Tuesday had all the promise of being a day-to-get-to-the-end-of-as-quickly-as-possible. Not only did Lou have the prospect of trailing after her mother in the supermarket, but someone from HR at work had asked if she could spare them an extra afternoon because one of the other job-share accounts women was off with some dreaded lurgy and the other had been signed off with stress. Cold, windy and rainy, it was the sort of day on which you switched off the alarm, turned over and went straight back to sleep–if you didn’t have a pesky conscience.
But her first job of the day would be to order a skip. Something about the name ‘Tom Broom’ made her smile; there was a solid, honest quality to it. Then again, with her track record for judging personalities, Tom Broom was most likely a cross-dressing serial killer with a particular hatred of short, auburn-haired women with Yorkshire accents.
Nevertheless, she rang his number and a deep-voiced man answered the phone to take down her details. She hadn’t a clue skips came in different sizes until he asked her if she wanted a two-, three-, four-or five-ton one.
Two-ton sounded huge and plenty big enough to take a few bin bags, surely. So she ordered a mini-skip to be delivered the following Tuesday. Payment on delivery–£70. Blimey, it was true then. Where there was muck there
was
brass!
She suspected her mother might need something the same size to box up all the things she bought for Victorianna’s ‘hamper from home’.
‘I thought American supermarkets were teeming with goods!’ said Lou, as Renee picked up a tin of anchovies in some farty oil.
‘Oh Elouise,’ was all her mother said, in a very fatigued tone, and added some special offer basic toilet rolls to her trolley.
‘She’ll not want those, surely,’ said Lou. ‘She’ll want super-dooper-softy-wofty-six-ply-woodland-scented—’
‘They’re for me,’ Renee interrupted.
Her mother’s shopping items were nearly all ‘super-value’ items. Renee could quite easily afford the branded goods for herself but chose not to. She preferred to raise the crucifix of her being-on-a-pension-status against the demon of luxury spending at every available opportunity, even though she was comfortably off and would be forever, at the rate she spent money. Unless she went mad, ran off to Las Vegas for a year and blew all her savings on Cristal champagne and high-class gigolos. But that was hardly likely. As with many of that generation, raised in frugal, waste-not environments, Renee was terrified of running out of money–although she never quibbled about what she paid for those stupid hampers that her youngest daughter asked for, Lou noted.
As they were wheeling their trolleys out of the supermarket door, Lou stopped herself just in time from suggesting they go and grab a pot of tea and a big cream cake in the café. She had long since been aware that the world was divided into those who saw food only as a necessary fuel and those who relished it with passion and pleasure. Renee and Victorianna were of the former group. Renee would have sooner had a triple-heart bypass without anaesthetic on the booze aisle floor than partake of a custard slice. How sad that some people would never get turned on from watching Marco Pierre White going berserk with olive oil, Lou often thought. So, instead of cake-scoffing, she dropped her mother off at her house to go and bubblewrap all her jars and boxes and put them in an enormously heavy box for Victorianna and Wee Willie Winkie whilst Lou went home to butter a quick sandwich and then go off for a thrilling afternoon in the Accounts department at work. Not.
Nicola was in a foul mood because she was under stress with half her staff being off ill. She was out of her depth running that department and she knew it, and so her defence mechanisms were permanently set to projecting her inadequacies onto other people–one thing she
could
manage with great skill.
Nicola Pawson had acquired, through a mixture of flattery and flirting and goodness knows what other means, friends in high places in the company and basked luxuriously in her association with Rogering Roger Knutsford. She was a master in the art of ‘impression management’. Anyone with the slightest potential to be
useful to her found her to be a smart, fresh-faced young woman with a prettily symmetrical ready smile (close-lipped, obviously; open-lipped and they’d have run a mile). They could never have guessed at the hollowness that lay behind her pale eyes.
