I hadn’t even told her about the needing-hair-for-a-voodoo-spell part of the equation. Neither did she know that I had already seen my rival in the flesh twice before.
“I just need to know that there’s nothing I can do to get Michael back. If his new woman and I are completely different from each other, then I will know that it’s a lost cause, won’t I?”
“Stop!” Becky commanded. “You are going insane. It doesn’t matter what she’s like. It matters what Michael is like. And we’ve established, over the past weeks, that Michael Parker is a Class-A Twat. End of story.”
“You don’t really think it’s that simple. You remember what you were like when you broke up with Rob.”
I heard a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the phone. Prior to meeting her fiancé, Henry, Becky would have told anyone who asked that Rob Young was the love of her life and always would be. Becky had spilled a lot of tears over Rob Young. She nearly spilled actual blood, as well, when she heard that he’d replaced her with a former friend from teacher-training college.
“I do remember what I was like,” she said softly. “And with the benefit of hindsight, I can see that all that crying was a total waste of time. Rob was right to end our relationship. It was going nowhere. As soon as one of you wants out, it is over. When I think how much happier I am now that I’m with Henry, and how I might never even have met him if Rob hadn’t dumped me and I hadn’t forced myself to go on that singles boating weekend, I shudder to think I might have missed out on meeting the real man of my dreams …” Her voice quavered a little, as though she were actually shuddering. “Benefit from my hard lessons, Ashleigh. Do not attempt to see Michael’s new girlfriend or inveigle your way into her life in any way. If I hear that you have attempted to become her new best friend in order to find out what’s going on, I will call the hospital and have you sectioned.”
“So, you’re really not going to help me …”
“But I am helping you,” said Becky. “I am refusing to enable you in making an utter fool of yourself.”
I didn’t see it. What I saw was Becky being unreasonably squeamish about helping me do whatever it took to get Michael back, or, as far as she was concerned, start moving on. And hadn’t she spent the past few weeks telling me that move on was exactly what I needed to do?
Had she asked the same of me, I would have done it. In fact, I had done something similar on her behalf! I remembered now that I had hidden in a bush outside Rob Young’s house to get a positive ID on the woman who had replaced Becky in his affections. At Becky’s request! She had conveniently forgotten about that. I called her back and reminded her.
“Ashleigh,” she sighed. “What can I do but apologize for having involved you in my madness? There are still days when I wake up in a cold sweat as I remember the depths that I sank to over that stupid man. I would not wish that feeling on anybody. Especially not you, my best friend. And that is why I am going to save you the misery. You may not thank me now, but you will. Good night.”
I was not very pleased. But she was not my last resort. I could still ask for help from the one person who was contractually unable to refuse. My personal assistant, Ellie. I would give her my instructions first thing the following day.
“You want me to call this upholsterer woman and ask her to come in and look at the company’s sofas?” she repeated as though I were some kind of idiot.
“Yes,” I said. “What’s so funny about that?”
“But they were new last year,” Ellie pointed out. “There’s nothing wrong with them.”
“I know,” I said. “But I can’t help thinking that the black leather and tubular steel combo is a bit flash. A bit eighties. Too Loadsamoney. It’s not very new austerity, is it? Not very ‘credit crunchy.’ ”
“Neither is spending even more money to re-cover a sofa that’s only twelve months old, with no obvious wear to it,” said the clever little cow.
“Ellie,” I said, “don’t worry yourself about it. You’re not expected to know anything about the budgets. Just call the number and make an appointment. It won’t cost anything to get a quote.”
Ellie gave me that weird look again. “If you insist,” she said.
“I do insist,” I told her.
