge step towards our wonderful life together. Talk about naïveté. Served me right for falling in love with a married man, I guess.
People often presume that if a young woman sleeps with an older, wealthy man, that she’s a gold-digger, but it’s not always the case. Jim wasn’t wealthy in his own right, anyway, and I adored him. I fell in love with him because we had this fantastic, intense chemistry between us, that indefinable ingredient ‘X’ that turns attraction into love, and because (I can see now) he represented everything I had grown up without, and wanted so badly to find.
Normality, status, appreciation of the things money can buy, and freedom through financial independence.
Let me explain.
If I tell you about my family’s names, you’ll get the picture immediately.
My mother chose mine to honour various Pagan rain spirits. She said rain cleansed her psyche, or some such other hippie claptrap. Whenever there was a serious downpour, one of those that swell rivers and flood drains, she would, to my younger brother’s and my excruciating embarrassment, go into the garden and perform what she claimed were spiritually enhancing dances based on yoga movements.
At the back of our run-down council house.
On Greylings Estate, Northampton.
Naked.
While she was thus occupied, my dad would stand by the kitchen door and hum with his eyes shut, rocking from side to side. My brother and I stayed in the front room, telly turned up loud, and prayed that none of our mates were looking out of their bedroom windows. We were lucky; we only had the police round to warn her about indecent exposure three times during my childhood.
I came into the world on the ninth of November, 1985, in some sort of deep paddling pool contraption in an alternative birthing centre, with a load of weirdos chanting all around. I’ve seen the video, it’s beyond gross. One of our neighbours, Beardy Wayne, was actually playing panpipes.
Mum doesn’t just like rain. She’s ‘totally into all precipitation, yeah?’ My brother is called Storm. Can you imagine how silly we felt, as children? “Hello, I’m Raine, and this is Storm.” Perhaps Mum hoped we would grow up to form a New Age panpipe duo called Rainstorm.
Mum’s name is Pauline, but she changed it to Indra, after a Hindu rain god. Don’t know why, because she’s always going on about being Wiccan. Perhaps there aren’t any Wiccan rain gods with groovy names. I hated being called Raine when I was a kid (I wanted to be called Kimberly, Kayleigh or Danielle like most of the other girls at Greylings Middle School), but I like it now. It’s smart, I think.
Years ago, I read that if you want your child to be a bank manager, you should bring him up to be an anarchist, because children always rebel against their background. This is so true. My parents are the sweetest, daftest, most textbook hippies you can imagine. Throughout my childhood they drummed into me that desire for status and material goods can bring only unhappiness, that forced adherence to ‘the norm’ is destructive to the soul, and the most important gift you can give a child is the encouragement to express his individuality. Thus, I grew up wanting money, convention, security, acceptance. I didn’t want to be an individual, I wanted to be the same as everyone else. Most of all, I wanted people to see me as someone they’d like to emulate, not as part of some pop psychology-loving, lazy, dog-on-a-string, pink dreadlocked, weirdo hippie underclass, to be laughed and pointed at. I’d had enough of that.
Our life in Brickyard Court on Greylings Council Estate was subsidised by various combinations of Jobseekers’ Allowance, income support, housing benefit, child benefit, crisis loans and God only knows what else. Once I got to an age where I knew about such things, I would ask Mum and Dad why they were happy to take a house and money from ‘the system’ they claimed to despise so much. They never had a satisfactory answer.
As children we never had proper toys bought from shops. We had homemade rag dolls made by my parents’ loopy friends, or stuff from charity shops. One Christmas, Storm spent weeks hoping for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but unwrapped only a dodgy looking wigwam with papier maché Iroquois figures. The wigwam fell apart on Boxing Day, and the Red Indians (sorry, Native Americans) perished during a collision with a pint of Dad’s homemade beer.
I was the only five-year-old in the class with pink hair. Until I started school, I thought everyone was like us, that the world was a place where people got their kit off as soon as the clouds opened, painted rainbows on the living room walls if they felt like it and lolled around the house all day smoking funny smelling cigarettes and baking bread. It was a happy way to spend one’s formative years, but I can remember, even when I was only four, wishing Mum would keep her knickers on when she danced in the garden. I remember being called dirty hippies by the rougher element on the estate, but the part in which we lived was peaceful and we had friends: other people like us, and a couple of families of bi
kers. Big smiling men with stinky leather jackets who scared me a bit when they picked me up.
Going to school was what opened my eyes. I’d loved my pink hair before I knew it was weird, but the other children laughed at me, and Mum had rows with the teachers about it; eventually Dad said it might be better if we washed it out, but Mum, determined that I would look ‘different’, took me round to the house of a friend who braided and strung it with beads, instead.
