Crazy Paving (11 page)

At CTA, there was great excitement. Only half the staff had managed to get in. Annette had made it. Helly was nowhere to be seen. Richard was running around consulting.
Everyone had a story to tell. It was the worst storm since 1987, they all agreed. Even worse than that, perhaps. At noon, Richard stood on a table and announced that, bearing in mind the atrocious
weather, the view of the management – with whom he had consulted – was that staff should be allowed home early. Gentlemen could leave at four thirty p.m., ladies at four.

This was tantamount to declaring a national holiday. For the rest of the day, a party atmosphere prevailed. Joan spent much of it standing at the window with Annette, pointing out bizarre,
detached objects which hurtled around in the street below: a man’s hat, a blanket, a pair of dancing newspapers which, as Annette observed, were obviously in love.

By mid-afternoon the office was nearly deserted as everybody made for home. Those commuting out of London had sloped off one by one. Richard, empowered to say who should leave and when, had been
sidling up to individuals and giving them the nod, enjoying his munificence. At three o’clock he had come round to their desks and said, ‘Not much point in hanging on I don’t
think, girls.’ Annette had jumped to her feet. Joan had said, ‘I’ll just finish up.’ With everyone else gone, she settled down to updating the list of Approved
Contractors.

It was only when she started working on it that she remembered why it was taking her so long; it was boring. After twenty minutes she gave up and wandered over to the window. Perhaps she should
go home too. She didn’t fancy walking. If she was going to try for a bus she ought to leave.

The storm was nearly over and the street below was quieter now. A scattering of office workers was walking swiftly by. An ambulance swayed silently past. A small branch lay in the middle of the
road, blown there from a distant tree. Joan watched it as it suddenly moved a few feet down the street, seemingly of its own accord. Then a van drove past and the branch was flipped over and blown
into a gutter, where it stuck.

The wind is ordinary now, Joan thought, not wild. It is pretending again. After the mockery and mayhem of the morning, she found the sudden stillness sinister. She frowned to herself. We thought
we were safe in the city. We didn’t think it would come this far. Storms happen between hills, not concrete. Well, we were wrong again. Puny men and women. She shivered suddenly. What was
wrong with her? This morning, crossing the Thames, the storm had made her want to roar like a medieval witch. Now she was frightened. She shook her head and turned away from the window, pulling her
cardigan across her chest protectively and holding herself. All at once, a thought had come into her head, very clearly and distinctly: something bad is going to happen soon.

Annette had scarcely seen William for a whole week. He had spent most of the time on site visits. The day of the storm, he didn’t make it in at all. When they had seen
each other, they had smiled uncertainly and talked as always. Annette was puzzled. The afterglow of their odd moment had lasted for several days, then she began to doubt what had happened. More to
the point, had anything happened at all? The memory seemed blurry: the briefest of touches, the feel of cotton, a catching of breath. She knew nothing about this man.

The day after the storm, he came around to her part of the office carrying a sheaf of paper, the specification for the refurbishment works at Harrow. She looked up at him. He came to a halt
beside her desk, and looked down at her.

Joan came pottering around the office divide holding a cloth.

‘You wouldn’t believe the state of the cupboard.’ She shook her head. ‘You’re going to have to speak to the cleaners, Annette. If we took all the cups out one
Friday then they could get at it. Nobody has for years . . .’

Annette had always been fond of Joan, but now she felt an overwhelming desire to lever her out of their second floor window.

Joan paused in front of her desk. She put down the cloth, then reached over and opened a drawer, ‘I don’t know . . .’

William was shifting from one foot to another. Annette wondered how long he would stand there without feeling impelled to say something for Joan’s benefit.

Joan had finished rummaging. She stood up, clutching her handbag. ‘Won’t be a mo . . .’

William watched Joan leave and then handed Annette the specification. ‘It’s like this Phil in Commercial left the Dayworks out I can’t believe it can you do you fancy a drink
after work?’ He gave a sharp intake of breath.

Annette wanted to giggle. ‘Yes. Okay.’

