by Alex Marwood
‘… so Tania got talking to him and asked him what sort of girls he liked, and he said slim ones with olive skin, so I thought, you know, Ooh, I’m in with a chance …’
Amber feels loathing pump through her veins, wonders at the way pity can turn to contempt at the press of a button. She keeps her expression steady: neutral but serious. She’s not going to let her emotions get in the way of her revenge. The pleasure will be so much greater if the news comes out of the blue.
‘… and as it turned out, he had a cock like a baby’s arm,’ finishes Jackie.
Blessed starts back from the table as though Jackie has thrown a bucket of ice in her face.
‘Jacqueline! Please!’ she protests. ‘I don’t want to hear things like that.’
Jackie feigns innocence, grins at her. ‘What?’ she asks. Blessed’s eyes flash white, then she looks down, pursing her lips.
Jackie ploughs on contemptuously. ‘So I took him back to mine, and I’ll tell you what, he went like the Duracell bunny. All bloody night, it was, and then I couldn’t get rid of him in the morning. I’ve got bruises on my bruises …’
Amber doesn’t want to hear any more. She clears her throat.
Jackie looks up. Plasters a false welcome on to her face. Now that Amber knows, the dissimulation is obvious; the tiny gloat that hovers round the edge of the lips, the almost imperceptible up-and-down flick of the eyes. Jackie’s the sort of woman whose sex life is as much about scoring points as simple pleasure. Amber should have guessed that she herself would not be immune.
‘Hi,’ says Jackie.
‘Would you like some cheesecake?’ offers Blessed.
‘No, thank you, Blessed,’ she says. ‘Actually, I wanted a word with Jackie, if that’s OK.’
Again the little flicker. Jackie knows she knows. ‘Sure,’ she says.
‘In private, maybe?’
‘No, that’s fine,’ says Jackie: a challenge. You know you’re never going to expose yourself to ridicule, Amber Gordon. Go on. I dare you. ‘I’m sure you’ve got nothing to say that can’t be said here.’
Amber doesn’t hesitate; sits straight down and puts her clipboard on the table, face-down. Jackie’s P45 is clipped to the underside, but she doesn’t want her to see it yet.
‘OK, well,’ she says. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news.’
Jackie tenses. ‘What?’
Blessed sits forward.
‘Well …’ She’s been rehearsing for hours, locked in her office, studying her face for inappropriate expressions. ‘I had a meeting with Suzanne Oddie a couple of days ago.’
Jackie looks at her suspiciously.
‘And I’m going to give it to you straight. The management are worried about costs.’
‘Oh, right,’ says Jackie. A flush creeps up her neck. She knows where this is going.
‘There’s a recession on, you know,’ says Amber. She raises her voice, so she can be heard beyond their little huddle. ‘Anyway, there’s no point beating about the bush. I’m afraid that she wants me to make cuts, and they’re big ones. I’ve been going over and over the books, but there’s no alternative.’
Jackie is silent. Blessed shifts in her seat. Amber notices with pleasure that the tables around them have fallen silent; that everyone is listening. Some of the listeners will be feeling sick with concern for their own positions, she knows. Well, fuck ’em. It’s not like they’re friends. I know that now.
She continues, sticking to the communication plan she’s scraped together from the internet. ‘So I’m afraid that I have no alternative other than to cut back on staff,’ she says. Waits a couple of beats for the words to sink in. Waits for the gulp and the tightening of the lips. Turns over the clipboard and looks down at it.
‘Jacqueline,’ she says, enjoying the feel of the name rolling over her tongue, ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to let you go.’
‘What?’ says Jackie.
Amber looks up and smiles – an expression that only Jackie can read for what it is. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve tried every other avenue, and I can’t find another solution.’
‘Why me?’ asks Jackie. The flush has gone all the way into her face.
Amber keeps the smile steady. Reaches out and pats the hand that fiddles with the old black Nokia on the table. Jackie snatches it away as though Amber’s got the plague.
‘I’m sorry,’ says Amber. The fact that a drama is unfolding has spread through the room. It’s fallen silent, breath held all around. ‘It’s nothing personal. I’ve got your P45 here, and we’ll pay you to the end of the week.’
