A Midwinter Match Read online

  I put the coffee machine on in the interview room and found the emergency biscuits.

  Priya passed me in the corridor. ‘Got a late one? Want me to stay?’

  ‘No, it’s fine.’

  ‘Okay.’ She wafted past me on a scent of Daisy mixed with Cadburys, and Taylor arrived shortly afterwards; terror and anticipation as much a part of him as his motorbike leathers and tattoos.

  He sat with his helmet on his knee for the next hour, while I talked him down from the state of raging panic that the invitation to interview had caused, wished him luck and sent him back on his way, sloshing with coffee and with his nerves practically jangling. Maybe I should switch to something more calming in the room? Camomile tea perhaps.

  The building exhaled quietly around me as I locked the back door behind Taylor’s screaming exhaust. I liked being alone in here, despite the fact it was rumoured to be haunted, but then, so was practically every other building in the middle of York, and I’d never seen anything scarier in here than Priya with a hangover. There was something comforting about the history, about the uneven floors and randomly placed windows. We were six weeks from Christmas but that hadn’t stopped some extra-festive person from winding tinsel along the bars on the ground-floor windows and sprigs of plastic holly were taped on top of the security cameras. It did make it look a bit like ‘Christmas on D Wing’, but the effect was, overall, cheerful.

  Boards creaked and roof joists settled as the heating clicked into night-time mode. The place even smelled different now, as closed doors locked each section down into its own olfactory aura – the lunches of the main office stopped blending with the hot electricity of the photocopying room and the overused plastic and people-under-stress scent of everywhere else. Now the corridor smelled of ancient dust and Victorian floor polish.

  I headed back to the office to collect my bags and keys and was totally astonished to find Zac still there, pacing round the room and talking on his mobile.

  ‘No, of course I’m not leaving you. No, honestly, look, I’ll be over soon. Please, just eat your dinner and I’ll see you soon. Yes, honestly. No, I won’t be much later.’

  There was a gentle exasperation in his tone that was unlike anything I’d heard from him so far. Almost a tenderness. So, Zac had someone waiting for him at home, did he? Well, of course he did, Priya had been right, he wasn’t offensive-looking. And he was good at his job, damn it. It had been too much to hope that he spent his evening alone in a solitary basement building models out of matchsticks and eating microwave meals for one. In the dark. And damp. Wearing big fluffy slippers and a onesie.

  I snorted to myself at the mental image of the trendily clad Zac living like a rejected hermit, and he heard me and turned round, hanging up the call as he did so.

  ‘Ah.’ An almost furtive look shaded his eyes for a second.

  ‘Why are you still here?’ I pretended I hadn’t heard anything.

  ‘Saw you had a client. Thought I ought to stay, for security.’

  I stared at him. ‘I’ve got keys.’

  ‘Yes, but—’ he spread his arms wide to indicate the whole building. ‘Anything could happen. You shouldn’t really be alone here after hours.’ He slid the phone into the back pocket of his trendy trousers, as though he was using the words to distract me from the call.

  ‘I do hope you aren’t going to turn out to be one of those people who characterises all long-term unemployed as only one waved fiver away from a bag snatch,’ I said sternly. ‘I wouldn’t be alone on the premises with anyone I didn’t know.’

  He jerked as though I’d slapped him. ‘No! I didn’t mean that at all.’

  I felt a tiny little tickle of triumph. I’d managed to score a point, get past his defences. Maybe he was protesting too much? Maybe he really did have a well-buried notion that our clients were all potential muggers and rapists? ‘Well then, why did you stay?’

  He dropped his gaze from me to the floor. ‘It’s an old building.’ Now he looked up, there was challenge, defiance in his eyes when they met mine. ‘And you can get attacked by someone you know well too, you know.’

  ‘Zac, there are security cameras everywhere, and panic alarms in all the rooms.’

  He raised his eyes again and held my gaze, almost as though he was trying to will me to read something in his look. That he thought I’d been stupid? Well, maybe, but I was confident in my knowledge of the building, and in Taylor. Then it dawned on me that perhaps Zac was trying to unsettle me. If I started to get even the slightest bit concerned about seeing clients alone, after hours or in unknown places – wouldn’t that make me far less suitable for the job?

