A Midwinter Match Read online

  ‘Zac, are you all right?’ I asked gently.

  ‘It—’

  The door burst open and Priya stood there, decorated with bags like a small and annoyed Christmas tree. ‘Rubes, you said you’d give me a hand to the car with all this stuff.’ Then she stared at both of us. ‘Am I interrupting something?’

  ‘I’ll be with you in sec.’ I gave her a wide-eyed stare, trying to indicate a mixture of ‘bugger off’ combined with ‘it’s getting tricky’, adding just a soupçon of ‘could be important’ spiced with a warm dash of ‘anyway, you traitor, you’re getting to actually like the Back To Employment lot and had better plie me with much cake, or you are dead to me’.

  ‘Okay. I’ll wait by the doors.’ She did the wide-eyed thing back and shuffled her retreat, carefully closing the door behind her with a hand that also swung two Thornton’s bags and something from Browns.

  ‘Zac?’ I made my voice soft. The tiniest part of me was rejoicing in the fact that I’d been right, he wasn’t as carefree and easy-going as he appeared on the surface. As though, if I was really honest, it may be something I could use to my advantage, as long as it wasn’t anything to do with machetes. But the rest of me was squashing this feeling down hard in favour of talking to someone who clearly needed to talk.

  But the moment had gone, shattered into high tension fragments by Priya’s arrival, like the dropping of a Pyrex bowl.

  ‘No, nothing, it’s all good.’ There was a gleam of artificiality about the grin, now I knew. ‘Honestly, everything’s fine.’ He was packing up his gear, not looking at me, smiling a general smile that relaxed his face. ‘See you tomorrow. Looking forward to your exercise!’

  He swept past me, briefcase almost as shiny as the smile. I stared after him for a few seconds, still torn. He wasn’t as perfect as he appeared. There were cracks. He wasn’t invincible. I needn’t lose this job. I could blow him open, keep my job, keep paying the bank.

  But that thought came teamed with awful sympathy. I knew how it felt to have to keep up the bravado; pretending that everything in the garden was rosy whilst feeling underneath like a glacier about to shear off into deep water. To have the knowledge that everything could be snatched away, everything you’d worked for and competed for and hung on to. That, where currently there was certainty and a pay cheque, there could just be a big black hole.

  Being in our profession meant that we, of all people, knew how hard it could be to get another job. There were always openings in the supermarkets, but even stacking shelves twenty-four/seven wouldn’t cover the bills.

  I had another burst of fury at Gareth, swanning off into his new life and love without a backward glance or any warning. Landing me with all the concomitant bills of getting out of a very, very short-lived mortgage arrangement and selling the house. Plus all those things I’d committed to, thinking there would be two salaries to cover them. Severance of those had also been expensive.

  That invisible corset gave another tweak and I could feel the panic rise into my throat.

  And… breathe…

  I gathered up my belongings, slipped on my coat and scarf and went out to help Pri.

  I didn’t sleep much. Instead, I sat up all night smoothing the seams to make my team-building appear less cobbled together out of disparate elements. I got in early the next morning, set up the screen and arranged the chairs, then turned on the machine I’d borrowed from Sophie. Then I rearranged the chairs again. By the time people started to arrive in dribs and drabs, unloading their gear into their offices and then making their way through to the meeting room, I’d reorganised the room three times, drunk an unwise amount of coffee, and the air smelled of vanilla syrup and toffee. I greeted everyone, feeling horribly like an unslept usherette, although without the protection of a nice tray of ice creams. There was a lot of awkward shuffling.

  Fortunately the sound of the popcorn machine broke a lot of the ice for me. Sophie had said that it could be a bit temperamental, and by the third time it had fired its lid across the room and people had fished popcorn out of one another’s hair, everyone was, at least, talking. They helped themselves to drinks to the occasional ricochet of kernels hitting the light fittings; it was like a gunfight in a teetotal speakeasy, but at least it made them laugh.

  Then I dimmed the lights, started up the computer, and heard the recognition flood the room as the titles came up on screen.