William scratched his scalp. ‘I’ve got the car, you see. I’m going straight to Fairlop in the morning so they’ve lent me the car. I could run you home afterwards. If you
like.’

‘Yes. okay.’

‘A quick drink mind, you might be busy, I don’t know. Whatever you fancy really.’

‘Yes.’

‘We could stay local or we could drive over your way – Lewisham, perhaps Greenwich?’

Annette nodded, biting her lower lip to prevent herself from standing, grasping him by the lapels of his jacket and shouting in his face,
I said YES!

‘Well, fine then,’ William said.

He turned and was gone.

The rest of that afternoon took on a weird glow. William went out on a site visit. Annette put the specification to one side and tried to work as normal, but suddenly every
detail of the office became invested with significance. At one point, she looked round to see that a smear of dirt on the filing cabinet next to her had inexplicably formed itself into an oblong
shape that was almost a heart. The leaves of Joan’s beloved ivy caught the light from the window and bounced it in her direction. When she heard a woman laughing in the street outside, she
nearly joined in.

She picked up a tape of dictation that Richard had left. The letter she began to type seemed bizarre. Richard was explaining to a contractor that the tender documents would be forwarded to him
as soon as possible. How sweet, she thought. Language had dissolved. Phrases had become like shards of coloured glass from a broken ornament; pretty and intriguing, but it was impossible to stand
back and picture the whole. She typed,
I will contact you on Monday 15th with my findings
and giggled. He will contact them with his findings? Why doesn’t he just use the phone?

The situation did not improve when she moved on to a Schedule of Dilapidations that Raymond wanted by the end of the afternoon. The contractors were instructed to infill ducts with trowelled
cement. Poor ducks, she thought. Each duck had an approximate length of eight metres. Further down the page, the words
bitumous macadam
conjured up an image of half a dozen burly lads
around a massive steaming cauldron, stirring with a wooden spoon and adding eye of newt or leg of toad. Some of it, she typed, was causing severe ponding in isolated areas. I bet it is, she
thought.

A few minutes later, Raymond strode past. He stopped, turned back and frowned at her.

‘Annette,’ he said with a mixture of amusement and irritation.

She removed her headphones and looked up, wide-eyed.

‘You’re humming,’ he accused.

‘Oh, was I?’ asked Annette. ‘I had the audio phones on. What was it?’

‘I’m not sure, but I think it might have been “I’m a pink toothbrush, you’re a blue toothbrush” . . .’

William felt sick. He was waiting in the Capital Transport Authority’s works car on the corner of Greycoat Street and Rochester Street. He and Annette had agreed to drive
down to Greenwich and have a drink there. ‘Greenwich is nice,’ Annette had said.
And we don’t want to bump into anyone from work
, she might have added.

William wanted this. He had wanted it all week. It had taken him four days and much careful planning to ask her. But right now, this minute, as he sat in an unfamiliar car down an unfamiliar
side-street, he couldn’t imagine what on earth he was playing at. What would they talk about as they drove? It was the middle of the rush hour, for Christ’s sake. Well William, he
thought, you sure know how to show a girl a good time. Twenty minutes getting past the roadworks on the Old Kent Road. That’ll sweep her off her feet.

He turned on the radio. It was tuned to a music station, golden oldies of some sort. What did Annette listen to? Golden oldies wouldn’t do, she’d think he was a prat. He fiddled,
trying to find Radio Four, but was unable to escape from a harsh judgemental fuzzing sound. He turned it off. He felt sick; truly, deeply, comprehensively sick. He wished he had never set eyes on
the woman. He wished he had gone to the toilet before he left the office.

In the office, in the ladies’ second floor toilet, Annette was being sick.

She was ten minutes late, the longest ten minutes of William’s life. He watched her as she walked down Greycoat Street. He liked her walk, a slow-swaying glide; funny
that he hadn’t noticed that before. She was looking at each car in turn. He raised his hand but realised that she was still too far away to see. Now she was making her way towards him. He sat
back in his seat and relaxed, enjoying the moment: gazing at an object of desire about to return the gaze.

He started the engine as she approached, then leant over to open the passenger door.

