A Midwinter Match Read online

  No, it wasn’t my kind of thing either. Alcohol was turning up the volume of the voices so people could hear themselves talk over the music, it was almost impossible to turn around without getting an elbow in the ribs, there was nowhere to sit that wasn’t already occupied and I’d passed ‘drinking as a hobby’ nearly ten years ago. But it would have made my jaw creak to have to agree with Zac, so I just raised my ongoing gin glass to him and smiled.

  ‘Didn’t think it was yours either,’ he observed. ‘That’s why I was surprised by the email. I didn’t have you down as spending your spare time pubbing.’

  He was standing so close to me that I could hear him quite clearly, despite the fact that the IT department were singing along to ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, with some quite obviously made-up lyrics straight out of the schoolroom.

  ‘Oh? What did you imagine I’d spend my spare time doing then?’ I asked pointedly. I really hoped that he wasn’t going to guess that I spent it sitting in my room staring out of the window, or watching entire Netflix series squeezed onto a couch between Sophie and a disassembled road bike.

  ‘I dunno. Country walks. Sitting by the sea, reading, that sort of thing.’

  ‘That’s not a list of hobbies, Zac, that’s a dating profile.’ I realised I’d used his name and took a big mouthful of gin to try to cover it up. In my jacket pocket, my phone rang. ‘Sorry, got to take this.’

  I grabbed my phone and moved away into the entryway to try to answer without the caller being drowned out by cheesy Christmas novelty hits, as sung by the combined choirs of a rapidly tipsy IT and Accounts departments.

  It was my dad.

  ‘Hi, Dad.’ My father sometimes rang to check up on me. My semi-breakdown in the spring had hit him hardest; seeing me have to return home to my childhood bedroom after having been, as he saw it, successfully launched as an adult with partner and own home, had caused him near physical pain. ‘I’m fine. I’m out on the town tonight.’

  I held up the phone so he could hear the lively background.

  ‘It’s your mum, Ruby,’ he said slowly, when I returned the handset to my ear. ‘She’s had a bit of an accident. She’s up in the hospital now. Thought you ought to know.’

  ‘Mum? What…?’ The walls I had so carefully constructed between me and the rawness of emotion trembled.

  ‘Oh, she had a bit of a tussle. Out running with the dogs. There was an incident, she got pulled into traffic and hit by a car. She’s all right, but very knocked about.’

  ‘I’m coming now.’ I put my gin down on the nearest surface and began searching for my coat, keeping the phone under my chin.

  ‘There’s no need, darling, she’s all right.’ But the faltering note in his voice told me he was glad of my reaction.

  I hesitated. I couldn’t drive, I’d be over the limit. A taxi or Uber all the way from York to Scarborough would be too expensive. I’d have to get the train and then the bus up to the hospital, I could run to the station from here. ‘It might take me a while,’ I said. ‘Are the trains to Scarborough still every hour?’

  Suddenly Zac was beside me. ‘I’ll drive you. I’ve barely touched this stuff. If you need a lift somewhere…’

  I wanted to turn him down. But what was the alternative? Priya was on the gin, so in the same condition as me and almost everyone in here. I could ring Ed and ask him to drive over, but he may still be at work, or out partying… No, Ed didn’t party, it cost money. But I needed to go now.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, distractedly. ‘Scarborough hospital. My mum…’

  ‘I gathered,’ he said dryly. ‘But it will save me from having to keep face by drinking whatever the hell this is.’ He glanced at the lager. ‘I’m not totally convinced it’s not something they keep for wiping down the bar. My car’s just round the back.’

  We hustled swiftly through the packed bodies. Some noticed us leaving together and whooped and nudged but I was too stressed to take it on board.

  The Discovery was still warm inside. Zac span out of the car park and then said, ‘Which way’s Scarborough?’ which told me he was also distracted, because it was written on the road, in quite large letters, and there was a sign on a post ten metres away too, for good measure.

  We buzzed out of York and along the main road that covered the thirty or so miles between my hometown and the city. An early frost was already breaking the dark into fragments along the windows and I felt almost as sharp myself. Tension was sitting along all my edges and I had to keep it there. I couldn’t risk thinking about my mum.

