Chapter 1
The following February
Her arms and legs spasmed outwards, she let loose a very loud scream and then Elizabeth awoke to find herself not on a nose-diving plane but on the seven thirty-six to Leeds and the focus of half a crammed carriageful of ‘glad that wasn’t me’ faces. However, not even their cold-water stares, the probability that she had been snoring and two mega-strength coffees slopping around her digestive system could keep Elizabeth’s eyes from shuttering down again – she was exhausted. She was last off the train and, in fact, had the fat, sweaty bloke sitting next to her not caught her with the hard edge of his briefcase as he heaved his carcass out of the seat, she might well have slept through to Barnsley again on the return trip. She had better buck up for later; she was hardly going to be the life and soul of Helen’s birthday party face down and asleep in her minestrone.
As usual, the train station was full of suits zipping in straight lines to their destinations clutching a laptop case in one hand and a grabbed breakfast bag in the other. As usual, there were a few early shoppers making a leisurely way up to the main city stores and managing to get in the way of the rushing executives, who did not take too kindly to having lumpy human obstacles on their own personal work paths. And as usual, there was a large contingent of big-bellied workmen staring at women’s breasts from the scaffolding as their more industrious colleagues worked on extending the station, yet again. The train used to dump Elizabeth right in front of the ticket barriers, but these days it deposited them all so far away on one of the new platforms that she almost needed to catch another train from there to the exit. That morning, it felt a particularly long way.
At least the ten-minute walk in the crisp February air served to startle her brainwaves into some activity, and by the time she had reached the great, smutty-bricked offices with the giant blue Handi-Save sign above the entrance she felt considerably more human and less like a dormouse again. It was an old, weary-looking building in the middle of a sea of younger, more dynamic structures, with its exterior reflecting the majority of the people on the inside – dull, tired and uninspiring. She pushed open the giant stiff revolving door that had given everyone who had worked there for any length of time a deformed bicep. It was easy to spot a longtimer at Handi-Save for they all had one arm bigger than the other, like a male Fiddler crab. Yep, she felt decidedly better for the walk.
‘Flaming Norah, you look rough,’ said Derek the security man. He, being ambidextrous, had two massive arms. ‘Good night, was it?’
‘I was in bed for nine,’ Elizabeth held up her best shushing finger as his mouth sprang open, ‘and before you say it, yes, I was alone. I don’t know what’s up with me at the moment. I think I’ve been bitten by a tsetse-tsetse fly.’
‘Tsetse-tsetse? Going round in pairs now, are they?’ grinned Derek. ‘Maybe you’re coming down with something. Mind you, in a place like this someone’s only got to say “cold” and everyone gets it through the air conditioning.’
‘I feel all right in myself, just tired,’ she said, hunting in her bag for one of her menthols. She proffered the packet to him. ‘Want one?’
‘Do I chuff!’ he said, warding them away like a vampire who had just been offered a garlic bulb. ‘If I want mints I’ll suck a Polo, if I want a fag I’ll have an Embassy, thanks for asking.’
‘Please yourself then! Right, now, I better do something with my face then if I look that bad.’
‘I’ve a carrier bag behind Reception. I could poke two eyeholes in it for you.’
‘Thanks a lot, Ras.’
He nudged her playfully. ‘Ah, you still look bonny!’
She turned away, mock-insulted. ‘Nope, sorry, the damage has been done, you can get stuffed,’ and though she could hear him laughing behind her, the smile slid off her face as if it had been greased with three pounds of melted butter. Not that she had taken offence, for it took a lot to wind Elizabeth up – at least it had done until recently, when this infernal tiredness threatened to turn even her cool disposition to something as brittle as the toffee she used to get as a kid that snapped off into artery-severing shards.