I kicked and screamed about that. I wanted to look like the other little girls, with their neat ponytails and white ankle socks. Mine were lime green, yellow, orange, anything but white. When the other kids made fun of me, Mum said I should ‘teach them the joy of sharing’, and baked me some grey-looking biscuits to pass round. I threw them over the hedge the moment she left me at the school gate.
The differences between us and ‘normal’ people were accentuated to me on a daily basis. I did make some friends, and in their houses I saw how other children lived. We might have all been on the same council estate, but they had what I thought were ‘posh’ houses, with three piece suites from furniture shops, instead of shabby old second hand chairs covered in Indian throws, which in turn were covered in burns from carelessly flicked spliffs. Our settee came from a skip. My friends’ mothers gave me proper supermarket orange juice, fish fingers and oven chips, not weird stuff made out of lentils and tofu. I didn’t realise how good processed food with preservatives tasted until I tried it in the homes of the Kimberlys, Danielles and Kayleighs.
Two of the Kayleighs didn’t have fathers, but they still had real holidays, at caravan parks in places like Hunstanton. The only holidays we had were treks in Beardy Wayne’s campervan to Stonehenge for the summer solstice. Fun, but Storm and I longed for amusement arcades.
Dad is skinny, with droopy, dirty blond hair and a patchy beard to hide his weak chin. He always wears a scruffy army jacket unless it’s very hot, when he takes it off to reveal spindly arms so white they’re almost green. Both our parents wore Jesus sandals, possibly the most unattractive item of footwear ever invented, until they were exchanged for multi-coloured Crocs.
Mum is round-faced, with coarse, wavy brown hair that grows past her waist and does absolutely nothing for her, especially when strands are sprayed green and adorned with beads. Over the years she’s put on weight. The layers of beaded, fringed and patchwork clothing grow looser and larger; sometimes she looks like a mad wizard, and the naked rain dances become ever more embarrassing. Happily, Storm and I both take after Dad, so at least we’re slim, with sensible hair.
If I’d thought I had a rough time at Greylings Middle, I felt even more out of place when I got to Big School.
Mum had gone to the all girls’, former grammar school and wanted me to go there too, so that, she said, I would be more likely to read and broaden my mind. I heard Dad tell Beardy Wayne, though, that she favoured her old school because three of the girls in Brickyard Court who went to the local mixed secondary had got themselves pregnant. Mum wanted more than that for me. Perhaps she wanted me to run my own wholefood co-operative instead of just spending my dole money in one, I don’t know.
At Northampton School for Girls, I came in touch with a world outside our council estate, and it changed my life.
I met girls who came from middle class areas in the town, whose fathers had good jobs, their own houses, nice cars, and all the rest of it. I wanted to live like that too, so badly. I liked how they spoke; at night, in my room, I would copy their vowel sounds to iron out the traces of Northampton accent in my voice.
I loved Big School. I worked hard because I liked the discipline of lessons, homework, revision and exams. I liked wearing a uniform. I took care of my clothes, and washed my hair every morning so that it smelt of shampoo rather than the pong of dope and incense sticks that clung to everything in our house.
I’d seen a way out. I could be like my friends, have their sort of life, if I tried really hard.
I started to keep my bedroom immaculate. Mum and Dad watched me cleaning it every Saturday morning, pulling out the furniture, dusting and hoovering, with amusement.
“You’ll be joining the army next, Rainey,” I remember Mum saying. Not likely. I wanted to earn. I wanted to get a good job and live in a house that wasn’t owned by the council.
Mum and Dad talked about freedom from conformity, living outside tedious convention and running their own lives, but they’d got it all wrong. Money was freedom.
Freedom was being able to choose the sort of people you lived amongst, like Jessica, Lucy and Rachael’s parents could; I’d grown up knowing that having a ‘problem’ family moving in next door was a council tenant’s biggest fear.
I never brought my friends home. I told them my mother had agoraphobia, with added xenophobic complications. I never, ever wanted Jessica’s lovely doctor father and psychotherapist mother to see our scruffy house—and what if it was pouring with rain when they came round? “Mum will be in soon, she’s just cavorting naked in the garden. Now, milk and sugar? How about a nice homemade biscuit? Storm, can you find the ones without the ganja in?”
My friend Lucy’s mother had a hairdressing salon, and for my fifteenth birthday she offered to ‘make me over’. She cut my waist-length hair to shoulder-length, with subtle layers that fell perfectly into shape. The dull gold colour was lifted with ash blonde highlights, and I loved it. She waxed my eyebrows into a delicate arch, too, and I was so grateful to her I nearly cried. I looked like me, at last.
