The fresh air cleared my head a little, and I arrived at work feeling more human than I had all morning. I showed my security pass to the guard at reception and weaved my way through the labyrinthine halls to my cubicle.
I work at an insurance company. I can’t say it was the exact profession I’d planned for myself – ‘I want to be a claims adjuster!’ said no thirteen-year-old, ever – but Number 9 on my list was a good, steady job with a good, steady salary, and that had been the logo on the banner for Jameson Hardwick Insurers at the college job fair. Literally: ‘Jameson Hardwick Insurers: A Good, Steady Career Path’. Not a particularly catchy motto, but it had appealed to me. It promised security and stability, the two things I craved the most. The nice people manning the booth had asked if I’d like to take a quick aptitude test – ‘Sure!’ I’d said brightly, sweating profusely in the polyester pantsuit I’d bought from The Express – and I’d aced it. They’d offered me a job straight out of graduation with full benefits, and a salary that was more than double the national average.
It turned out that I loved it, too. I know that everyone thinks that working in insurance must be boring – I can’t tell you how many people fake-snooze or make loud snoring noises when I tell them what I do – but it’s actually pretty interesting. No, seriously, it is. All day long, I get to read little stories about people’s lives and decide whether or not they’re true. Did the chip shop really burn down due to a grease fire, or did the owner’s brother-in-law have it in for him? Did the woman really suffer from third-degree burns because the coffee lid was faulty, or was she looking for an easy pay-out? Did the neighbor’s tree really fall on that man’s car because of an act of God, or was he trying to get him back for sleeping with his wife? See? Interesting, right? It’s like being a private detective without the need to wear a trench coat, chain smoke or talk out of the corner of my mouth.
‘Here she is!’ I arrived at my desk to find my cubemate, Ben, standing arms akimbo, hands on his skinny jeans-wearing hips. ‘It’s the BIRTHDAY GIRL!’
‘Shhh!’ I said, eyes darting around. ‘Someone might hear you! Anyway, it was yesterday, so you’re too late.’
‘Ah, that’s what you think. But I wasn’t in the office yesterday, which means I get a bonus celebration day.’
‘What kind of rule is that?’
He shook his head. ‘Don’t question the birthday rules or you won’t get any cake.’
My ears perked up. ‘There’s cake?’
‘Not just any cake.’ He reached under his desk and pulled out a small lurid-green cardboard box, which he presented to me with a flourish. ‘This is the motherload.’
I leaned in to take a closer look at the box in his hands. The top of the box was covered in cellophane, and inside lay a cake in the shape of a caterpillar. ‘The caterpillar cake!’ I’d told Ben during one of the long, meandering chats that seem to emanate from cube-sharing that I’d always wanted a Tesco caterpillar cake. Something about its stubby little face really tugged at my heartstrings. And now here it was, staring up at me with its edible little eyes. I shook my head. ‘I genuinely can’t believe you remembered.’
‘I couldn’t let the occasion pass without celebrating it properly. It’s unthinkable that you’ve been in this country for three whole years and have yet to sample the delights of the Tesco caterpillar.’
I lifted the top off the box, and Ben produced a plastic knife. ‘I feel bad cutting him,’ I said.
‘Actually, caterpillars lack nociceptors, so aren’t actually capable of feeling pain.’ I raised an eyebrow and he shrugged. ‘I watched a lot of David Attenborough as a kid.’
I hesitated for a minute, and then plunged the knife into the back of the caterpillar’s neck. Its little face flopped forward in a single slab, for ever severed from its body. This thought proved too much for me in my delicate state, and I felt the knot re-form in the base of my throat.
Ben took one look at me and slid our cube door closed. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, handing me a frosting-smudged napkin. ‘I know you said you weren’t a birthday person, but I thought you’d be pleased about the cake.’
‘I am!’ I wailed. ‘It’s great! I’m great!’
‘You don’t look so great to me, if you don’t mind me saying.’ He studied my face closely. ‘In fact, you look like shit.’
‘Gee, thanks,’ I said, wiping mascara and frosting around my face.