  ‘There are measures in place. I feel perfectly secure.’ I added a little more force to my tone now.

  ‘That doesn’t mean it can’t happen,’ he began, but now I’d got wise to his reasoning, I wasn’t having it.

  ‘Right. I’m locking the place up now. If you don’t want to be here all night, you’d better come with me.’

  We grabbed bags and coats and he followed me through the building, watched without speaking as I set the alarms and padded behind as I went out into the cold, and locked the doors.

  It seemed churlish to stride away into the night without another word, so I said, ‘Thank you for waiting for me anyway.’

  He was wrestling his way into a big coat, juggling his laptop bag and keys. ‘No worries. I’ll know, in future.’ His face emerged from the collar of the coat, bright-eyed and sunny again. ‘That you are immortal and immune to all known forms of danger.’

  ‘Just bear that in mind.’ I found I was smiling back and then cursed myself. I knew smiles were infectious, I could resist, so why was I doing it?

  ‘Would you, er, like to grab a coffee? Before we head out?’ Zac looked around the deserted, frost-shiny streets. ‘It feels a bit like a horror movie set here and I feel I should be somewhere warm and well-lit, armed with a coconut latte, in case of an apocalypse.’

  I looked around too. ‘This is York. No zombies, except very well-behaved and domesticated ones.’ Was he insulting my lovely city? ‘And thank you, but I ought to get home.’ Besides, my car was parked in the riverside car park, half a mile’s hike away under the swinging snowflake lights, because someone had taken my parking space. I thought about saying this, but didn’t. So, instead, I used a different form of attack. ‘Isn’t there someone waiting for you?’

  ‘Someone…?’ He looked genuinely puzzled for a moment and my opinion of him plummeted a little further. A girlfriend – wife maybe – had been on the phone to him only a few minutes ago, expecting him. He surely couldn’t have forgotten her already. ‘Oh, the phone call. No. No, that was something else.’ He dropped his head. Looked away. As clear an avoidance technique as I had ever seen, and I wasn’t falling for it at all.

  I stifled another laugh at his obviousness. ‘Well, goodnight then, Zac.’

  I walked off in the direction of my car, leaving him standing outside the darkened windows of our building. When I furtively looked back over my shoulder, whilst pretending to glance in a shop window, he was still standing there, with the floodlights of the Minster grazing one shoulder and the rest of him in shadow.

  I snorted again and began the trek through the winding medieval streets to my car, whilst managing not to be attacked by any zombies whatsoever.

  4

  Monday, and Zac’s team exercise was going well, bugger it.

  He’d set up the groups so that two from YouIn2Work were paired with two from Back To Employment, to build not, as I’d assumed, the tallest tower possible with marshmallow joints and spaghetti infrastructure, but the most imaginative. And I, apparently, had agreed to judge the results, which meant that at least ninety per cent of each company was going to hate me.

  Neatly done, Zac, neatly done.

  I wasn’t allowed to be near where he was carrying out his ‘team building’ – which I thought was distinctly unfair. Was I not part of the ‘team’? I gritted my teeth and f
inished all my paperwork from the latest interviews, sent some emails, did some research, and then stalked the corridors like a vengeance-filled ghost, while the sounds of laughing and conversation drifted through the building, making me feel as excluded as, presumably, any spirits still hanging around the place might feel. Then I stood in the frosty car park for a while, with the feeble warmth of the sun trying to crack through the ice on the puddles and wondering about letting down Zac’s tyres.

  His Discovery looked smug. It fatly filled my space and bulged slightly over the lines, so Priya’s Micra and Ian-from-accounts’ MG which occupied the spaces to either side were drawn as far as possible to their further extents, like ladies pulling their skirts back from an undesirable contact. This had caused a knock-on effect all down the line, so that late arrivals had had to squeeze themselves in to spaces slightly too small for their actual cars.