‘You can’t do this,’ says Jackie.
Amber pretends to get the wrong end of the stick. ‘Well, of course, we don’t have to pay you, if you’d prefer. After all, you’re casual staff. You don’t actually qualify for anything at all. But I wouldn’t want you to go short.’
Even the thick layer of fake tan on her face can’t disguise the fact that Jackie has gone deathly pale. She is beginning to shake. ‘Why me?’ she asks again.
‘Do you really want to do this here?’ asks Amber. ‘In front of all these people?’
‘Yes,’ says Jackie. ‘Yes, I do.’
Amber shrugs. ‘OK, then. As you like. I’ve chosen you because you’re the person who pulls her weight the least. I’ve looked at what everybody does, and you do the smallest amount of work in the hours you’re paid for. And you’re the first, Jackie, but I’m afraid you won’t be the only one.’
A frisson runs round the room. Right, thinks Amber. Bet you won’t be lingering quite so long over your buttered scones for the next few weeks.
‘I thought we were friends,’ says Jackie.
She almost cracks. Almost says what she wants to say: Some bloody friend, Jackie Jacobs. Instead she blinks, channels Suzanne Oddie and says, ‘I’m sorry. You can’t let your personal feelings get in the way of business.’
She unclips the P45 and the cash-filled envelope and pushes them across the table. ‘Of course, I’ll understand if you don’t want to finish your shift.’
My God, she thinks. This being-a-bitch is easy. And it’s taken me all these years to find out.
As if she can hear her thoughts, Jackie pushes her chair back from the table and says, quietly: ‘You bitch.’
Amber shrugs. ‘I understand,’ she says, in the HR style she’s been rehearsing all evening in her office, ‘that you’re upset.’ She’s had plenty of experience of job loss from the other side in her life, but had never noticed how calculated to cause offence a lot of human-resources-speak actually is. ‘It’s a stressful event for anyone.’
‘You fucking bitch,’ says Jackie, raising her voice. The faint buzz of talk that had begun in the further reaches of the room stops dead. All eyes are on them. ‘We both know why you’re doing this.’
She wouldn’t. Not in front of all these people, surely?
‘You’re getting rid of me because I fucked your boyfriend,’ says Jackie.
A hiss of indrawn breath behind her. Tadeusz and Blessed sit rigid in their chairs. Amber blinks. Holds her ground, says nothing.
‘Don’t try and pretend you didn’t know,’ says Jackie.
Amber allows herself a spiteful imitation of Jackie’s own words. ‘But Jackie. I thought we were friends.’
There’s not a movement in the room.
‘You found out, and now you’re getting your own back,’ says Jackie.
Well what did you expect? A bunch of flowers?
‘Trust me, Jackie,’ she says with a lilt of humour in her voice that would infuriate a saint, ‘if, as you put it, you … fucked … my boyfriend, all it means is that you’re not just lazy. It means you’re a lazy slag.’
Jackie looks like she’s been slapped. Amber is tempted to reach out and push her jaw closed with a finger. Instead, she picks up the form and the envelope and tosses them across the table.
‘Either way, you’re unemployed,’ she says.
12.30 p.m.
‘Oh my
God,’ says Jade, ‘you’re, like, so posh.’
Bel hasn’t thought all that much about the drive, or the house, or the effect they’ll have on her companion. They’re not hers, after all: they’re Michael’s, and her life’s been hostage to Michael and Lucinda’s choices since before she remembers.
‘No I’m not,’ she says. ‘What makes you think I’m posh?’
Jade laughs out loud, scornfully. ‘Are you mad?’ she asks, eyeing the two-hundred-year-old beech trees, the way they’re planted in a perfect line, a precise distance apart, along the length of the drive, masking the house at the end. Her own home is also set back from the road, also hidden from the glance of passing vehicles, but the approach is a muddy track where brambles, elder and blackthorn fight for primacy. To her, posh is having a shower attachment on the bath taps instead of having to use a mug to rinse your hair with. It’s eating things you actually recognise from the adverts on the telly. It’s scrapping your car when it can no longer be nursed through the MoT, rather than leaving it to feed the stinging nettles in the field. To Jade, the kids on the modern estate on the other side of the village are posh.
