A Midwinter Match Read online

  Zac was still smiling as though he knew all this already. To be honest, he probably did. There had been meetings and feedback forms and stuff going on with us too, but it had all been eight months ago, when I’d been too busy dealing with the aftermath of being dumped by Gareth; having to sort out the sale of the house, and moving in to a shared house with three other people. It had been like becoming a student again, with the added complication of a mortgage.

  Michael was still talking. Something about Zac and I carrying on working, being given a couple of months and then being assessed on results with the ‘best fit for the new model’ keeping the job and the other being given ‘an attractive redundancy package’. I bet that Michael didn’t know what either of those things were. At least, he’d know what a redundancy package looked like, but not from the sharp end. I’d been left paying off the house debts, so anything less than Henry Cavill levels of attractive just wasn’t going to cut it.

  In essence, we were being expected to compete for the job. The very thought made my ribcage ache and worries I couldn’t process begin the familiar cascade. And I’d have to compete against this man, who’d already got a Discovery, to my aged Skoda. Plus the bosses from the other company were smiling in a complacent way as though they had already redecorated my office and moved him in with a kiss on the cheek and an increased salary. I’d be out on the street with the surplus confectionary whilst he’d have a cupboard full of colour-coordinated Post-it notes and neat ranks of A4 pads.

  To make matters worse, whilst we competed we had to share the office, displacing Priya, who I relied on to be my sounding board, into the tiny office, no bigger than a cupboard, next door.

  When Zac and I walked down the corridor in the kind of silence that you could have cracked with a spoon, I found Pri already manhandling her belongings out of the door.

  ‘Don’t leave me with him!’ I hissed at her, as he swept inside.

  ‘There isn’t room for three of us!’ she hissed back. Accurately, as it happens.

  When Zac and I got into the office together, I feared for the amount of breathable air. Which was odd, because Priya and I had shared for three years without either of us suffocating, but then she was five foot four and Zac topped her by a foot. Quite a bit of which was hair. He had one of those spiked-up haircuts that added to the TV presenter look.

  We shuffled around one another for a few moments.

  ‘Is that one your desk?’ He eventually pointed at the desk by the window. ‘Shall I have this one, then?’

  He sat down at the desk which had, until very recently, been Priya’s. After a moment he stood up again, removed a magazine and bar of chocolate from the chair, put them on the desk, then sat down again.

  Priya duly reappeared, picked up the magazine and chocolate, and left, walking past me with her eyes very, very wide, which was when I noticed that the magazine was a copy of Your Cat.

  Zac and I sat opposite one another for a few more uncomfortable minutes. When my telephone rang, I seized upon it as though it were a call from God. Although He was, presumably, over the road in the Minster and could just have shouted.

  I answered, to hear Michael on the other end, who began telling me that, following consultation, ‘they’ had decided that it would be a good idea for us to run some getting-to-know-you bonding exercises for both sets of employees. The inverted commas were so implicit in his tone that they flashed in a synasthaesic way every time he uttered another buzz phrase. Buzz phrases weren’t like Michael. He usually sat in his office drinking coffee and only interacted with us via his PA, who, come to think of it, hadn’t been at the team meeting, which was worrying. Michael didn’t usually phone us directly either, which probably accounted for his tone of worry. He sounded as though he wasn’t 100% certain how phones worked and wasn’t convinced that he was talking to the right person.

  ‘So, I can leave you both to it, then?’ he finished, jovially.

  ‘Sorry, Michael, what are you leaving us to?’ I wanted to add ‘and who is us?’ but it would be Zac and I. Of course it would. There was an awful inevitability to all this.

  ‘Setting up the exercises? If you run one and young Zac there runs another – well, it will be a chance for the Board to see your different approaches!’

  I had no idea why he was trying to make us competing for the job sound like it was going to be fun. Oh, wait, yes I did. It was because his job wasn’t in any danger and, besides, he could take early retirement any day on an enormous pension and supported by his much younger wife who earned squillions doing something legal. Legal, as in, she worked in law and wore stylish black suits and knew her way around canapé fillings and the judicial system.