‘Sorry, I got held up,’ she said, smiling, as she climbed in and turned to pull at the seatbelt.

‘That’s okay,’ he said, returning her smile. He noticed that she had applied fresh lipstick, a soft peach colour that toned with her pale skin. She did that for me, he thought,
swelling with pride. A traffic warden was making his way slowly down the street as they pulled out.

‘Just in time,’ said Annette, her voice low and warm.

‘Greenwich here we come.’ William accelerated away from the kerb, smiling all over his face, for suddenly, being in a car with Annette, driving away from work, seemed like the most
natural thing in the world.

They drank in the corner of an empty riverside pub and talked about work and Perthshire. They both had relatives there. Annette entertained him with the history of personalities from the office.
As their laughter died after one anecdote, William reached across the table and placed one hand over hers.

Annette had nearly finished her second half of lager and was dying for the loo, but stayed there for another twenty minutes rather than break the contact.

Neither of them raised the topic of dinner. It seemed enough to be sitting there, like toddlers who had just learned to sit at all. To go any further forward that night would be foolish.

At a quarter to nine, Annette checked her watch. She didn’t want to leave but thought that William might be getting anxious and wondering how to break it to her.

‘I’ll drop you off home,’ he said.

They pulled into her cul-de-sac and she pointed out her house. ‘That’s it,’ she said, ‘the one with the red numbers. I thought I’d be different.’

They sat in silence for a few moments.

‘We must do that again,’ Annette said, and knew instantly that she had said the wrong thing. To say that they must do it again implied that there was a possibility they would
not.

‘Yes, if you like,’ William replied quickly, his tone carefully casual. The intimacy of the pub had been dissolved. They were back to square one.

Annette undid her seatbelt. ‘Thanks,’ she said.

‘Goodnight.’

As William drove home on automatic pilot, euphoria fought with confusion, caution with desire. I am on a road, he thought, something like a motorway. No stopping. As he pulled
out of Hither Green Lane, a roadsign informed him that there were ‘
CHANGED PRIORITIES AHEAD
’.

His house was in a wide, quiet street with small square gardens in front of tall tight terraces. On the corner of the main road was a row of shops: fruiterers, off licence, launderette. As he
approached, he realised that he could not possibly arrive home just yet. He pulled in by the shops and undid his seatbelt. He sat back, his head on the headrest. Unreal. It was all too unreal.

It began to rain, softly, the scarcest of noises pattering on the car roof. A neighbour walked past – Mr Greenly from number eighteen – turning up the collar of his sheepskin jacket.
William was momentarily panic-stricken. Had Greenly seen him? What if he and Alison bumped into him at the weekend and he said, ‘Hello William, what were you doing parked outside the shops on
Thursday night?’ Unlikely. Possible. William jumped out and trotted over to the off licence, where he bought a four-pack of lager and a packet of mints.

Back inside the car, he tossed the four-pack onto the passenger seat and opened the mints. He had been driving home when he had had a coughing fit, so he had stopped to get mints. He had bought
the four-pack on impulse. He fancied a lager. Yes, it sounded perfectly plausible.

He sat back in his seat and sighed. Already, he thought. It has begun already: the lies, the excuses, watching my step, having an answer ready for any question no matter how insignificant or
accidental. Already. And I’ve hardly touched her yet.

The next day was Friday. He drove out to Fairlop in the morning and rushed through his meeting with the contractors. He was desperate to get back to John Blow House before
lunchtime.

He arrived at just gone one o’clock, as Annette was standing up from her seat and reaching for her coat. She shrugged it over her shoulders as he approached and lifted her hair free from
the collar. Joan was wandering around a few yards away, but he was breathless and reckless by then.

He went up to Annette. ‘Green Man? Ten minutes?’ he said softly. She nodded.

After lunch, they walked back to the office side by side, together but carefully apart.

In the tiny mirrored lift, they had their first snog.

Saturday in Bromley. William was lying on top of his bed, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. Alison was downstairs, cleaning the kitchen before she went shopping. He could hear
the clatter of the floor mop, Paul’s reedy voice enquiring, followed by her softer tones telling him to get his shoes on because they were going out.