  ‘Your mum…’ Zac said, eventually, almost as though he knew I was trying not to think about her. ‘Is she often ill?’

  ‘Oh, she’s not ill.’ I seized on the distraction of words. ‘She’s had an accident. She’s almost never ill, my mum.’ Keep the tension reined in tight. Don’t let it run away with you. ‘She’s a runner. She used to be a fell and trail runner when she was young and now she’s retired she likes to keep her hand in, so she runs along the beaches and over the hills with the dogs. From what Dad said, I think she’s been hit by a car.’ The bluntness of having to say it made my voice cut off. The walls were still there though, just about staying up. I breathed deeply.

  ‘She sounds super-fit.’ There was a bit of a tone to Zac’s voice. Almost a resentment?

  ‘Oh she is. She runs marathons and things.’

  ‘Is she quite young?’

  ‘Fifty-five.’ And admitting only to fifty, although the fact that my sister was thirty-three was beginning to make that increasingly unlikely. ‘She retired quite early, she had her own psychotherapy practice, Dad’s sixty, but he doesn’t run any more, since he had his knee replaced.’

  We crunched down the salted and gritted hill into Scarborough, where the sea widened the view into a patch of cold grey movement. I directed Zac towards the hospital on the far side of town, and we drove through the mostly silent streets, where the cold wind funnelled down through closed shops towards the harbour. Lights shone from clifftop windows, bright and hard against the absolute dark of the bay, and then we turned inland towards the bigger houses, cushioned from the worst of the weather.

  Zac parked outside the hospital and I ran through the cold night to find my father.

  He was standing drinking coffee next to my mother, who looked bruised and annoyed in a hospital gown.

  ‘I’m perfectly all right,’ she said, waspishly. ‘I have no idea why I’m even here.’

  ‘Which is precisely why you’re here, dear.’ Dad sighed. ‘You were knocked out cold and they need to make sure you don’t have any damage to your brain. How they will be able to tell is quite another matter,’ he added in an undertone.

  It turned out that Mum had been running over the top of the cliffs along a small road with the spaniels. Another dog coming the other way had caused the dogs, who were on running leads, to pull my mother over across the road in front of an oncoming car. Luckily there had been no great speed involved and her injuries were mostly gravel rash and bruising and the bang on the head. My mother was more concerned about the dogs, who had apparently been taken home by a neighbour and were currently under house arrest in the utility room.

  Zac joined us. I had no idea how to introduce him to my parents, who were bickering lightly over the arrangements for the spaniels when he turned up, so I settled for telling them that he’d kindly driven me over from a work party. They didn’t need to know he was my nemesis. And anyway, nemeses don’t drive a Discovery and refuse lager, not in my head anyway.

  ‘Do you want to stay over tonight?’ Dad said. ‘Mum’s being let out tomorrow. Eva is coming down with the children on Thursday, for the weekend.’

  ‘Eva is my sister,’ I told Zac.

  ‘Or you could both come up for the weekend?’ Dad ploughed on, having grasped the wrong end of the stick as firmly as one of the spaniels. ‘Zac could meet your sister, have Sunday lunch, that sort of thing.’ He glanced again at my annoyed mother, who had a huge blue bruise
forming along the side of her face. ‘Everyone’s going to think I beat you,’ he said glumly.

  ‘Oh, I think Mum will be dining out on this for months,’ I said cheerily. ‘I don’t think you need worry about that. And Zac and I ought to get back.’ I looked at him where he was standing a little away from our family group, arms folded and pretending not to listen. ‘Work, and all that.’

  ‘So, you’ll both come for lunch on Sunday?’ Mum sounded uncharacteristically eager. And a little frail. Maybe she wanted me to give all the gossip on my ‘new relationship’ which, as it wasn’t any kind of relationship, she’d not heard a word about. Maybe she just wanted us there to mitigate the effect of my sister, who could be rather forceful and would, no doubt, spend the weekend telling Mum that she should be giving up running at her advanced age and take to crochet and Agatha Christie, like a decently elderly grandmother.

