by Jason Ayres
She had met him in the spring of 1995 when she was nineteen years old and on her gap year while she decided which university she was going to. She had a number of offers on the table. With her grades and sparkling recommendation from the school, they were all happy to defer her entry for a year.
She never made it. A chain of seemingly random events and decisions over the preceding months had led her to fall into a relationship with Alan. From then on he had ensured that the door leading to higher education was slowly and quietly closed.
Around the time she had left school the previous summer she had lost her virginity with a Jack the Lad character called Glen. He turned out to be her first, but certainly not the last, seriously bad choice of man.
She hadn’t really wanted to go out with him in the first place, much preferring his friend Richard, but Glen had told her that Richard was gay and muscled his way in instead. What he had said about Richard was eventually revealed to have been a lie, many years later.
Before long, she had good reason to seriously regret getting involved with Glen. Before Christmas of the same year she had fallen pregnant. A few weeks after they had been going out, Glen refused to use condoms anymore, claiming that he was allergic to them. He insisted that she go on the Pill instead. Somehow during the crossover period she had conceived.
Far from being supportive, Glen had ordered her to “get rid of it”, informing her that he had no intention of becoming a dad at his age. She was left in no doubt whatsoever as to the ultimatum she was facing – it was him or the kid.
He was no help to her whatsoever during the whole process. Then, once her baby was dead, he promptly turned around and dumped her anyway. Not long after that she discovered he had been sleeping with at least two other girls behind her back for months. This included the very day when she was having the abortion, when he had claimed he couldn’t get the day off work. She later found out that he had actually been busy in bed with a barmaid from Ye Olde Chapel, no doubt spinning the same bullshit about being allergic to latex.
Losing a baby and being let down at such a tender age hit Kay hard. The feeling of invincibility that her youth and early academic success had given her was stripped away by the whole sordid state of affairs. Real life had come right up in front of her and well and truly slapped her in the face.
In the dark winter months of early 1995, she sank into her first and only bout of teenage depression. She had been working flat out in the weeks leading up to Christmas in a temporary job at the local sorting office, but it was only seasonal work. Once all the Christmas post was sorted and sent she was no longer needed. Now she found herself lacking the desire to seek more work and barely left the house in January and February.
As the nights drew out and the weather got warmer, she picked herself up and dusted herself down. She was determined not to waste the rest of her year off. With Glen out of the way, she could at least now revisit her earlier plans to go travelling. But not earning any money for the first two months of the year had put a dent in her finances.
Needing to earn some decent money to finance her plans, she decided to sign up with a temp agency for a few months. If she got enough money together she could head off in June and still be away for over three months. That was not as long as she had originally planned, but even so, there was plenty she could do in three months.
There were a number of temp agencies for her to choose from, offering different types of work. She decided to go for one that specialised in office work. Working in an office was not something she aspired to, but she didn’t think it would do any harm to get a couple of months’ experience in that sphere. It would be something she could stick onto the CV after university. Competition for jobs at the BBC and Channel 4 would be fierce. She needed to give herself the best possible chance if she was to get to where she wanted to be.
This seemingly unimportant choice of agency at the time was one of many minor decisions that had led her to where she was today. Kay reflected that life was probably like that for most people, their whole lives mapped out via a series of random events and choices.
The first, and as it turned out the only, place the agency sent her was a large, grey building on the outskirts of Oxford. It was the head office of one of Britain’s largest supermarket chains, and she was to provide maternity cover for a clerk in the accounts department.
It was a dull, repetitive job which reaffirmed her desire to make something of herself. She could face a few weeks of doing this sort of work, but to do it for a whole lifetime would have been soul-destroying.
Part of her job involved cashing cheques for staff. This was still a popular way of paying for things, as well as acquiring currency back in those days. This meant she came into contact with a lot of people in the business, especially toward the end of the month. Then everyone started cashing cheques a couple of days before payday, knowing they wouldn’t reach their accounts before their wages went in.
Her pretty looks didn’t go unnoticed and she frequently found herself being chatted up by the male employees. They were delighted to find an attractive nineteen-year-old girl manning the desk. Kay didn’t know it, but she was a popular topic of conversation among the men in the office who referred to her as “fresh meat”, some even placing bets on who could bed her first.
One man in particular seemed smitten by her, which was pretty obvious from the number of visits he made to the accounts department. By the end of her second week he was visiting the desk to cash small cheques on a daily basis.
She didn’t know it then, but this man was to become her future husband. Alan was much older than her, just turned thirty and a rising star within the organisation. He had just been part of the marketing team that had successfully launched the chain’s first loyalty card scheme, giving points to shoppers for their food purchases. As a result, he had been rewarded with a new role as a buyer in the wine department.
