When She Was Bad(14)

‘See this?’ Still Tom didn’t look up. ‘Oi! See this?’

He glanced over and then immediately looked back down again.

‘I’d rather bond with this glass than Rachel Masters,’ Amira told him. ‘She gives me the heebie-jeebies. I’m dreading our cosy one-to-one first thing tomorrow.’

‘Yeah, well, you’ve just got to suck it up. Look on the bright side. With the size of our mortgage we’re only going to have to be working for the next hundred years or so.’

Tom sounded bitter, and the tingling turned into an insistent jabbing. She knew he hated his auditing job. But he’d made the decision on his own to give up on the music stuff. She hadn’t pushed him. It wasn’t fair to make her feel guilty. Anyway, the band had always been a pipe dream. This was London, where it cost you fifty quid just to breathe the air. You couldn’t live on creative juices alone. And her mother would literally have driven her bonkers if they’d stayed there any longer, always making a big deal about being so easy-going, so different from her own strict Indian parents, yet the master of the pained expression, or the big sigh accompanied by the dreaded phrase ‘your father always dreamed you’d . . .’ followed by whatever was the exact opposite of what Amira had just announced she would do.

Every day Amira still missed her gentle-giant dad, even though it would be eight years next month since he’d died. But she remembered him as a kind man with a big laugh that shot out of him like a volley of cannon-fire when he watched a silly TV programme or joked with one of his many relations back in Ireland, not the reproachful figure hunched over with disappointment that her mother tried to project. Families were so weird, weren’t they? If they hadn’t been related, Amira couldn’t think of two people with less in common than her mother and her.

Amira’s unease was still with her when she got up to go to work the next morning, along with the heavy throb of a hangover. She blamed those huge wine glasses they’d received as a moving-in present. Three of those and you’d drunk a bottle without even realizing it.

She hesitated over what to wear, spending so long in front of the mirror trying on and discarding clothes that she was late leaving and had to do run-walking all the way to the station, cursing the heels she’d foolishly decided on at the last minute.

This wasn’t at all the way she’d seen her working life. She’d always presumed she’d do something worthwhile. Something that made a difference – charity work or advocacy or something – but instead she’d fallen into recruitment, thinking it was just a stopgap while she made up her mind what she really wanted to do. Six months had turned into a year and then another, and now five years had gone by and here she was pinioned in place under the weight of their monstrous mortgage.

Walking through the double doors into the office, Amira was struck all over again by the strange new atmosphere. In the Gill days, people would have been hovering by each other’s desks, cradling cups of coffee and chatting before getting down to the business of the day. But now everyone was at their stations, computers on, eyes down. The daring few who risked walking past the new boss’s office to the kitchen did so with heads bowed. Where they used to take it in turn to do a coffee round (well, some had more turns than others, it had to be said), now they made quick, solitary forays to the kettle, making single cups that took just minutes to prepare and could be carried surreptitiously through the office without drawing too much attention.

Waiting to be called into Rachel’s office for her one-to-one, Amira texted Tom. Shitting self. Guillotine poised above head. Only as she clicked send did she notice her phone had auto-corrected ‘guillotine’ to ‘guilt’. Great. So now Tom would start reading all sorts of weird meanings into a text that was supposed to be light-hearted. She toyed with the idea of texting him again to correct it, but decided against it. Let him wonder.

‘Amira?’

Paula had materialized by her desk, noiselessly like a ghost.

‘Rachel will see you now.’

Amira smiled, but Paula wasn’t really looking at her directly, rather at a point slightly to her left. She seemed tired, Amira couldn’t help noticing. Her pale eyes were made paler still by the smudged purple shadows underneath. It must be stressful, living in that little terraced house with an estranged husband and adult kids who, as far as Amira could see, did bugger all to help. If only Paula would stand up for herself a bit. She should have chucked Ian out when they split up, broke or not. He’d have had to stand on his own two feet then, give up that vinyl business that was never going to make him any money and go out and get a proper job.