The Way Out (14 page)

‘Of course – April, yes, I… Oh! Ali, I'm so sorry, I didn't think, I'm… Oh, this is all so hard! Everything I say is wrong.'

‘Don't be daft,' I tell her lightly. ‘You're being hormonal. I'm fine. Don't worry about me. I'm really, really happy for you.' I say it with feeling and I mean it. If only she had stopped right there.

‘I wish I could do something. It must be horrible. But…' She seems to be gathering herself. ‘I know this might sound a bit harsh, but if it does, I'm only being cruel to be kind. You do have to pull yourself together at some point. You can try again. The doctors said there was no reason you couldn't. I mean, there's nothing wrong with you. You were just unlucky.'

I could almost forgive her, even that.

‘I know how you feel,' she says.

I can't look at her. Can't bear to see her face. Don't want her to see mine. If I look at her right now, she might burst into flames. I concentrate on the tablecloth. The hum of conversation around us drops and all I can hear is the relentless click of the
empty clock. I stare at my plate and the breadstick I'm holding breaks in half.

She doesn't know. No one knows.

You lived for precisely one hour. That your eyes were the deepest navy. You were, for those sixty minutes, every one of those three thousand and six hundred seconds, the most perfect child the universe had ever witnessed before your small life flickered and went out. Like your mother, you arrived too early, but unlike your mother, you couldn't wait around. The sensation of my own heart continuing to beat in my chest has sickened me ever since I felt yours stop.

Instead, I take a large gulp of wine and try to keep my voice steady. ‘I know. Unlucky, that's all. I need to move on. I will. I am.' I smile and knock back the rest, catching the waiter's attention for another refill. He notches his eyebrow up to the next setting but brings me another without comment.

For the rest of the time, I spoon-feed Kate the expected leading questions about names, colour schemes and people carriers and she happily chews over her pending domestic dilemmas. Eventually, my supply of questions begins to run dry and arid patches of silence open up.

‘Oh god, I'm late.' Kate looks at her watch. ‘I really have to run. I've got an antenatal appointment in half an hour.' I wave her away with a smile and she leaves, her meal hardly touched.

I push my own pasta around the plate. The girls at the long table giggle and feed each other ice cream with raspberry sauce from long silver spoons. Above my head, the wall clock's pendulum continues to scythe the seconds away. Our flowers are drooping and as I watch, one curled petal falls to the table and rocks from side to side.

Mezzanine

From the top of the racking, if you tilt your head and let your eyes go slack, you can see right through the perforated steel of the mezzanine floor, down to Groceries below. Then further, if you stay with it, through that floor to White Goods on the ground level. Must be, what? Sixty foot, give or take.

It's a rush, especially when I'm leaning out and holding on by only one or two fingers (the best way). That jolt of vertigo when the total height snaps into focus, the feeling there's only a few twigs of bone and stringy loops of muscle keeping me anchored to the living world. It's fucking terrifying. Makes me dizzy and weak but I do it every time. Because I can. Because I can feel all that and not lose it, not shake or cry or scream. I am in control.

There's that.

Then there's the feeling that comes next. Like I'm balanced, almost weightless, right at the very top of an idea so simple and perfect that it'll clear away all the shit in my head and make everything line up and fit together. That tipping point where all the effort of getting up there is over and the reward will be total lasting peace. Exactly there. That peak of anticipation before I go tearing down the other side, hair streaming, wind in my face, headlong into another brick wall. Not the Answer after all. Just another dud. I smash into but not through it. And I have to start again.

Can't hang around here forever though. Work to be done.

Aisle 12. Kitchenware. Check my folder. Vyleda mop heads
- 3; mop handles - 2; Hozzlehock pegs - 2 standard size plain, 1 multi-coloured, 2 jumbo pegs with the springs. Section 7. Shelf 10. I don't know who racks the stock in the warehouse when it arrives but it's as if they deliberately put the difficult to carry stuff right at the top. Mop handles being a good example. The heads I can safely drop from any height and they'll be fine but the handles are different. Bits can get broken off. I have to find a way of carrying them down without losing my grip.

