Hush Hush

by Mullarkey, Gabrielle

  Angela lay in bed, stroking herself in the dark, imagining Robert doing the same. Usually, this gave her solace (sometimes a DIY orgasm), but tonight she was distracted by her Great Lie. Why had she said it? Who in their right minds would employ a totally useless woman who’d been out of the workforce for four years?

  Not totally useless, a little chirrup of self-esteem insisted. She had managed to keep body and soul together in the previous year. If Rachel and Sadie thought her capable of landing a decent job, maybe she should start thinking the same?

  The summer after A levels ‒ the summer she met Robert ‒ was also the summer that gave Angela her lifelong hangup about seeking, and finding, a job.

  She trailed home after her last exam, swinging her satchel in a heat haze, inhaling the sharp scent of mown grass and the mellower bouquet of freedom. As she meandered through the kitchen door, Sadie, thumping pastry on a worktop, looked up and said, ‘Lal Doherty’s got you into the frozen food place for six weeks. You start the day after you break up.’

  ‘What? No way, Ma!’ Jolted out of her reverie, Angela collapsed into a chair.

  ‘Now don’t let me down, love,’ pounded Sadie. Her pastry-pounding was unnerving. She had a pugilist’s blunt intent. ‘Lal’s pulled strings to get you into the wages office instead of the factory floor. Told them you were a bright girl, probably going to university, so they’ve taken you on without an interview. It’s only making up pay packets and sorting out the canteen money for the bank.’

  Angela slumped deeper into her chair, not even thinking of enlisting her dad. Sadie’s word was law.

  ‘You might’ve asked, Mum! I’m crap at maths ‒ grade D remember? You know what’ll happen. The first time I make a mistake, all these left-school-at-sixteen types will go, “I thought you had A levels” and “So much for education, if you can’t do a bit of long division in your head.” Bloody hell!’

  ‘Oh now, don’t be gutless, lovey,’ cooed Sadie, letting the bad language go. ‘I can’t let Lal down.’ That had always been the way with Sadie. She pretended (or believed) that it was she, not Angela, who would face the direst consequences of foiled plans laid on Angela’s behalf.

  It had taken Angela another couple of years to recognise this as emotional blackmail. She should’ve said, ‘Stuff Lal Doherty. I never asked him to do me a favour, and this is my last summer before I have to go to work for ever, so I want to enjoy it.’

  She’d already decided not to go to university. She’d pre-empted her decision by putting far-flung choices on her UCCA form. She’d had two offers, from Aberdeen and Lampeter (somewhere in Wales) and had no interest in going to either.

  But instead of two-fingering Lal Doherty, Angela cowered inside her school blazer, nibbled a knob of raw pastry and knew she was beaten. The murphia had struck again.

  The local murphia was a loose-knit but cohesive cabal of Wilmesbury-based Irish who scratched each other’s backs whenever possible, county feuds carried over from home permitting. The murphia influence was vital in working-class jobs because anything vaguely middle-class and professional was quickly sewn up by the Order of Nicodemus, the Catholic church’s answer to the Freemasons. In Wilmesbury, the order were also anti-Irish, ranged against the superstitious peasantry who gave restrained, royalist Catholicism a bad name. Rachel’s father, a wealthy solicitor, had turned down an invitation to join the Order of Nicodemus. He was a member of the anti-Nazi league instead.

  Lal Doherty’s string-pulling for Angela was now ratified and official. Moreover, if she welshed on the deal, a Nicodemite’s daughter might sneak into the frozen food factory’s wages office instead. Non-manual summer jobs were at a premium for students and school-leavers.

  Angela’s brother Owen (who was at university) worked each summer as a porter at Wilmesbury Hospital. The previous summer, a nutter had stabbed him in the hand with a syringe. But frankly, Angela would’ve traded Owen a swivel-chair number at the frozen food factory for the casual violence of the NHS any day.

  She started at the factory a week later.

  She chafed against life’s unfairness as she piled up verdigris’d coins under the baleful eye of Mags, the chief cashier, then popped them into polythene bags and finally into a blue cloth bag for Neville, the factory gofer, to take to the bank.

  At the end of that first week, Mags and her colleagues, Joan and Florrie, made up the pay packets in silence, testimony to the solemn responsibility of their vocation.

