Here's Looking at You (31 page)

Anna sniffed and cleared her throat, but noticed she felt better for having uttered that terrible truth. When she saw her silly chubby face on those photos she felt so bad for that girl. She went to school keen and eager to learn and what she learned was that she was worthless.

‘Given you are loved, lots, this is plainly not true,’ Michelle said, as she sat back down.

‘Apart from the no-boyfriends-ever thing.’

‘Hang on. There are tons of men who’d like to be your boyfriend so don’t try any Miss Havisham bleating.’

‘This is true. I had Facebook open the other day and Phil who I work with said he’d love to have a go on you,’ Aggy said.

Anna laughed weakly. ‘OK. Percy Pig, please.’ Michelle lobbed a packet of Phizzy Pig Tails.

‘I think it’s still bad because you haven’t talked about it,’ Aggy said. ‘You don’t let anybody talk about it. Mum and Dad worry they’ll upset you if they ever bring it up. At the time, you shut yourself in your bedroom and read books, and now you store it all up inside, and keep new people at a distance. We’ve never even told Chris about the thing that happened …’

This was uncharacteristically serious and perceptive for Aggy, and Anna listened. She had to. She could feel herself welling up.

‘Me and Chris have a laugh. I don’t want him to think of me differently …’

‘He won’t! Talking helps,’ Aggy said. ‘I mean, I once completely ruined things with this client I ended up in bed with and it was a nightmare – he told people stuff I’d said in bed and they laughed. And then I told the story my way and people laughed, but in a good way, and it was like, once I’d made it mine, it couldn’t touch me anymore. You know? Make a school photo your Facebook profile picture or something.’

Anna pulled a face.

‘OK, maybe not that. But you know what I mean. Make the Mock Rock a story. Make it one of
your
stories. You’re so funny, everyone would laugh with you.’

Anna leaned over and hugged her sister’s bony shoulders. When Aggy was a child, Anna used to say it felt like cuddling the Stabilo ruler in her pencil case.

‘I tell you what, I don’t think even this James is as self-assured as you think,’ Michelle said. ‘When I spoke to him, he asked if you were alright, several times. I got the impression he was embarrassed.’

‘Embarrassed to know me, mainly. He should be embarrassed at the things he said but he’s not the type to blame himself, I promise you that.’

‘He might think on it and apologise.’

‘Hah. Not holding my breath.’

Anna thought about how upset she was at being discovered and wondered if, had she held it together, it could’ve been less confrontational.

No. He’d laughed, denied all guilt and called her a freak. He’d proved all her suspicions right.

‘If he has pissed off, he wasn’t worth anything,’ Michelle said. ‘Also, you never much liked him anyway, did you?’

‘Not really,’ Anna said.

‘Do you feel up to going back to work on Monday?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Good. I don’t think solitude is what you need. I think remembering how much you love your job is what will help.’

‘True. Granny Maude used to say: “Don’t work too hard if you want to be happy. Men like fun much more than they like clever. Which means you’ll be successful but lonely,”’ Anna said.

‘Granny Maude told me that if a man has an affair it’s because he was missing something at home,’ Aggy said.

‘This Granny Maude you two mention. Was she happily married?’ Michelle said, popping a Percy Piglet variant in her mouth.

‘Not really. She was always moody and Granddad Len always had the face of a haunted ant-eater,’ Anna said.

‘I might stop fretting on her relationship advice then,’ Michelle said, chewing stickily. ‘Granny Fraud more like. What’s that?’

Anna followed Michelle’s line of sight.

‘A box of diaries. From school. I was going to look through them.’

‘
Why
, for God’s sake?’

‘To remember—?’ Anna shrugged tiredly, ‘I don’t know. After the reunion I thought, if I can’t get closure that way then maybe I’ll get it by facing all those memories and reading the diaries. Then I wasn’t sure I could face it.’

‘Bollocks, don’t wallow. I have an idea,’ Michelle said. ‘Why don’t we burn them? A pyre? Then that can be your closure. We’ll dance around it making whooping sounds.’

Anna laughed and Aggy squealed.

Ten minutes later, having heaved the box into the garden, they all stood shivering, half-lit by the combination of the kitchen light and the back door security lamp.