I leave the folder and clamber sideways, hand over hand, gripping the metal struts, pushing my toes between cardboard boxes for a foothold. We're not supposed to do it like this. Health and Safety and all that crap. But there are only so many ladders and so many stands and never enough to go around. If you always try to do things by the rules then you'll never get anything done at all.

My guidance teacher at school used to say if I didn't improve my attendance record and study for my exams then I'd ‘end up stacking shelves at the supermarket.' Like that was the very worst thing that could happen to a person. Mr Smiley was surprisingly stupid. I remember I used to think teachers had to be clever, but the longer I stayed in school the more I noticed that most of them didn't have a scooby, and some weren't even half-way bright. That was a real let down.

As it turned out, I don't stack shelves. (Fuck you very much, Mr Smiley.) I'm behind the scenes, supplying those that do. I'm what's called a Picker. I write down what's missing from the shelves in a special folder full of plastic-covered shelf plans, using a special pen so it can be wiped clean at the end of each shift, then I go to the warehouse and load everything needed into tall
metal trolleys and send them down in the lift to the shop floor. The shelf-stackers take it from there. I wonder whether Smiley would consider what I do better or worse than shelf-stacking. I wonder why I wonder that, because I honestly couldn't give a fuck.

I work from seven in the evening till midnight. The twilight shift, they call it. Makes it sound romantic and maybe a bit mystical, like we're a bunch of elves or pixies, tippy-toeing around the store in the half-light, sprinkling fairy dust and working our magic to make sure everything's perfect for the humans by morning. Hope I'm not bursting your bubble here but it's really not like that. No magic. No pixies. Just shit work and minimum wage. Same old same old.

Mum used to say ‘don't pick it, it'll only get worse.' The phrase pops into my head every single time I clock on, like it's programmed into the card puncher. Card in, ka-chunk, fucking annoying advice out. It's irritating the way her nonsense hangs around, wormed into unexpected places, wherever there's a gap. It's like she's haunting me before she's even properly dead.

I stop for a little light refreshment. Section 5. Shelf 8. Still there. In a dusty old box of cracked draining racks that someone should really throw out, a half bottle of Bell's, tucked down the side. The very thing. Onwards. I take a wide swing out, one arm gripping, the other swooping in an arc. As a species, we should've stayed in the trees. There's something about climbing like this. Feels somehow real.

Mum also used to say ‘little pickers wear bigger knickers.' Never mind big knickers, I'm wearing cycle shorts under my blue polyester uniform skirt. All the female pickers learn that on their first shift. When you're high in the warehouse racking, even
if you use the ladders like you're supposed to, there'll always be some smartarse down below ready to pass comment. Be easier if we could wear trousers, but that's against the rules too. Not a big fan of the rules, me.

Right on cue, I get a drawn-out, sarcastic wolf whistle from Davey, pushing a trolley below where I'm pulling packets of pegs out of a box. He hasn't stopped, or even looked up properly, it's just a reflex.

‘Away and piss off!' I shout down. Doesn't cost anything to be polite.

‘Love you too, Babe,' he calls back over his shoulder, still pushing his trolley towards the lifts.

‘Jackie,' I call after him. ‘My name is Jackie.'

Davey's alright. Some of the others aren't, which makes Davey a Good Guy. The clunk and rattle of his trolley wheels dwindle away to nothing, lost in a few turns of the high-sided cardboard maze.

I drop the three mop heads, one after another and they land with soft thuds. The wooden pegs can be safely dropped as well but not the plastic ones, they're likely to break. I start wrestling the mop handles out of their box. At least there's only two. Heads wear out quicker than handles. Shame people don't have replacement heads for when the ones we've started out with get knackered or worn out. Folk could have a collection of spare heads for different occasions. A head for every day of the week. Useful for those difficult mornings too. Which might not be quite so difficult if I stopped drinking so much. But the thing about drinking, proper drinking, till I'm almost-passing-out (but not), is that I get close to the edge, which is the only place I can feel alive.

