A Midwinter Match Page 9

  I sat down at my desk, fished in my pocket, and finished off the chocolate.

  Yes. When I probed my memory, it didn’t throw up wonderful instances of communion between Gareth and I. No long walks in summer silence, hand in hand. No unspoken jokes that could crease us up without a word being said. Nothing that would have made us into the couple in that picture on Zac’s desk. Just lots of sweaty sex, arguments over meals, a good-natured falling into a relationship that suited us both but never had any real loving passion, unless it was his, for football. And, evidently, my gorgeous blonde replacement. I silently wished her well and hoped she was ready to mother a grown-up.

  Zac was a little bit late. He arrived on a gust of cold air, his hair tipped with frost and several scarves wrapped round his neck.

  ‘Bloody cold out there,’ he said, unparcelling himself. ‘Snow for Christmas, you reckon?’

  I forced my eyes to look at his face. Not to take in the general outline, the ‘tall, upswept hair, shoulders, legs’ that said ‘this is Zac’, but his actual face. Brown eyes, straight nose, dark eyelashes that gave him a slight appearance of wearing mascara. Square chin and cheekbones that gave his face definition.

  ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ Zac squinted down his nose. ‘Is there something stuck to me? I had to run the gauntlet of Accounts coming in, they’ve already got the party poppers out, so I wouldn’t put it past them to have reached the “kick me” sign stage.’ He glanced at his back view. ‘And it’s still a month to Christmas. They are going to be unbearable.’ Another suspicious look at me. ‘You’re still staring.’

  ‘Sorry.’ I pointed my eyes at my screen. ‘I just realised that I don’t really know what you look like. If I ever had to give your description to the police, I’d struggle.’

  ‘That does not allay my fears. Is Michael threatening to have me killed and dumped in the river or something?’

  ‘Well, it would be one way to get rid of you,’ I said, without thinking and then realised how harsh it sounded. ‘I didn’t mean…’

  But he was grinning again. ‘Ah, he’s old, I reckon I could fight him off.’ There was a complacency to his words, as though he knew he was never going to be ‘got rid of’ in any context. The tiny worm of doubt crept back into my brain again. ‘Coffee?’

  He didn’t wait for my answer, but disappeared through to the interview room, from where I could hear him wrestling with the coffee machine and he came back bearing two mugs whilst I was still trying to get my computer to acknowledge my presence.

  ‘Here. Watch out for your keyboard.’ He handed me a mug slopping full and went back to his side of the office with his, sitting on the corner of his desk and staring out of the window in an unfocused sort of way. ‘What time is Miriam due in?’

  ‘Half past nine.’

  He sipped and then made a face at his coffee. ‘Right. I’m going to be a long way away when that happens.’

  I wondered if this was a power play. Make me nervous, unsettle me. ‘I’m sure she will be fine.’

  Eyebrows raised over the mug. ‘Okay. You just keep on believing that. I’m going through to the office to check over some CVs they were sorting out for me. Scream when you’re finished, I’ve got someone coming in and I need the room after you.’

  ‘Scream?’

  ‘Or bang your head against the wall. Honestly, it will be mild compared to what I’ve done after a visit from Miriam.’ He swung himself off the desk and over to the door. ‘I’ll remove all the breakables.’

  Yep, he was definitely trying to scare me.

  I checked my emails and there was one from the bank, mentioning – just mentioning in the lightest possible tones – the bank loan and encouraging me to make increased payments to clear it off faster. My throat threatened to swell and I had to breathe slowly and carefully to prevent the panic from rising. I knew I owed them. I was paying it back at the only speed possible to me, did they think I was keeping secret millions from them and only paying the loan at the minimum rate for fun?

  Grounding myself was usually the best way to ward off these feelings. I looked around the office. Noticed anew the off-centre window, the uneven flooring and the walls which met and joined at odd angles in unexpected places. The smell of hot electronics, and paper, old dinners, paint upon paint and the cleaners’ spray. It was as familiar to me as the inside of my car, and I usually paid about as much attention to it, but now it was taking on a new aspect, tinged with the fear of loss. No, forget that fear. Look at the details, derail the brain from its cycle of worry with minutiae, force it to pay attention to the tiny things and use them to blot the bigger things out.