He was smart, attractive and confident. He was also a great deal more mature than some of the younger lads in the office who had made clumsy attempts to ask her out. When he asked her if she would like to come out for lunch with him, it seemed almost rude to say no. She also couldn’t deny that she was flattered by his charm and interest in her.
Lunch led on to dinner dates, and a host of other romantic gestures. When he told her he was going to France for a few days on a wine buying trip and asked if she would like to accompany him as his assistant, she leapt at the chance.
They spent three wonderful days in the Champagne region in the spring sunshine, all expenses paid, during which they inevitably became lovers. And what a lover he turned out to be – accomplished, confident and generous in bed, a million miles away from Glen’s clumsy and selfish fumbling. She was well and truly smitten.
When they returned to the UK he asked her to move in with him. Her parents were opposed to the idea, but she was lovestruck and ignored them. What did they know? Just six weeks after meeting Alan, she packed a suitcase full of clothes and moved in with him.
Nearly a quarter of a century later she would find herself packing a suitcase again, but this time it was when he was showing her the door. There were no parents to run back to by then: they were both dead. Meanwhile, he was moving Lucy in – another young employee. The wheel had turned full circle.
Those first few months living with Alan were blissful. He was clearly doing very well for himself, living already in a spacious semi-detached house. In those early days they spent every waking hour together. He drove her into work every day in his company Volvo, then they met for lunch, sometimes sneaking off to Shotover, a local beauty spot, for a bit of naughty fun in the car.
In the evening he would drive her home again. They would prepare gourmet meals together in the kitchen, washing them down with the fine wines that he acquired as a perk of his job. Later they would watch movies and make love on the sofa. He had all the satellite channels, something she had never had at home. Her parents were of a generation who considered that four TV channe
ls was quite sufficient.
Alan was generous to a T back then, never asking her to contribute a penny towards the food or bills. He made life as easy as he possibly could for her, which made it all the more difficult to face the decision that was looming on the horizon.
Living scot-free had enabled her to save money rapidly for the travelling she hoped to do in the summer, but she was now facing a dilemma about whether or not she should go. She had told Alan of her plans to go travelling when they had been away in France, but had avoided discussing it since she had moved in with him. He had not mentioned it again either, which didn’t help. Perhaps he had just assumed that now she was living with him, she had dropped her plans. The trouble was, the longer she left it, the harder she was finding it to bring the subject up.
Further ahead, there was also the issue of university that would have to be tackled at some point. She had told him all about her career plans on one of their first meals out. He had seemed enthusiastic and encouraging, but again it had not been mentioned since. Now she was at the point where she needed to accept a place if she was going that September. She knew she couldn’t stay in Oxford with him unless she changed her course to something they offered, which she was not willing to do. She still had her heart set on media studies and was strongly considering Leeds or Durham as her best options.
Alan had made her feel so wanted and happy that she was getting strong feelings of guilt over her plans. Would leaving him to travel or study be an act of betrayal after all he had done for her? If there had been any cracks in their relationship at that time then she would at least have had some reason to justify leaving, but he was just so damned perfect. That was going to make it all the harder to leave.
With the benefit of decades of hindsight, Kay now wondered if he had been manipulating her even back then. She had assumed then that he hadn’t asked about her plans because he had forgotten about them, but was he in fact playing a clever game with her? Had he been so nice to her purely so that she would feel unable to leave?
His impeccable conduct back then was a far cry from what she was to experience in later years, once he had got her where he wanted her. But she was only nineteen then. She simply didn’t have the life experience to see what he was doing. Maybe there had been warning signs that her forty-three-year-old self would have spotted a mile off, but she was young and in love, and as she had heard people say many times, love is blind.
Spring gave way to summer, and as June dawned she knew she could not put off her decisions any longer. Breaking away from Alan would be very hard but she had saved for and planned her trip round Europe for so long that she couldn’t turn her back on it now. It didn’t have to spell the end of the relationship – if he loved her, he would wait for her to come back – wouldn’t he?
She had over £3,000 in the bank and a clear plan in her mind as to what she wanted to do. Her plan was to start at the top of Europe and work her way downwards.
She had decided that one of the Scandinavian countries would be her first destination, with mid-June as her planned departure date. This wasn’t a date she had chosen at random. A year or two before, she had watched the latest David Attenborough series, Life in the Freezer, on BBC1. She found it fascinating to learn how the sun never set in the summer in the Arctic regions.
She had vowed there and then that she would one day go and see the midnight sun. Hence her rather unusual choice of country to begin her travels through Europe. By choosing a date as close as possible to the summer solstice, she wouldn’t have to travel all the way to the North Pole. All she had to do was get inside the Arctic Circle. Her best options for this seemed to be Norway or Finland.
She had opted for Finland. This gave her the option to visit Lapland, somewhere she had seen depicted in many Christmas movies. She doubted it would seem very Christmassy in June, but no matter. She would get a budget flight to Helsinki, and from there travel north to the city of Rovaniemi. She would give herself the best possible chance of seeing the midnight sun by ensuring she was there on the date of the summer solstice. Then she just had to keep her fingers crossed for a sunny day.