  Some people sighed and complained. Some were grudgingly accepting and others were happily anticipatory. I was showing them an old episode of Blackadder. It was the episode ‘Chains’, where Edmund Blackadder is tortured but, since neither he nor his inquisitor speak the same language, they have to mime the various insults and implications to one another. I thought it nicely reflected on how two cultures have to come together to work, despite their differences, but I suspect this nuance was missed by most of the viewers.

  It was also as far from marshmallow and spaghetti penises as I’d been able to get, watching TV as a bonding exercise. It had worked for my housemates and me, why should it not work here?

  By the end, it wasn’t a totally unqualified success, but everyone was talking, some were laughing, and most of the weaponised popcorn had gone. A tight little knot of Haters were discussing Monty Python – I couldn’t tell whether the discussion was for or against – one group were trying to decide whether Baldrick’s pencil case disguise was anachronistic and there was a subset of ‘how fanciable is Queenie’ discussion breaking out.

  When the room had emptied to let everyone get back to work and I’d started scraping the popcorn off the curtains and worrying about the stuff embedded in the ceiling, Priya came to join me.

  ‘Are you coming out for a drink tonight?’ she asked, desultorily sweeping rubbish into a black sack. ‘Please come. I agreed yesterday on a high from the marshmallows and now I don’t know what we’re going to talk about.’

  I gave her an exasperated look. ‘Pri, it’s a drink, not an arranged marriage. Two gins and you’ll talk about anything to anyone anyway.’

  ‘I know and I need you there to stop me. You know what I’m like, Rubes.’

  Priya had a way of getting herself into trouble through a combination of being too nice for her own good and hating to stand up and say ‘no’. She’d once got talked into going fishing with a bunch of anglers from the local club after a session on Prosecco, and the trauma had never left her.

  ‘Please come. Why not invite some of the new guys along as well? You could extend your team bonding as far as the pub,’ she added slyly. ‘You might even be able to get it on expenses.’

  Thinking back to Zac’s success with his team bonding, and my effort which seemed to lack a certain something, this wasn’t a bad idea. I might just get extra points. So when I got back to my office, I circulated an email to the entire staff, arranging a meet-up in the local pub straight after work. I had a take-up rate of about one in ten, but that was good enough to make me feel I was getting somewhere. Quite a few of the Back To Employment crew still headed home to Leeds every night, but some were staying in hotels and B&Bs, and a lot of the usual suspects from our workforce were looking for excuses to party. It would be a nice mix and, as Priya had said, could count towards ‘team building’.

  There was no reply from Zac.

  I sat with a client in the interview room, listening to him unspooling a scroll of reasons why he hadn’t had a job for four years and wondering why Zac hadn’t replied. That phone call, he’d had to reassure someone that he wasn’t going to leave – was that a worried spouse or partner? And why were the reassurances necessary? Was he planning a separation; were they the last to know? And the way he’d been cajoling them to eat – could it be a child? He’d said it was complicated, which meant not a straightforward amicable arrangement with divided-up property and childcare. And tension that sometimes seemed to descend upon him—

  ‘…and then the wife left and took the kids. And the doctor said I was depressed, well, not kidding, but when you�
��re left with all the shit and she’s taken herself off to Cardiff and I can’t afford to get to see the kids more than a couple of times a year—’

  But Zac seemed generally to be a happy person, not letting any assumed ‘complicated’ life affect his work. I wondered how he did it.

  ‘…so now they’re saying I’ve got to take any job I’m offered or they’ll cut my benefits and I’m hanging on by my fingernails as it is!’ wailed my client.

  ‘Could you relocate to Cardiff?’ I glanced down at his notes, feeling rather guilty that I’d tuned out so much of his backstory. ‘You’re experienced in machinery, do you have any other family keeping you here?’

  ‘Er.’ My client, small, balding, in his forties and with a defeated slump to his whole body which seemed to extend to his mindset, frowned at me. ‘Well, it’s in Wales, innit?’