Bloody Ellie. Every day I wondered why I had given Ellie the job rather than any one of the other eight candidates I interviewed for the position. At the time she had seemed the most simpatico. I daresay she reminded me a little of myself. She was quietly spoken. She seemed a little shy. I wanted to give her a leg up. I wanted to help her get ahead, just as my first boss had been kind enough to see potential in me. And for the first month of Ellie’s tenure (her probation month), I thought I had been proved right. She was sweet and deferential and eager to please, but after that, when her probation period was over and she knew I wouldn’t be able to get rid of her without a fight, it was as though she’d had a personality transplant. She became chippy and sarcastic. She did her best to undermine me at every turn. I swear I even overheard her telling another assistant in the company that she thought of me less as her mentor than “plain mental.” “I really don’t know how she got to such a senior position,” Ellie had continued. But the fact was, I was in a senior position to her and I had to remember that. If I asked her to jump, Ellie was only supposed to ask, “How high?” There was to be no questioning of my authority. Right?
About ten minutes later Ellie poked her head around the office door and told me, “They’re sending someone around on Friday at four thirty.”
“Someone?” My ears pricked up. “Didn’t they specify who?”
“No.” Ellie shrugged. “Why would they?”
“I want the woman I asked you to call. Her specifically.”
“So, let me get this straight, you want this woman in particular to come in and quote for re-covering our sofas, which don’t need re-covering. You don’t want to have to deal with her yourself but she has to come in when you’re in the office.”
“What’s so difficult about that?” I asked in exasperation.
“There’s nothing difficult about it,” said Ellie. “I can fix just about anything. But it’s weird.”
“It’s not weird. I’m too busy to deal with the upholstery myself, but I want to be sure that they don’t send some monkey apprentice who’s going to get the measurements wrong. Someone gave me her name and told me she’s the one to use.”
“Have you cleared this with Barry?” Ellie asked. Barry was the managing director. “Only surely there’s no point going through this rigmarole at all if he’s just going to turn around and say that we’re not allowed to spend any money on office furnishings. You remember that meeting we had at the beginning of the year. ‘Careless spending costs jobs’ and all that.”
How could I forget? Barry’s Second World War style of dealing with the credit crunch had caused a great deal of hilarity for us all. He’d tried to set an example by bringing in homemade sandwiches for a week before reverting to using the local Pizza Express as his canteen. Neither did he seem to see the irony in exhorting us all to save money, then wasting a sheaf of A4 by insisting that we all have printed copies of the three-page email memo he sent on the subject, so that we could pin them above our desks and see his ‘Careless spending costs jobs’ slogan every time we looked up.
I addressed Ellie’s concern. “If and only if this upholsterer woman is up to my exacting standards, I will let Barry know what I think, which is that a little money spent now on making the office look more à la vent could be a valuable long-term investment, as visiting clients will see that we’ve moved on from the age of bachelor-pad-style bling.”
“À la vent?” said Ellie.
“It’s French,” I told her. “Look it up.”
Exit Ellie with much eye rolling. But she did report back later that afternoon to confirm that the proprietor of Well-Sprung herself would be taking the appointment on Friday.
“Good,” I said. “Now, wasn’t that easy? And thin
k how much easier it would have been if you’d just done what I asked in the first place.”
“Weirdo,” said Ellie under her breath. She thought I didn’t hear.
Really, she was shaping up for a very bad half-yearly review indeed. Assuming I dared give her a bad review when we found ourselves eyeball-to-eyeball over the board table.
Having arranged a meeting, or at least a chance to see Miss Well-Sprung up close again, I had a new sense of focus.
When Friday rolled around, I spent most of the day feeling slightly sick as I waited for the moment when my rival would arrive. I’d had my hair done that lunchtime. It was an extravagance, but if Miss Well-Sprung worked out who I was, then I wanted her to be able to report back to Michael that I was looking great. Fabulous even. Obviously doing very well without him, thank you very much. What’s more, I wanted her to feel intimidated. I also changed into a DVF wrap dress.
Ellie frowned when she saw me. “Do you have a meeting that I don’t know about?” she asked. I could tell that this was a source of anxiety for Ellie, who did not like to be left out of anything that might aid her rise to the top of the company tree. “Or”—and this she said with an air of disbelief—“a date to go to after work?”