People were either wary of her or sucked up to her–both of which inflated the sense of her own power. A power that masked her own inabilities and a history of being one of life’s inadequates. It wasn’t nurture that had made her so–Nicola Pawson was simply born without the emotional repertoire to enjoy connections with other people. From her earliest days at school, all that had really mattered to her was playing the game of controlling others. She struck out at those less able than herself, trained her inner laser on other people’s weaknesses, tried to bring down anyone popular or likeable. But yet she secretly envied those with values she was too weak to adopt. By the time she had reached adult life, her manipulative skills had reached a near-genius level of sophistication and her greatest pleasure was creating fear and discord. She was, in psychiatric terminology, a borderline psychopathic bully. And in general conversational parlance–a right nasty little cow.
But two people stopped Nicola from reigning supreme in her present position. The first was Karen, who was more amused by her than anything. Especially that put-on exaggerated accent of hers that would have made the Queen sound like a navvy. Karen unashamedly relished the fact that Nicola so obviously envied her private education, beautifully polished vowels and her double-barrelled surname. The second–Lou
Winter–would have been totally gobsmacked to learn that she got to Nicola so much.
Lou and Karen were true professionals; always punctual, always smart, and they knew their financial onions. They were warm and well-liked and respected, and people in the company affectionately labelled them ‘Little and Large in Accounts’, bracketing them together as a double act. Neither woman gave Nicola a crack to seep her poison into, since showing how much they detested ‘Metal Nicky’ would only have given her something to kick against–and one thing Lou had learned from Phil was how empowering a show of indifference–real, or assumed–could be. Lou wore the indifference like a suit of armour at work and could never have begun to imagine the chaos that it set off in Nicola’s head.
But simpler, gentler people like Zoe and Stan were ready meals for sharks like Nicola. She knew they would never report her for her treatment of them. They would never make a fuss, knowing that such action would only make things worse for them and bring them to Roger Knutsford’s attention in the worst kind of way. Plus Nicola saw to it that anything they might have to report would sound very petty and totally unreasonable. She had a clever way of putting her own warp on things so that her story and the opposing one were almost alike, but her version was infinitely more articulate and believable.
But Stan
is
always late, you can ask anyone in the department. I have asked him on a few occasions if he would be happier going part-time, as I think it would be so much better for his health, but he’s always adamantly refused.
Even Stan’s wife Emily had looked a little sceptical on occasion when he’d gone home and offloaded his daily woes. She,
like most other people, couldn’t understand why anyone would go out of their way to torment another living creature just because they could. And Stan knew that if he couldn’t make a loving partner believe him 100 per cent, he wasn’t going to have a lot of success with the far more impersonal HR department.
And boy, was Nicola in the mood for taking her frustrations out on someone that day! Rogering Roger was taking one of the newly appointed designers out for a ‘business lunch.’ Her name was Jo MacLean and she was a serious contender for position of Teacher’s Pet. Tall and willowy with perfect red lips, her flawless complexion, long swishy brown hair and vulnerable doe eyes poked annoyingly at those dark insecure places within Nicola. It was no coincidence that Zoe, with her own flawless complexion and long dark hair, was first in line for Nicola’s vented spleen.
Nicola leaned over Zoe’s desk and, with a disarming closed-mouth smile, whispered, ‘Can I have a word?’
‘Yeah, course,’ said Zoe, already nervous at Nicola’s tone, which didn’t exactly intimate that she was going to be giving her an 18 per cent pay rise.
‘Roger isn’t happy,’ said Nicola. Three words only, yet she managed to imbue them with a menace that threw Zoe immediately into a state of distress.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Isn’t it obvious?’
Yes, it appeared to be obvious. There was only one interpretation Zoe could think of for her words. She’d just bought a car and was saving up for a house with her boyfriend. She couldn’t afford to lose her job.
‘With me? Why? What have I done?’
‘I haven’t got time to talk now. Later,’ said Nicola.