  ‘I… We… errr… I can’t,’ I said, at exactly the same time as Zac said, ‘That sounds lovely, thank you.’ I tried to eyeball him sternly, but he refused to make eye contact, so I had to finish with, ‘I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Your mother will make her special trifle,’ Dad said hopefully. ‘Er, if she’s up to it,’ he added, when Mum glared at him.

  Zac and I left them to it and went back out to the car. The relief of having seen that my mother was really all right, and not my father’s version of all right, which would have had her making her ‘special trifle’ with two broken legs and her neck in a brace, made me giddy and talkative.

  ‘Thank you so much for driving all this way,’ I trilled, as we climbed out of the town, leaving its lights swinging behind us as the sea heaved. ‘You really didn’t have to.’

  ‘I did,’ he oversteered slightly. ‘It could have been bad. You weren’t to know.’ He flashed me a sideways look which I saw reflected in the windscreen. ‘You needed to see her.’

  ‘Yes.’ My brain ran away with visions of what could have been, my mother critically injured, operated on, dying there in that hospital bed whilst I carried on partying with my workmates. ‘Yes, now I know she’s all right, it’s not so…’ Then I stopped. I’d been going to say that it wasn’t so bad, that the anxiety was manageable when I knew everyone was okay. That the awful fear that rose around me in the middle of the night, threatening to suffocate me, could be stilled for a while. But it was Zac. So I couldn’t. ‘Not so worrying,’ I finished, which made no sense really, but ‘worry’ was what I actually felt, downgraded to something socially acceptable. Something non-prejudicial.

  ‘I like your parents.’ Zac swung the car up over the hill and the wheels found grip amid the gravel. ‘They’ve certainly got bickering down to an art form.’

  ‘They’ve weathered thirty-three years of marriage, there must be some kind of affection there. You didn’t have to agree to Sunday lunch, though. Now I’ve got to think of a way to get you out of it.’

  ‘I don’t mind coming to Sunday lunch.’ He gave a brief grin. ‘Your mother’s making her special trifle, after all.’

  I sighed. ‘Stop it. I know, I know, you were just being polite, but I really can’t bear them all grilling us about our non-existent relationship and having one of those awkward conversations where we have to pretend to be in love whilst hating one another. I’ve read those books. I think I have to have a secret baby at some point too.’ I watched the road flash past. The relief was still there, burning through my veins, making me talk to Zac as though he were a friend.

  ‘I’m sure we can leave the baby out of it. And we can just say we’re workmates. They aren’t going to force us to have sex in front of them to prove we’re in a relationship, are they?’ He frowned. ‘They seem fairly normal and not given to that sort of thing.’

  ‘You haven’t met my sister,’ I said darkly.

  ‘And what’s your objection to Sunday lunch with your family?’

  I wanted to say ‘you coming along,’ but didn’t. He had just driven me on a round trip of sixty miles, waited in a boring hospital room without complaining or chatting up nurses and been polite and pleasant to my family. ‘I don’t have one. I go over about once a month anyway.’

  ‘There you go, then.’

  ‘But you can’t seriously want to go for a meal with people you hardly know!’

  There was a moment in which the only sound was the thrum of the car engine and the crack of the grit under the wheels. A moment in which I realised that I didn’t know much about Zac at all. ‘I know you,’ he said at last. ‘And, let’s face it, Sunday lunch is always a winner. Plus, trifle.’

  I was smiling. I couldn’t help it. I knew it was partly because of his cheery tone and the talking up of the trifle, but the way my spirits rose as I fought to stop the grin spreading made me not care. ‘As long as we don’t have to do the pretend relationship. I’ll ring them tomorrow to check on Mum and tell them we just work together.’

  ‘Damn. No secret baby, then.’

  ‘No. I think it’s for the best.’

  We both laughed then, a more relaxed kind of laugh, something that sounded as though we both meant it, and finally something inside me let a little tension unspool into the night.

  6

  The rest of the week was busy.

  More clients than usual wanted to come in. Normally we offered counselling to anyone who wanted it after the initial consultation, and the take-up was around one in five. Now, with Christmas on the horizon and short-term jobs available in shops and Post Offices, more people were faced with the possibility of returning to work and the resultant anxiety, doubt and interview fear that came with it.

