‘You’ve been weird all afternoon, what’s up?’ Harriet asked as she watched Nancy with her arm around Jack’s chair, staring into space. Nancy didn’t respond so Harriet leaned forward across the dinner table and clicked her fingers in front of her face. Nancy jumped and looked at her, confused. ‘I said, what’s up? You’ve been acting weird all afternoon.’
‘Nothing, I’m fine.’
Harriet wasn’t convinced. ‘Yeah you sound it.’ She picked up her phone to check her emails – 35 new emails in the last two hours. She clicked open one of them and saw it was marked as urgent. Exhaling, she opened it up fully and began reading. Within two minutes of reading it became apparent that she would have to call them to sort out this latest mess. She was getting to the end of her patience with this now. This holiday had flagged up the incompetency of the team she surrounded herself with at work. Things were going to have to be shaken up when she got home. She hadn’t realised, until she came away, just how much they relied on her. And whilst she couldn’t just leave them in the lurch now – it was her business after all – she knew that things were going to have to improve. Staff training, rethinking positions, even dismissals if this continued.
Before she had a chance to stand up and go anywhere, she was interrupted by Jayne’s cheery voice. ‘Hi, how are you?’
Harriet looked up. ‘Hi.’
‘Listen I don’t know if it’s your kind of thing, both of you,’ she looked over to Nancy too, ‘but there’s an event down on the beach tonight, I saw it on the noticeboard earlier today – it’s a beach party with a twist, apparently. Only I don’t know what the twist is.’ She laughed, flicking her hair over her shoulder, displaying the beautiful lace-topped dress she was wearing. ‘Anyway, just thought I’d mention it, we’re going down there so maybe we’ll see you there?’
‘Yeah maybe.’ Harriet’s phone pinged another email. ‘Listen, I have to go and make a call. Nance, watch the kids for me, I’ll be back in half hour.’
Harriet rushed off towards the corridor, opting to take the stairs instead of the lift.
***
‘Alright Nance, I was going to come down in a minute, I was just finishing up here.’
Nancy walked through the door to their room and slammed it shut behind her, ushering Isla and Jack into her adjoining room and turning the TV on before coming back into Harriet’s room, gently closing the door behind her and placing Tommy into his cot.
‘What’s up, why are you being all secretive?’ Harriet said, laughing but her face quickly turned when she saw Nancy’s expression was far from happy. ‘You OK?’
Nancy stood facing her friend of twenty-two years, anger bubbling up. ‘No, I’m not OK. You told me this was a holiday for us to get away and relax. You told me we both needed to get away and that this would be a fun girly holiday with sun, sea and cocktails. Didn’t you? Didn’t you say that to me?’
‘Yes,’ Harriet replied, indignantly.
‘So why the bloody hell am I constantly hearing you talk about work, reading emails and disappearing off for hours on end for conference calls!’
‘I—’
‘Look, don’t get me wrong.’ Nancy held out her hand, palm down. ‘ I get that you have to work and I get that you’re a single parent trying to provide for your children and I get that you are a driven and determined human being who wants to excel with her business … I get all that! But you need to take a break otherwise you are going to go mad! You will burn yourself out and you will get ill.’
‘Nancy—’
‘You had the perfect opportunity downstairs to make a really nice friend and you just walked off and practically threw her invitation back in her face. I spoke to Jayne after you left and she’s lovely. She kept saying how nice you were and how you reminded her of her friend who really struggled with being a mum but didn’t tell anyone and ended up being depressed and making herself really ill. She went out of her way to come over to you and all you could do was say you had to make a bloody phone call!’
‘If you’ll just let me talk—’
‘Why? So you can give me your usual spiel of how you have to work and how the company cannot survive without you there, blah blah…’
‘For fuck’s sake Nance, will you shut up a second and let me bloody talk!’
The girls both stood for a second staring at each other, both highly wired with frustration and emotion. Nancy felt her chest rising and falling rapidly, her breathing a reflection of her heartbeat. Her anger and frustration had built steadily from when Harriet had walked off; peaking when she got to their door and she saw Harriet was still working. She had spent days trying to find the right moment to bring this up properly and instead, it had just come out in an angry rant.
After a moment of silence where you could cut the tension in the room with a knife, Nancy prompted her response. ‘Well? Go on, I’m listening.’
But the response that came wasn’t what Nancy had expected because Harriet just dropped down to the bed, put her head in her hands and simply said, ‘I can’t do it anymore.’