  I stared out at the snaggle-parking. Only the Discovery and the battered old Audi of the caretaker were properly parked, which meant that Zac and Sam had been first in. Either Priya or Ian must have been next, with others arriving pretty much simultaneously, as usually happened, and that’s what had caused the disarranged parking.

  The Discovery’s windscreen was thick with frost. Even Priya’s car was only sheeted with the lightest coating and I knew she’d got here early because she’d texted me while I’d been on my way in, to say that the meeting room had been set up for the exercise and she wasn’t looking forward to it. So Zac had been here really early. Not necessary, surely, to set out a few marshmallows and packs of spaghetti and to put a few inspirational quotes and ‘amusing’ memes up on the screen? On a Monday? What kind of weirdo got in early on a Monday?

  Well, the kind of weirdo who’d managed to make it look perfectly acceptable that I wasn’t part of the team bonding, for a start. Also the weirdo who was running out of the building calling my name.

  ‘Hey, Ruby! Think we’ve got as far as we can – it’s judging time!’

  We walked together back through the building.

  ‘Why were you in the car park? Not trying to make a run for it were you?’ Again that grin, totally trustworthy. He just had to have corpses in the attic or an addiction to peculiar practices in body-tight nylon.

  ‘Just wondering how early you must have got in, to get absolutely everyone else to park like dicks. Don’t you have a life?’

  Yes, it was sharp. Yes, it was mean. But I was feeling isolated. As though he’d single-handedly cut me off from the rest of the workforce and was running me out of town.

  The grin died. It was replaced by a shadowing behind the eyes. An unconscious hunching of the shoulders. ‘Not really.’ It was said on a dying tone, ending almost in a whisper.

  ‘But you have to be home for someone, I heard you on the phone the other night.’ Guilt at the wiping of the smile made me press my point, as though I were trying to explain myself.

  ‘It’s… complicated.’ He stopped walking. He’d been slightly ahead of me in the narrow corridor, and I walked into his shoulder before I stopped too. His whole body was tense, I felt the rigidity of bone and muscle, a smell of something nice and ‘outdoorsy’, wood and leather and fresh air. Whether it was a cologne or just the smell of him I wasn’t sure. ‘Ruby. That call…’ He looked down at the floor.

  I looked down too. There was nothing remarkable about that bit of floor, where generations of paint had been laid over boards and then worn off by feet, leaving a wafer-edge of border. ‘What?’

  ‘Can you not… I mean, please don’t mention that phone call to anyone. It was personal.’

  He looked so dejected, his body so stiff and his gaze on the floor. Like a little boy who’s been reprimanded for stealing sweets. I knew I had the upper hand here, but couldn’t bring myself to use it.

  ‘No, I won’t. Of course I won’t if you don’t want me to.’

  ‘Thank you.’ That was a whisper.

  Then he started walking again and, within a stride, the bounce was back in his step and the grin back on his face, as though that moment of pain had never happened.

  ‘Right. So, there’s some good efforts in here–’ he wheeled around in the door to the meeting room ‘– but I mustn’t influence you. So…’

  He flung the door open to a scene that most closely resembled an explosion in a food development kitchen. The air smelled of half-melted marshmallows and the sweat of creativity and my feet crunched over discarded spaghetti sticks, scattered like a really ambitious game of Spillikins. Well, at least the cleaners would hate him.

  They would be the only ones, by the look of it. The place had descended into hilarity. Several creations had fallen apart in the time it had taken Zac to fetch me, and were holey blobs of marshmallow surrounded by snapped spaghetti, like odd alien creatures. Others had held together better, and several were impressive. Two teams had built giant willies, but frankly I was surprised it was only two. The team at the back, which consisted of Priya and Karen and two of the Back To Employment crew, were leaning on one another practically crying with laughter as their structure fell apart slowly, piece by piece as we all watched. As the weight of my gaze fell upon it, it gradually leaned further and further to one side, finally resting its top half on the model next door like a sleeping drunk on the Tube. I wasn’t at all sure what it had been meant to represent, but there was a certain ‘Peppa Pig’ vibe about it. Karen had grandchildren, so maybe it was intentional.