‘Come on, let’s sit you down.’ He pushed me gently into my office chair, and I rolled backwards to the edge of my desk. ‘Now tell Uncle Ben what’s the matter.’
I pulled a face at him. ‘Uncle Ben? Gross.’
‘Call me whatever you want, then. Just tell me what’s happening.’
‘It’s Christopher,’ I said, breath coming in stuttered bursts. ‘He’s— he’s—’
‘He not shagging someone else, is he?’ I took that moment to burst into tears, which Ben took as an affirmation. ‘He is, isn’t he! What an absolute cock-end. I knew it from the minute I saw him, with his stupid slick hair.’
‘What’s wrong with his hair?’ I squeaked.
‘I don’t know – it’s all shiny, or whatever. Cock!’ He reached across the cube and handed me another tissue. ‘Don’t you worry about him. He’s an arsehole and you’re better off without him. Arsehole.’
I managed to shake my head. ‘It’s not that,’ I said. ‘He’s not cheating on me.’
Ben looked oddly disappointed. ‘He’s not?’
‘No. It’s just – I thought he was going to propose last night, and then he didn’t, and then we got into a big fight, and then— and then—’ A fresh flood of tears exploded out of me. Where had I been storing all these tears, anyway? How did I have so much saline stashed inside my skull?
‘Ah, I see,’ Ben said, nodding sagely. ‘You women. Always looking to pin us down.’
I looked at him through a swollen gimlet eye. Ben was twenty-five, and his dating history, to my understanding, consisted of three years spent in unrequited love for a woman called Amanda at university, and the occasional drunken house party hook-up. ‘Some people want to settle down,’ I said, sniffing defensively.
He rolled his eyes. ‘Look, if a bloke doesn’t want to get married, he doesn’t want to get married. You should tell him to fuck off and then go out and sow your wild oats. I’ve got a couple of mates who are into older women – I could set you up!’
The older woman comment smarted more than I’d like to admit. God, imagine dating again. Surrounded by twenty-five-year-old idiots like Ben, who would think of me as some kind of cougar – if I was lucky. I tossed the crumpled napkin in the trash and leaned down to switch on my computer. ‘Thanks but no thanks.’
‘Suit yourself,’ he said. He pointed to the slab of caterpillar face resting on the table. ‘You going to eat that?’ I shook my head and watched as he took an enormous bite. ‘Look, the last thing I’ll say on the matter is this: you’re gorgeous, and any man would be lucky to have you. If Christopher can’t get that through his shiny head, you’re better off without him.’
I felt the tears threatening again and jumped up from my seat. ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ I said, and I grabbed my bag and ran to the ladies’ room.
3
The tiled wall at the back of the bathroom stall was cool, and I leaned back and let my head rest on it. A ball of wadded-up toilet paper rested in my open palm. I’d been in here for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes now, listening to the morning rush of women emptying their post-commute bladders and blotting off excess blush and swiping on lipstick. I waited them all out.
Sitting fully-clothed on a toilet while locked in a bathroom cubicle at work wasn’t a high point, and sooner or later Ben would send in a search party to rescue me. I took a deep breath and stared at the little silver latch that was keeping the outside world at bay. I knew I couldn’t stay in there for ever. But I wasn’t quite ready to leave my little bleach-scented cocoon.
I reached up and into my bag, w
hich was dangling from a hook on the back of the door. I might be going through an existential crisis, but I wasn’t about to let my bag touch the bathroom floor. I rummaged around until my fingers curled around my phone. I checked the time: 10.07. The case assignment meeting started in twenty-three minutes. That gave me time.
It was 5 a.m. in New York, but I knew Isla would be up, either patrolling the hospital corridors where she was a last-year neurosurgery resident or being ferried home from a BDSM club in an Uber. She was a rainbow of contradictions, my best friend.
I unspooled a fresh length of toilet paper as I listened to the phone ring out. She picked up right before the voicemail clicked in.
‘Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude!’ I could hear the sound of surgical equipment beeping and whirring in the background. Work, then. At least that meant she wouldn’t be on a come-down from anything. ‘How was your birthday? Did you play shot roulette like I told you to?’