From there she would travel south by train using a student railcard. She would visit as many countries as she could, finishing with a tour of the Greek islands in September. She had built up a good selection of guidebooks to help her find the youth hostels where she would stay and the places of interest she could visit.
It would mean lugging a lot of books around with her, but that was how people did things in those days. It was 1995 and the internet revolution was only just beginning. Online guides, the few that existed, were in their infancy and the only way to access them would be in one of the internet cafés which were springing up all over the place at that time.
It would be an exciting time to be travelling in Europe. The Iron Curtain had recently come down and there were a host of newly independent states springing up, formerly part of the Soviet Union. These had once been very difficult to visit but were now throwing open their borders, keenly embracing and welcoming visitors from the Western world.
Kay hoped to include some of these on her journey. Everyone else went to France, Spain and Italy, but she wanted to do something different, something unusual. It was going to be the adventure of a lifetime.
The thought that she was just nineteen, inexperienced and potentially vulnerable, didn’t dissuade her. She was young and fearless, her heart and mind full of adventure. To her, this would only be the start – one day she planned to be the one writing the guidebooks rather than reading them.
But none of it ever happened.
She kept putting off telling Alan, even booking her flight before broaching the subject with him. On the same day she booked the flight she also accepted a place at Leeds University. She didn’t tell him about that either.
It was just four days before she was due to fly from Heathrow to Helsinki on the third Saturday in June when she finally plucked up the courage to tell him. She hadn’t expected him to take it well, but he was surprisingly supportive. He even offered to drive her to the airport the night before and pay for them to spend a last night together in a hotel, prior to seeing her off in the morning. He was so nice and reasonable about everything, she hadn’t for a moment thought of turning his offer down.
That was her first mistake. Had he got angry or upset at that point, it would have been easier to break away. Kay would still have had a few days to get her act together for her trip. But he had been one step ahead of her all the way. She was sure now that he had known exactly what he had been doing in order to turn the situation to his advantage. She had seen many similar examples of his cunning in the intervening years. Unfortunately, back then she had still been blissfully unaware of how he operated.
It was just one of so many “what if?” moments she had played over and over in her mind in the long, lonely hours she had spent in her flat lately. The morning she had been due to fly from the airport was one of the pivotal moments. That one wrong decision she had made that day had followed her down the years, like a lead weight dragging behind her.
She had let him talk her out of going at the eleventh hour and after that the opportunity never arose again. He had got his own way and it would set a precedent for the rest of their relationship. Without realising it, she had already become subservient to him.
Twenty-five years on, she had still not seen the midnight sun. It seemed there was precious little chance now that she ever would.
Chapter Three
December 2018
Wearily Kay dragged herself out of bed, trying feebly to gather the strength to face another day.
It wasn’t far to the bathroom, if it could even be called that. It was a tiny room with a toilet in one corner and a shower cubicle she could barely squeeze into in another. There was also a sink, even smaller than the one in the kitchen. There was no towel rail – the only place she could hang a towel was over the back of the door.
That was her luxury en suite bathroom,
as McVie had outrageously called it when he first showed her around. It wasn’t even a proper room. The wall separating it from her bedroom was just a cheap partition, of the type used in offices to separate conference rooms, and it wobbled when she walked across the floor.
The faded yellow ceramic tiles, ingrained with decades of other people’s dirt, were icy to the touch. The cold was a shock to her feet after the threadbare grey carpet of the bedroom which at least provided a smidgeon of warmth.
Avoiding the tile with the large crack running diagonally across it, she fumbled for the shower controls. As fast as she could she reached for the left-hand control, turning it clockwise and quickly pulling her hand back. She wasn’t quick enough, and got a splash of cold water across her arm, just as she did every other day. The shower head was ancient and clogged up with black mould. Rather than one continuous flow, it sprayed what little water it gave out in all sorts of unpredictable directions.
While she was waiting for the hot water to come through, she kicked off her skanky T-shirt and knickers, eager to feel the relief of the hot shower as she shivered in the cold.
It was definitely colder in the room than usual, even accounting for the freezing weather outside. She was soon to find out why. As she stepped into the shower she got a much bigger shock than the one the tiles had given to her feet. The water was icy cold. She gasped for breath and quickly stepped back, catching the big toe of her right foot in the cracked tile, giving it a nasty pinch.
“For fuck’s sake!” she shouted out in frustration. It was just one thing after another. She really had had enough of this miserable existence. As so often in recent days, dark thoughts filled her mind as her eyes welled up with tears once again.
And then she caught sight of herself in the mirror above the sink. The cold tiles and cold water may have given her body a shock, but that was nothing in comparison to the surprise that now greeted her eyes.