  I had a sudden, throbbing image of the amount I still owed the bank, and shuddered. My breath threatened to stop in my throat, but I carefully kept the panic down. Breathe.

  ‘Oh yes, that will be fun,’ I trilled, aware that Zac was watching me over the top of his computer screen. ‘I love those team-building things.’ I had to dig quite deep to find the reserves of sparkle and cheer, but I did it. ‘Leave it to me, I’ll tell him all about it.’

  Using Zac’s name would attract his attention, like saying ‘Beetlejuice’. And I wanted to steal a march in the organising stakes.

  ‘Oh, Zac’s been told,’ Michael chirped back. He sounded nearly as bright as me. I wondered if he was putting it on too, and allowed myself a second of imagining Michael in his office with the backcombed lady holding a gun between his shoulder blades as he spoke to me. ‘It was his idea, you see. Very good idea, you must admit, excellent way to get us all bonding and working together as a team. Going forward,’ he added, as though the gun had been jabbed in his spine to force him to add the obligatory corporate speak.

  I raised my eyes from where they’d been scanning the surface of my desk, giving my subconscious a good battering about the mess of receipts, Post-it reminders, sweet wrappers and general office detritus, to see Zac still looking at me. I could only see his hair and his eyes above the screen, but there was a definite tone of smiling complacency about both features. I smiled back. I’d perfected the art of smiling with my whole face and looking as though I really meant it, even when I wanted to crack the object of the smile around the back of the head with a plank.

  ‘It all sounds brilliant.’ I injected yet more lightness into my tone. ‘I’m really looking forward to thinking up something fun. Pushing the envelope,’ I added, and then hated myself but it seemed that corporate speak was infectious.

  ‘That’s the spirit!’ Michael hung up, leaving me still grinning like The Joker and trying to beat down the urge to set fire to the curtains.

  ‘Team-building thing?’ Zac asked as I put down the phone. ‘We talked it through before we came over from Leeds. I wonder why they decided to keep you in the dark?’ His brown eyes continued to peer at me over the top of the screen, focused and sharp. He sounded interested and friendly and the tiny part of me that had hidden behind my heart was hating that he was the competition. The rest of me, cynically, wondered why he sounded interested and friendly and how much of an effort it was for him to assume that tone. ‘Bit unfair.’

  I smiled with as much mystery as I could summon. We may actually have been told about it all, but anything that had happened during the last stressful months had got lost in a kind of chute that had poured everything downwards. Feelings of loss, fear of the future, and a financial spiral that had sent me back to my childhood bedroom for a while. My mum had fed me soup and soft-boiled eggs and lectured me lightly, using therapy speak, on equality in relationships, and my dad had threatened to borrow my uncle’s shotgun and hunt Gareth down.

  So much had passed me by. Including, it would seem, arrangements for my job.

  ‘Oh, it’s fine,’ I said breezily to Zac. ‘I do that sort of thing all the time with my clients, so it’s just a matter of extending it across the team.’

  A whopper of a fib, of course. My clients didn’t need to ‘bond’. They mostly n
eeded to get over their fear of the unknown, and whilst building rafts on a muddy pond in November would definitely be an unknown experience, it really wouldn’t have helped them much in their attempts to learn to fill in forms and go to interviews.

  Zac leaned forward and tilted down his screen, presumably so he could see me more clearly. ‘That sounds interesting,’ he said, leaning his elbows on the desk and resting his chin on his hands. ‘What sort of thing do you do with them?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t want to answer that question,’ I said. ‘Confidentiality, you see.’ I wondered whether Dad’s offer of the shotgun still stood and was transferrable.

  ‘Really?’ Zac frowned. ‘I wouldn’t have thought—’ but then his phone rang and I could drop my face down below the level of my screen and let the bright, chirpy smile slide away from my lips and eyes.

