Stefan was one of those people who knew everyone. He had over two thousand friends on Facebook. His phone was always buzzing with incoming texts, Instagram messages, tweets, voicemails that started ‘Hey, babe . . .’ He was eleven years younger than Charlie, and it showed in the way social media came as naturally to him as breathing. Ten days after their first meeting, his profile was still up on Grindr though he swore he wasn’t active on there any more, but Charlie didn’t believe him.
Charlie had never felt so happy, or at the same time so utterly afraid. It was as if someone had stripped the top layer of skin off him, leaving every nerve-ending exposed. Stefan cancelled dates at the last minute, but when they did meet, he made Charlie feel that he was the wittiest, sexiest man alive. At least some of the time. He told Charlie he wanted to show him off – and then once they were out, flirted outrageously with everyone he met – men and women.
Stefan called himself a freelance design consultant, but Charlie had little idea what he actually did. When Charlie got up to go to work on those rare mornings he was allowed to stay over, Stefan remained fast asleep; he seemed to spend his days flitting here and there, lunching or drinking with this person or that. He lived in a rented flat in a trendy central London neighbourhood, but he expected Charlie to pay when they went out. He asked about Charlie’s job but didn’t bother to disguise how his eyes glazed over when Charlie replied. Charlie found himself talking up his position and his level of responsibility in the department, just so he could bear to look at the image of himself reflected back through Stefan’s dismissive gaze. For the first time ever, he wished for a more impressive job title – and an accompanying pay packet. Charlie was both miserable and ecstatic and it was driving him crazy.
And all the time, he was having to come into the office and deal with the shit that was going on. Chloe seemed constantly either on the verge of tears or else adopting this grating loud and gregarious ‘let’s go and get hammered’ persona – clearly for Ewan’s benefit. Like he even noticed she was there when Rachel was around. Amira was preoccupied, Paula on edge, and Sarah, who was his natural ally in the department, was almost like a ghost person. She slipped in and out as unobtrusively as she could and spent the day with her head bent over her desk. Since the disaster of her missed meeting with Kevin Bromsgrove the previous week, she’d stopped taking lunch breaks even. He was worried about her. She had a pinched, haunted look, but when he tried to catch her on her way to the kitchen or the loo, she made it clear she didn’t want to talk. Her eyes would flit anxiously towards Rachel’s office or the door. ‘Got to be on best behaviour,’ she’d whispered the day before when he finally cornered her by the kettle.
‘She’ll forget about that Bromsgrove business soon enough,’ he’d said, trying to cheer her up. ‘It’ll be someone else’s turn to be the new whipping boy.’
But Sarah hadn’t been convinced. ‘There’s something else,’ she’d said. ‘And I’m dreading Rachel finding out.’
‘What?’ he asked. But Sarah had just shaken her head. ‘You don’t even want to know,’ she sighed.
On the Tuesday afternoon, Mark Hamilton came down from his penthouse office to talk to them all about the forthcoming team-building weekend.
‘It’ll be great fun,’ he said, his strangely colourless eyes with their sandy lashes flicking from one person to the next as if inviting agreement. ‘It’s being organized by a company who specialize in this kind of thing. It’ll be a mix of cognitive exercises, boardroom games and Outward Bound stuff.’
At the phrase Outward Bound, Charlie felt as if someone had snapped an elastic band against the inside wall of his stomach. There could be no two words more guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of a man who’d had a migraine all through school that only visited him on PE days, and who had never completely got over the pain of discovering as a teenager that his newly divorced father had failed to turn up to see him two Sundays in a row because he was standing on the touchline supporting his girlfriend’s soccer-playing son. ‘It must make a lovely change for you being around someone who understands the offside rule,’ he’d said cuttingly. But his dad – who he now accepted had been loving in his own way – had just said, ‘Ah well, that’s the thing about families – you don’t get to choose each other.’
Wasn’t that the truth!
Stefan was into fitness. He wore a lime-green plastic band around his wrist that measured his steps. Sometimes if he felt he’d underperformed that day, he’d leap to his feet when they were on the sofa – or, once, in bed – and run around the room a few times, stopping to lunge forward on to one leg. The band told him how many calories he’d burned and how well he’d slept. Charlie had come to dread a low reading, since it could send Stefan’s mood plummeting. He hated that band with a passion, feeling it to be a personal reproach, a kick in the teeth for everything he was.