Derek, or Rasputin as everyone called him, would have been mortified even to suspect that he had upset her because they went back such a long way. He had only been at Handi-Save a week himself when she had turned up at the Reception desk aged sixteen, all wide grey eyes, smashing blouse buttoned up to the neck and her dark gypsy curls tamed into a ponytail. She had been half-fearful, half-excited by her important-sounding destination – ‘the typing pool’ – to where Ras volunteered to escort her. She’d had a picture in her mind of lots of typists working around a pool full of warm, blue water and was critically disappointed when it turned out to be just an airless office full of women with perms and frumpy frocks banging away on word processors. Ras was string-thin back then, with a number one haircut and a moustache like Ron from the pop group ‘Sparks’. He ended up getting them both hopelessly lost which caused a standing joke that was still running.
Twenty-two years later, they were both still there, crossing paths in Reception each morning, though Elizabeth had long since left the pool and was now the Managing Director’s secretary. Ras, on the other hand, had concentrated his energies over the years into evolving physically into a heavyweight wrestler who would fail a Roy Wood’s Wizzard audition for being too hairy. He’d had four kids, three wives, two motorcycle crashes and a steel plate in his head. The only things that seemed to have stayed constant about him were those friendly facial features and the warmth in his morning greetings. He alone these days put a smile on Elizabeth’s lips at work, or as she preferred to call it, ‘the Hammer House of Handi-Save’.
The worrying part in all this was that if Ras thought she looked rough, then Julia definitely would – and the only reason Elizabeth had pushed herself out of bed that morning was because Julia and Laurence had made it perfectly clear that being absent on a Monday was tantamount to admitting to a hangover. So ironically, there she was dutifully turning up but looking as if she had been on a weekend ciderfest. A picture of the pair of them flitted across her mind, which made her growl inwardly. She was wound into the ground before she had even set eyes on the Gruesome Twosome and it was so not like her to feel this way. Hardly anything ever got to Elizabeth and even if it did, she never showed it.
She grabbed a coffee from the machine and slid into the tiny and horribly smoky room that the militantly anti-tobacco Laurence had ‘allowed’ the smokers to have and, as he said ‘pollute as their own’. The rebellious air in there usually calmed her down before she had even lit up, but that morning it felt thick and unpleasant, and welded itself like glue to the back of her throat. She sat on a table in the canteen instead, gulping back the lukewarm gritty coffee whilst pitter-patting with her fingertips at the fluidy swellings under her eyeballs. She didn’t dare risk another look in the mirror in case it threw back a worse reflection than the passable one she imagined was there before making her way to the lift.
She pressed the button (only four times that morning) before it started to shudder and rattle upwards at a pace that a snail with a weight problem could beat – even the machinery didn’t want to work here! She hadn’t always felt like that, for there had been a time when she used to belt up the staircase in the mornings, glad to get to her desk. Obviously that was before the days of that well-known double act Laurence Stewart-Smith, a name impossible to say without hissing, and his wonderful side-kick, Julia Powell – Powell as in the contraction of ‘power crazed troll’.
Laurence Stewart-Smith: also known as ‘Eyebrow Man’ on account of the long furry caterpillar which ran the width of his forehead before scuttling into his hairline to hide the 666. Laurence Stewart-Smith: in the opinion of the City, The Man – business genius, whizz-kid, darling of industry, multi-millionaire manof-the-people, demi-god of the hoi polloi – but in the opinion of anyone who really knew the man behind the title: total plonker.
Julia did not lift her head as Elizabeth walked past her desk, which had long since failed to surprise her. Julia could not communicate with females on a lesser grade unless it was by email, even when sitting two metres away as Elizabeth did. There were bagfuls of evidence to substantiate the theory that Julia was threatened by other women, who were creatures to be ignored, or destroyed. Men, however, were a different kettle of fish. Then she would start flirting and sticking out her chest and batting her eyelashes in the general direction of the flirtee – the number of bats being directly proportionate to the quality of his suit.
Sometimes, to be controversial, Elizabeth would open a mail and shout across the reply to Julia as it really seemed to annoy her, but this past week or so she was just too tired to play the dissident. Was this the onset of old age, she wondered. Was she about to start dribbling and nodding off after a morning Rich Tea biscuit and exchanging her cappuccinos for a nice cup of cocoa? She was only eighteen months off being forty, after all.