‘Nicola, please, what do you mean? You can’t just say that and then leave it.’
‘I said not now,’ said Nicola, and swept off leaving Zoe close to tears. She might have been young, but she knew that big companies could get rid of anyone if they felt like it. And how good would that look on her
CV
, that she’d been sacked from her last position? Zoe came from a hardworking family with good, strong values. Clean, scrupulous fighters were always hampered in such battles by their morals.
Stan saw Nicola edge close to his desk and the hairs on the back of his neck sprang up. He couldn’t understand why she made him feel like this. He was an older, working man–a grandfather, for goodness sake–and she was a mere girl by comparison. But logic didn’t come into it. Nicola effectively held his life in her hands and he knew she knew that. He couldn’t afford to leave this job before his sixty-fifth birthday because it would affect his pension and, ergo, his future security. It never crossed Stan’s mind that this was a bullying campaign. He thought bullying ended at the school gates.
‘Can I have a look at what you’re doing, Stan?’ she said. Her voice was quiet, with a girlish lilt that belied her intentions.
‘Here you go.’
She made him feel like a five year old in front of the headmistress. His work had always been immaculate, but Nicola made him doubt his abilities and once or twice recently, he’d checked his figures to find he really had made mistakes.
‘Ooh, I don’t think that’s quite right, do you? How can an eight and a six make sixteen?’
‘Let me see that.’
She handed back the print-out with a long sigh. Dammit–he had made an error. Was it her micro-managing that was stressing him out enough to make mistakes, or was it his mistakes that were making her micro-manage him? He didn’t know any more. He just wanted out of this bloody place before it killed him. He was snapping at Emily because he couldn’t relax when he eventually did get home. His mind was already preparing for the bus being late the next day and another confrontation with his boss–another day of being made to feel like a foolish child. But even if he did report her, what could he say?
I’m sure she taps her watch when I go to the toilet?
‘Roger’s concerned…’ she said, trailing dramatically off.
‘What about? Me?’
Nicola leaned in conspiratorially. ‘I know you’re just killing time until your retirement…’
‘Excuse me, but I’m not—’
‘Don’t raise your voice, Stan. I’m trying to help.’
‘Sorry.’
Was
I raising my voice? he asked himself.
‘As I was saying, Roger’s been picking up on all the mistakes.’ She said
all
as if he were churning out one every thirty seconds. ‘He’s concerned. I’d be careful.’
She drifted off back to her desk leaving him with an increased heart-rate. The effect made her feel good, in control. It was fun and it distracted her from thinking about what crap Roger Knutsford was spouting to Miss Jo ‘Long Legs’ MacLean.
Neither Zoe nor Stan looked up when Lou came in. Their heads were down, concentrating hard on the work they were doing–checking everything time and time again and then fretting that the checking was taking up too much time.
Lou felt so sorry for them. She would have bet the contents of her purse that Nicola had been on their backs again. It wasn’t fair and she wished she could do something. But standing up for her colleagues might only make things worse. Of course, if this had been school, Lou would have had Nicola by the scruff of the neck like she’d had her then nemesis–Shirley Hamster–on numerous occasions for bullying the younger kids. But that Lou was long gone. This Lou sat at her desk and got on with her work quietly and expediently, and didn’t rail against the social order.
She couldn’t have known that some primitive sense in Nicola was alert to the dormant strength which still lay within her. The irony was that Lou felt the weakest of them all, especially at the moment. Never had her name been so apt. Inside, she felt as cold and dead as Winter itself.
The night before the skip arrived, Lou totted up ten binliners-full of throwaways, not counting an old carpet that she had had to cut up into strips with a Stanley knife. She had asked Phil to help her lift it downstairs in one piece but he had looked at her in total horror and said, ‘I’m not knackering up my back lifting that thing. Why don’t you just leave it where it is for now?’
