When She Was Bad (21 page)

‘I tell you something,’ said Will, who’d regained his air of relaxed bonhomie. ‘In terms of team-bonding, that was truly excellent stuff. You all pulled together, rallied around Paula, supported her. Mark and I couldn’t have planned it much better ourselves. In fact, how do you know we didn’t plan it ourselves?’

He glanced around the group, eyebrows waggling. There were a few giggles.

A savage wave of heat swept over Paula, rising from her feet upwards until she felt as if her whole body was on fire.

Her skin burned with shame.

26
Amira

‘Do you think someone did it deliberately?’

Amira would have laughed if Paula hadn’t looked like she was blinking away tears. She’d been taken aback when the older woman had knocked on her hotel-room door just a few moments ago asking for a ‘chat’. She and Paula had always got on well enough – at least until Rachel practically offered her Paula’s job and it all became awkward – but they’d never been intimate. Now Paula was slumped like a bag of boiled rice in the armchair by the window, asking her if someone could have deliberately tampered with her safety cord.

‘Blimey, not you as well.’

Paula blinked at her, not understanding.

‘Charlie was convinced someone had poisoned him the other day,’ Amira explained. ‘Hey, have you two been at the skunk again?’

‘Skunk?’ Paula looked more confused than ever and Amira stifled an impatient sigh.

‘Skunk. You know – weed. Gives you paranoid delusions.’

‘Oh. Right. Yes. Funny.’

Amira felt a pang of guilt. Paula was entitled to feel paranoid – her boss
was
trying to get rid of her. Maybe not by dropping her off a rope bridge but scheming behind her back to replace her was just as soul-destroying.

‘You look nice,’ Paula said now, as if to compound Amira’s guilt. The automatic reply ‘so do you’ died on Amira’s lips as she surveyed the outfit her companion had selected for the evening’s dinner activities: the familiar voluminous beige tunic over baggy black trousers. Low-heeled black court shoes of a type that were last in style in the early eighties and a shapeless black cardigan completed the look.

‘You’re so lucky,’ Paula continued. ‘You can wear anything with your colouring. Which one of your parents do you take after?’

Amira shrugged, uncomfortable as always with this line of questioning.

‘Neither really. My mum is Indian and my dad was Irish, so I ended up this mutant creature who doesn’t look like anyone. What do you think of this dress? Be honest.’

She had got used to heading off enquiries into her complicated heritage, but immediately she regretted her choice of topic.

‘It’s gorgeous,’ said Paula sincerely. ‘Is it new?’

The guilt was instantaneous. Amira’s fingers flew to the bold-flowered-print Ted Baker dress she’d agonized over a couple of days before. She hadn’t meant to go shopping. She and Tom had banned themselves from buying any new things for the next, oh, fifty years or so. But as she’d been walking to the Tube after work she’d started thinking about Rachel and how she always looked so perfectly put together, and she’d allowed herself to think for the first time about the possibility of promotion.
If
she took the job – of course, she wasn’t committed yet – she’d need to start looking smarter. And that had got her thinking about the weekend and how she had absolutely nothing decent to wear. What would be the harm in just going to have a look? She wouldn’t buy anything. She’d only be thinking ahead to when she got the . . . well, when she’d need to dress better, and would have the salary to do it too. So she’d detoured via Oxford Street and gone into the department store, and there had been the dress and she’d tried it on and fallen in love. And even though they were on the very edge of their overdraft limit in their joint account, and her credit was maxed on the joint credit card plus the two store credit cards Tom didn’t even know about, she’d still taken out yet another store card and bought the dress, her euphoria lasting as long as it took the sales assistant to wrap it up in tissue and deliver it into a thick paper bag. But back home she’d felt consumed by self-loathing. She’d shoved the bag into the back of the wardrobe, vowing to return it the next day. But somehow the dress had remained in the wardrobe. When she’d put it on earlier, she’d felt fantastic, but now Paula’s well-meaning compliment reminded her of just how she’d be getting this promotion (if she took it) and then she had an image of Tom’s face creased with worry, and she felt suddenly damp with shame.

Dinner was in the hotel dining room. On the way down, Amira and Paula agreed to make an effort not to be intimidated by the presence of their bosses and to just enjoy being in a nice hotel with everything paid for. But even before they’d sat down, their resolution floundered. Mark and Rachel sat on opposite sides of the table with a spare seat next to each of them. All the other chairs were occupied.

