All this fear and pain and hopelessness, and yet I still couldn’t bring myself to take the T600.
I hated myself.
I hated London.
I couldn’t stay there.
I didn’t know what to do.
I wished Ginny was with me. Ginny would have known what to do. Ginny always knew what to do.
Genevieve Mabuto was the first, and only, real ‘girlfriend’ I ever had, and the only reason I survived my new office career.
After I left Shipping and Ports: Global it should have been nearly impossible for me to find a good job with my lack of office skills and experience. But I simply mentioned my unemployed status to Xav, who braved one of his rare chats with his dad, and a week later I was the executive assistant to the EMEA insurance director at Worldwide Insurance Solutions in the City.
I hated it.
It was obvious I’d never worked in a proper office before. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing and everyone around me knew it.
They also knew that I had got the job through my connections and had jumped into a coveted position that had been due to go to someone else.
Hannah Chambers.
Hannah was the executive assistant to the HR director and the leader of the EA gang, and had wanted my role. She never forgave me for getting it.
Hannah was only working at the bank to earn enough money to pay for her flight to go and work with Ugandan refugees. She was pretty and kind and funny to everyone … except me. And everyone loved her … except me.
The first thing she said to me on my induction day when I turned up in my black trousers and white shirt was ‘Catering’s downstairs.’
The next day as I walked across the office wearing a similar outfit, she yelled, ‘Have you even been home?’
By the end of my first week she was commenting on the frequency of my visits to the bathroom (where I was going to cry). And by the middle of the next week I had stopped drinking after my first cup of tea in the morning so that I only needed to go to the toilet at lunchtime and when I left work. And still she accompanied my every stroll past her desk with some cheery aside like ‘Here comes the office’s little ray of sunshine.’
Which tells you how fucking miserable I was because I normally am a little ray of fucking sunshine. Well, most of the time
On the Friday of my first week, Hannah walked through the open-plan office loudly declaring that it was ‘The EA lunch. Let’s go girls.’ I grabbed my stuff and walked over to the lifts with everyone else. She waited until I tried to step into the lift and then said, ‘Not you. You’re not invited.’ I thought she was joking, so tried to step forward. She sidestepped, blocking my path. ‘You’re. Not. Invited.’
As the door closed she gave a sarcastic wave and everyone laughed.
After that I was excluded from everything; lunches, EA meetings, after-work drinks, the 5k charity run. Hannah never missed an opportunity to laugh at me, point out something I’d done wrong, or try to mess my work up. God forbid anyone left a message for me with her – I’d never get it. Yet somehow no one picked her up on it, no one mentioned how horrible she was to me, everyone still loved her.
It was awful.
I should have done something, told someone, put in a complaint – but I didn’t. I slunk in and out of work for a month, and then I gave up.
I got in early on the day I was going to resign so that I could print my resignation letter off without anyone seeing it.
So, I was pretty annoyed when Ginny slapped my resignation letter down on my desk and said, ‘You can’t resign like that! And why are you resigning? You’ve got the easiest director here.’
I was resigning because I was completely miserable. Because I desperately missed my ships and my ports and writing about my ships and ports. Because I was being bullied. Because I hated being stuck in an office with women who knew how to dress well and do their make-up and hair correctly when I didn’t. Because I didn’t have any friends that were girls who could tell me how to do my hair and make-up correctly. Because I used to be a little ray of sunshine and now I wasn’t.
I didn’t tell Ginny this. I just looked down at my resignation letter and shrugged.
On it I had written:
‘Please accept this letter as notice that I am resigning. Thank you and regards.’
Ginny looked at the letter, and then at me, and then she laughed.
‘Come on, I’m taking you out.’
Ginny had started in the company as a temporary admin officer. She’d quickly ousted the existing admin manager and taken her place, becoming a permanent member of staff. She then decided she didn’t like the title Admin Manager, and so had changed it to Office Manager. She’d accomplished all this in under six weeks.
On paper her role was junior to mine and all the rest of the EAs’, but that wasn’t how Ginny saw things. Nothing happened in the office without Ginny’s knowledge and approval: stationery orders, working rotas, desk changes, sickness approvals, even leave had to be signed off by Ginny. She looked down at all the other admin staff and never deigned to be part of the EA lunches or socials. Within two years she would successfully transition to the EMEA sales team and would be, by far, their top sales person.
On the day I was due to resign, Ginny took me for a two-hour liquid lunch and got me so drunk that I fell asleep with my head on the desk at 4 p.m. and my resignation letter ended up in the recycling bin.
The next week I didn’t get invited to the EA lunch again, but I didn’t care, I was invited out by Ginny instead.
By the end of that month it was common knowledge in the office that Ginny had my back, and things improved dramatically.
Even Hannah was scared of Ginny.
When Ginny and I were having our, now regular, Friday lunchtime drink, Hannah sidled over to our table. ‘We’re having an EA meeting this afternoon. You should come along.’ She gave her sweetest smile. ‘No hard feelings.’
Ginny downed her drink and returned Hannah’s smile with a charming one of her own. ‘Fuck off Hannah, you total bitch,’ she said sweetly.
