What You Make It Read online

  ‘That's right,’ Egerton confirmed cheerily, nodding several times, as if she'd complimented him on something.

  After a pause in which Jane realized that he really didn't understand the subtext of her observation, she continued. ‘Why?’

  ‘You're going to have company. Didn't Whitehead tell you?’

  ‘No.’

  Egerton waggled his eyebrows at her, still beaming, and then sailed off down the corridor just as Whitehead emerged from his office.

  ‘I gather I'm going to be sharing my office,’ she said.

  ‘That's right.’ Whitehead nodded. ‘Bit of a reshuffle after the staff meeting on Friday. Decided to reorganize things a little, maximize resources. Getting a bit crowded in the main office, so …’

  He trailed off smoothly, as if there was no more to be said. Making an effort to speak as conversationally as possible, Jane pressed him. ‘But why my office? It's not the largest.’

  ‘True, but you are only here three days a week now, and not really a member of staff any more, so…’

  Jane nodded, to show she understood. She understood all right. After three years of doing half of Whitehead's job for him she was now just a freelancer, and bought labour sat where it was put and did what it was told. ‘I see. So who …?’

  ‘Camilla.’

  ‘Camilla? But she's only been with us, with you, for three months.’

  ‘I know, but she's coming on very well. And she's used a Macintosh before, so …’

  ‘Isn't she mainly a secretary though?’ Mainly an ambitious, flirtatious and smug little smartarse, was what she meant, but tried not to let it show.

  Whitehead finished manufacturing his coffee and floated back in the direction of his office, where the phone was once more ringing. ‘Won't do any harm to have someone else who knows how to run up a bit of design. Can't have all our eggs in one basket, can we?’

  By the time she was standing on the Northern Line platform, waiting to go home, Jane had calmed down. The buzzing irritation that had built up in her during the day had burst the moment she left FreeDot, leaving her feeling empty and tired.

  Sodding Camilla. Minutes after her conversation with Whitehead, the secretary/flavour of the month employee had slipped into Jane's office and settled herself at the new desk. She then spent the rest of the day alternating between typing fantastically loudly, and looking over Jane's shoulder as she finished the layout for the inside of FreeDot's new brochure. At one point she had asked Jane if there wasn't an easier way of doing the task she was currently engaged in. The politeness of Jane's reply, Jane felt, should have shut the girl up for the rest of the week. But it didn't.

  As she sweltered on the tube, buffeted by meaty bodies and smothered by lank hair, Jane tried to rationalize her feelings about the girl. She was nineteen. She wanted to get on. There was nothing wrong with that. The fact that her star was in the ascendant at the same time as Jane's was taking a nosedive was not her fault. Jane closed her eyes and tried to tune out the people around her, tried to grope once more for Genial Positiveness.

  When she opened them, the tube was stationary at Mornington Crescent. On impulse she got out.

  Walking down the road she fought hard against the feeling that this probably wasn't a good idea. They were supposed to be friends, after all. And friends called on each other, didn't they? She stopped at the flower seller at the corner and bought a small bunch of irises.

  At the entry phone she pushed down another surge of doubt, and pressed Andrew's bell. After a pause a disembodied voice said something, accompanied by the familiar whine of feedback.

  ‘Hi,’ she said brightly, her heart beating irritatingly hard, ‘it's me.’ There was a pause. ‘Jane,’ she added, less brightly.

  ‘Oh, right, hi.’

  ‘Are you going to let me in then?’

  ‘Yeah … yeah, sorry.’

  The lock buzzed and she pushed the door open.

  His door was ajar when she reached the top of the stairs and she walked straight in. ‘I picked up some flowers,’ she said, smiling, ‘Because I know you never bother …’

  Andrew was standing awkwardly by the door, hands thrust deep into his pockets. Sitting on the sofa was a tall and deeply tanned girl, dressed in a racing green suit that went perfectly with her carelessly blonde hair.

  Jane faltered, and came to a halt a couple of feet into the room. ‘Well,’ said Andrew heartily, ‘Jane, Nikki, Nikki, Jane.’

  ‘Hello,’ the girl said, and before she dropped her head Jane noticed just how nauseatingly perfect her cheekbones were.

  ‘Nikki was just passing,’ Andrew volunteered with elaborate blandness. Jane nodded. She was looking at the table under the window. On it stood Andrew's large vase, filled with a huge bunch of uncut flowers, still in their paper. The same paper that was wrapped around hers.

  ‘Well,’ Nikki said into the silence. ‘I must be going.’

  When Andrew returned from seeing her to the door he went to some lengths to convince Jane that Nikki really had just dropped in. He needn't have bothered: Jane believed him. Her shock had simply been that of seeing her for the first time, seeing the girl who previously had only been the shadowy cause of thirty different kinds of hurt. Now that Nikki didn't have Andrew either it didn't seem to matter so much.