  Zac and I alternated possession of the interview room, and I found an empty office which had been occupied by two members of YouIn2Work whose jobs had been rationalised out of existence with the merger. We turned the empty office into Interview Room Two, which enabled both of us to help clients at the same time, but the reason the room was empty hung over me. I could feel the weight of redundancy whenever I sat in there.

  So it came as no real surprise to me that I woke in the small hours of Sunday morning and lay in the darkness feeling panic binding my ribcage and stopping my breathing.

  Redundancy is real. It’s not just Michael trying to get us to work harder. I could be out of a job, and then what? Stay here and try to find something else after Christmas? But what? And in the meantime the debts still need paying.

  I could go home. Back to Scarborough, to the old house on the cliff, to my old bedroom, but the debts STILL need paying and there won’t be the money… and can I really face it, am I really up to applying for something and starting something new? Learning new stuff? When I can barely concentrate on the stuff I already know?

  I got out of bed and went to the window where at least the air was breathable. Cold, scything into my lungs.

  Mum could have been killed by that car. Dad would have to sell the house, what would he do? Move up to Durham, nearer to Eva? Then I’d have nowhere to go back to if all this falls apart.

  I can’t lose this job. I CAN’T. But Zac seems so professional, such a safe pair of hands, can they all tell that I’m really just making it up as I go along? That so many of my clients getting work is just a fluke?

  I felt sick, but being sick wasn’t an option because I couldn’t breathe if I was vomiting. The band around my ribcage got tighter and tighter and my heart was splitting itself against the bones of my chest as I tried to force in air which was suddenly as thick as treacle.

  No money. Nowhere to go. No job. On the streets, sleeping in the park. Begging outside the station.

  And then all the Instagram pictures that I’d seen before my friends had made me block Gareth came flashing in a montage sequence into my mind. All those images of the Greek islands, the iridescent blue water, the sun, his shiny new life with his beautiful girlfriend, while I starved and caught TB and died, ignored, on a trolley in an A&E department of some big city hospital.

  The walls, those carefully constructed walls that I im
agined as sturdy Yorkshire stone surrounding my terror and my inadequacy began to crumble. I felt each crack coming, dreaded its appearance but was powerless to stop it, and ended up back on my bed, curled into a foetal ball and sobbing.

  The light of the slow-dawning morning brought some relief and about five minutes’ sleep. Before I knew it, Sophie was knocking on my door to tell me that Zac was downstairs and had I forgotten that we were going to lunch with my parents? And, oh dear God, did I want to borrow her Touche Éclat because I was going to need some serious help if I was going out with my face like that…

  I uncoiled myself from the tangle that my duvet and I were in and sat up. Sophie threw her make-up bag at me and headed back downstairs. I looked at myself in her tiny handbag mirror. I hadn’t forgotten about lunch, but half of me had hoped that Zac wouldn’t turn up and the other half had been too busy trying to keep breathing. Clearly I should ring my parents and cancel. Tell Zac I’d got norovirus or something. Take my tablets and go back to bed for the day, deep-breathe my way through Sunday and hope that I looked less like a corpse in time for work tomorrow.

  But that would be to admit weakness. That would let the panic win. If I let the fear and doubt and horror have its way this time, then next time it would be so much harder to fight off. And, besides, I couldn’t, daren’t, let any failing show in front of Zac. I’d even have staggered out with noro, just so that Zac couldn’t win this point.

  When I got downstairs, ten minutes frantic make-up application later, I found him in the hallway, with Cav. They were looking at Cav’s bike, which was upside down, wheels off again, outside the understairs cupboard.

  ‘…and then I upgraded to the carbon fibre frame,’ Cav was saying.

  ‘Ah, Ruby, there you are.’ Zac moved slowly back towards the door as though he was worried that Cav might go for him with a bag of spanners. ‘Ready?’

  There was a note in his voice that said please be ready, please don’t disappear back upstairs and make me listen to more about bikes through the ages. But his face was friendly, open, engaged, as though Cav and he had been having a simply fascinating discussion and my arrival had meant that it, sadly, had to come to an end. He could have listened to bike talk all day.