A Midwinter Match Read online

  And breathe…

  When I went down to the crowded living room where the television had pride of place, Sophie had her legs up on the one sofa, Ed was perched on a beanbag and, to my surprise, Cav was there too, sitting on the floor polishing what looked very much like a wheel.

  I squeezed myself into a corner of the ottoman where Cav stored his inner tubes, and we collectively watched four episodes of a drama that had been promised to be ‘edge of your seat’. Sophie was utterly absorbed and gave us a running commentary of her thoughts, with highlights such as ‘a woman with hair like that has got to be guilty’, ‘urgh, I wouldn’t snog him, he could be hiding anything in that coat’, and ‘didn’t she used to be in Coronation Street?’ Ed seemed to be watching analytically, he’d nod every now and again as though a line of dialogue was particularly salient, and Cav carried on polishing his wheel.

  After we’d finished, we sat and chatted about what we’d watched. Outside the window I could see frost starting to form, creeping its flowery fingers along the edge of the glass. Cars spat grit along the road and the lights lined up the bins and walls of the front gardens, like rulers.

  A sudden feeling of almost-contentment swept over me. No, this wasn’t my lovely little house in the country and Gareth wasn’t upstairs waiting for me. But I was inside on a cold night, with the heating that Sophie insisted on having turned up high crinkling the edges of the wallpaper. Outside was dark and cold. A place of lonely lights and secretive corners. I was here, surrounded by life and warmth and the remnants of the Victoria sponge that we’d all snacked on during the drama. We were all laughing about the ridiculousness of the plot; of overly handsome actors pretending to be down-and-outs and hugely dramatic revelations. Even Cav was joining in.

  I could almost forget the breath-snatching terror that descended over me when I wasn’t concentrating. The feeling that the worst was about to happen, that I couldn’t stop it and my life was millimetres away from sliding down the nearest drain. I felt, for want of a better word, normal. Just for this moment I wasn’t looking out from the inside of a box labelled ‘disaster’ onto a world that made sense to everyone else.

  And in that moment, I had an idea.

  ‘Have you sorted your team-bonding exercise?’ I asked Zac the next day, as we squeezed ourselves into our collective office.

  He looked at me with an expression that indicated he was half-hopeful that my friendliness was a rapprochement after yesterday’s door slam and subsequent frostiness and half-suspicious that I was plotting something.

  ‘Er, not really.’ It was the first time I’d got the feeling that Zac wasn’t in absolute control of every inch of his life, and had a moment of feeling slightly relieved. ‘I thought I might go traditional. You know, spaghetti and marshmallows, who can build the highest tower kind of thing. Usually goes down well.’

  ‘Mmmm, marshmallows,’ I said, without thinking, and he grinned.

  ‘Yes, I found the cupboard.’ He opened the bottom drawer of the largely disused filing cabinet, with his foot. It was rammed full of all the biscuits and chocolate that had previously reposed along the shelves of the big stationary cupboard. ‘The bosses were doing a bit of an inspection earlier, so I moved the stuff in here and locked the door. Told them it was confidential.’

  There was another one of those moments of communion, when we met one another’s eyes and his expression told me that we were in absolute accord with our feelings about the sort of management that does spot inspections of offices.

  ‘Oh, and by the way.’ He’d lowered his voice a little now. ‘I’m sorry about yesterday.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ I tried to look as though I had been waiting for this apology with bated breath and a cool level of acknowledgment of his transgression. Mentally, I was leaping in the air and cheering at the fact he felt he ought to apologise.

  ‘I think I implied that you couldn’t handle tough clients? It was stupid of me. I really meant that you could pass all those grim jobs that nobody wants to do on to me. I’m not much good at cleaning toilets, but I have fantastic attention to detail when it comes to whitening grout.’ He gave me a grin that was so ‘open’ I could practically see the back of his head. ‘So. Yes. Sorry about that. I should have apologised yesterday, but you seemed – busy.’

  A polite way of saying that I had avoided him for the rest of the day, unless my presence in the office had been absolutely necessary, when I’d made conspicuously frantic phone calls. Oh bugger. Now he wasn’t even the sexist clod I could dislike either. This was awful. Why did he have to be so nice?