  Shit. Now I had to think of a team-building exercise. Something original – Zac looked as though he’d learned his team management skills from a textbook. He’d probably resort to the obstacle course or blindfold end of the spectrum. The sort of thing that everyone would complain about because it meant getting cold or wet or being outside, or, in the case of ‘leading your blindfolded teammate’, having to touch another person.

  I peered covertly at my new competitor as he spoke on the phone. He could, at least, have had the decency to be snide, or to have made carefully angled comments about my office; he could, in short, have made more effort to be the enemy. Instead, he was coming over as open, reasonable and decent, which just wasn’t fair.

  I needed to dislike him. I couldn’t compete against a man who was happy and friendly and smart, it would be like fighting for my job against a Border Collie. Why couldn’t he be sweaty and lecherous and eat pork pies whilst reading emails laboriously with his finger trailing across the screen in a greasy smear?

  And now I had to think up something unique, indoors, preferably sitting down, that would bond two groups together. One lot from Leeds, which we regarded as a metropolis only one step away from downtown New York, whilst they, presumably, thought us to be only just moving into running water and not pitchforking one another to death over witchcraft claims.

  I had to do it to keep my job.

  That gave me a bitter taste in my mouth. I pushed the fear down for now, knowing it would bob to the surface soon enough. There was not enough weight in the world to submerge those feelings deeply enough to stop them coming back up. To keep my mind off them, I switched to listening to Zac.

  Zac sounded as though he were talking to a client. Someone he knew well, obviously, from the way he kept calling them ‘Bob’, and seemingly talking them down from a bad interview situation. Eventually he sighed and said, ‘Okay. Okay. Maybe you’d better come in and we can talk about this, before you get sanctioned and your payments cut.’ A pause. ‘No, we’re working out of the York office now, can you get there?’ The voice at the other end quacked a few times. Sounded aggrieved. ‘Yes, yes, you can get your travel expenses paid.’

  Zac looked up and met my eye. For the tiniest second there was communion, as we acknowledged the way our job could pull us in so many different directions; being encouraging whilst wanting to shout. But I soon looked away. I didn’t want to have any kind of fellow feeling with Zac. I couldn’t afford to like a man who may soon have my office and my job, however pleasant he may appear to be. Besides, I didn’t know him. He might turn out to be awful to his mother, or kick kittens when he thought no one was looking or hate Midsomer Murders. Nobody could be as alertly agreeable as this, without it being a front for a seething mass of something. Plus, listening to him talking to Bob, he was being a little bit brusque. People who have been out of work for a long time needed more than those who’d never known a moment’s unemployment telling them they just had to buck their ideas up and apply for more jobs, and Zac sounded as though he was coming dangerously close to that attitude. Maybe he was going to turn out to be an outrageous bully.

  I could only hope.

  When he asked his client to come in tomorrow at three, I managed to stop wondering about him and raise a decent amount of indignation at his attitude.

  ‘I’ve got the interview room tomorrow at three. I have a client,’ I said, when he’d put down the phone with a sigh.

  Zac blinked. ‘Surely there’s more than one interview room?’

  ‘Why? There’s only me doing this job, I can only see one person at a time, why would we need more than one room?’

  He sighed and dropped his head behind the screen. When he raised it again, his hair was less perky, as though he’d had his face in his hands. ‘What do you suggest?’

  ‘I don’t suggest anything. It’s my interview room.’ I wasn’t keen on this problem-solving approach, because it meant me doing all the work. ‘The room is free in the morning, why not reschedule?’

  ‘Bob’s not a morning person,’ Zac said heavily, as though this was an ongoing bone of contention. ‘And it isn’t just your interview room any more. And there isn’t just you doing the job.’

  We sat in a dry, sour silence for a moment.

  ‘I suppose I could take my client to the coffee shop next door,’ I said, when he clearly wasn’t going to back down. This wasn’t fair. I did conflict resolution with my clients, I didn’t need to start dragging it out in my own office with a man who kept smiling at me, even if that smile had faded a bit in the last few minutes.

