Hush Hush (9 page)

‘Oh God!’ panicked
Angela.
‘
She’s
been throwing me killer looks all day. What shall I
…
?’

‘Not to worry,’ sang
Val, taking off for platform three.
‘
See
you at the coal-face tomorrow. Byee!’

Angela reached home, exhausted.
It was half seven and she’d been up since half six. She’d
have time to eat, bathe, catch the headlines on
News at Ten
,
and fall into bed comatose, before rejoining the treadmill for day
two of the rest of her life.

The morning and evening commuter
rush were as scary as she remembered. It had been almost surreal,
hurrying across the footbridge that morning in a silent phalanx of
train-catchers, their uniform the belted mac, their shields the
tablets and iPads
they
raised defensively once sitting or standing on the train.

The only saving grace was working
so close to Victoria. As long as she left work dead on five-thirty,
it looked as if she’d bag a seat on the five-fifty-three to
Wilmesbury, without having to run all the way to Victoria and get a
stitch.

The first thing Angela did when
she got home was unplug the phone, switch off her mobile and decide
she was not on-call to anyone. She couldn’t cope with Sadie or
Rachel ringing for news of her first day.

It
was Sadie she really feared. She’d end up blabbing about
Pauline and the kitchen coven and crashing the machine
‒
all negative things, rooted in worry about her fitness for the job
‒
and Sadie would make things worse by observing,
‘
You’re
so paranoid, lovey. It’s perfectly simple. If you’re nice
to people, they’re nice to you. Any other outcome involves
contributory negligence on your part.’

Sadie put the phone down. It was ringing at
Angela’s end, but she must’ve unplugged it for the night.

Halfway up the stairs, on her way
to run a bath, Sadie paused to regain her strength. She gazed up at
the remaining treads. She could swear her staircase was actively
steepening, rising millimetre by millimetre, week by week, with the
incremental stealth of a suspension bridge.

She loved her narrow,
high-ceilinged, terraced house, but it offered an increasingly cold
shoulder. Doorknobs slithered away from her grasp. The kitchen units
were creeping higher up the wall to join elusive cobwebs.

Rationally, she knew the problem
was her arthritis. It forced her to concentrate on reaching, grasping
and retaining wall and door projections that had once rushed to fit
snugly in her hand.

Loneliness compounded the
bothersome onset of infirmity. She had Binky of course, but he was a
pensioner in his own right, with joints and a temper that stiffened
in the damp. When Binky went to the great litter tray in the sky,
Sadie doubted she’d have the heart to start over with a new,
frisky incumbent.

Perched on the edge of the bath,
leaning in to check water temperature, a flame of hot arthritic pain
(she called them twinges) shot up her leg and into her pelvis.
Moodily, she stared into the swirling water, waiting for the pain to
pass, like a labour contraction. Arthritis was a bugger. It crept up
on an otherwise healthy body, crabbing and twisting it into blasted
tree formation, while inside, your perfectly spry mind cried out not
to be judged on appearances.

Sadie had tried copper bracelets
and heat pads on her wrists and insteps. She’d given up
ambitious gardening (anything that involved bending or hunkering) and
now passed desultory days hoeing weeds from a great height. Her rose
arbour and vegetable patch had reverted to a boring hanky of
manageable lawn, attracting sympathetic comment from spryer
neighbours over both bordering fences. The local consensus was,
‘
Poor
old gel isn’t up to it any more.’ Which was why Sadie
still made such an effort to keep the grass mown and the weeds hemmed
back to the edge of the trellis, sulkily intent on encroachment but
not yet daring to try.

She also sensed that her
tip-foraging days were numbered. Even her part-time job at the
newsagent’s (which she loved) was becoming a strain; all that
scrabbling change out of the till and clawing penny chews out of
bottomless jars.

Naturally, being Sadie, she’d
hidden the true extent of her pain from Angela.

But since Robert’s death
and especially since Christmas Day, Sadie had dared to think the
unthinkable. Should the widows cranky live together? Would Angela
cope better if she, Sadie, was on the spot?

Though frankly, Sadie had felt
worse than inadequate on Christmas Day, rocking Angela in her arms,
aware of Angela’s embarrassment battling with her desolation.
Even as a child, Angela had never been cuddly. If Sadie had picked
her up and tried to cuddle her, she’d squirmed away like an
impatient cat.

