So she’d done what she was brought in to do. Easier to go in strong and make the painful decisions before you had a chance to get too close to anyone, then ease back later. But maybe Ronan walking out had affected her more than she’d thought. She certainly wouldn’t win any prizes for diplomacy. She had gone too far and this was the result – this hastily scrambled summit meeting to smooth out the ruffled feathers. Mark Hamilton had been furious to be called in to mediate between Amira and Charlie and herself. ‘I don’t care how you do it, just sort it out,’ he’d told her. Rachel had been shaken. She wasn’t used to being on the wrong side of management.
The kitchen table was a 1960s vintage piece. White and circular with a chrome central column underneath, which flared out at the bottom. Around it sat six retro 1960s chairs, S-shaped, in chrome with different colour seat cushions – red, turquoise, yellow, orange, green, bubblegum pink – the only splashes of colour in the otherwise uniformly white space. They’d been Ronan’s sole contribution to the décor. He’d bid for them on eBay, paying an over-inflated price to a dealer in Camden, who’d delivered them the next day. She supposed he’d be taking them to wherever it was he was living now. The thought of him sitting on those chairs in some other house, maybe even with the twenty-two-year-old intern, gave Rachel a shooting pain in her chest.
When she’d settled her staff in around the table, dragging a bar stool for herself over from the island in the centre of the kitchen – realizing too late that the extra height was not helpful to her objective of breaking down the barriers that had built up between her and her team – Rachel launched into her carefully prepared speech.
‘I realize we’ve got off on the wrong foot,’ she began. ‘I always did have two left feet, so it’s not surprising I failed to find the right one.’
Silence.
Rachel ploughed on. She’d been brought in to make some tough decisions, she said. Nevertheless she should have handled things better. She understood that Paula must be feeling upset and sidelined, but she assured her that her position with the company had never been in question. Rachel had never intended for her to leave, merely to move sideways to a position more suited to her skillset. And Amira and Charlie had never been in competition with each other; she was only weighing up different people’s strengths to make sure she had the best person for the job.
Her own voice sounded fake in her ears. But still she ploughed on. She knew just what she needed to say. Just what they needed to hear.
She’d done all this before.
38
Charlie
Was this how it felt to have a nervous breakdown? It was as if Charlie’s normal self had vacated his body and was observing from a distance as this other alien self twisted his limbs and guts into knots of hatred. Rachel’s house with its classy address and expensive understated décor was the sort of place that would have impressed Stefan. Sitting in that fabulous kitchen with its clean, modern lines, listening to Rachel wittering on about ‘unique strengths’ and ‘skillsets’, Charlie felt as if the house was mocking him, as if she was mocking him, holding out this bricks-and-mortar embodiment of everything he was never going to be, everything he was never going to get.
Individuals like Rachel destroyed people, just like that first anonymous email had said. They got you to act like them even though it half killed you to do it, by dangling a prize in front of your eyes. And then, when you’d lowered yourself so you were sliming down on the floor alongside them, they snatched the prize away. And there you were. Nowhere. No one.
Charlie picked absently at the scab on his arm where he’d cut himself breaking into Stefan’s flat. He remembered some of the words Stefan had thrown at him over the phone when Charlie had called him to try to explain: loser, stalker, maniac, freak. Charlie had always been hard on himself, his own worst critic. Nevertheless he’d felt a level of pride in his own integrity and loyalty. Those had always seemed to him to be non-negotiable. And yet for Stefan, he’d offered them up. No, not offered them up – but allowed them to be taken.
And what had he got in return?
He looked around the table at the people he’d once considered friends and saw only a bunch of strangers who’d all in different ways betrayed their best selves, leaving behind these empty husks.
There was a knife lying on the table in front of him that Rachel had used to cut the supermarket quiche she was warming up in the oven. Heavy, sharp, expensive. While Rachel was talking at them, Charlie picked it up and ran it gently against the soft pad of his thumb, enjoying how solid it felt, the heft of it in his hands.