  At that moment, the door flew open, banged off the corner of Zac’s desk because he’d moved it a couple of inches to the left for some reason, and Priya stood there.

  ‘I’ve okayed it,’ she said a little bit breathlessly. ‘We’re good to go next week.’

  Zac and I stared at her for a moment. Then I remembered that I’d given her the job of sorting the admin for my team building. ‘That’s great,’ I said.

  ‘You’re leaving?’ Zac half stood behind his desk. ‘But I thought…’

  ‘No, good to go as in good to go on with what we are meant to be going on with,’ Priya rattled without making eye contact whilst trying to shuffle back out of the doorway.

  ‘Sorry to disappoint you,’ I added.

  ‘Oh, I’m not disappointed.’ He gave another one of his presumably patented grins which made him look approachable and sunny-natured. It made me slightly uneasy, mostly because I knew how it was done and did it myself quite often. His phone rang, and, broadening the grin at me over the top of it, he answered.

  Priya was slowly retreating, like an outgoing tide, sliding around the wall towards her tiny room, and I got up and followed her into her tiny office.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ If we closed the door, my knees touched her desk, so I kept it half-open in case of oxygen shortage.

  ‘Did he say anything? Yesterday?’ Priya’s mouth pulled sideways and she did a kind of ‘hunch of shame’.

  ‘What about?’ Her entire posture was shouting that she was humiliated. ‘Pri? You haven’t got history with this guy, have you? He’s not going to turn out to be the bloke you shagged one night who now knows all your deepest secrets?’ I banged the back of my head gently against the door. ‘Because that would probably finish me off here.’

  ‘Always with the sex. Why do you always go to the sex?’ Luckily the annoyance made Pri stop huddling like a Dickensian miser and straighten up. ‘Come on, is there anyone in this building less likely to have shagged Zac Drewe, apart from Karen on the switchboard whose tales of the failings of HRT are legendary?’

  Well, there’s me, I nearly said, but didn’t.

  ‘Yes, sorry. No idea why my mind went there.’ I stopped banging my head.

  Priya gave me a pursed-mouth look. ‘You know I’m gay, right?’

  ‘Yes, yes of course I do. I’m sorry, I have no idea why that was the first thing that sprang into my mind.’

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘You look at him and think of sex. Which is a perfectly normal reaction. If you’re straight.’

  I moved towards her, so keen to correct her misunderstanding that I bashed both my thighs on the sticky-out bit of the desk. ‘No! Oh, God, no, Pri, don’t! The only kind of matchmaking I want from you are those ones that are covered in chocolate. I absolutely have no intention of any kind of sex with Zac Drewe. He’s the competition for a start and for another thing nobody can be that cheery when they’ve just been told to relocate and compete for their job – nobody! Unless they are taking industrial-strength drugs,’ I added, and then spared a moment to wonder why Michael was so resistant to drug tests for employees.

  ‘He’s not ugly, though.’

  ‘Well, no, but attraction doesn’t work like that. Otherwise I’d never get out of the house in the morning. Ed and Cav aren’t ugly, but I don’t want to get into bed with them either!’

  Priya shrugged. ‘So why are you grinning, then?’


  ‘Sorry. Just imagining Michael spending his evenings smoking spliffs and off his face on cocaine. I got a bit mentally sidetracked.’

  She raised her eyebrows at me.

  ‘So,’ I tried to divert the conversation. ‘Why are you coming over all embarrassed when you see Zac? And what is he supposed to have mentioned?’

  She looked at her hands and blushed. ‘The magazine.’

  ‘What, the one you left on your chair? Pri, it was Your Cat, not Bondage Weekly.’

  ‘I know! But, in a way, that’s worse. I don’t want him to stereotype me. You know, typical lesbian, who lives with about a million cats.’

  I looked at Priya. We’d been friends ever since we’d both started at YouIn2Work within weeks of each other, and our friendship had deepened when budget cuts had meant that counselling was forced to share an office with PR and Admin. She was short, curvy and dark, all of which suited her perfectly. I was taller, leaning towards plump and my hair was ash blonde. Well, that was what it said on the box, anyway. I was straight, she was gay. When we’d met, I’d been happily settled with Gareth and she’d been single and dating. Now she was happily settled with Nettie, and I… well, I was as likely to start dating as I was to create team-building exercises featuring rafts, put it that way.