  Angela had her own little pile to do. After making up and sealing twenty-two pay packets, she noticed a fiver left over on her desk. Heat and a dull sense of terror surged through her abdomen, a terror not felt since she’d turned over an exam paper in the fifth year and realised she couldn’t answer a single question.

  ‘Oh my gawd,’ said Mags, eagle eye alighting on the fiver, ‘she’s gorn and left some money out of a packet.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ puffed Joan. ‘Ain’t ye got the brains ye woz born wiv?’

  Angela despised Joan. She despised stupid people who went through life stupendously ignorant of their own stupidity, and got chances to put down people like Angela, who spoke grammatically, recycled their empties and agonised now and then about the global distribution of wealth. Angela started to cry, without warning and without really caring.

  ‘Oh there now, lovey, it’s not the end of the world,’ tutted Florrie, the oldest and kindest person in the office. Angela liked her. Florrie’s husband was called Monty, and Florrie was able to keep a straight face while saying things like, ‘My Monty’s a martyr to his corns.’

  ‘We’ll have to undo those twenty-two packets and see who’s a fiver short,’ sighed Mags with the disdainful ennui of a bomb disposal team leader. ‘It would be the end of the world, Florrie, if even one of those maggots on the floor came up so much as a penny short. Gimme those packets over here.’

  Angela carried over the slippery little pile. This was even worse than her first-day fiasco of printing three hundred and twenty clock-cards upside down on the clock-card printing machine. ‘D’ye think cardboard grows on trees?’ Joan had shouted.

  ‘I’m leaving,’ announced Angela, depositing the pay packets and wheeling round to face the room.

  The silence was not very stunned. ‘Bout right ’n’ all,’ snorted Joan.

  ‘You wasn’t really cut out for it here,’ nodded Mags, a shade kinder now that Angela had done her dirty work for her. ‘We’ve years of experience between us,’ she added even more gently, acknowledging that youth could be callow as well as thick.

  Angela got her coat and left at once, the weight merely slipping from one shoulder to the other. There were now Sadie, Lal Doherty and the family honour to consider.

  ‘Bye,’ she said carelessly, closing the office door behind her.

  ‘Take care, lovey,’ called Florrie.

  ‘Thick as pig shit,’ observed Joan.

  Angela walked home slowly in the wavery heat, kicking stones. She’d made the discovery, long-suspected, that she didn’t like working in an all-woman environment. This posed a problem, as office work beckoned in one form or another. Her only practical skills beyond anticipated A levels were stage two typing and eighty words a minute shorthand.

  Sadie did her nut. There was much reference to ingratitude, failure to stick at things, and even (last resort stuff) offering up a horrible job for the souls in purgatory.

  Angela sat on the settee, pretending to listen, but peeking at Tabby the cat, who was standing behind Sadie, four white socks neatly aligned, peeking back coquettishly through the arched window of Sadie’s bow legs. ‘… find yourself something else to do, so I can let on to Lal that you got a better offer,’ finished Sadie with a deflating sigh, like the air going out a Lilo.

  ‘Fine. Rachel Cockburn’s invited me to a wedding afters,’ remembered Angela. ‘She said I can stay with her for a few days as well. She hasn’t got a poxy summer job cos her mum and dad want her to enjoy her last summer as a free woman,’ she added d
aringly.

  ‘The Cockburns! They’re made of money,’ retorted Sadie. It was shorthand for ‘not our sort’.

  ‘Well,’ said Angela, edging out of the room before she delivered her final thrust, ‘in that case, I’ll warn them about standing too close to naked flames.’

  She took a sleeping bag and her week’s wages from the factory to Rachel’s house on the posh side of Wilmesbury. Angela and Rachel had spent their school years sussing each other out. There’d been plenty of rows, imagined slights ‒ Angela was particularly sensitive to the notion that she might be a project, a Harriet Smith to Rachel’s sophisticated Emma ‒ and short-lived break-ups followed by effusive returns to best friendship. It was only in the years since school that they’d become friends on more equal terms.

  The wedding afters, held in a local hotel, was memorable for two key incidents. First, Angela got locked in a toilet cubicle in the Ladies at the pounding height of the evening disco. After rattling the bolt back and forth, it broke off in her hand. She shouted for ages above the steady throb of a distant drumbeat, before footsteps tapped her way.

