Running in Heels (14 page)

I'd forgotten about the Verona trip, and I'd forgotten that in two days it's February 14. Or rather, I'd buried the fact in concrete. Matt and Julietta must be flying to Italy this afternoon. But my ears are twanging for other reasons.

“Have you, uh, not rung Tony, then?” I say, trying to sound casual.

“I think he's a sweet boy,” she huffs. “I
am
fond of him, but being a dancer is like being a nun!”

Further inquiries reveal that Tony has rung Mel an unprecedented four times since Friday and she is yet to get back to him. And while Tony's former flames—most of whom found themselves burned out after twenty-four hours—might call this justice, I feel a twitch of sympathy for my brother. Four calls in five days. That's about
my
lot for the year.

I run back to the office where, to my relief, Belinda tells me that Matt is in meetings until he and Julietta leave for the airport at five. I float through the rest of the day, untouchable. I see off the chancers clamoring for press tickets (“fax me a copy of
The Builders Weekly
's dance page and I'll see what I can do”), I tell my mother what she wants to hear (“That rave about his metallic gold Benz convertible did seem forced, you can tell he misses Hendon”), I don't brood about Chris (“I won't brood about Chris, I won't brood about Chris, I won't…”), and I don't ring my brother (though I realize with a selfish rush of hope that if Mel is being coy, Tony might need
me
to divert the path of true love to his door).

At 6
P.M.
I switch off my mobile and leave for the Coliseum. Belinda natters and chatters—as Matt says, she's a lovely girl if only she'd pause for breath occasionally—but I don't hear her. I am watertight, airtight, as cold and impenetrable as a spaceship, my hatches whirring down against alien invasion, lights red, alarms wailing, wah, wah, wah. Belinda and I stand in the foyer handing out tickets and programs to the press like bread to a gaggle of geese. I fawn, flirt, and foist drink on the hacks in the interval, then I take the tube home and fall like a brick into bed. I remain stiffly awake until four, then sleepwalk to work the next day. My bottom has barely brushed the seat of my chair when the phone rings.

Six minutes later, I am leaning blearily against the wall of a toilet cubicle wondering how I managed to book Matt and Julietta onto a plane that
arrived
in Verona at 8:25 rather than—as I stated in a neatly printed itinerary—
left
Gatwick at 8:25 and how unlucky it was that the next plane to Verona didn't depart until 8:00 this morning and that Matt had to book himself and a distinctly underwhelmed Julietta into a flea-bitten Travel Lodge while their soft Verona hotel beds lay frivolously bare. It was also unlucky that Matt had to pay a surcharge to switch flights and spend forty minutes soothing the irate photographer (who'd wanted to shoot Julietta reaching from her balcony bathed in the golden kiss of the early-morning light, but would now have to settle for the less affectionate bog standard lunchtime light).

It was even more unlucky that, despite the dozen faxes I'd sent, the Italian authorities dramatically claimed to know “
niente
” about a British newspaper photographer taking pictures, and only gave their surly permission when Matt summoned his dormant theatrical resources and declared sorrowfully, “How am I going to break this to the Italian ambassador, whose idea this was?”

And not unlucky but inevitable for the idiot whose brain blips led to this great bobble chain of blunders, that her continued
employment is now an impossibility. And I don't doubt that talking about myself in the third person is a symptom of my decay. I mean, I'm clearing my desk today. I'm free to watch
Wheel of Fortune
for the rest of my working life.

MATT HAS TOLD PERSONNEL THAT I'M NOT TO BE
escorted from the building. I'm to leave in my own time. I don't cry. Why should I? I glance at Belinda, reading the
Daily Express
and attacking her midmorning lunch, and wonder what to say. Belinda is so gloriously immune to the emotional temperature of the workplace, I'd swear she was inoculated against office politics along with measles and rubella. I'm about to make my announcement, when Chris calls, touchingly cool. I still don't cry.

“Did you see that Robbie bloke, then?” he asks gruffly.