  I picked the winner from the edifices that had managed to retain structural integrity. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it was sturdy enough to be lifted from the table, and that was good enough for me. Everyone cheered, a tin of sweets was awarded and promptly handed round.

  From everyone’s faces it looked as though the bonding exercise had been a success. Bugger. I felt my stomach prickle. My event couldn’t live up to this. Everyone, even Pri, was laughing, sharing sweets and shoulder-slapping, it looked more like the aftermath of a successful takeover bid than an exercise in Being Ridiculous With Food. And Zac was in the middle of it all, being congratulated, laughing with the rest. Being accepted. Being popular.

  My idea, which had been looking thinner and thinner every time I’d caught sight of Zac’s cardboard boxes, finally waved a gossamer goodbye, but I grabbed its tattered edges and held on. It was too late to come up with anything else, too late to book an assault course or source proper blindfolds. In my desperation I had even asked Cav for ideas. He had suggested getting people to strip down and reassemble a Festka One Road. I didn’t even know what that was until I looked it up, and just imagining the faces of my workmates if presented with building a road bike as a bonding exercise had forced me to take an extra couple of my anti-anxiety tablets. Even my idea was better than that.

  But I’d been so certain that Zac’s exercise would fall flat. I mean, nobody liked marshmallows that much, did they? Oh God, I was going to fail. My attempts at getting natural competitors to work together was going to make nuclear disarmament talks look like a primary school’s colouring competition. They were all going to hate me.

  Two client interviews, a run-in with IT about my computer, lunch with Pri who wanted to do some Christmas shopping and needed my help, mostly to carry bags, and an afternoon listening to Zac in the interview room with a lady who came out clutching tissues and in a clear state of shock, didn’t give me any additional thinking time, and then the day was over.

  Zac swept back into the office, distracted and with his hair slightly flopped on top of his head, like Tintin, if Tintin had been six foot four and less preppy and more designer-casual. He collapsed into his chair and put his head in his hands. ‘I cannot imagine,’ he said slowly, ‘why some people seem to think that they are just going to get money handed to them without even having to fill in any forms. How do they think we are meant to know who they are?’

  ‘Last client?’ I had a certain amount of sympathy. Sometimes people could be – not stupid, but naïve, to the point of exasperation.

  �
��She’s been unemployed for six months. She thought – God only knows how – that the agencies would somehow “know” and send her money. She’s been sitting at home spending money she doesn’t have, and waiting for benefits to come in, without even applying.’

  I’d come across similar cases before so it didn’t startle me as much as it might otherwise have done. ‘Poor woman. She must be horribly in debt.’

  Zac closed his eyes slowly and tipped his head to rest against the back of his chair. ‘Yeah. I’ve done what I can, she’s got all the addresses now, but…’ A big sigh. ‘I’m still not sure it went in.’

  He looked so utterly defeated that a warm wash of pity rose up inside me. ‘Your team-bonding exercise was great, by the way. Priya is still giggling. And she’s even going out for a drink with your guys that were on the team with her tomorrow night.’ I hoped that the hurt and betrayal I felt at Priya’s apparent defection from my cause didn’t come over in my voice. She couldn’t help it. She’d been wooed with confectionary.

  Zac opened his eyes. ‘Wow, result.’ He nodded, his hair scuffing the back of the chair. ‘Great stuff.’

  There were dabs of blue tiredness under his eyes, I noticed. Faint lines he was too young for alongside his mouth.

  ‘Have you got yours all ready for tomorrow?’ He was looking at me very steadily, as though he knew that I was analysing his face, and didn’t mind.

  ‘I am not going to answer that.’ The words were unfriendly but my tone wasn’t. There was something about that steady gaze that made me not want to look away and I found my eyes were catching on those lines and shadows and wondering.

  ‘No, of course. You want to surprise us all.’

  It was quiet. No sound at all from the other offices, not even anything filtering in from the street outside. Just the faint whirring of our computer fans and the buzz of the overhead light, I could hear the rasp of his breathing, the tension in it. I wanted to ask about the new tiredness under his eyes and the fresh worry lines across his forehead, but I needed a tactful way to raise it, without it sounding accusatory.