  Zac stood up now. His hair nearly brushed the beams of the old building. ‘Thank you, Ruby.’ If I listened hard, I was sure I could convince myself that there was a tone of satisfaction there, as though he’d known all along that I’d be the one to bend.

  Another moment of silence. I stared out of the window, to where the winter sun shredded through the bare branches of a lime tree onto damp grass, and took some deep breaths.

  ‘There is a positive to both of us covering the position, of course.’ Zac sat on the corner of the desk I was, reluctantly, coming to think of as his. ‘You can pass any of your really tough clients on to me.’

  The breath I’d started kept going in whilst I thought of something appropriate to say. When nothing had presented itself and my lungs were cracking my ribs, I let it out on a huge sigh. ‘I’ve been doing this job for seven years,’ I said, and every year of those seven hung behind the words, keeping them level. ‘I can manage even the difficult clients, thank you.’

  I swept out of the office, buoyed up by the tiny amount of implied criticism I could take from his words. He wasn’t perfect! He could carry sexist attitudes, chauvinism and an overinflated opinion of his own abilities, just like everyone else. Thank goodness for that. I’d been beginning to worry that there was nothing going on behind that façade of easy-going, good-humoured openness. Now at least I could start to dislike him with reason.

  I slammed the door, to let him know I’d noticed.

  2

  I sat in my bedroom and stared blankly out of the window. A tiny part of me was comparing the view, over roofs and tiny gardens thickly forested with trampolines, goal nets and swing sets, with the view from the house Gareth and I had bought. It had been in a village on the edge of the city, and looked over fields of grazing cows and newly planted barley. I’d woken every morning to the sound of cockerels crowing and rooks settling in the trees. Here, I woke to next-door’s motorbike engine and the shouted greetings of people heading to the paper shop down the road.

  The sense of failure swept over me again. Gareth had gone, and his engagement to a slender and beautiful woman had been documented all over Instagram and Facebook, until my friends had forced me to delete him from my social media. The pain of losing him was now more of a dull embarrassed ache. Losing the house hurt more. I’d just found the perfect shade of paint for the stairs.

  I stared at my laptop and the files I was trying to sort through. I had seven clients I needed to contact and three who wanted appointments. Normally I would have rung them now and booked them in, but, as Zac seemed to think he had f
irst dibs on the interview room, I didn’t want to make any appointments without checking up on the new Booking Page. And I didn’t want to do that during the evening as Zac would be able to see, and I wanted him to believe that I partied away the night in a whirl of friends, spontaneous invitations, cocktails and dinners, and Christmas markets and skating on frozen ponds with my millions of attractive and very wealthy boyfriends. Basically, I wanted him to believe that I lived in a Hallmark movie, that allowed me eight hours of restful sleep a night to be the organised and perky person he saw before him. Besides, I had to work out some kind of team-bonding exercise and nothing was springing to mind, unless I could find a large frozen lake and fifty pairs of ice skates in central York.

  Well, it was worth a shot.

  ‘Rubes! You coming to watch that Netflix thing!’

  Sophie’s voice rattled up the stairs to reach me. She was eight years younger than my thirty, and made me feel incredibly old. Her life was far more as I wished mine could be, with perpetual changes of boyfriend, lots of cute outfits and an insouciance that bordered on randomness. I shared the house with her, Ed, who was dark and serious and worked for an accountancy firm and was saving like crazy for his own house, so never left the premises to socialise, and Cav whom we rarely saw. Cav had a bike and, when he wasn’t working his bicycle courier job, he was mending his bike, cleaning his bike, taking his bike for ‘a spin’ or reading bike magazines. Cav was the most single-minded man I’d ever known.

  ‘In a sec, Soph!’ I shouted back. I was allowed another short moment of wallowing in ‘what could have been’, surely? I often told my clients not to turn their backs on the past completely. To look at their mistakes and learn from them. Unfortunately, the only thing I could learn from my past was not to trust a boyfriend with a job overseas, and that pale blue was not a good colour for a downstairs toilet. My lungs cramped in a threatening way.