‘Too late for me to be saved from being a boring stick-in-the-mud who nobody wants to be around.’
That was my growing fear. You’re forced to give up so much to the job that it makes you unattractive: in non-physical ways, though your appearance can certainly suffer too. It becomes a vicious circle. The job is all you can talk about, all you can think about because there is nobody else at home to change the subject, to occupy your time and your thoughts. Then you reason that as it’s the only thing in your life, you might as well dedicate more time to it, to be as good at it as you can. Gradually you become a machine, and you can lose your humanity. You begin to lose contact with what it is to be a normal person, living a normal day-to-day life, and once that process is in motion, the prognosis is bleak.
‘Well, you’re not there yet, or I wouldn’t have invited you,’ Peter assured me.
‘You’re only saying that because I’ve got a machine gun.’
‘Mine’s bigger than yours. And it’s all about balance, isn’t it? I think I could use a bit more of what you’ve got. It’s been said – not always with the greatest discretion, hence my awareness of it – that I’m a case of wasted potential. Acting the kid too much. If you want to get ahead, you have to get serious, don’t you?’
‘Well, don’t stop acting the kid quite yet,’ I told him, reloading my magazine with hundreds of the tiny white plastic balls. ‘I’m just getting the hang of this.’
Which was why, sometime later, I was prepared to tolerate the sting of sweat in my eyes and the digging of tree roots into my ribs in order to remain concealed, even when down to my last few rounds.
Peter raised himself up on to his elbows, scanning the trees. I pulled myself into a tight crouch alongside. The woods were so dense that it was dark as dusk, visibility down to single figures and not helped by peering through the aluminium mesh covering the mask’s eyeholes.
Suddenly there was movement somewhere ahead, a volley of shots. They weren’t aimed at us: merely where someone thought we were. Nonetheless, we reacted instantly, rolling back into the trench. I ended up on top of Peter, only for a moment. Our faces were centimetres apart. We had masks on, and couldn’t see into each other’s eyes, but I think we both noticed I stayed there a fraction longer than natural momentum dictated.
It was a last-man-standing game, and from the complete absence of friendly armbands we had spotted over the past fifteen minutes, it looked like we were all that remained of the red team.
‘I think we’re done,’ he confessed. ‘We should surrender, and they can kick off the next game.’
‘Sod that. I’m not losing again.’
‘Don’t worry about it. You’re doing great. And remember, Serious Girl, it’s just for fun.’
He obviously hadn’t met many surgeons.
‘Winning is fun.’
‘Okay, so how do you plan on doing that?’
‘Knife. Give me it.’
Peter reached down to his belt and handed over a foam-plastic dagger.
It had been explained at the start that if you could successfully ‘stealth’ an opponent and tap them on the shoulder with one of those, they were out, and unlike when they were shot, they could not yell out ‘Hit!’, as it would give away your position.
‘You’ve got the big gun. Draw their attention. I’ll do the rest.’
I grew up with two brothers who would have loved to exclude me from their games, and doubtless would have succeeded had I been younger and smaller, but I wasn’t. I became adept at sneaking up on them; at sneaking up on anybody. I learned balance, how weight distribution affected footfalls and other sounds, and in particular I learned to be very slow and very patient.
In this game for bigger boys, I only had to be particularly stealthy once: when I was sneaking back through their slowly closing circle. Then I was behind them as they closed in on where they thought Peter was holed up, their attention concentrated exclusively upon any sound or movement that might give away his position or herald a shot from his rifle.
I tapped them on the shoulder and said: ‘Shh.’ One by one they fell as I moved in my silent spiral, until only Peter remained. And then I snuck up and tapped him.
He sighed in defeat, then turned around and saw that it was me.
Somewhere in the woods, a guy with a megaphone was announcing that the red team had won.
‘You’re absolutely lethal,’ Peter said. ‘Nobody saw you coming.’
‘Nobody ever does.’
WASTED
They walked slowly along the side closer to the river, scanning for indications that a car had gone over the edge and down the slope. The water ran twenty feet or so below the level of the road at this stretch, at the foot of a steep banking.
‘No crash barrier,’ Rodriguez noted. ‘Is that not a bit remiss if it’s a known blackspot?’
‘The previous casualties haven’t been people going off the road. It’s eejits smacking head-on into oncoming vehicles because they’ve misjudged the bend, or more commonly round here, they’re trying to overtake in a completely inappropriate place. Wait till you’ve been here a while, you’ll see: some of them act as though they’ve got radar.’
Rodriguez kept crouching low to the ground, running one hand along the top of the grass, the other training his torch a few feet in front of him. Ali was pointing hers down towards the water. The beam picked out tufts and bushes before the flat blackness. It didn’t shimmer so much here: it was slow and deep.
‘Got tread marks, I think,’ Rodriguez announced. ‘The grass is flattened here.’
Ali pointed her torch where he was indicating, and then a few feet along. There was a second indentation, around six inches wide.
‘Looks parallel,’ she said.
They proceeded cautiously, picking out every step with care under the beams of both their flashlights. The indentations were sporadic, vanishing and then resuming again, sometimes visible on one side, sometimes the other, but always the same distance apart.