“I just wanted to wear a dress, okay?” I snapped back at her. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing.” Ellie shrugged. But later on I heard her utter the word “menopause” while she was on the phone to one of her friends.
Menopause? For heaven’s sake. I was thirty-two.
Anyway, I got absolutely nothing done that day. How on earth could I concentrate on anything but the arrival of Miss Well-Sprung? I practiced a hundred thousand casual lines in my head.
Do I know you? she might ask me.
I don’t think so, I’d say.
Hold on, she’d reply. I definitely do know you. Or, rather, I know your face. Michael still has your picture by his bedside.
There was fat chance that she would actually say that, but at least if she did I knew I would be able to laugh a lightly disdainful laugh at the thought and tell her, Michael? Oh, you must mean Michael Parker. That’s ancient history! But please do give him my regards.
At half past three the buzzer rang. She was right on time. I positioned myself near the open door to my office and pretended to be tidying my bookshelf so that I would be able to get a good look at her.
Miss Well-Sprung was in the office for just twenty minutes. She took a few measurements of the black leather sofas and left Ellie with a folder of fabric samples and a company brochure. I watched as Ellie shook hands with her and pointed her in the direction of the office. Miss Well-Sprung did not even glance in my direction. What a waste of well-practiced, witty one-liners.
I rushed out of my office. “What was she like?” I asked Ellie.
Ellie shrugged. “What do you mean? She seemed to know what she was doing.”
“Yes, but what was she like?”
“She seemed like a nice enough person. She left this”—Ellie handed me a book of swatches—“for you to choose the material you want. Assuming Barry approves.”
“Of course Barry won’t approve,” I said. “You may as well have this couriered back to her.”
I was certain that I would have what I needed soon enough.
I had to wait until everyone had left the office to look for my precious hair. There was bound to be one. I’d seen plenty of forensic-science documentaries. I knew that we’re all shedding hundreds of hairs each and every day. Unfortunately, bloody Miss Well-Sprung didn’t seem to be. There were no hairs whatsoever on the black leather sofa. I pounced on a long hair that lay across Ellie’s desk, but close examination of said hair against a sheet of white paper seemed to suggest that it was more likely to be mine than my rival’s.
I scoured the floor around Ellie’s desk and did an inch-by-inch search of the lobby, where I happened upon a hair that looked decidedly pubic. I discarded that with a shudder. After a further hour on my knees I found another hair, slightly darker than any I had on my head and longer than any that might have belonged to Ellie. It wasn’t very long, but I decided it had to be one of Miss Well-Sprung’s. I pressed it between two sheets of notepaper and put it in my diary for safekeeping as I headed home.
Back in my kitchen, I opened the sock and quickly slipped that single hair inside alongside the curious ingredients that Martha had promised would make my wish come true. To do the rest, I had to wait until darkness fell, which was late as we were almost at the summer solstice. When darkness did arrive, I donned my scarf and my sunglasses (with the single lens), then cycled to Michael’s apartment complex and tried to work out where I could plant the sock to best effect.
How had I not noticed before that River Heights was part of a concrete jungle? There were two tiny flower beds on either side of the main gate, but neither was any good. If I understood Martha correctly, then the spell sock had to be placed so that Michael and Miss Well-Sprung would actually step over it each time they went into River Heights. They were unlikely to clamber over the flower beds when a perfectly good path ran between them.
As I pondered my dilemma, the night guard stepped out of his gatehouse for a cigarette break and I realized that he had spotted me. Hanging around the gate with my face covered by the scarf and my one-lensed sunglasses, I must have looked a little odd to say the least. The guard extinguished his cigarette and walked toward the gate.
“Wrong building,” I said, and with a cheerful little wave, I hopped on my bike and continued down to the end of the cul-de-sac in the hope that the guard would be satisfied that I was just an innocent cyclist who’d gotten lost.