  Tiny things. The scatter of staples across Zac’s desk. The sun just creeping through the corner of the window, uncertain as to whether it was going to stay. The photograph, which Zac had moved slightly so I now couldn’t see the picture from where I sat.

  And breathe.

  I couldn’t lose this job. I couldn’t. Apart from the fact that it was my job and I loved it, I knew that prejudice and narrow-mindedness would make another job like this hard to find. My three weeks’ off with ‘stress’ would count against me in another appointment. They might not be allowed to ask about my mental health at the interview, but you could bet there would be a ‘health questionnaire’ as part of the process and the merest sniff of anti-anxiety medication or extended time off would flag me up as unstable. Unreliable. Unable to cope with sudden crises. I could explain to them until I was purple in the face that the ‘crisis’ that had precipitated my need for antidepressant medication was a one-off, never-to-be-repeated love-life disaster, but it would be too late. I’d be labelled ‘flaky’. Probably in a handwritten note attached to my file, destined to be destroyed should I ever challenge it.

  Plus, those bank loans were not going to be manageable on National Minimum Wage.

  My hands shook a little as I sipped coffee from the overfull mug and, when my phone rang and made me jump, I spilled a tiny bit on my keyboard.

  Zac must never know.

  It was only Reception, to tell me that my appointment was here. Over Karen’s voice, I could hear another woman speaking, a loud rattle of complaint in a tone like gravel in a tin can. That must be Miriam and it sounded as though Zac hadn’t exaggerated at all, damn him.

  I made my way down to the interview room to meet her, holding my coffee in front of me like a shield, and slightly glad of the distraction from my circling thoughts.

  She was there before me. Sitting, uninvited, in the best chair, smoking, despite all the signs thanking her for not smoking; mid-fifties, thin in a way that made her tendons stick out, as though she smoked all three meals a day. Hair bleached so often it was fragile. Wearing an expensive coat and trainers, cheap scarf knotted around her neck. She didn’t bother to look up as I came in.

  ‘You’re not allowed to smoke in here,’ I said mildly.

  She gave me a look that was both shrewd and challenging. ‘I,’ she announced, ‘can do what I fuckin’ like, right?’

  I didn’t bother to reply, I just sat down opposite her and watched her smoke for a moment. She smoked with long in-breaths, then taking the cigarette out to blow the smoke from the corner of her mouth, like a docker on a furtive tea break.

  After a few puffs, she rested the still-lit cigarette on the edge of the box of tissues on the small table next to the chairs and looked at me, sucking her teeth. ‘Well, you’re an improvement on the last dickhead they told me I had to talk to. At least you know when to shut up.’

  In an instant I reached out and stubbed her half-smoked roll-up out on the glass tabletop. The sad scribble of smoke trailed away into nothing and Miriam narrowed her blue-shadowed eyes at me.

  ‘’Ere! That’s my fag! You can’t do that!’

  ‘I,’ I enunciated carefully, ‘can do what I fucking like, right?’

  A pause and I half-braced myself in case the leopard-print bag that squatted under the chair made a swing for my head. But instead, after a
few seconds of adrenaline-fuelled silence, Miriam laughed a rattled staccato laugh.

  ‘You’ve got balls, girl, I like that.’ Then she started to unbutton the coat and unwind the scarf. ‘Right then. Looks like I’m stoppin’.’

  I checked her notes. Miriam had made a job of resisting all attempts to place her in work. She managed financially on what looked like cash-in-hand jobs here and there, badgering the local benefits agency into paying her dribs and drabs, and sharing a council house with her two daughters and their children. She was here because several tethers had reached straining point, and she was about to be denied all payments unless she showed that she was seriously applying for actual, real jobs.

  But, oddly enough, I liked her.