  ‘You don’t need a passport.’ I smiled to soften my words and also because some people really did think Wales was foreign and, in some cases, overseas. ‘Is there any reason you couldn’t move closer to your children?’

  I’d seen pictures of his family, it had been the first thing he’d done after he’d sat down, showed me photos on his phone of his children. I had no idea why all my clients seemed to want me to be able to pick their family members out of a line-up.

  ‘I mean, would they accept my qualifications there? Don’t you have to speak Welsh?’

  I gently reassured him and we looked up some of the jobs available in his quite specialised field, around the Cardiff area. By the time he left, he was perkier and more optimistic and the beaten-down air had been replaced by something more positive. He seemed taller, too. This was why I loved my job – helping people to see that there was a way forward, however hopeless the present looked. I just sometimes wished I could work that magic on myself.

  When I came out of the interview room, Zac was leaning against the wall in the corridor.

  ‘You’re very kind to them, aren’t you?’ he observed, falling into step with me as we headed back to the office. ‘I mean, you didn’t seem to get annoyed that, in four years of unemployment, nobody has suggested he just move closer to his kids?’

  I looked sideways at him. ‘Maybe they did in the beginning, but it was too much for him to take in back then. Depression is a bugger, he may not have been able to process the idea of moving when just getting out of bed felt like a huge thing.’

  Zac pulled a face. ‘I think I’d have been a bit more direct with him. Half an hour listening to his woes just to suggest moving to Wales?’

  We’d reached the office and bundled in through the narrow doorway. The room really was too small when one of us was over six feet tall, but at least the boxes were gone. ‘I like to treat my clients holistically. What stops people getting a job isn’t always lack of qualifications. Sometimes they have lives that get–’ I looked pointedly at him ‘– complicated,’ I finished.

  ‘Back To Employment have a sixty-seven per cent rate of success. Our methods don’t seem to hold people back you know.’

  He sounded a little bit prickly. Maybe it had been my choice of words, maybe he felt defensive.

  ‘Our success rate is sixty-five per cent and rising,’ I replied. ‘So my methods clearly work too.’

  Zac sat behind his computer. ‘Sometimes you need to be straightforward. Break it down a bit, sure, but sometimes the truth is just unavoidable. No amount of sugar-coating can make… some things acceptable.’

  He sounded as though he was talking about getting people into work but thinking about something else at the same time. As though there was a topic in the back of his mind that was seeping through his conversations.

  ‘That’s one way, but it doesn’t work for everyone. That’s why we do what we do.’ I sat behind my computer now. The screens felt like battle lines, as though our chairs were the trenches and we were digging in. ‘There’s all the rest of YouBack2Work, or whatever we’re called now, to do the straightforward helping with the other stuff. Our team’s unique selling point is that we give clients the opportunity to work out what’s keeping them out of work. I think you are too hard on your clients. From what I’ve heard when I’ve been passing,’ I qualified, as I’d never sat in on one of his sessions. But then, he’d not sat in on one of mine either – he was getting his opinion from as brief an exposure to my methods as I was from his.

  To think I’d been gradually warming to him. Huh. I’d even been going to ask if he was coming to the pub tonight, well, now I definitely wouldn’t bother. If he didn’t have the manners to reply to my email and he was calling my methods of counselling my clients back into work into question, he could die of loneliness and dehydration back in Leeds with his ‘complicated’ life situation for all I cared. Maybe it was a vengeful ex who was, even now, cutting the crotches out of all his trousers and throwing his pop art collection into damp bushes.

  I hadn’t liked his subliminal suggestion that depression could be overcome with a forceful approach either. There were tablets in my handbag that proved him wrong. But what could I do? If I dragged up my past to prove my case, then I’d give him ammunition against me. I needed this job. He, presumably, already knew about my short-term hiatus from others, and that was as much of a mark against me as I could take. If he found out that I’d not quite shaken the knock-on effects of the crash of my relationship, I didn’t yet put it past him to bring it up in any private conversations about the role, ‘going forward’, as Michael would no doubt have put it.