  ‘Pri, for one thing, you are a very long way from the lame cliché of a lesbian and for a second thing, what the hell does it matter what Mr Fly-By-Night thinks of you?’

  Priya looked at her hands and muttered something. It sounded very much like ‘if you don’t keep your job, I have to work with him’. Then she raised her head. ‘I can’t bear it. Being the “token gay” and everyone smiling tolerantly and sort of patting my head and expecting me to knit for their babies and be all jolly and everything.’

  I stared at her. ‘Do they? Seriously? Even now?’

  She sighed. ‘Yes. Give it a try and see. Anyway. I don’t want him–’ she jerked her head towards the next-door office ‘– to think of me like that. Pity invitations to things because he assumes that Nettie and I spend every evening watching Netflix and baking and talking about our cats.’

  It definitely sounded as though Pri wasn’t going to form a neutral zone between Zac Drewe and I. She was firmly with me, in the trenches.

  ‘Ruby, you have got to keep your job,’ Priya hissed, with a meaningful look at the door. ‘I couldn’t bear it otherwise.’

  This was a little further into ‘over the top’ territory. ‘Hang on, Pri. Don’t you think you might be a bit oversensitive here? He saw your magazine, and now you are painting him as a heteronormative, pigeon-holing, boor. He might not be like that at all.’ I paused. ‘He’s being surprisingly pleasant so far. In fact, he’s so pleasant that I’ve had all kinds of thoughts about what he might really be like underneath.’

  Priya began stripping the shiny wrapper off a Twirl bar, almost as though she was doing it subconsciously. ‘Aha!’ she exclaimed. ‘I knew you’d be spending time thinking about him. Knew it!’ Then she munched a mouthful of chocolate contemplatively. ‘Anyway, I don’t care if he turns out to be a cross between Mother Teresa and J. K. Rowling,’ she said darkly. ‘I’ll always know how I think he sees me.’

  ‘Well, he’s not getting my job without a fight. Or, indeed, at all.’ I didn’t dare think of any other possibility right now. ‘Don’t worry.’

  Pri didn’t look massively reassured, unsurprisingly, so I left her to her chocolatey solitude, and went back into what passed for my own office. It was a good job I had, because Zac was just taking receipt of a load of brown boxes, and if I hadn’t got back when I did, I wouldn’t have got into the room.

  ‘What are these?’ I asked, as he signed paperwork and the delivery man backed out, doing a kind of hula move through the boxes.

  ‘Stuff for my team-building morning,’ he answered vaguely.

  I looked at the piles. ‘We’re meant to be building a team, not the Forth Road Bridge.’

  ‘You remember that I’ve got my client coming at three?’ He still sounded vague, as though he was thinking of three things at once. ‘And you’ve promised that I can have the interview room?’

  ‘It wasn’t a promise, I was railroaded into it,’ I answered shortly. ‘And only because I can take my client to the coffee shop. I presume that you will cover the costs of our coffees?’

  He nodded, still clearly elsewhere, and I made a mental note to include cake. Then I noticed that he was frowning and there were lines around his mouth that hadn’t been there before.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

  He moved convulsively. A jerk of his shoulders as though something had just landed on them and was settling its weight. Then he smiled, slowly. ‘Oh. Yes, sorry. Just had a… phone call. No, everything’s good.’ Now the grin flashed to its maximum width. ‘Fine and dandy. How about you? Have you got your team exercise sorted? Apparently we have to wheel them out next Monday and Tuesday.’

  That gave me the whole weekend to really get prepared. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be ready, but I’d give it my best shot. ‘Oh yes,’ I put as much brightness into my voice as he had into his. My tone radiated like the sun. ‘Looking forward to it. It will be so good to see how everyone responds.’

  He carried on grinning. ‘Yes, it’s going to be fantastic, isn’t it?’