  ‘Help, I’m stuck!’ she squeaked. ‘The bolt thingy has come right off and I’ve cut my finger.’

  ‘Hang on,’ said a male voice. ‘Stand back and I’ll kick the door in.’

  Angela cowered by the toilet bowl, thrilled.

  Her rescuer kicked the door viciously and groaned. ‘Must be made of solid titanium,’ he growled in a face-saving mutter.

  ‘Try again,’ encouraged Angela, who knew the door was flimsy plywood. ‘You nearly had it then.’

  This time, when he kicked, his foot came right through the wood and waved about helplessly, trapped between jagged splinters.

  ‘Stop kicking and I’ll disentangle your foot,’ ordered Angela and, grasping the polished black shoe, she shoved him outwards. She heard him collapse in a noisy heap on the other side. ‘OK?’ she called.

  ‘Oh yeah, never better. I’ve just missed cracking my head on a sink.’

  ‘Well, excuse me, but I’m still trapped in here,’ snapped Angela. She was usually tongue-tied with boys, but it helped when you couldn’t see them. It did occur to her that she might be making a fool out of a hunk. ‘Actually,’ she went on, eyeing the hole in the door, ‘I can wriggle out through this gap. I’m pretty limber and my dress has no ruffly bits to get snagged. Here I come!’

  She thrust her arms through the hole and began to clamber out, then twitched in surprise as white-cuffed hands encircled her waist. As he pulled her towards him, the continuing shock of his touch made her arms go limp and her legs unhelpfully stiffen. ‘Jesus,’ he puffed manfully, ‘heavier than a sack of spuds.’

  She gathered herself off the freezing floor tiles and wiggled her spaghetti-strap dress back over her hips. ‘I’m actually quite small-boned and underweight for my height, not a sack of millet.’

  Then she risked looking at him. Not a hunk ‒ way too short for a start, and wearing an awful lilac-coloured cummerbund around trousers with mummy’s boy creases. He explained later that the cummerbund was standard issue for the ushers, a job he’d been corralled into as a friend of the groom’s.

  But even at that first encounter, Angela had been mesmerised by his eyes. Deep brown eyes with chocolate-dark irises, fringed by girly lashes. They gave his ordinary face a soulfulness, a depth that she subsequently never tired of falling into.

  His brown eyes met and held her prosaic grey-blue ones.

  ‘Oi!’ said a hotel person, stomping onto the scene and surveying the wrecked door. ‘You’ll have to pay for that. That’s wilful destruction of property.’

  ‘Huh, we should sue you for faulty door locks,’ said Robert, standing up for both of them and using the magical ‘we’ pronoun. ‘This lady’s cut her finger badly. I assume you have a first aid box at reception?’

  He successfully took command of the situation. That was the moment Angela fell in love with him.

  A week later, Angela got a jiffy bag in the post, containing a limited edition tin of mints to celebrate the frozen food factory’s centenary. It was clear from her scrawl on the compliments slip that Florrie had gone to courageous lengths: ‘These mints were earmarked for you by management who didn’t realise you’d left and I don’t see why you shouldn’t still get them even though the others wanted to keep them with the biscuits for elevenses.’

  Angela had been saddened to see an obit for Monty in The Wilmesbury Herald a couple of years later.

  Sitting up in bed, Angela switched on her laptop and browsed the jobs section of The Guardian website, vaguely recalling a job that might still be on it … here it was!

  Everybody loves Goss!

  It’s what makes the world go round.

  Wanna be a part of our world?

  Goss! is looking for a super sub who

  can spot a litiral at 50 paces, write

  sassy heads and captions, keep to tight

  deadlines and maintain a tip-top sense

  of humour at all times.

  Think you fit the bill?

  Goss! was a downmarket women’s weekly, big on makeovers, diets that let you eat chips, and tips on how to stuff cushions and lag pipes with rolled-up pairs of old tights. They were obviously desperate. Angela could tell from the sense of humour reference, though surprisingly, there was no mention of ‘team member’.

  Team-member was ad-speak for, ‘must be prepared to be humiliated and crapped on by people who’ve been there longer than you, so they can get a bad mood out of their system.’