  Because the first interview was more of a ‘getting to know you’ chat – not all counsellors were a good fit for all clients, and some clients subsequently decided that ‘work counselling’ wasn’t going to be quite what they thought – we drank coffee and I let Miriam talk. She liked talking. I heard how she was enjoying the fact that the offices had moved from Leeds to York, because she now got her travel expenses paid to come to a lovely city and do her Christmas shopping. She told me about her two daughters, their feckless partners and the resulting children, although I didn’t quite get to the bottom of how many there were and which belonged to whom, but they made Albie and Xavier sound like models of decorum.

  I could see why Zac hadn’t got on with her. I could see why people might find her difficult and brittle and confrontational, because she was. But she was also funny, self-deprecatory and sharp with lived wisdom. There were no family photos from Miriam, just wicked little observations and vignettes from what sounded like a tough life, and by the end I didn’t just like her, I admired her. But quietly, because any hint of patronisation would, I suspected, have ended in complaints. And – I eyed her handbag with suspicion – possible knuckledusters.

  Once her hour was up, and she’d been told to make another appointment and left winding herself back into scarves and her coat, I went back through to the office, where Zac was hiding in a corner, trying to look as though he was doing something important.

  ‘Well, she didn’t disembowel you with her teeth,’ he said, looking at me over his shoulder. ‘So that’s a plus.’

  ‘I quite like her.’ I sat behind my computer, ready to type up my notes. ‘She’s sparky.’

  ‘So is an electrical storm.’ Zac made a twisted-mouth face at me. ‘She’s lulling you into a false sense of security, I tell you. Next time, she’ll be shouting about her rights and threatening us with the ombudsman. I don’t know if she actually knows what that is, mind.’

  I felt suddenly defensive on Miriam’s part. ‘She’s brighter than you think.’ I remembered that thin face, slightly out-of-date make-up and the lines around her mouth that said she’d probably been smoking since she was twelve. ‘I think she’s had a hard life.’

  ‘Maybe, but the fact remains, she has to look for work or get her money cut.’ Zac came to stand in front of his desk, blocking the light.

  ‘Yes, but do you have to be so… so reductionist about it? There’s obviously something going on there that’s stopping her from working. She seems desperate to get out of the house, her grandchildren sound as though they are only one step up from being fed out of saucers on the doorstep. They make Eva’s pair sound like cherubs. Although,’ I added hastily, ‘not the sort of cherubs with bows and arrows because that would be a very dangerous idea.’

  He shook his head slowly. ‘You always see the best in people, don’t you?’

  ‘I have to try. Otherwise what’s the point of this job? We could just sanction them until they’re starved into job seeking.’ I knew I sounded sharp, but this was an argument I’d had before. With Gareth. Who couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t walk into jobs with the ease that he did.

  ‘Ruby, it’s all right. We’re on the same side here.’

  But we’re not, are we? I wanted to say. We’re fighting for the same job. And I don’t know who’s winning, and I don’t know what your real game is. And I need this job.

  I went back to typing up my notes and he, seeming to feel that he’d said enough, sloped off to see his next client.

  7

  Priya and I sat in the little café by the river. We’d spent the Saturday Christmas shopping together, mainly because, as usual, she needed someone to help her carry her bags. But she’d promised me coffee and cake as a reward for struggling through the crowds, getting rained on and standing outside shops whilst she picked up and put down their entire selection of stock, so I went along. She brought the coffees over to our table, which was right by the window, looking out over the swollen brown waters that swirled and plunged under the nearby bridge.

  She sipped at her coffee and regarded the big gooey bun on the plate beside it with almost indecent anticipation. ‘Are you getting Zac anything for Christmas?’

  ‘What?’ I nearly choked on my cappuccino. ‘No! Of course I’m not. Why?’

  ‘He asked me what you might like for Christmas, so…’ Her eyes were mischievous over the foam.

  ‘Oh bugger. You could have told me this whilst we were in the middle of Fenwicks, rather than now, Pri.’

  ‘I forgot.’ Priya stared over my shoulder at the crowds we’d just extricated ourselves from, massing across Skeldergate Bridge in both directions. There were shoppers everywhere, shouldering their way through the sleety drizzle with their heads down, adorned with bags, like herds of buffalo had been driven through M&S. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘But he’s the enemy! We agreed, he’s the opposition! What kind of person buys Christmas presents for their nemesis?’