So Angela wept in Sadie’s
arms on Christmas Day, but hated herself for it, and resented Sadie
for seeing her like that. Words of comfort had stuck in Sadie’s
throat like a boiled sweet swallowed too soon. What could she say?
She’d too often damned the living Robert with faint praise.

He’d been scared of her
forthrightness, for which she’d despised and bullied him a bit,
using humour as her cover. She’d poked gentle but relentless
fun at his golf jumpers, spare tyre, and his dun-coloured hair
brushed so carefully away from a side parting. He’d taken such
pride in his ordinariness, it had irked her.

‘I can’t suggest
living together now,’ she reasoned with Binky, who’d
strolled into the bathroom.
‘
Supposing
this Conor bloke has real potential? A live-in mother-in-law might
scare him away. Remember all those Les Dawson jokes?’

She nodded sagely at Binky,
mindful of where duty and sacrifice lay.
‘
Anyway,
which house would we settle on? Angela wouldn’t want to live
back here.’

Sadie’s terraced home,
humble as it was, still had the cachet of being larger and more
valuable than Angela’s semi-detached hut. Sadie’s house
was turn-of-the-century stolid redbrick, built before boxy dimensions
and cheek-by-jowl living became the suburban norm. But Angela’s
hut was centrally heated, closer to town and easier to get around.
The stairs were less steep, for a start.

‘It’s
all academic,’ she told Binky, rising carefully from the side
of the bath.
‘
I have
to wait and see how things develop with Conor. And if all goes well
on that front, an old battle-axe like me can’t be putting
obstacles in the way.’

Quickly, Conor McGinlay shut his wardrobe door.
He’d been beaten back by an onslaught of hairy tweed and
mildewed mothballs. Scratching an itchy armpit, he strode into the
bathroom and dived without preamble into the linen basket.

It was Shane’s turn to load
the washing machine, which explained why the basket was still full.

Conor emerged clutching a pale
apricot cotton shirt. He sniffed it from a distance and then bravely
snuffled the armpit. Next came the wrinkle inspection.

Shane loped into the bathroom,
wearing his
iPod
. He
eyed the shirt.

‘Looks a bit past it.’

Conor lowered the shirt.
‘
Looks
can be deceptive. It was your turn this week to load the machine,
chuck in a couple of detergent scoops and turn the knob. Not too much
to ask, is it? Mrs T still does the tricky bits
‒
unloading, sorting, ironing and magically redistributing.’

‘Didn’t know it was
my turn,’ shrugged Shane.

‘Ignorance is no defence,’
frowned Conor.

‘Ye wot?’ Shane
lengthened his jaw for that village idiot look that irritated (and
didn’t fool) Conor.

‘D’you think I need
to iron this shirt?’ he asked, going for manly solidarity.

‘Don’t even try, Dad.
You could burn your ear if the phone rings.’

‘Is that a Dad joke or an
Irish joke?’ asked Conor dangerously.

‘It’s an old joke,’
replied Shane sweetly, and staggered out of the bathroom.

He wasn’t drunk or stoned,
as Conor had first feared when he’d noticed how much staggering
about Shane did. Uncoordinated lurching, exaggerated by army-sized
backpacks of schoolbooks, was the perambulatory norm for Shane and
his peers.

Conor decided the shirt would do.
For some unfathomable reason, he felt guilty about what he was
embarking on
‒
or at
least, planning to embark on.

He almost felt as if he was
cheating on his son. A ridiculous notion, given Shane’s supreme
indifference to his comings and goings for work. But then again
‒
what did he expect? He came and went so often that both he and Shane
would be wrecks by now if his son was at all needy and clingy by
nature.

He was not a skilled father.
Guilt made him overcompensate for his absences with lavishly
indiscriminate amounts of pocket money and gifts (bribes, Kate called
them). Still, Kate paid her own blood money and spoilt Shane with his
latest heart’s desire. Thank God he wasn’t a scheming
child, playing them off against each other. Shane would return home
from Kate’s New York loft, laden with trainers (soon forgotten
about), softball racquets (never used) and fleece-lined jackets (lost
within a week). He wasn’t overly acquisitive. He accepted
parental largesse with a certain amount of well-bred embarrassment.