It wasn’t much of a choice, but Amira would definitely prefer not to sit next to Rachel, not least because she’d have Sarah on her other side and she didn’t trust herself to talk to her at the moment, particularly not when she’d had a few drinks (which she very much intended to do). Just what was Sarah playing at? She’d always sworn she was going to stop at two kids. Always joked that she and Oliver never had sex anyway, so it wasn’t so much a choice as a fait accompli. If she’d changed her mind, the least she could have done was give one of them a heads-up. It was they who’d be picking up the slack for her. Again. No wonder there was a spare chair between Rachel and Sarah, who was looking very fed up. Just as long as she didn’t have to sit . . .

Too late. Paula was already squeezing her way around to the far side of the table to take the empty chair next to Mark, who had the look of someone trying too hard to appear pleased. Resigned, Amira took the seat between Rachel and Sarah.

‘Phew, thank God it’s you,’ whispered Rachel.

Amira was shocked. Though she knew what Rachel thought of Paula professionally, it still seemed horribly indiscreet of her to express favouritism so openly, even if no one else could hear. She glanced at the almost-empty bottle of wine in front of her boss and wondered how much of it she’d had. Those glacial eyes were sharp enough to cut yourself on. Once again, Amira was flushed with self-hatred – this time for allowing herself to be party to the kind of office politics for which she and Tom had always reserved their ultimate scorn, lying on the sofa watching the conniving and backstabbing in reality shows. She knew he’d be horrified about what had been going on in the office, which practically amounted to a witch-hunt of Paula and Sarah. But then almost immediately, she was switching the blame on to him. After all, it was partly his fault she had to compromise herself like this. If he’d just taken some financial responsibility earlier, they would not be so stressed about this mortgage and she wouldn’t have to kowtow to a bullying boss.

The mortgage you pushed him into
, said the voice in her head. She batted it away.

A loud whooping noise came up from the next table where the sales and marketing team were sitting, making Amira jump. They seemed to be playing a drinking game. The ginger-haired guy whose name she could never remember was draining a pint of something while the others looked on, chanting, ‘Down in one, down in one.’ When he smashed the glass down on the table, he had a foam moustache. Those around him clapped.

‘Everyone’s treating me like a leper,’ whispered Sarah on her other side. ‘It’s not as if I planned to have another baby. It was a mistake.’

‘Do you think maybe after two you ought to have learned how they’re made?’ Amira had meant it to be a joke, but it came out harsher than she’d intended.

‘I know it sounds really lame but you don’t understand how exhausted we are all the time, both of us. After seven thirty at night our brains just shut down. We’re not thinking straight, certainly not thinking about consequences. And I thought it was a safe time.’

Amira made a face. ‘There
is
no safe time. Anyway, you’re clearly not that exhausted if you’re still having sex.’

‘Once in a blue moon. Honestly. It’s just so unlucky. I haven’t even been able to bring myself to think about it. After I’d done the test, Oliver had his back to me, doing the washing-up. I tapped him on the shoulder and showed him the little stick thingy with the blue line and he just stared at it and then turned back round and carried on washing up. Didn’t say a word.’

‘You’re happy now though, right?’

Sarah lifted her eyes to hers and Amira saw they were blurred by a sheen of tears.

‘I just don’t know how we’ll cope with another one, Amira. We’re so tired. Joe and Sam are so physically demanding. And I’ve only just really got back into work mode again. My career’s hanging by a thread as it is.’ She shot a meaningful glance in the direction of Rachel who had turned her back on them to talk to Ewan on her other side.

‘You’re not thinking of getting rid of it though, surely?’

Sarah looked stricken. ‘No. I mean, I look at Joe and Sam and think, no way, but then I imagine what it’ll be like to go back to the beginning again with the constant feeding and the not sleeping and that smell of shit and sour milk that gets into your hair and your skin and I just can’t . . . Well, I just can’t. That’s why I didn’t tell anyone. Couldn’t face dealing with it.’

‘Has
she
,’ Amira jerked her head backwards towards Rachel, ‘said anything to you?’

Sarah shook her head, and now there was a tear building in the corner of her eye, then spilling down her cheek.

‘That’s a conversation I’m dreading,’ she whispered.