“How much would this have cost, if I’d been a customer?” I blurted out, when she’d finished.
She looked a bit awkward; I’d forgotten, you see. Posh people didn’t discuss how much things cost. “Oh, full head of highlights twenty-five pounds, cut and blow dry fifteen, four quid for the eyebrow wax,” she said, reeling it off as though she didn’t want to tell me. “You’d pay more in town, though.”
So, forty-four pounds. I would need forty pounds every couple of months to keep my hair like that; I could buy tweezers and do my eyebrows myself. I had to have that money. I had to make sure I could always afford to keep my hair looking like that.
From the day I discovered how I could look, I became obsessed with personal grooming, something that’s never left me. I am always newly showered, waxed, shaved, plucked, highlighted, manicured and shampooed. I never, ever let it slip. It gives me confidence, makes me feel like the person I need to be.
It’s not vanity. It’s self-preservation.
It means I’m never too scruffy to fit in. I have to be perfectly presentable, wherever I need to go, at a moment’s notice; I never want to feel ashamed of myself or have anyone look down on me, ever again.
Being fifteen was great, because it meant I could earn more than just pocket money, at last. I got a job in the local eight-til-late. Eight hours on Saturday, two on Sunday and two on Friday night made up the twelve hours I was allowed to work during term time. In the school holidays I could do more. Dad started to make noises about me contributing to the family’s finances, so I told them I would buy my own food instead. I bought things I’d eaten at Jessica and Lucy’s houses: ham, tuna, white bread bought from bakers’ shops, Nescafé Gold, interesting cheeses. Normal food. Normal was more important to me than nutrition, about which I knew little. No more would I eat homemade, wholegrain, saltless, tasteless lentil-ridden crap. I didn’t believe it was that good for you, anyway; Mum was about fifteen stone by then, and Dad’s face was the same colour as the soya milk he poured on the muesli he bought in great sacks when he got his disability living allowance (his bad back didn’t stop him humping the sack the hour’s walk home from the Whole Health Co-operative).
I put all my own food in the fridge, in the Tupperware boxes I bought and labelled ‘Raine’s—keep out’.
“I thought we taught you about sharing,” Dad said, examining my little pieces of Boursin and brie with beady eyes.
“You can have some if you want, but don’t nick it all—I bought it wi
th money I’ve earned,” I said. “Anyway, it comes from Tesco’s and you don’t agree with lining the pockets of the supermarket giants, do you?”
“What’s happening to you, Rainey?” Mum had appeared at the kitchen door. “All this working for ‘the man’, it’s making you selfish. It’s like you’re rejecting everything we’ve taught you.”
I remember that moment so well. I turned round and said to her, “but that’s what teenagers do! We rebel, don’t we?”
She flushed, trying so hard not to get cross with me, and said, “but we’ve brought you up to be rebellious, against the system. And here you are, looking like little Miss Marks and Spencer, and worshipping the great god money.”
She didn’t understand. That was when I fully realised that my parents weren’t the deep thinking, sociologically aware people they pretended to be. They were just sheep, going along with half-cocked hippie ideals, embracing only the bits that suited them, and were as rigid in their way of looking at the world as the most conventional of my friends’ parents.
I carried on working as many hours as I could, amassing my savings in a locked box under my bed (I didn’t trust Dad not to borrow it when he ran out of dope), and as soon as I was sixteen I asked Mum for my building society savings book so that I could deposit the lot. The hundred pounds with which it had been opened by my grandmother was no longer there. No matter. I hadn’t expected it to be.
I worked hard at school and passed ten GCSEs, and then I left. There was no point in staying on to do ‘A’ levels; I was much too impatient for more studying. I needed to put my plans into action. I needed to acquire.
I worked as an office junior, and then as a receptionist at a large hair and beauty salon called Snips, which saved me money because I got my hair and nails done for nothing. By then, I’d moved out of Brickyard Court and rented a ‘studio apartment’ with a tiny galley kitchen, a loo, and a shower room you could just about squeeze into if you weren’t bigger than a size ten, which happily I wasn’t. But it was brand new, clean and white, and I adored it. Mum talked about expeditions round the charity shops to furnish it, but I refused to have any furniture apart from my bed until I’d saved enough to buy new stuff, for which I took an evening waitressing job. I sat on my bed and lived on sandwiches and anything I could scrounge from the restaurant until I had enough money to buy my very own sofa bed, fridge and cooker.