My throat tightened. ‘Not exactly,’ I whimpered.
‘Shit.’ She heard it in my voice instantly. That’s what twenty years of friendship gets you. ‘Hang on a minute.’ There was the sound of clipped footsteps and a door opening and closing. ‘Okay, what’s going on?’
‘It’s Christopher.’
‘Has that motherfucker cheated on you? I swear to fuck, I am getting on a plane and I am going to kick his stupid English ass.’
‘He’s Welsh,’ I croaked, ‘and no, that’s not it.’
‘What then? He’s obviously done something wrong, the little shit. Honestly, the plane ride isn’t that long. I could be kicking his ass by dinnertime.’
I balled up the tissue and pressed it into my eyes. ‘He doesn’t want to marry me.’
‘What? How do you know?’
‘He told me!’
‘He told you that on your birthday? What kind of a sick fuck—’
‘Okay, he didn’t exactly say it. But he intimated it.’
‘What do you mean, he intimated it? How do you intimate something like that?’
‘I thought he was going to propose last night. Because—’
‘Because of the list.’ I could practically hear her eyes rolling back in her head.
‘I’m thirty-one now! You know this is the year I’m supposed to—’
‘Marry your soulmate – I know! I know! I was there when you wrote it, remember?’
‘Exactly. Which means you should understand.’
She sighed. ‘So you thought he was going to propose …’ she prompted.
‘He booked us into this super fancy restaurant – which turned out to be terrible, by the way—’
‘Never eat in a restaurant outside New York,’ she said. ‘That’s just basic common sense.’
‘But we ended up going to this Italian restaurant and there were candles and garlic bread and a man playing the piano—’
‘Very Lady and the Tramp.’
‘Exactly! Perfect, right? And the whole time I was just waiting for him to do it.’
‘Willing him.’
‘Waiting, willing – whatever. Anyway, we were crossing over the Thames, and there was moonlight, and water lapping, and sparkly city lights, and all of a sudden he dropped down on one knee, and I thought, this is it!’
‘But it wasn’t it.’
‘His shoelace was untied.’
‘Fucking shoelaces. Velcro should have made them obsolete. Oh, babe, I’m sorry. What a goddamn headfuck.’
‘I know. And then we ended up getting into this huge fight, and he was basically like, I’m not ready! And I was like, Why not? And he was like, I don’t know, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be.’
Isla heaved out a long sigh. ‘Where are you now?’
‘Crying in the bathroom at work. Obviously.’
‘Obviously. Okay, well, here’s how I see it. In times like this, there’s only one solution.’
‘Nunnery?’
‘Vegas.’
‘Vegas? What do you mean, Vegas?’
‘I mean we go to Vegas. You and me. It’ll give you a chance to get drunk and blow off some steam, and it’ll give him a chance to miss you. You know how men are. They don’t realize how much they need something until it’s threatened to be taken away from them. Like toddlers and their pacifiers. Or Americans and Obamacare.’
‘I don’t know … When were you thinking? Next month?’
‘Next weekend.’
‘Next weekend! What about work?’
‘Jenny, you live in Europe. Well, what used to be part of Europe. How many vacation days do you guys get over there? Fifty? A hundred?’
‘Twenty-five,’ I said quietly.
‘And how many of those days did you take last year?’
I hesitated. ‘Twelve.’
‘Jesus. Who are you, Bob Cratchit? “Oooh, please Mr Scrooge, may I have Christmas day off so I might eat a speck of goose?”’ Isla’s British accent was terrible.
‘Whatever. What about you? Don’t you have brains to operate on?’
‘Bobby Miller owes me a favor. Also, he’s desperate to get in my pants. He’ll cover for me.’
I searched my mind for more roadblocks. The thought of a spontaneous trip to the grocery store was enough to make me break out in hives, never mind a weekend in Las Vegas with the human hurricane that is Isla. ‘The flight will cost a fortune.’