“We met for a quick drink,” I say, amazed that I'm up to normal conversation. “He's just a friend.”

Chris growls, “That's what they all say, until they stick a hand up your skirt.”

Depending on whether this fantasy forecast is envy or ego, I should be either fuming or flattered. I can't decide, so I whisper the news of my layoff. I'm superfluous. I'm the green bit at the top of the carrot. So what. I light a cigarette as a token of my disregard for the rules. Emphysema and unemployment, a cheese-and-tomato lifestyle.

“I wanted to tell you,” I hiss, expelling the smoke through my nose like a teenage dragon, “but I didn't think we were talking.”

Chris is quiet. Then he says, “Sorry. I should've rung earlier. I've let you down again, haven't I? I'm such a git.” An admission touching in its frankness, but I feel obliged to protest.

“Not really,” I say.

“No, I have.”

“You haven't.”

“I am a git, though,” he insists. “I've let you down.”

A polite squabble later I realize he is determined to be a git, so I concede the point. I replace the receiver and see Belinda gawking at me. “You! 'Avin' a fag! In the office! Woss goin' on?”

I hesitate. Belinda's lunch smells vile. That's one thing I won't miss. Belinda eats like a fat person—full cream milk, peanut butter, chocolate bars, crisps, potato waffles, roast dinners, fruit tarts, cheesecake—yet remains offensively thin. She's been spat at in changing rooms. “It's me genes,” she explained once to Mel, who went through a phase of sitting with her at lunch to pinch chips off her plate while ostentatiously doodling over a wilting salad. (The phase ended when Belinda went off chips and on to macaroni cheese. Mel asked brightly, every day for a week, “Aren't you having chipth today?”)

I stare at the floor and say abruptly, “I've been let go.”

There is no response from Belinda except a strangulated gargle. I glance up to see her face is brick red and her mouth wide open, with a steaming lump of baked potato falling out of it. “Hoh hoh hoh!” she puffs, fanning wildly.

“Hot?” I inquire unnecessarily.

Belinda nods dumbly, tears in her eyes. I fetch her a glass of water and she signals her gratitude.

“I'm leaving today. Now. So, um, it's been fun working with you. Maybe see you around.”

Belinda stares. “
Now?
So what you plannin' on doing?”

“I'm not quite sure.”

Belinda digs at her chili con carne, and says, “You should sign on.” I stifle a splutter—it's always heartwarming to discover your colleagues have faith in you—and murmur, “That would really make my mother happy.”

“Yeah, but you gotta eat,” says Belinda, who is proving to be persistent, a talent she makes sparing use of in her work life.

“Dole or starvation,” I say dreamily. “I don't know which she'd prefer.”

I arrange all my belongings neatly in a cardboard box, and Belinda helps me to the front door. We pass the wardrobe mistress, who stares. Belinda glares and snaps, “What
you
lookin' at?”

“Thanks, Bel,” I say.

She winks. “You take care, Nat. You can do better than this place, anyway. Be in touch, yeah? We'll 'ave a drink sometime.”

I hug her, then stagger to the gym with my cardboard box. The receptionist kindly guards it while I train. I think less about losing my job than the fact Chris rang. I didn't think I'd hear from him again and was preparing for martyrdom. But this zigzag uncertainty is cool. Chris and I are toying with each other, and that is fine by me. I am his well-connected bit of posh. And he is an escape from the Alcatraz of my good girl's life. He represents everything my mother hates. He is the wild, wicked opposite of Saul, of marriage, of a respectable responsible show-offable husband with smart hair and sleek suits and a solid job in the City. And I know Babs dislikes him and I'm glad. Chris would rather hang himself than settle down. His hedonism taunts her. It nips at the matronly heels of I-do.