  Angela was skilled at pretending to be a team member, though. It meant sloughing off every semblance of your individuality, like a snakeskin, the minute you revolved through that office door, and enduring the slings and arrows of some PMT-raddled cow (invariably your boss) without letting her see that you cared or that you fantasised about killing her.

  Angela had actually worked for a male boss once. God, what a treat that had been, like the Elephant Man living it up on a colony for the blind. Lazlo, chief sub at Women Today, had been gentle and patronising, compensating fitfully for his sexism by promoting Angela beyond her carefully concealed abilities.

  He was nice to her and to his other female subordinates, because he didn’t see women as his equals, and therefore wasn’t threatened by them. Angela reckoned that all women were born equal in each other’s eyes and would cheerfully slit each other’s throats for the key to the stationery cupboard.

  Oh Jesus, she thought, flopping back on her pillow, I have become paranoid in these last few years. I have allowed incidents from the past to grow out of all proportion. I shouldn’t be so down on my own sex, the oppressed sisterhood. I should apply to the desperate people at Goss!, even having the nerve to spot their ‘litiral’ at fifty paces. I need a job, I need the money, I need to appease Rache and Mum in different ways.

  Tomorrow, she’d dust off her CV. Tomorrow, she’d fire off an email that repaid the ad-speak with equally coded gimme-a-job-speak. The day after, she’d probably get the job by some freak of nature ‒ first choice candidate killed by a dangerously swung cat or something. If that happened ‒ if she got a job back in dreaded London ‒ would it then be too late to stop the world and get off?

  Chapter Two

  The nice people at Goss! were desperate enough to call Angela for an interview. She didn’t expect to get the job ‏‒ didn’t really want any job ‒ but she’d go for the interview experience. She’d only applied to Goss! because its office was within walking distance of Victoria station. No Tube trains would be involved. She hoped.

  There was always an outside chance that a suspect package would close Victoria on D-day. Then she might be re-routed to somewhere out of the way, like London Bridge and, as she’d never braved a London bus, that would leave the Tubes.

  Angela tried not to panic unduly. On the one hand, it was stupid to worry about factors beyond her control. On the other hand, it was better to clench her buttocks in anticipatory readiness. It was lik
e going to the dentist. If you dreaded a root canal and updated your will beforehand, you always got off with a scrape and a polish.

  Of course, over lunch in Baggio’s, Sadie was keen for more particulars of her new job.

  ‘What’s the hold-up with your start date?’ she waded in over starters.

  ‘No hold-up, Mum. It’ll definitely be within the next couple of weeks.’ By which time she’d have a convincing lie for the job’s disappearance. The hush-hush new mag would come a cropper before the first fence. But why? She quite fancied citing a spectacular row between the editor and the publisher over launching the first issue with an exposé of the late Jackie O’s allegedly kinky sex practices.

  Sadie prodded a spring onion under her dentures. ‘Will you be able to cope with the commuting to London? Remember, you gave it up four years ago because it stressed you out.’

  ‘Needs must,’ shrugged Angela uneasily. ‘I daren’t fail, with you and Rache nagging me to rejoin the rat race.’

  Angela had never told Sadie about the Tufnell Park incident. Sadie believed that Angela had given up work because the stress and spiralling cost of commuting had outweighed her modest salary. And because Robert hadn’t encouraged her to stick at it.

  ‘Let’s have no more talk of failure and nagging, lovey. You’ll put yourself under pressure before the off. I agree with Rachel that temping locally might’ve been a gentler baptism.’

  ‘So you’ve talked about me,’ muttered Angela.

  ‘We both care about you. You’ve become a bit of a recluse in that house. It’s not healthy.’ Sadie waved a salad-laden fork. ‘Look at me. I felt like giving up after Dad died. But I got on with it, took that job at the newsagent’s, readjusted. Of course …’ she met Angela’s hostile stare, ‘… it takes time. Nobody expects you to jump into a power suit and start running ICI.’

  ‘That’s a relief.’

  ‘I think you should start this job with a “so what?” attitude. So what if it doesn’t work out? With the initial experience under your belt, you’ll gain the confidence to pick and choose applying for other jobs.’