Ali stopped Rodriguez a few yards from the edge. They played their torches down the rest of the slope, picking out where their progress ended.
‘Shit. I’m going to be popular.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we’ll need to scramble a helicopter to search along the river, and we’ll have to call out a diving team as well. There’s no choice, but I’m about to put a big hole in the budget for nothing. It’s what, quarter past three now? That call went out at about two forty-five. Anybody who went into that freezing water half an hour ago and didn’t come straight back out is already dead.’
KISS WITH A SPELL
You never forget the first time you kiss somebody. A tender act somehow more intimate than when you first sleep together, because in that moment, you are so utterly vulnerable: it feels as though so much is at stake, like everything can change in one delicate act, one exquisite touch. No matter what happens after that, for good or bad, it is a memory that plays back via all the senses, a point in time you can return yourself to with absolute clarity. It is a precious treasure at the heart of the growing hoard in a relationship that strengthens and endures, and it is the bittersweet remnant you cannot purge from your mind when everything has turned to ashes.
Bittersweet, yes: not merely bitter, because it is the sweetness that burns. It is the feelings of joy and excitement and desire and hope that remain so painfully vivid. If I close my eyes right now I can feel, see, hear, smell and taste everything about that kiss, and I can become again who I was in that moment. I can see the future as it appeared to me then, and remember the two of us as the people I believed us to be.
I wish I could erase all of it, but I can’t. I wish I wasn’t so easily taken back there by hearing a song on the radio, or catching a scent of curry on damp clothes. But mostly I wish I could delete what I said to him the instant before our lips met, because that is what truly mocks me now.
I felt exhausted but exhilarated as Peter drove us both back to Inverness. In a day
replete with me surprising myself, for an encore I realised that I couldn’t wait to tell people at work what I’d been doing. In the past I’d have been looking forward to telling colleagues about the seminar or conference I had attended over the weekend, but this prospect was so much more exciting. It was the thought of shocking them, of seeing their perceptions of me given such a shake. I even rather malevolently fantasised about phoning up and telling my father, to appal him. The boys-and-toys factor would have rubbed salt too.
‘Thank you so much for today,’ I said to him, as we pulled up outside my house. ‘And thank you for not telling me. I think I’m starting to remember what fun is.’
‘Yeah, if you ever need a dose of enjoyable pointlessness in your life, I’m your man. Honestly, when I have kids, they’ll be the ones dragging me away from the play-park. That’s half the reason I’d want to have them: an excuse to do silly stuff; to just play.’
I caught myself noting that he wanted children. I tried to pretend it was an idle thought, but I was fooling nobody.
‘Kids should do silly stuff,’ he added, looking more reflective. ‘I had a little too much seriousness, too much properness in my childhood. That’s why my inner kid is a bit too close to the surface: he’s finally got the keys, so he’s driving half the time. And that’s why I’m glad I met you. You say you’re boring but I think you’re inspiring. You make me want to screw the nut and make more of myself.’
‘Thank you.’
I reddened, my fingers gripping the door handle. My instinct was to feel awkward and thus to bail in a heightened moment like this, and then inevitably I’d go away and over-analyse it later. The thing was, right then I didn’t feel awkward, and whatever was heightened about this moment, I wanted more of it.
‘Actually, and I feel slightly guilty about this, but can I undo my good influence and tempt you not to screw the nut for a few more hours? Pub and a curry? You weren’t going to change everything with one evening’s programming anyway, were you?’
‘That’s precisely the internal logic that’s kept me from being a millionaire. I like your thinking.’
Despite being the one who had proposed an evening at the pub, I took the car into town. This was for two reasons: one was that I had a laparoscopic colectomy in the morning and needed to be sharp; but more immediately I wanted my judgement to be as keen the night before. While I was getting showered and changed, I had been struck by an unaccustomed feeling of giddiness, of which I was instinctively wary.
As I took my seat opposite Peter, watching the overspill pool on the dark wood at the bottom of his pint glass, I felt a sense of freedom. Normally on a Sunday evening my mind would be already on the next day’s work, yet being in the pub with its sights and smells and the hubbub of chat served to remind me that Sunday evening was still the weekend if I wanted it to be. Emily was often posting on Facebook about going out with colleagues and students, referring to Monday-morning hangovers with what was ostensibly ‘old enough to know better’ regret, but which I recognised as perverse pride.
I could barely remember the last time I had done this. I used to go out with friends – colleagues – but these days they all had kids or spouses. There didn’t seem to be as many girls’ nights as there once had been. It was only really at Christmas that the department went out together: big gatherings, trying to show a social side to the trainees. Even then, it tended to be one or two drinks then off to a restaurant where they had a mass booking for about thirty people. To me it seemed to defeat the ends of socialising to go out in such a huge group, as in practice you only got to talk to the four or five people sat closest to you, and if you were unlucky they were the four or five people you had been hoping to avoid. That said, maybe I was the one that most people didn’t want to get stuck with. Certainly the younger trainees seemed rather skittish around me.