Where Jade comes from, ‘posh’ is an insult. To Bel’s people, it’s an expression of aspiration.
‘So have you got a swimming pool?’ she asks.
‘No.’
‘Pony?’
‘Miranda’s got a pony. Michael says there’s no point in me getting one, as you need to start at Miranda’s age to be any good.’
Even to Jade, this sounds like an excuse for unfairness. She squints sideways at Bel, but her face is impassive. Now there’s posh, she thinks. That face – the one where you don’t show any feelings, ever – is something only posh people are good at. She finds a fallen stick on the gravel of the drive, and swipes at the heads of the cow parsley on the verge. ‘I’m bloody starving,’ she says.
‘Nearly there,’ says Bel.
‘Who’s Miranda anyway?’
‘She’s my half-sister. She’s six. She’s Michael’s,’ says Bel, and doesn’t notice the purse of the lips that greets this statement. Every family has its moral code, and multiple parenthood is a violation of Jade’s. Her father may be free with his fists, but he’s never played away. It’s never occurred to her to wonder who would want to play away with a pig farmer who holds his coat together with binder twine.
They pass through the high wall, bathed in the baleful glare of stone lions, and see the house before them.
‘How many of you are there?’ asks Jade.
‘Four. And Romina. She lives in the flat,’ says Bel, and gestures at the stable-block to the right; a red-brick mini-me of the big house, right down to the tall, fluted, non-functional vanity chimneys. She feels a twinge of embarrassment as she speaks. Hopes Jade won’t judge her on her stepfather’s shameless display of superfluity. She’s glad the cars have been put away in the garage. Deduces that Jade doesn’t have a Range Rover, a Porsche and a Golf GTI lined up on her own gravel sweep.
‘Posh,’ says Jade, and starts towards the front door.
‘This way.’ Bel turns round the side of the house.
‘You don’t use the front?’
‘Nobody does, in the country,’ says Bel grandly, parroting her adults, then blushes. ‘N-no. I always use the back.’
Jade shrugs and follows. She doesn’t like the look of the front much anyway: the shutters are closed across the whole façade, the dead eyes of the house staring sightless into the empty courtyard. She follows Bel up a dank side path. After what feels like ten minutes of damp and foliage, they emerge at the servants’ entrance.
Bel puts her hand on the large brass door handle and pushes. The door doesn’t move.
‘Bugger,’ she says.
‘What’s up?’
‘Locked.’
‘We never lock our doors,’ announces Jade. They have nothing to steal. And anyway, the dogs would see any interloper off before they got within a hundred yards of the house. And if they didn’t, the sound of them would bring Ben Walker and his twelve-bore round from the pig sheds before they got past the washing lines.
Bel tries the door fruitlessly one more time, then starts off in the direction of the stableyard. Jade plods patiently in the rear. ‘Who’s Romina?’
‘Miranda’s nanny. She’s meant to be keeping an eye on me. Come on. She’s probably in the flat.’
She leads the way back up the alley and beneath the grand arched entrance to the stableyard. It’s quiet here, and shady: two wise, curious heads, one bay, one chestnut, appear at stable doors and watch them as they cross the flagstones. Bel greets them and receives a friendly whicker in response from the bay. ‘Trigger and Missy,’ she says.
Jade walks over and holds a hand out to be sniffed. Feels gentle velvet lips brush her skin, the snuff of warm damp breath on her fingers.
‘That one’s Trigger,’ says Bel.
‘Hi, Trigger,’ says Jade, and continues to rub the horse’s nose as she looks around. It’s a big-face stableyard, the sort that was originally built to house carriages. An elegant arched door, echoing the lines of the belltower arch under which they’ve just passed, leads to a barn. Funny, she thinks. I’d always heard it was really old, this house, but it looks brand new. There’s nothing out of place here.
Every door, apart from those of the two inhabited looseboxes, is closed and latched; a burglar alarm is conspicuous in its turquoise livery on the wall of the tack room. It’s weird, thinks Jade. I mean, you’d expect a wheelbarrow or a couple of hay-nets or some mucking-out tools or something. But the whole place looks disinfected, as though nothing ever happens to mess it up. It looks like someone’s come along with a bottle of Domestos and scrubbed it with a toothbrush.