Lou found that was no longer an option. Her initial plan might have been merely to clear out a few drawers and cupboards, but knowing there was so much space taken up by the useless and the broken had seriously begun to irritate her and, once she had started, she found she couldn’t stop. The clear areas just showed up the cluttered areas more by comparison. How could she have lived for so long with so much rubbish and not seen it? Plus she hadn’t had as much enjoyment from getting her teeth into something since she and Deb had planned
Casa Nostra
, despite the fact that all her nails were broken.
‘Well, if that is how you want to spend your leisure time, Lou, you go right ahead,’ said Phil, watching her heave bulging bin-bags downstairs. ‘But all I want to do when I get home from a hard day’s work is sit down,
have my tea and read the paper.’ He omitted to mention that he had spent most of that day sitting down, drinking tea and reading the paper.
The skip wagon reversed down her drive at nine o’clock the next morning and out of the cabin jumped a man and a shire horse. Well, he was certainly as big as a shire horse anyway and he stole Lou’s heart instantly–ran away with it and refused to give it back.
The dog bounced over to her, sensing that in her he would have a warm reception, and dropped into the play position, his great furry head on his paws, his huge dark eyes looking up pleadingly at her for attention.
‘Clooney, you big tart, come back here!’ said the skip man gruffly.
Lou bent and ruffled the huge German Shepherd’s head and when he opened his mouth to pant, it looked as if he was smiling.
‘Clooney, what a great name,’ said Lou, taking in the skip man for the first time. He was a wardrobe in overalls with dark hair that flopped at the front over a pair of very smiley bright grey eyes. He wasn’t her type, though. Lou had never really gone for big men. It was too impractical for a five-foot-one woman to smooch with anyone over five foot seven on a dance floor without her neck being half-broken, and without them looking like a pair of total prats. Marco Pierre White excepted, Lou’s tastes had always been for the smoother, average-heighted blokes. That said, Lou’s inner checklists, for some unknown reason, were telling her that this was a man who was making her pupils dilate.
‘He gets all the women. I wish I had his knack,’ said
the man, unloosening the giant hooks on the skip.
‘Shall I pay you by cheque or cash?’ asked Lou as Clooney nosed her hand for a stroke.
‘Either’s fine,’ said Skipman. ‘But, let’s say, cash is always slightly better.’
‘No worries,’ said Lou, who guessed he would say as much and had the money ready in her jeans pocket. ‘Although these days with all the fake fivers about, I wonder!’ she laughed.
They both instinctively looked down at the money she was holding out towards him.
‘Not that these are fake,’ she said quickly. ‘I didn’t mean…They’re all real…I think anyway. I wouldn’t know how to check. Oh, help!’
Skipman threw back his head and let loose a deep, gravelly laugh.
‘I’d set the dog on you if they were, but I don’t think he’d be much of a threat.’
Clooney was growling softly, looking very much as if he were trying to scratch an itch on his nose and not quite hitting the spot. He overbalanced with the effort, looking clumsily adorable.
‘Give us a call when you’ve filled it,’ he said. ‘Level to the top, please–no piling on.’
‘Saturday would be great,’ said Lou without hesitation.
‘Sure?’ asked Skipman, helping Clooney out with a good old scratch.
‘I’ll have it filled by then,’ said Lou decisively. ‘And can you deliver another one as soon as you can after that, please?’
‘I can deliver it Sunday, if you want. I’m a seven-day-a-week man!’
‘Perfect.’
‘You’re going to be a busy lady, I see, filling my skips in between printing out some more fake fivers to pay me with.’
My skips.
So this must be Tom Broom himself then. He had a very curvy smile. Nice teeth. Natural.
Lou laughed. ‘Precisely. Not enough hours in the day for us forgers.’
‘Well, see you Saturday then.’ He hoisted Clooney into the cab and held up his hand in a masculine wave.
But Lou was already at work, hurling black binliners into the mini-skip and looking brightly forward to a whole afternoon of filling it with many more.