‘Ah, there’s where you’re wrong. I have, like, a billion Air Miles thanks to all those boring pharma conferences I’ve been forced to attend. Thanks to Pfizer, I can totally swing your ticket and mine.’
‘Oh.’ That was it. Not a single obstacle in sight. ‘What will I say to Christopher?’
‘The man told you he didn’t want to marry you on your birthday. Do you really give a single flying fuck what he thinks?’
I thought about it. ‘No,’ I lied.
‘Good. Go talk to your boss now and email me when you have the all-clear. I’ll start researching hotels. I’m thinking penthouse suite.’
‘Is that somehow covered by Air Miles, too?’
‘No, it’ll be covered by one of my many little plastic card-shaped friends.’
‘Isla …’
‘Jenny …’ she mimicked. ‘I’m going to qualify as a fully-fledged neurosurgeon next year. Do you have any idea how much money people are going to pay me to cut their heads open?’ I felt momentarily queasy, though I couldn’t pinpoint if it was stemming from the thought of Isla operating on someone’s brain or of her being super rich. ‘Just let me do this, okay?’ She sounded serious. I knew it was pointless to argue.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
‘Ohhhhh my God, amazing. Amazing! We are going to have so much fun. Vegas isn’t going to know what’s hit it.’
The queasiness returned. I wasn’t someone who dropped everything and jetted off to Vegas. I was someone who planned a vacation a year in advance, researched the best options for travel insurance, and checked the Home Office website to make sure the threat level wasn’t above a sunny yellow. But these weren’t ordinary times, and I knew if I stayed in London, I would just stew. I had to get out. And there was no one I’d rather see at that moment than Isla.
After we hung up, I let myself out of the bathroom stall and spent a few futile minutes trying to mitigate the damage to my blotchy, swollen face before returning to my cube.
Ben looked up when I came in, concern etched across his face (along with a little dab of frosting – my grief hasn’t stopped him from polishing off the caterpillar’s face). ‘You okay?’ he asked.
I blinked. ‘I’m going to Las Vegas,’ I said, and then I sat down heavily in my chair and spun around to face my computer. It was time to get to work.
4
Things came together quickly. My boss was surprisingly relaxed when I asked him if I could take a last-minute long weekend. In fact, he’d been delighted. Apparently HR had made enquiries about my unused vacation time and were about to open an investigation into whether or not I was being bullied in the work
place. Ben agreed to cover my cases while I was away and even promised to keep a running tally of the number of times Jim and Christine – an office romance just on the verge of ripening – made vaguely sexual overtures towards each other at the tea station.
Christopher, for his part, looked completely stunned when I told him. He’d actually asked if I felt all right, as if I’d told him I had a rash rather than vacation plans. I’m fairly sure he would have rolled a glass across my arm if I’d let him. He adapted pretty quickly, though, and was helping me pack within the hour. ‘Are you sure a long weekend is enough?’ he’d asked as he’d tossed me my bathing suit. ‘Maybe you should take the full week.’
Isla sent me an e-ticket for my flight and a link to a website – she’d booked a suite at the Paris Hotel in the hope that it would make me ‘feel at home’ because it was ‘like Europe only baller’ – and before I knew it, Christopher was driving me to the airport in our little Peugeot, my case shoved in the back seat.
He sailed past long-stay parking – extinguishing the small hope I’d been harboring of him seeing me off at security – and pulled up to the drop-off lane outside Terminal 5. He kept the engine idling. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, tossing an arm around the back of my seat. ‘Maybe this break is a good thing.’
‘It’s not really a break,’ I said, checking my reflection in the flip-down mirror. I looked borderline undead. ‘It’s just a long weekend.’
‘What about – just a thought here – but what if we did think of this weekend as a break?’
I watched the hinge of my jaw go slack. ‘You mean, a break from us?’
He put his hands up in the air, as if the idea was something that had flown out of his head of its own volition. ‘It’s just a thought, but – well, things have been a little heavy between us recently, and with you going off to Vegas like this, it just feels like a natural sort of … sort of …’
‘Sort of what?’
Jenny Sparrow Knows the Future Page 3