I pull on my trainers and think that once this would have upset me. What! This man doesn't love me for the wonderfulness of
me
, he doesn't love me enough to spend his drug money on a glaring diamond ring that I can twiddle and flash at the rest of the world—look, everyone, three thousand sparkly pounds of how much he loves me!—he doesn't appreciate the very special human being that I am, he doesn't want to snap me up like a priceless piece of Elvis memorabilia, I'm just another bit of Spice Girl tat, boo-hoo what's wrong with me that he doesn't want to keep me forever, how dare he! (Not that I'd want to
marry
him
, he's feckless and unreliable.) No, none of that. I feel detached. I'm out of love with him. Quite able to live with the ego-crunching knowledge that this arrangement is one huge use. In fact, it pleases me. Chris is irresistible because he doesn't care. I despised Saul's neediness. It made a bully of me. He had to reject me to prove himself a man. As for Babs, I pity her. I think she's weak. Sure, the day job is heroic. But out of hours she is dependent on Simon and his double cuffs. I am self-sufficient.
I
am a modern woman. Frannie would be proud.

Simon and Frannie, my main competitors.

I punish the treadmill, smirking at the recollection of the first time Frannie met Simon. She took one look at his affluent corn-fed smugness, decided he hadn't suffered enough and was that particular breed of shallow blinkered male who needed dragging back to vicious reality. Hence her detailed and vivid reply to his token inquiry, “What do you do?”

“Of course, Simon, the worst thing about an episiotomy is, the scissors are always blunt. You give them a local anesthetic, jam the needle deep into the flesh, then you cut at the height of contraction—they're in so much pain, aside from hearing a scrunching noise, they don't feel it as such. It's like cutting bacon rind, Simon. It's quite thick. It's best to make a decent incision, but that depends on how sharp the scissors are, it can take a few chews. The last thing you want is it tearing, because if it leads to a third-degree tear, that involves the rectum…”

I feast on the image of Simon's tall slender figure falling gracefully to the floor, his bottle of designer beer trailing a farewell arc of droplets in the air. (She tried the same tactic on Tony once, but it backfired when he interrupted the saga with, “Birds! No pain threshold! I've had shits that'd make you faint!”) I am wincing at the memory of Frannie turning a ripe purple, when a figure appears in front of me, taut brown midriff, belly button like a gasp. I jerk myself back to the present.

“You run like you're being chased,” says Alex.

Much as I resent slowing my pace—my joints set like cement—it is patently rude to keep going. So I stop.

“Well, you caught me,” I reply, smiling. She rewards me with an easy laugh. Even though her amusement is always so willing, I feel a tweak of pleasure at having prompted it. Babs is the same, she makes you glow. Unlike Chris or Tony, who make you slave for their approval. They're like a pair of pharaohs. I once asked my brother why he never smiled on meeting people, and he said, “They've done nothing to please me yet.” How different from his sister, so full of puppy-dog smiles I can't give them away.

“So what's new?”

“A lot actually. I, ah, I've just been let go.” I grin stupidly (as well I might—talking about myself like a badger, released back into the wild by the RSPCA).

Alex clamps a hand to her mouth. She says through long pink nails, “You mean your job?”

I nod. “I was told today. I had to clear my desk,” I blurt. I know such intimate disclosure smashes the gym-chat blandometer but I can't stop myself. I feel that telling one or two people a secret is like a vaccine—it's harmless and prevents me falling ill with the strain of keeping scandalous information to myself.

“You're joking!” says Alex. “What did you do? If you don't mind my asking,” she adds quickly.

I tell her,
ish
. She replies, “How do you feel?
Are
you okay?”

I give myself a mental once-over and find my state of mind unbruised. “I'm fine,” I say to her disbelieving face. “Really.”

Alex shakes her head. “I don't want to speak out of turn,” she says, “but you don't look like you're fine. You look like you could do with a break.” My smile is brittle enough for Alex to add, “I did speak out of turn. I'm sorry.”