Trigger, finding that Jade has no titbits, chaws down on her knuckles with his teeth. She snatches her hand away, then pushes his nose softly away from her with a clenched fist. ‘So which one’s Miranda’s?’ she asks, though both look to be sixteen hands high.
‘Neither. Trigger’s Michael’s and Missy’s Lucinda’s. They’ve just been brought in to be fittened up for hunting. Miranda’s pony’s in the bottom field.’
‘Mmm,’ says Jade. ‘Better not go over my dad’s land. He’d have your guts for garters.’
‘I don’t think anyone would want to hunt over your dad’s land,’ says Bel. ‘They’d lose the scent among all the pig shit.’
She glances sideways at Jade as she says this, to check what the reaction will be. She’s testing the waters, seeing how far she can go with teasing. Jade laughs. ‘Too right,’ she says, ‘and I don’t s’pose as the barbed wire’d be too popular neither. So where’s this flat then?’
‘Over here.’ Bel leads the way to a neat white-painted tongue-and-groove door by the side of the barn, its ornaments the same twisted black iron that decorates every other door and window in the complex. ‘Her car’s not here,’ she says. ‘She wouldn’t have parked it in the barn. She never puts it indoors when Michael and Lucinda are away.’
She rings the doorbell and they stand back as the sound echoes up the stairs. There is no response. Somewhere out in the cornfields a skylark gets up, twinkles its way into the blue, blue sky.
‘Bugger,’ says Bel.
‘What? She gone out?’
‘Dunno. Looks like it.’
‘I’m bloody starving,’ says Jade.
‘Yeah, sorry. Me too.’
‘Isn’t there a key somewhere?’
Bel eyes her.
‘Yeah,’ says Jade, ‘I’m not going to come back and burgle you.’
‘You have to promise,’ says Bel.
‘Whatever,’ says Jade, insulted. ‘I’ll go home if you like.’
‘No,’ says Bel hurriedly. ‘No, don’t do that. I didn’t mean … It’s just, you know, if I told anyone I’d be in, you know, doo-doo.’
‘“Doo-doo”?’ asks Jade. ‘Doo-doo?’
‘Shut up,’ says Bel. ‘Come on then. But if anything happens, I’m telling
. I don’t care how much trouble I get into.’
Bel opens the barn door and leads her inside. Through the gloom, Jade can see that the same pristine tidiness prevails here: a collection of lean, chromey cars that gleam, rustless and smearless, in rows so neat they might have been measured with a ruler. Walls and rafters are whitewashed and cobweb-free. Not a drop of oil or a tyre mark besmirches the swept golden concrete of the floor.
‘Bloody hell,’ says Jade. ‘How many cars has he got?’
‘Ten,’ says Bel. ‘Michael’s a collector.’
‘And they all work?’ asks Jade, thinking of her father’s own collection.
‘I think so. He doesn’t drive them. Except for car shows. He takes them to car shows, but only on a transporter. The Range Rover’s at the airport. And yeah, Romina’s car’s gone. She has to park it over there.’ She gestures to a dark corner.
‘Jesus, she must work hard.’
‘What?’
‘Keeping all this lot clean.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ says Bel. ‘Romina’s a nanny. Ramón and Delicious do the house stuff.’
‘Delicious?’ Jade starts to laugh. ‘What sort of name is Delicious?’
‘A Philippines name,’ replies Bel loftily. ‘They’re all called things like that.’
‘Where’s Philippine?’
‘The. The Philippines. They’re near Hong Kong. That’s where Michael picked them up. Hong Kong. That’s where he used to live. That’s where he made his money.’
Jade shrugs. Hong Kong means no more to her than France; both, she knows, are abroad, and she’s only ever been as far as Oxford twice. London is as strange and as foreign – and as uninteresting – to her as either of the countries Bel has named. ‘Well, why don’t you get them to let you in?’
‘They’ve gone home for their holidays. While the house is empty.’
‘But it’s not!’
‘You know what I mean,’ says Bel, and goes over to where a pile of tyres, clean and unmarked as though they have never seen a road, is stacked neatly in a corner.
‘Who looks after the horses?’
