“We can’t work like this,” I tell her but she shrugs again.
“It’s not my call,” she says. “Please keep this to yourself until after the official announcement.”
Luckily, I’m good at keeping confidences.
I try to think of ways to reverse the funding decision right up until my first meeting.
But I have nothing.
Pam’s right, we can only do our best.
But my best isn’t going to be enough any longer. It’s going to be nowhere close.
Jack
It’s the same old office with the same old team in it. The same old faces asking me about my weekend out of politeness.
I give them the same old bland answers and wonder how I didn’t realise my life was so flat and dull before Carrie Wells came tumbling into it.
I normally struggle to give too much of my time to this business, but right now, with that delicious girl waiting at home for me, I’m struggling to give it any time at all.
I’ve never been so pleased to jump back in my car at the end of the work day. I’ve also never been so pleased to pull up onto my driveway to find Mike’s old car already parked in my space.
I’m grinning as I step through the front door, whistling a stupid tune as I head straight through to the kitchen.
“Someone’s happy,” Carrie says, but it seems like I’m the only one. She gestures at Mike, head resting on his palm as he flips through the local newspaper.
He looks like he’s had a pig of a day, but as I step closer it looks like it’s even more than that.
He’s on the job pages.
My mouth dries up. Surely Pam Clowes didn’t grill him that fucking hard about Carrie being here. Surely the prick didn’t fess up to fuck knows what.
“What’s going on?” I ask and it takes him a moment to meet my eyes. “What did you tell them?”
“Nothing,” he says. “None of this is about Carrie, it’s about the quarterly budget.”
I take a seat. “But they cut it last time round, they said it would hold for at least another six months.”
“Yeah, well they changed their mind. We’re forty percent down.”
“Forty?!”
That’s fucking ridiculous. That office is strapped enough for investment as it is. We’ve talked it through plenty of times. Mike’s even considered giving up some of his retirement fund to help out a little.
But this. This is something else.
“They’re letting George and Diane go at the end of this week.”
“And what about their workload?”
“Client funding is down from a six-month plan to two. Fortnightly instead of weekly. We’ll have to take on the backlog between the few of us left.”
“What do they expect of you? You’d have to be a miracle worker to get anywhere in that kind of window. You won’t even be able to liaise with the agencies, the conversation chain will be over before you’ve even had a chance to action the paperwork, you’ll be starting afresh each time.”
He sighs. “I know.”
Of course he knows. I feel like a jerk for pointing out the obvious.
Carrie looks worried for him. She’s dithery as she flits about the kitchen, making up a fresh pot of coffee as we talk.
I smile to see the mud stains on the knees of her jeans. They suit her.
“What you gonna do?” I ask Mike, and he shakes his head.
“I don’t know,” he says. “What can I do?”
“You can quit,” I tell him. “Find something to do where you don’t have your hands tied with crappy budgets and tick boxes.”
He holds up the job page. “That’s exactly what I’m doing, but there’s not much out there where I’ll be genuinely able to make a difference for a living. In fact, there’s fuck all.”
Another job’s not quite what I mean, but he carries on scanning the ads obliviously.
I watch Carrie as she pours the coffee, noticing the way she glows after a good day of work on the land.
She’s nothing like the hissing little bitch I walked in on just a few weeks ago. She’s nothing that any of her previous carers would recognise.
And that’s not from Jack’s little sessions with her every week, talking her through her options in a stuffy little office.
It’s this place, it suits her. We suit her. And as much as I’d like to think it’s a good hard fucking that brings her in line, that has little to do with it.
Trust, responsibility, hard work and a little bit of freedom along with a healthy amount of discipline. Those things have everything to do with it.
And love.
That has the most to do with it of all.
Love and respect.
I have an idea exactly what Michael can do with the rest of his career, but I don’t blurt it out right then and there.