Hannah never spoke to me again.
As much as I wanted her to be, Ginny wasn’t with me now. I had to make a decision about my future, I didn’t have any choice. The time had come to leave and go to …
I didn’t have the ending to that sentence yet, but I couldn’t live in Broadcasting House, and I didn’t want to be in London any more. My love affair with the city was over. The only thing left here was death and memories I couldn’t allow myself to think about.
I resolved to spend the next day before I left London stocking up on supplies (drugs) and releasing as many trapped animals as I could.
I soon realised it was mostly dogs that were trapped – people had obviously just let their cats out to fend for themselves, which made me wonder why I hadn’t seen more.
In the first three houses I broke into, the dogs were either already dead or too weak to do anything other than cry out helplessly. I was too much of a coward to put them out of their misery so I spooned water into their mouths and left them with plenty of food and water and left the doors to the outside open.
It was heartbreaking.
The fourth that I broke into had a small terrier who bounded up to me, let me scratch him behind his ears, and then skipped happily out of the front door. He was perfectly happy and perfectly fed. How? My imagination immediately jumped to half-eaten corpses sitting in the front room, but this house didn’t smell like someone was decaying inside it. I walked through to the kitchen and saw the answer to my question. Six enormous bags of dried dog food ripped open on the kitchen floor and every single bowl, cup, dish, saucepan and piece of Tupperware had been filled with water and distributed throughout the kitchen and front room. The mantelpiece was crowded with photos of an elderly couple walking, playing with, and holding the terrier. At the end they had attempted to provide for the one they loved the most.
I went to six other houses, two with a cat and dog that ha
d nothing, two with dogs that had food and water left for them, and the last two where the dogs had obviously found their own source of food in the way that I most feared. These dogs raced straight out of the houses, snarling and yapping in a way that convinced me the pet-rescuing section of my life story was probably just about done.
The last pet I broke in to free was a golden retriever; bones showing through where his fur had fallen out from lack of nourishment. I thought he was dead at first, but when I got closer he lifted his head and attempted a big doggy smile that I returned in spite of myself. I realised it was the first time I had genuinely smiled in days. I spooned some water into him, and put water and food next to him and left. But as I approached the door I heard him whining behind me and turned to see him struggling, shakily, to his feet to follow me.
I didn’t want him.
I wasn’t here to start an animal shelter.
I knew then that my Good Samaritan work was over; this, like most things in my new world, was just too upsetting.
I drove back to the nearest residential area and swapped my sensible Golf for a Porsche. It took me nearly two hours to find the right house and the right keys to get the car, but Porsches had been James’s favourite and I felt I owed it to him to leave London in style.
I went to the nearest supermarket and filled the boot of the car (which it took me a good ten minutes to work out was in the bonnet) with food and water.
Then, despite my previous protestations, I went back and got the golden retriever. I don’t know why, maybe it was because he had made me smile. Maybe it was because I was so painfully lonely.
No amount of drugs could displace that.
I carried the bag of bones that was the dog to my car while all around us other creatures wailed and barked and screeched.
I put the dog on the passenger seat, got in, revved the engine loudly to drown the noise from outside, and left London for the final time.
I named the dog Lucky.
January 10th 2024
I didn’t have a plan when I left London. I didn’t know where I was going, had no idea what I should do next. I just wanted to get out, to get somewhere with no sounds, no smells, and no imprisoned animals to feel guilty about.
The roads out of the city were empty. Once more I saw a few crashes, a few abandoned cars, but no traffic and, thankfully, no corpses. Street and traffic lights still worked and I obeyed them out of habit.
I saw no plumes of smoke this time. I supposed that the constant snow and drizzle must have, at last, put out the fires.
I was still regularly seeing people out of the corner of my eye but, after climbing thirty-six flights of stairs on my last day in London to investigate what turned out to be battery-operated Christmas lights and a life-size cardboard cut-out of Elvis, I was getting far more picky about which of these ghostly figures I followed up on.
Although I very nearly did take Elvis with me.
Because it was the first motorway I saw signs for, I got on the M1 and headed north.
It was completely deserted. I saw maybe one abandoned car every hundred or so miles, but that was it.
It was satisfying to be on the move and leaving the city behind.
The Porsche only had a Bluetooth system so I couldn’t play music, but the engine made a pleasing purr that reverberated through the car. It was like driving a giant kitten. The rain had stopped and it wasn’t cold enough to be icy, so driving on the empty roads was easy. Lucky was curled up asleep in the passenger seat, snoring softly and filling the car with the smell of wet dog, which, under normal circumstances, would have been unpleasant, but was strangely comforting after the smells of the last few days.
In homage to James, I decided to open up the Porsche and see how fast she could go. I was zooming along at 105 mph when there was a frightening screech from the back wheels and I skidded across two lanes; which would almost certainly have meant certain death if the road had been as busy as usual.
I didn’t want to risk crashing the car and bleeding slowly to death alone on the M1, so I reduced my speed to a sedate 60 mph.