  If we kept escalating our excitement and anticipation at the current rate, we were going to be ecstatic about it in the next couple of sentences, and greeting the opportunity like winning the lottery by the end of the day. But there was something in his brown eyes above the grin that didn’t quite fit. I wondered if the phone call had been from Mrs Backcomb and the Grey Man. Maybe Zac was on a warning? Maybe keeping my job wasn’t going to be as hard as I imagined? The thought made me smile.

  ‘Right.’ Zac started weaving his way out from behind the desk. ‘I’d better get these somewhere more convenient. Is there room next door?’ He gave a nod towards Priya’s tiny office.

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t go in there,’ I said, remembering Priya’s words about being stereotyped. ‘She’s just – on the phone to the rock-climbing club, organising their next climb,’ I finished, slightly desperately, hunting for the most esoteric hobby I could come up with.

  ‘Priya climbs?’ His eyebrows were in his spiky hairline. Good.

  ‘Oh yes. They’re planning on doing the…’ Oh God, why hadn’t I paid more attention in geography? ‘The Matterhorn.’ I seized on the only mountain I could think of that could plausibly be climbed by someone who lived in York and only got three weeks’ holiday a year.

  ‘Wow. That’s quite impressive.’ To be fair, he did look impressed.

  To change the subject, because we’d exhausted all I knew about the Matterhorn in our ten-second discussion, I picked up one of the boxes. It was very light but a slight bump around the base when I shook it told me it wasn’t empty. ‘Marshmallows?’

  ‘Yep.’ He looked – well, it was hard to describe. As though part of his mind was elsewhere, roaming the possibilities of alternative employment hopefully, but also a touch… defiant? As though he knew how clichéd the ‘build the tallest structure possible using only the adhesive power of marshmallows and the rigidity of spaghetti’ was but hadn’t been able to come up with anything better and was hoping that everyone would assume that this was the only team-building exercise in existence. ‘What are you going to do? Not the same…?’

  Thanking heavens, possibly for the first time ever, for Sophie, I did my best mysterious smile. ‘Ah. You will have to wait to find out. Do you want Tuesday or Monday? Michael said we’re only to take less than an hour, so as not to affect productivity.’ I gave the boxes another glance. The marshmallow and spaghetti thing tended to degenerate into everyone eating the sweets whilst the spaghetti pooled onto the floor and the cleaners stood in the corner and complained. I wondered, briefly, if he’d ever done it before.

  ‘Oh, I’ll go first, if you don’t mind.’ He smiled at me again. ‘Get it over and done with.’
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  Good, I thought, sitting down to go over my client’s file for the afternoon meeting. Going second would give me more of the wow factor, and the cleaners ought to have got the worst of the spaghetti out of the carpets by then.

  3

  Samantha and I sat in the tiny coffee shop, watching other customers come in and seize gratefully on the warmth in the steamy little room; unbuttoning coats and slipping off scarves. Christmas was starting to loom large in people’s calendars as November’s gloom was brightened with huge illuminated overhead snowflakes, and shop windows twinkled invitingly. The narrow wooden stalls of the Christmas market crowded the streets and squares, their counters strewn with handmade goods, and the air smelled of roasting chestnuts from the street vendors’ carts. York at Christmas was like a Christmas card, pleasingly Dickensian but with proper plumbing and fewer urchins. People had started to shop as though the festive season had caught them by surprise and, in consequence, the respite of the café was being gratefully received.

  Samantha sipped at her coffee. ‘I’ve tried, Ruby, honestly I have. But when the only experience you’ve got to offer is having been a Saturday girl at Woolworths twenty-five years ago – well.’ She put her cup back into the saucer and stared at the remaining foam sadly. ‘I’m useless,’ she said quietly. ‘Forty-three and it’s all over for me.’

  Samantha hadn’t worked since she was seventeen. Married and pregnant straight out of school, a stay-at-home mum with, reading between the lines, an obsession with a tidy house and ironed clothes, and a husband who’d left her as soon as the youngest child was away at university, she was struggling with the new need to earn a living.

  ‘And that housekeeping job you put me up for, they told me I’d need to be in charge of the budget.’ She rotated her cup as though she was about to try to foretell her future in the dregs. ‘Adrian always did the money stuff. I wouldn’t know how to do a budget.’