I take a cab home, playing over the exchange with Alex in my head, worrying that I didn't reassure her heartily enough. She is the kind of woman I gravitate toward. Balls of steel, as Tony would say—his ultimate accolade to a chick. Alex reminds me of Babs, hard shell, soft center. Caring but not—unlike some
women I could mention—a sacrificial lamb, woolishly bleating after everyone else's welfare in the pathetic hope that just one person will turn around and exclaim, “But who's looking after
you
?”

I scowl. Babs hasn't rung to see how it went with Robbie, or my father. I need to see her, I need to talk to her properly. No one else will do. There is no compensation for the loss of a best friend.

I get home and call Tony.

“He's in a meeting,” says his PA.

I ring my mother and tell her I'm unemployed.

“Oh my god! What are you going to do now?” she asks, her voice wobbling.

What am I going to do now? What am I going to do now? What
will
I do? What can I do? My mother's shrill panic drills through my skull. I have fought off the truth but now it swarms all over me like an army of ticks, wriggling and burrowing into my flesh, attacking me, picking and pricking at me, worming under my skin until I am caught in the vicious grip of reality, barely able to snatch a breath. I sit, with a thump, on the hallway floor, gasping, grasping at the pale blue walls, which tilt and shift alarmingly. I've lost control. I thought I had it but it's gone, and in its place is anarchy, I'm consumed by it, eaten up with fear, oh Babs oh help me please I need you.

 

B
abs just about bursts through the door, her forehead a comical map of anxiety. “Natalie, you scared me, are you okay? Oh, look at you!”

She grasps me in a soft warm hug and I float away in a far-off dream, snug as a wish inside a fortune cookie. I shut my eyes and the room bobs up and down. She rubs my back and I lean limply toward her with dangling hands, resisting then sinking into the comfort of her strong arms. I am sunk, literally, cannot go lower, I feel so wretched and that screechy strangulated shudder, like
water being sucked down a drain, wrings out my ears, until I realize the noise is me.

Babs lifts me to the sofa and gently strokes the hair from my face. Then she disappears and reappears with a Caffeine Queen mug of water and a length of paper towel as long as an electoral list.

“There you go,” she whispers, crouching at my feet.

“I'm not crying that much,” I snivel, using several acres of paper and crying some more. I gaze into her dark eyes and see the kindness there, and the tears fall hot and fast. If only she were cruel I could have kept them in.

“Natalie,” says Babs—taking my hand in hers as if her touch will make the words less wrenching—“we need to talk.”

I nod slowly, and the room ripples.

“Hang on, let me open a window,” she adds, loosening her red scarf. “It's stifling.”

She flings a window wide, then heavily plops down next to me on the pale suede sofa (which makes a surprised “
pouf!
”) and says, “Nat, this has been coming on for a while, and I think you know that.”

I stare at my feet in their sensible shoes, not daring to speak. Babs pauses for a second, then adds, “Nat, I'll say what I think. I don't think you're crying because you've lost your job. I don't think you're crying because of the Tony thing. And”—her voice thickens—“I don't even think it's because you feel I've abandoned you.”

Babs stops talking and I flinch. Ugh, how does she do it?
I
am a fawning fan of the emperor's new clothes (“
Love
the jacket, Your Excellency! Armani? Christian Lacroix?”) and Babs speaks the unspeakable! I gaze unseeingly at the hardwood floor.

“Nat,” murmurs Babs. “These, these crises are consequential, they're not the seed of your problem, they're the fruit of it. Your mum didn't drag your dad back from L.A. so he could wail about your layoff.
She
can do that! The job's not it. Yes, it's serious,
losing your job is serious, but you are not your job. Your parents know that. Your job is not who you are. And that's what she, they are worried about. They're worried about
you
. Losing your job is not your problem, it's just a by-product of your problem.”

Babs glances at me. I tense my jaw and look blank. (What can I say, it's easier when you're blond.)

“Nat,” she says, “I know you don't want to hear this. I know your mum has tried to talk to you…and your dad. I know it's been hard for you, me wrecking the status quo, but I can't apologize, I won't, I can't be responsible for how you feel about that, Natalie….”