I was continually distracted with the changing landscape that bordered the motorway. Already things were falling into disrepair. The rain and wind had caused mud and rockslides on banks bordering the road and, with no one to shore it up, initial damage that might have been quite small had grown rapidly. Building sites were a mess, with cranes tipped, tarpaulin flapping, and caravans overturned. In one place the bank at the side of the motorway had slid away and the entire hard shoulder was missing. I saw two bridges partially collapsed.
Perhaps more worrying was the lack of electricity in many towns and villages. I had expected it to happen in London where ambient usage was huge but thought that the smaller, less populated areas would be fine.
I was wrong.
There seemed to be no rhyme nor reason to the outage. Watford was dark, but Luton (much bigger) still had power. The next-door neighbour of a village that still had power would be without. I would drive through miles of motorway with no lights and then suddenly be floodlit in the most random of areas.
If I hadn’t been so enthralled with the changing landscape and scenery I might have noticed the petrol gauge on the Porsche flashing.
I doubt it, though, as I didn’t know where the petrol gauge was.
I do now.
Nothing dramatic happened, the car just stopped working.
One minute we were cruising along, the next, sliding sedately to a halt in the middle lane of the M1.
In the middle of the night.
In the middle of nowhere.
The dashboard said it was 3.24 a.m. and two degrees outside.
I knew that we were past Northampton, but had no idea how far past or how far it was to the nearest town or village. We were on a dark patch of motorway and I could see no lights as far as the horizon. It was pitch black and it was raining again.
For a while I sat and watched rain drizzle silently onto the windscreen. The car got cold quickly without the engine running, and I knew that I would freeze if I tried to wait for the sun to come up.
Lucky woke up, whined at either the cold or the dark, and shuffled across onto my lap. He (I didn’t know how to confirm this but I was going to go with ‘he’ for now) was warm and comforting so I let him stay.
In less than five minutes he was shivering, and my feet were freezing, so I knew we’d have to leave the car.
I hadn’t brought a map or a torch or shoes, apart from a pair of Ugg boots that were more slipper than boot. I had a waterproof jacket, but not trousers. I had twenty bottles of water and plenty of food, but nothing to carry them in except 10p supermarket plastic carrier bags.
I pulled a couple more jumpers on and pulled the jacket over the top. I wrapped each of my boots in plastic bags and put a couple of bottles of water and two Mars Bars in another to take with me. I had no hat, scarf or gloves, so I put the hood of my jacket up and pulled the strings so it was tight around my face.
I came very close to leaving Lucky in the car, but I was worried that he might freeze to death. I put a jumper on him, too, to cover up the bald patches, and hoped he’d be able to walk far enough to make it to wherever we were going.
Obviously, I had no idea where that was.
Outside it was much, much colder than it had been in London. The section of motorway that we were on was a flat plain, exposed on both sides, and the wind was racing across, driving relentless drizzle straight into my face.
Lucky whined loudly and I didn’t blame him.
We started walking.
I decided to stick to the motorway as I had no way of knowing if there was anything nearby and I knew there would be a service station at some point. I just didn’t know how far it would be.
We walked for about fifteen minutes before I realised I had left the Tramadol, my mobile phone and charger in the car.
I don’t know why I still kept my mobile charged and on. I had no internet access, no one had called me
and I had no one left to call, but I wasn’t ready to give it up yet. I think I still had hope I might need it at some point. Plus, there was no way I was leaving without the bag of drugs.
So, we turned around and walked back to the car.
I am sure that, by this point, Lucky was regretting that he had come with me. He must have wished he’d taken his chances back in his house.
I have no idea how long or how far we walked.
It was the most miserable night of my life. At least when James had died I had been warm and dry.
I took the plastic bags off my feet pretty soon after we left the car; they filled with water, making walking difficult and completely negating their purpose. My ‘waterproof’ jacket started to leak across my shoulders and down my back. My hands and feet were soaked, frozen, and lumpen, so that I had to sort of stomp along like some post-apocalyptic ogre.
I have no idea how Lucky kept going for so long. He was so skinny and angular, could hardly walk, and had only eaten half a can of dog food before I put him in the car. I soon had to take the jumper off him as it was soaked through with rain and dragging along the ground. Still, mile after mile, he shambled along, his fur soaked through, highlighting his tiny, emaciated frame.
Lucky gave up just as the sky was beginning to lighten on the right-hand side of the motorway. One minute he was dragging along beside me, a ramshackle bag of bones and dripping fur; the next he was … gone. I thought at first he had run off but then I turned and looked back along the motorway and saw he had collapsed on the road behind me.
I left him.
I was freezing and in pain and tired and didn’t even know if I was going to make it, so to take him with me would have been ridiculous.
I got about twelve steps before I turned around.
I’m selfish, not a total monster.
I heaved him up into my arms, his sopping wet fur drenching me even further, and began to shuffle forward.
The sun was all the way up (or as much as I could see through the clouds and drizzle) and I was counting to a hundred and then sitting down for good when I saw a ‘Services – 1 m’ sign in the distance.
Last One at the Party Page 12