A screech of laughter cut across the table. Chloe was sitting next to Will and clearly finding whatever he had just said hysterically funny. Amira had been surprised to find Will here at dinner. She’d assumed his duties ended after the outdoor activities were over. On the itinerary they’d been given before they arrived, there had been an entry on the Saturday night reading ‘after-dinner games’. She’d hoped it might be something like Scrabble or even pool, both of which she quite enjoyed, but Will’s presence made her nervous in case it was something more elaborate. More scope for public humiliation.

‘Amira,’ shouted Chloe. She had those pink blotches that pale girls get after a few drinks. ‘Tell Will that joke you told us last week. The one about the monkey on the bus.’

Amira groaned.

‘That kind of is the punchline, Chloe,’ she said.

Again the screech of laughter. ‘Oh yeah! I’m such a div!’

The meal progressed without much incident, but Amira couldn’t shake off that sense of feeling disappointed in herself. When Rachel started talking to her about her vision for the department, asking her advice on what she thought about offering a performance-based incentive – like a day at a spa – she couldn’t help thinking about how it would look to the others, she and Rachel cosying up together making plans for the office. She knew that when the axe finally fell, Paula would remember this evening and wonder if they had been plotting her downfall. ‘
Did you know then
,’ she could almost hear Paula’s quiet voice in her ear, ‘
at that team-bonding dinner? Did you already know she was going to get rid of me?
’ And what could she say to that?

‘I’d like to propose a toast to the team,’ said Mark Hamilton, once the plates were cleared away. ‘And to say a big thank you to Rachel for helping to make this weekend happen. I think today has been a tremendous success in bringing everyone together, making us think about how we work with each other and the importance of cooperation within the department – as well as the benefits of a bit of healthy competition. Plus we had a lot of fun, which is always a bonus!’

‘Well, apart from Paula getting marooned on the high wire,’ said Charlie. He was smiling, but there was a hard undercurrent to his voice.

‘Oh come on,’ said Rachel. ‘Paula’s fine. I expect she’s forgotten all about it. I really don’t think we need to keep bringing it up.’ Her voice was like flint hitting rock, fine splinters of words spraying into the air on impact.

‘If I could just say something.’ Will’s interruption broke the tension. ‘Though what happened to Paula was unfortunate and we’ll certainly be having a thorough investigation into what went wrong with that safety cord, in many ways it was also an invaluable learning experience for you guys. The quality of a great team lies in how the stronger members bring along the weaker ones. Not that I’m saying you’re weak.’ He turned his smile on Paula, who had flushed so that her rounded face, damply glowing from all the rich food, took on the texture of lightly sweating red onion. ‘It could have happened to anyone. But it was wicked how everyone rallied around. I think you should all give yourselves a round of applause.’

They all clapped politely, even though Paula looked as if each clap was causing her physical pain.

‘And now,’ Will went on, ‘we’re going to play a few after-dinner games. Nothing involving heights, don’t worry,’ he aimed that remark at Paula. ‘Just a bit of fun to hopefully help us all get to know each other even better.’

Amira’s stomach muscles clenched involuntarily at the last few words. She had a flashback to being the new girl at school and a well-meaning teacher sitting her at the front of the classroom with a tennis ball that she had to bounce to different children in turn asking them their name and then saying hello to Toby or Melanie or whoever when they bounced it back to her.

‘So you might have played this one before,’ Will continued. He was in his civvies tonight – plain black T-shirt, black jeans. Amira wondered what he made of them all. Was he really as enthusiastic as he appeared to be, or were they just another bunch of grey office types, interchangeable with the last lot he’d had in? Reason told her the latter, but still there was that foolish, hopeful voice that said maybe he’d found something unique about them, about her. Suddenly it seemed important that this man, this perfect stranger, didn’t lump her in with all the other faceless workers who streamed in and out of this hotel.
I have a degree in Psychology with Criminology
, she wanted to tell him.
I once spent six months travelling around South America. I climbed a mountain without proper equipment and thought I was going to die, I surfed sand dunes and cycled down a road in Bolivia so
dangerous the locals call it Death Road. I volunteer with the Samaritans and dance around my kitchen to the Black Eyed Peas on Saturday mornings. Don’t judge me
, she wanted to say.
Don’t judge me on my job and the person I have to be at work and the way I simper when my boss makes a joke.