No matter how smashed I get, no matter how physically incapable, there's always part of me sitting in a corner of my head, calmly watching, absolutely sober. Nothing can touch that part of me. Nothing. It's cold. Immune to everything (I've checked it all). I like to get close to it so I can remind myself it's still there. I'm still there. Standing near the edge is the only place I can get a grip, feel the shape of things, feel my hold on them.

I wedge the two mop handles under my arm and start climbing down, pausing at each shelf to move the packets of plastic pegs down as I go. It's tricky. My arms are getting tired and the mop handles keep catching on the racking and threatening to lever me off into thin air. But I've done this before. I can handle it.

It's always better to visit the edge deliberately than to wait for it to come and find me. Often, it arrives without warning. I wake up and it's right at the side of my bed and just putting my feet on the floor is taking a step off a cliff, off the edge of the world into endless black space, and I've no idea when or if my feet might land again on solid ground.

Made it. I stack everything together on my trolley and take a moment to roll my shoulders, stretch my arms out, imagine them growing and spreading out and out and up and up.

And sometimes the edge stalks me all day, lurking under kerbs waiting to snatch at my ankles when I cross the road, or in the lift shaft where the lift should be but hardly ever is, waiting to suck me down. Or in the silences I don't know how to fill when people talk to me. Wherever there's a gap. It could be
anywhere.

My mother came out through the gaps between her father's words and what his silences admitted. I met him, that once, though she didn't want me to. ‘There's nothing to be gained,' she said. Another of her ready-made phrases. Her speech was always full of them. She hardly ever put words together herself. Her talk was all verbal chicken nuggets – bland, bite-sized and pre-processed. Now she's even lost the ability to choose the right one for the occasion. She'll sit there and smile vaguely, her eyes drowning in themselves, and say things like ‘you'll catch your death' and ‘what a wicked web we weave…' then trail off and start humming some never-ending tuneless tune.

Lately she doesn't seem to care who I might be but sometimes she hazards a few guesses. Some of the names she comes out with – I'm sure she's never even met folk with those names, she's just pulling them out of the air, or maybe from memories of TV soaps.

Mary? Trisha? Amelia? Gracie?

‘Jackie,' I tell her. ‘It's Jackie.'

She looks at me and frowns like she's searching through the clutter in her head and I think maybe she's going to find me in there somewhere, but she just shakes her head and says, ‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.'

Finding him was easier than I'd imagined it could be. He wasn't even bothering to hide. As if he had nothing to be ashamed of.

I went to the pub first, steadied myself, then went and sat in his piss-smelling front room and watched as everything I didn't know but half-suspected about my mother's childhood came hissing like steam out through his words and formed the shape of a girl struggling to disappear. He gave me a battered box-file of papers, old photos and letters. Said he had no use
for them anymore and I may as well take them away. Pandora doesn't know the half of it. Inside that box were packed the overlaid shadows of those who came before him, like a lesson in cause and effect. All the generations rising up out of it until they clenched together and swung back down, like a fist coming right at me on the mezzanine floor. I start climbing again. I feel better up high and I left the stock folder up there anyway.

There are holes in everything. Holes, in fact, if you want to take it all the way (and why wouldn't you?), are what the world and everything in it is made of. I've been thinking about this. Atoms, right? They're mostly empty. Electrons and whatever else, whizzing around a big load of nothing. So, the truth of it is, there's more nothing than anything else. There are more gaps than not-gaps, more holes than Mum still likes to crochet. She's rotten at it but never lets that stop her. She makes squares with different patterns in endlessly ugly colour combinations then sews them together to make scarves and tea cosies and cot blankets. The results were always misshapen and full of holes but they've got a lot worse recently. Holes are what they're made of now, loosely strung together with wool.

There were similarities. Of course. You can't get away from genetics. It's inheritance. Passed down, hand to hand, one to the next. He was old, but still managing to live on his own. He looked at me as I was leaving, sniffed the whisky on my breath and said, ‘the apple never falls far from the tree.'