  I ignored Zac for the rest of the day. He didn’t seem to mind, he was in and out of the office or clicking away at his keyboard in an unconcerned way, which annoyed me even more. Had he criticised my approach to upset me? Because he was worried that my efforts at bonding the teams together may be seen as better than his? Or because he genuinely was concerned that his method of counselling might be a little less effective in the long term?

  I narrowed my eyes at the top of his head, which was all that was currently visible over the computer, and muttered ‘sixty-five percent’.

  I was sure that, among the clatter of keys I heard ‘sixty-seven’ come back, almost inaudibly and smiled to myself. He was rattled. Good.

  5

  The pub was noisy and warm. We’d got in early and managed to occupy almost an entire room, alcohol was loosening tongues and inhibitions, and Priya and I were trying out a new flavour of gin, when Zac walked in. I didn’t know if I was happy to see him or not, but the gin certainly helped me be less annoyed at his presence.

  ‘I’ve just spent twenty minutes looking for you,’ he said. ‘I thought you were still in the building.’

  I indicated, with the hand not holding gin, the pub. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m here. Why did you think I was still at work?’

  ‘Your car is still in the car park.’ His mouth was tight, as though his lips were pursed around an invisible cigarette. ‘I thought, maybe, you’d got another late client.’

  Priya made a bug-eyed face at me and sloped away, clasping her gin to her chest.

  ‘I’m getting an Uber home.’ I didn’t know why I felt the need to explain myself. ‘Otherwise I couldn’t have a drink.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And I did tell you that I’m perfectly happy being alone with clients after hours.’ I sipped at my drink so that the glass formed a barrier between him and my expression, which I suspected may have been a wee bit gloaty.

  ‘Even so.’ He looked, I was glad to see, a bit awkward.

  ‘So there’s no need for the white knight to wait around all chivalrously.’ ‘Chivalrously’ took a bit of getting out, because of the gin. I turned around in search of the bowl of chips that Priya had ordered and left on the bar. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Well, I can see that.’

  Michael, who was bonhomie-ing his way through the crowd, caught up with us. ‘Glad to see you two bonding!’ He slapped Zac on the back. ‘Another one in there, Ruby? Zac, what are you having?’

  ‘Oh, I’m not… I mean, I jus
t popped in to check…’ Zac tried, but Michael was being his traditional unstoppable force. I think he was trying to make an impression seeing as the Grey Man and Beehive Woman were sitting together at a nearby table like a couple of aliens planted on Earth to observe our customs.

  ‘Well, just a swift half then,’ Michael carried on, overriding Zac’s attempts to get out of having a drink. ‘Lager?’

  Before we knew it, Zac had a half pint of lager in front of him, and my previously unoccupied hand now held another gin. Michael slouched off to buy drinks for the IT boys, which was being a lot better received than his attempts to jolly us into partying.

  Christmas music came through the sound system over our heads. Zac’s hair practically touched the speakers that were warbling ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day’ and I sipped at my gin and regretted the flashing Christmas earrings I’d put on especially. The noise level was rising.

  ‘You didn’t reply to the email,’ I said for want of something else to kick off the conversation. The stretching silence between Zac and I was beginning to be obvious in the midst of all the chat.

  ‘I wasn’t coming.’ He took a sip of the lager, made a face and put it down on the bar behind him. ‘I didn’t think a negative warranted a reply.’

  Accounts were holding a raucous discussion about something and occasional loud laughs broke out. It was only a matter of time before peanuts got flicked. They were like that in Accounts.

  ‘Why not? Team building.’ I finished the current gin and started on Michael’s round. Priya had taken possession of the chips and whirled them away to take part in her conversation with some of the newcomers, which was disappointing. I was hungry.

  Zac looked pointedly around the bar. It was hot and crowded and noisy, filled with the smell of beer, hot fat and wood polish. ‘It’s not really my kind of thing.’