  Priya lowered her cup.

  I took a deep breath. ‘Do you like him, Pri? I mean, I don’t know what to make of him. He seems just so… nice. Mostly, I mean. I don’t like the way he is with some of his clients, like he thinks they just need a good scolding to get out there and get a job as a brain surgeon, but apart from that…’ I trailed off. Surely I should be working up a case against Zac? Amazingly it wasn’t just my tablets stopping me from being righteously indignant about the way he’d been foisted on me; about the whole job situation. He was good at what he did and he didn’t even have the decency to be a shitty human being.

  She jerked her head in an awkward sort of movement.

  ‘He’s got a bit of a “holier than thou” attitude though.’ I picked on the only part of Zac’s character that could really stand up to a bit of assassination. ‘All this “my life is complicated” stuff, like it’s designed to make my life look like it’s straightforward, and therefore anything I say about, well, about the depression or the anxiety, it’s just going to make me look a bit…’

  Priya kicked me under the table.

  ‘What? That hurt. You’d better not have broken that ornament I got for Mum…’

  The kicking got harder and more metronomic. She’d dropped her head and was whispering into her coat collar like a spy communicating with HQ, but I couldn’t hear above the background hubbub of the café.

  ‘Maybe I could get him something like a whoopee cushion?’

  ‘Hello, Ruby. Priya.’

  The voice came from behind my right shoulder and I jumped with surprise and stiffened with embarrassed annoyance. ‘Oh God.’ Terror about how much of the previous conversation he may have heard made my brain go suddenly cold.

  ‘Hi, Zac.’ Priya stopped kicking me but kept her head down. ‘Fancy seeing you here,’ she said in the flat note that told me she’d arranged the meeting.

  ‘I thought you lived in Leeds?’ I spoke to him without turning round. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘Christmas shopping.’ He swung himself into the seat next to me, with an evident lack of shopping about his person. He didn’t seem annoyed. My mind started to loosen with relief, he couldn’t be this insouciant if he’d heard me assassinating his work character, could he? So maybe he hadn’t heard any of it. It was noisy in here, afte
r all.

  ‘There are shops in Leeds. I’ve been there. Big shops. Nice shops. Why do you need to come to York to shop?’

  ‘You sound as though you aren’t pleased to see me.’

  I looked accusingly across at Priya. She’d practically tortoised her way inside her coat so that only the top of her forehead was sticking up from the velvet collar, and she’d slithered down low in her chair. ‘Zacsaidsomethingaboutshoppingbeingboring,’ she muttered indistinctly into thick red velvet.

  ‘Priya was trying to tell me that Christmas shopping is the epitome of an experience in York,’ Zac said cheerfully, and my relief increased. He couldn’t have heard me and still be this sunnily disposed. ‘But then, she also promised to buy me a coffee, which hasn’t happened yet, so I’m beginning to doubt her opinions all round.’

  Priya got up with such speed that the word ‘alacrity’ was insufficient. She practically left skid marks across the floor. ‘Coffee,’ she said and disappeared down the stairs.

  ‘Is she setting us up or something?’ I stared suspiciously after her retreating red wool back.

  ‘Or something, I think.’ Zac settled his elbows on the table, which rocked. ‘I don’t think either of us want to be set up, do we?’

  I thought about his ‘it’s complicated’. The wedding photograph on his desk. ‘No I don’t.’

  ‘Good. Neither do I. I actually think she just wants someone to help carry the shopping.’

  Despite myself, I laughed. ‘That’s usually my job.’

  ‘I am sure you will bear the disappointment manfully.’

  We lapsed into silence. I remembered what I’d been saying when Priya started kicking me and had the dreadful, creeping feeling that maybe Zac was just covering up having overheard. I’d mentioned the anxiety and depression. Had he picked that up? Had I just handed Zac the weapon he needed to defeat me?

  To cover up any trace that he may be searching for, I became ultra-bright. ‘I love Christmas, don’t you? Best time of the year, and Pri is right, York is such a wonderful city in December. Have you seen the decorations all lit up yet?’