Returning to his bedroom, Conor
hung the shirt on the back of his wardrobe door. It smelt OK. If in
doubt later, he could slosh a bit of aftershave over key areas. He
wondered, with a brief flicker of panic, if he’d become a total
barbarian since Kate left, a raging troglodyte in matters of
etiquette, cleanliness and civility. Sometimes, he caught Mrs Turner
looking at him in astonishment as he polished off a KFC chicken
bucket after living on nettle soup up some godforsaken mountain for a
week. And Angela Carbery had thought him a pig on the flight from
Morocco.

At
such times, Conor had the grace to blush. But he was a man
‒
a man who had to shave twice a day to look human
‒
and as such, he had to grunt his way out of embarrassment,
dismissing and deflecting all put-downs. If there was a more
civilised approach to life, he longed to find it, or find someone
who’d point him in the right direction.

It was Friday. At the end of Angela’s first
week, she was still doing the eleven-o’clock beverage run. But
she didn’t really mind. She could escape from her desk and
daydream by the kettle for a few minutes. She tried hard not to
wonder about Conor McGinlay. Maybe, if she’d been nicer to him,
sparkled with a bit of feminine gratitude for taking up his time
…
if she’d made an effort to give him her phone number properly.

Luckily, she’d been too
whacked to see Sadie in person during the week. By tactical skill,
she’d kept Sadie’s midweek phone call within the
parameters of her first week at
Goss!

Braving the office kitchen no
longer fazed her. The kitchen coven had crystallised into
individuals, one of whom was Mandy of admin fame. Angela now realised
they were far less threatening than she’d first thought. They
were simply bored women having a raucous laugh.

Cradling her noon mug of coffee
(she’d already done the group beverage run), she tip-toed back
to her desk. She didn’t look at Pauline, in case she blushed at
being caught with a unilateral beverage.

Val looked up from a proof and
gazed past Angela, puffing down her nose like a horse on a frosty
morning.
‘
Who,’
she whinnied,
‘
is
that?’

Angela and Pauline turned.

Angela’s heart squeezed
into a ball that hurt her chest.

Conor McGinlay was ambling
through the open-plan office like a bull in search of a
thirty-two-piece dinner set. His thick hair gleamed a foxy red under
the strip lights. He wore a surprisingly attractive dark linen suit.
He was clutching a small bunch of freesias
to a
crumpled shirt-front the colour of a mango mousse (though it was
probably called something manly like ‘sandstorm’ on the
label).
Aware of being gawped at, his expression was one of
pained fury.

Finally spotting Angela, he
cantered over like a mettlesome charger.
‘
I’ve
had to donate a kidney at reception to get into this place,’ he
announced, thrusting the freesias towards her nose.

Angela fought back tickly petals
and took a deep breath.
‘
How
did you know I worked here?’

He shrugged.
‘
Rang
a few magazine publishing outfits and asked to speak to you. Came up
trumps fourth time lucky.’

Angela blushed with wild joy at
his persistence.

‘Angela?’ Marla bore
down.
‘
Perhaps your
friend could wait down in the lobby for you? It’s not policy to
let civilians roam at large in the corridors of power.’ She
beamed at Conor, a smile infused with authoritarian good humour.

Conor grunted.
‘
Can
you come to lunch now then, Angela? I’m parked on double
yellow.’

Angela looked quickly at Marla.

‘Yes, yes!’ shooed
Marla.
‘
Off you go,
the pair of you.’

Watchful eyes followed them to
the lift. Angela studied the carpet, the freesias carried upright in
one sweaty hand, like a talisman. He said nothing to her. She felt
perturbed that he’d spilt her life so publicly all over the
workplace. She was also thrilled that he’d bothered.

In the lift, she realised they
were about the same height. Well, she was tall for a woman, and he
was stocky.

‘I like your shoulder bag,’
he said.
‘
It’s
very
‒
you.’

Angela clutched her bag
protectively. A twenty-first birthday present from Rachel, its faded
orange cotton was decorated with tap-dancing frogs. Hardly a byword
for sophistication.
‘
Thanks
for the flowers. I should’ve left them on my desk. They’ll
get droopy now.’