‘Don’t you have a metal bin or something?’ Michelle said, arms wrapped tightly round herself, shaking with cold.

‘The bins are plastic,’ Anna said.

‘We could try microwaving the diaries?’ Aggy offered.

‘Microwave paper and cardboard?’ Michelle said.

‘And metal, the padlocks are metal,’ Anna said.

‘We were only going to destroy the diaries, not get rushed to hospital with no hair and make the dipshit slot on the local news,’ Michelle said.

She sighed. ‘You want something cooking properly, you cook it yourself. Have you got a barbecue set? And barbecue lighters?’

‘Wait! Yes.’

Anna darted off into the undergrowth and hauled out a circular barbecue grill on three legs, full of ash, while Aggy ferreted around noisily in the kitchen cupboards.

Michelle got it going with liberal use of matches, and called for the first diary.

She prodded it with a barbecue fork, watching the teddy bear face warp and melt, an Alessi sister on either side, hugging her.

‘Nearly done. Slice the buns and ready the ketchup. Man alive it smells rank,’ Michelle said, coughing as the metal catch on the diary melted. ‘Keep it away from your costume, Anna, it’ll go up like a rocket. OK, Aggy, I’m ready for the 1995 diary now. Did you really have to write so much, Anna?’

As they stood in a huddle, arms linked, Anna said, ‘Thank you, you two. I feel much better. I should have done this a long time ago.’

‘It’s time you accepted that they’re the ones who have something to be ashamed of. Not you,’ Michelle said.

Staring into the flickering cauldron of soot-covered diary, Anna realised for the first time how true this was.

James had been at a meeting with Will Wembley-Hodges, an ‘artisanal cheese string producer’ in the Bermondsey Arches who wanted to bring his product to the mass market.

He had to nod vigorously at a businessman in a pink straw trilby.

‘So you’re walking down the street, having a cheese string, but instead of processed cheese, it’s Armenian sheep’s milk cheese with black cumin.’

James was tempted to reply with something along the lines of
thank goodness someone’s tackled the ‘walking down the street with the wrong sort of cheese string’
problem
, but obviously didn’t.

His mind drifted during the meeting with schemes and plans of how best to apologise to Anna. He was working up to it.
Freak, what had possessed him to use the word freak?
He almost twitched with shame every time he recalled it. And then her mate Michelle had called him, and he’d felt awful when it became obvious he’d really upset her.

When he got back to the office mid-morning, the hushed room had a strange tension.

James was merely mildly perturbed until Harris passed him, carrying his vast tub of steamed chai. The look on his face was as grotesque as it was threatening: malign excitement, triumphalism, and most of all, gleeful anticipation.

‘James, can I have a word?’ Harris said, seating himself at his screen in the open plan office. You could have heard a pin drop.

‘Uh. Yeah?’ James said, sitting down.

‘Over here, if you don’t mind,’ Harris said.

He got up and joined Harris at his desk nearby, who had the office’s general inquiries email account open as full screen. He clicked to open a sound file and the graphic rippled and jumped as it started. A voice came out loud and clear, amid background rustling and movement. It was a young-ish male Londoner and James took a moment to realise that the stranger’s voice was his.

‘… You don’t give two craps about what I do, fine. I get it. It’s a bunch of digital twattery that didn’t exist five minutes ago and now we sell it to you as essential, because unfortunately for you it is. Because everyone has smart phones and the attention span of Graham Norton after a speedball and a Red Bull, even the ones who go to museums. But this pays my mortgage and I’m alright at it, so it’s what I do. Not everyone has a passion for their work like you …’

Anna. It was that time he got tetchy with her, after they’d been recording the question and answer session for the app. What else did he say? Oh God, what else did he say …

‘… And you think my colleagues are dicks, guess what? So do I, with one or two exceptions. And they all seem to have surnames for forenames. But instead of sitting here trying to get a rise out of me every other minute and make it clear just how moronic you think it all is
…’

Harris hit pause.

‘That’s a nice way to talk about us all, isn’t it?’

James stood motionless, trying to find a way to cope with his entire office hearing what he thought of them. It was like the experience of someone walking in behind you when you were slagging them off. But multiplied, many times. ‘It’s from UCL. Things going badly with the girlfriend, by any chance?’