But that Sunday night was like the nights out I remembered from when I was younger, when I felt like I was winning. Simply chatting, laughing and enjoying an atmosphere that seemed all the more convivial because of the awful weather that had blown in all of a sudden. There’s nothing quite like rain lashing the windows to make you feel snug, and I was feeling particularly cosy that evening. It was starting unmistakably to resemble a date. Apart from there being only the two of us, the conversation was venturing ever deeper into getting-to-know-you territory.
I talked about the whole Bladebitch thing because I wanted my side of it out there, and because, despite our conversation of Friday night, I still felt we had to get past it. He was sympathetic, and by that I don’t just mean he agreed with me, or acted like he agreed with me in order to keep the atmosphere pleasant. What surprised me was that he had clearly thought about the issues behind the blog, rather than merely the business of my being hacked and exposed. Too many men dismissed the blog as a catalogue of career-specific feminist grievances. Peter understood that it was really about work-life balance.
‘I once heard someone say that what you need in order to be happy is something you like to do and someone you like to be with,’ he told me. ‘The first shouldn’t prevent the second: that’s all you’re saying, isn’t it? And the danger is that giving too much to the first makes you forget all the good things about it.’
From there he got me talking about happier times in my career, and I remembered the person I used to be not so long ago, the girl who was taking on the world. For the first time in ages I believed she might be coming back.
It was bucketing down with rain when we came out of the curry house, the crisp clear weather of earlier like a memory of a different day. We made a sprint to my car after I said I’d drive him home. He lived in town, but even at a ten-minute walk he’d be drenched by the time he got home.
He directed me to pull up outside a recently built residential development: twin compact blocks of modern apartments. I had passed them a hundred times and always thought they seemed corporate and soulless, though they looked toasty and dry on a night like this. My own place, by contrast, looked like anyone’s idea of a cosy cottage, but it was draughty from so many little nooks that it was a bugger to keep warm.
There was a moment’s silence between us after I put the car in neutral and pulled on the handbrake. It was as though we both still had so much to say but were burdensomely aware that time had run out, not only on the evening, but on a very special few days.
It felt like the weekend needed a denouement. A cheerio or a ‘see you on Monday’ would have seemed so deflatingly banal. I was trying to think of something appropriate to say, but really I didn’t want to talk.
Peter spoke quietly, barely audible above the music playing on the car stereo.
‘At the risk of blowing it merely by saying this, I want to kiss you. But I’m afraid if I do that, I’ll break whatever magic spell is keeping you interested in me. Like the opposite of the princess and the frog: suddenly I’d be changed into someone you want nothing to do with.’
‘I don’t believe in fairytales,’ I told him. ‘People don’t just transform into something else overnight. So kiss me.’
ACCIDENTS AND AFTERMATHS
‘You’re a life-saver,’ Ali told Rodriguez, instantly regretting her choice of words. He was handing her a polystyrene cup full of steaming hot coffee. It was as welcome as it was thoughtful, but the stark reality was that nobody was saving any lives out here today.
She watched the bubbles appear in sporadic fizzing bursts upon the water’s surface. The scuba team had arrived about half an hour back and hit the water by the first light of dawn. When she called it in, she was told they wouldn’t be able to get there for at least two hours, so the decision was taken to hold off until morning, as their involvement was never going to be a rescue mission.
Ali had been here all night, spending much of it deafened by the sound of the helicopter as it strafed the riverbanks with its searchlight. Despite the freezing cold, she had actually broken into a sweat from shuttling up and down the slope between the river and the road, clambering
over rocks and clumping through vegetation. They were combing the banks either side to see if anyone had crawled from the water and collapsed, or maybe dived from the vehicle before it hit the water.
The search had been joined by as many police bodies as they could spare, which at that time was not a lot. Their numbers were further depleted when Murdo McKay lost his footing near the water’s edge and fell in. They got him out in a matter of seconds, but the terror, shock and pain on his face and the deathly blue colour of his lips was a reminder of how futile this search was likely to prove.
They got him out of his wet clothes and wrapped him in a heavy waterproof jacket Ali always stashed in the boot of her patrol car. Some shifts you were barely out of the vehicle, but experience had taught her there was always the possibility you could end up standing outside in the freezing cold for hours on end.
It was when the ground search was declared over and she no longer had the exercise to keep her warm that the sweat started to cool under her uniform and she really felt the need of that coat.
Rodriguez had driven Murdo to the hospital. There were paramedics in attendance but they had to stay at the scene in the decreasingly likely chance that a survivor was found. When he returned, he was carrying two coffees, one of which he handed to Ali.
She hugged it like it was a miniature radiator.
‘You look perishing,’ he said. ‘I thought you natives were used to the cold.’
Natives, he said. He got points for that. He was going by the accent rather than her appearance.
‘There’s this young polar bear,’ she told him. ‘Goes up to its mother and asks, Mummy, am I a real polar bear? Mummy replies, Course you are. You’ve got white fur, you’ve got claws, you live in the Arctic and you eat fish. Why do you ask? Young polar bear replies, Because I’m fucking freezing.’
Black Widow Page 8