I was too spooked to do anything that night. The following evening I returned only to be foiled by the guard again. This time he was standing right outside the gates on his cigarette break. On the third night he was there once more and definitely spotted me on my approach, still wearing the sunglasses and scarf. I was desperate to get the curse under way by now, so I brazened it out and decided to hang around until he went back inside. I cycled on by as though going to the other building again.
At the bottom of the cul-de-sac, I waited for five minutes in the shadow of the large bushes that surround Riverside Point, the slightly nicer building that Michael hadn’t been able to afford to buy into. I watched and waited for my moment. As soon as the guard at Michael’s complex went back into his hut, I was on my bike and pedaling like Lance Armstrong, pausing only to drop the voodoo sock through the grate outside the main gates. If the guard noticed, there was nothing he could do about it. I had deployed my curse.
“Hey! Watch out!” I was so busy making my getaway that I almost cycled into Michael as he walked down the pavement toward home.
“You could have bloody killed me!” he shouted after me.
I laughed out loud. I actually cackled! Perhaps the curse had already started working.
So, I had delivered the spell to Michael’s door. All I could do now was wait. And worry. The more I thought about it, the more it occurred to me that I had made a mistake by dropping the sock into the grate. Grates mean drains, and that drain doubtless led down to the sewer. In all probability the sock had been washed out into the Thames within hours of being dropped through the grate. Michael and Miss Well-Sprung would not have to step over it at all.
After a week had passed without Michael calling to tell me that Miss Well-Sprung had left and he wanted me back, I began to think that the thousand pounds from Mum’s loan had been well and truly wasted. I’d been an idiot. Not only was Michael still happily apart from me, every time I spoke to Mum on the phone I had to tell her what I’d learned at my dog-grooming course.
Worse was to come when Mum and Dad threw a buffet lunch to celebrate their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. As soon as I walked in, I was cornered by one of my parents’ neighbors, Mrs. Charlton, proud owner of two standard poodles called Roxy and Satin (or Rocky and Satan to anyone who had the misfortune of crossing them).
&nb
sp; “Your mother tells me you’ve been doing a dog-grooming course.”
“Er, that’s right.” What else could I say?
“She said that you’re going to need lots of dogs to practice on, so I told her you could borrow Roxy and Satin. I can’t afford to take them to the proper grooming salon anyway. Not now I’m a pensioner.” She paused.
I knew I was expected to sympathize.
“If you want to do them this afternoon, I can give you my keys and you can go around there while your mum’s getting the buffet ready.”
“But I’ve got my party clothes on,” I said by way of an excuse.
“You can borrow my apron.”
“Perhaps another day.”
“They really need to be done now. It’s going to get hot next week.”
“Oh, go on,” said my mother, who had appeared at my side with a dish full of cocktail sausages. “It’ll only take half an hour, won’t it? You could even bring the dogs over here. So we could all watch.”
I felt the walls closing in. Never had I been so grateful for the intervention of my brother, who said first, “You can’t bring Rocky and Satan over. Ben hates them.”
“If Ben was properly trained …,” Mrs. Charlton began.
Then Lucas scored another point. “Auntie Joyce is here,” he said to me. “Come and help me get her out of the taxi.”
I may have pulled a muscle helping her out of the back of the cab, but Auntie Joyce was and always had been one of my favorite relatives. She was actually my great-auntie Joyce. Her sister, my maternal grandmother, had been a judgmental old bag, given to such outrageous pronouncements on my love life as “Why don’t you just give up and become a lesbian?” But Joyce was sweet and disinclined to cause a fight. My grandmother said it was because she had overdone the sherry.
Anyway, Auntie Joyce had never married. As far as I knew, she had never had a man in her life at all, which perhaps explained her unlined forehead and the generally untroubled demeanor that she had carried with her well into her eighties.
Getting Over Mr. Right Page 10