Of course. Their fight.

Playing for time as his brain whirred, James squinted at the details of the email.

‘I’ve already sent it to Jez and Fi,’ Harris snapped, before James could come up with any sort of explanation. No surprises there. James had already sussed this was probably an employment terminator. It was nothing less than an audio resignation letter.

The email sender was an anonymous email address and the message simply read: ‘
It has come to our attention that a member of your staff conducted himself extremely unprofessionally during a recent project
involving our university. We thought you might be interested to hear the attached file
.’ The subject line was: ‘
Urgent from UCL. re: James Fraser.’

James licked dry lips.

‘I didn’t mean it. She was being arsey and I was defending myself. That’s been taken out of context.’

‘Fi’s in London so she’s coming over at lunchtime to speak to you.’

‘Fine,’ James said, stalking back to his desk before Harris could enjoy himself further. After a minute or two of swirling confusion, apprehensiveness and fury he decided to call Anna and demand an explanation.

He ducked out of the office and left a voicemail after two missed (almost certainly dropped) calls.

Jeez. So much for apologising to her. Anna didn’t seem well balanced last weekend, but this was outer space monkey nuts. He didn’t think she’d be that spiteful. He clearly hadn’t got the measure of her at all.

To think he’d thought she was nice? Woo-ee. From now on he’d trust his first impressions.

James returned to his seat. As the minutes ticked by, conversation barely rose above a murmur. Eventually, Harris could take the exquisite tension of waiting for Fi no longer.

‘Hey, James. How are you feeling, knowing you’re going to be sacked like Rome?’ he sneered. ‘In the sack race, you’re taking first place. You’re back, SACK and cracked. You are in SACKcloth and ashes …’

‘Yeah, hilarious, Harris, you Lord of the Lols, you,’ James said. ‘Can I make it clear? When I said there were one or two exceptions to the dickhead rule, I definitely didn’t mean you.’

A glimmer of light in his darkest hour: there was a surprising amount of laughter at this. Harris looked like a gnome smelling a fart.

People often used the term ‘throwing yourself into work’ as if it was a negative thing; a way to avoid tackling your problems. In Anna’s view though, throwing yourself into work was infinitely better than throwing yourself into a canal, under a bad man or turkey-gobbling Xanax.

Speaking of bad men, there had been one surprise interaction with a newly sympathetic Laurence, who had wanted to tell her how sorry he was about the Mock Rock. Anna was pretty sure it would be the last interaction they ever had, if she was right about the only goal Laurence was pursuing.

Michelle was right, she relished being her work-self again. Having given a pretty damn rousing lecture to her third years, she headed back across campus feeling buoyant for the first time in weeks. Torching her school diaries might’ve been ceremonial but it had the desired effect. She’d have cheerfully burned an effigy of James along with them.

On the walk from lecture hall to office, she thought she heard her mobile pipping in her bag and investigated the caller ID as soon as she’d put her folders down. She pulled her phone out and was disconcerted to see it was James Fraser. A voicemail message winked at her.

This was not good. Michelle might think James could find it in him to say sorry, but Anna didn’t think for a moment his pride would permit it. And if it did, he’d hardly be moved to do it in the middle of a Monday morning.

She listened to the message.

‘Anna. I have no idea what the hell you’re playing at, but this attack really is shit behaviour on a grand scale. Can you call me back? And if you think you can dodge me by not answering my calls, I’ll come and sit in your reception until you see me. Looks like I’ll soon have the time on my hands to do it.’ Click. Dialling tone.

Attack? Something was very, very wrong. Trying to summon up defiant courage instead of fear, she called his number. He answered on a later ring than she expected, then she sussed from the traffic in the background he’d belted out into the street.

‘Hello? You wanted to speak to me?’ she said. ‘I’m not dodg—’

She didn’t manage to finish the sentence.

‘Yeah I did. Can you tell me why you think this is a proportionate response to something I did nearly two decades ago? To lose me my job? You know I have something we didn’t have when we were sixteen, called a mortgage? And bills?’

‘What’s a proportionate response?’

‘The email. With the recording.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’