  Yes it did, actually.

  And he'd lied. Nikki was more attractive than her.

  The conversation limped along for a while. At first she said her flat was great, then admitted how much she hated it, how tired she was of living between someone else's walls, surrounded by someone else's furniture. Of hiring her life. When Andrew asked her why she didn't buy somewhere she couldn't help reminding him that she'd wanted to. She'd wanted to buy somewhere with him.

  Each time she said something like that he sat back with a patient expression which seemed to be saying he was doing his best in the face of difficult odds. And each time she brought herself to say something that wasn't small talk she felt a twist of resentment. He didn't deserve to hear about her feelings. He wasn't close enough to her any more.

  In the end she stood up. ‘This was a mistake,’ she said firmly, and shook her head when he halfheartedly disagreed. ‘I'm obviously not ready for friendship yet. I'll try again later.’

  It wasn't until she was at the door that she noticed she was still clutching her bunch of irises. She thrust them at him.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘To add to your collection.’

  She spent the evening on the sofa pretending to read, but really just trying not to think. Whenever her mind drifted from the words in front of her, her head was suddenly full of pictures, fragments of imaginary scenes. Nikki, laughing, seen in profile against the white wall of Andrew's flat. Nikki, holding something playfully out of reach, and Andrew's hand and wrist as he stretched for it.

  Each time Jane shook herself away from the images, her eyes searched around the room for something to hold them, something to bring her back into herself. But there was nothing there. Her books and her objects were like moss on a pavement, toys in an empty playground. Not meant, or meaningful. All they did was accentuate how much the place wasn't hers, how much it was the owner's. It was as if he'd seeped into the walls.

  The phone rang, surprising her so much she cried out. She leapt across to it, heart thumping. It was for Mr Gillack. The owner. She gave the caller Klass l's number and clunked the phone bad-temperedly back down.

  It took her five tries at the lock before she was satisfied that evening. She pushed down the catch and counted ploddingly to eight, leaning down on every number. She did it again, and then once more, twisting the knob so hard her knuckles went white. She got as far as the bedroom door and then had to go back again. She undid the lock, showed herself it was open, and then pushed the catch down, watching the bolt slide through the crack between the door and the frame. Then she pushed it down hard for two more counts of eight. She knew it was no good asking herself why she did this. It was better to just get on with it.


  When she opened the wardrobe to hang up her blouse something in the back made her start. Then she realized it was just Mr Gillack's most hideous possession, a large champagne bottle with a huge frond of pampas grass sticking out of it, which she'd chucked into the back of the wardrobe within ten minutes of moving in.

  She moved one of her coats to hide it more thoroughly.

  In the morning, she spent a good fifteen minutes under the shower, braising her skin, waking herself up.

  She felt better. It was time to accept that Andrew was no longer part of her life. He wasn't even going out with the girl he'd been unfaithful to her with. It was over, history. Not even very interesting history, she decided: more like the history of welding. She was squeezing the soap so hard in her hand that on one particularly dramatic sweep up her arm it squirted out and ricocheted off the tiles on the wall to smack her in the chest. For a moment she felt like a hurt child, as if the world had unexpectedly slapped her, and then she burst out laughing.

  By the time she was finishing her tea and simultaneously slipping on her shoes, she felt positive enough to even wonder if her lock ritual was something to do with the last year. She could remember the night Andrew had told her about Nikki, her feeling of complete and utter shock in the face of something so unexpected, so much at odds with the way she thought things had been. When you believed you knew your world and suddenly found out that you didn't know anything at all, maybe you came to doubt your own perception, even distrust your memory. Maybe you had to keep suspecting things just for your own peace of mind, then keep reassuring yourself again and again through endless rituals of self-protection.

  Remembering for once that she lived closer to the centre now, Jane glanced towards the filing cabinet to check the time. The clock wasn't there. Puzzled, she slowly panned round the room until she found it. It was on the bookshelf. Shaking her head at her own absent-mindedness, she returned it to its proper place and left for work.

  When she arrived at FreeDot Jane went straight to the kitchen to make her first cup of coffee. The Northern Line had pulled off one of its occasional bouts of suspicious efficiency and she was both early and feeling relaxed. Perhaps today she would be able to make an effort, get Camilla on her side.

  Then she passed her office.

  Her machine was on, and Camilla, a model of bright young ambition, was sitting at it, manual in hand.

  Jaw clenched, Jane stood over Camilla for almost a minute before the girl noticed, so absorbed was she in invading someone else's territory. When she eventually registered her presence she smiled without a trace of guilt and moved, rather than retreated, back to her own desk.

  Jane sat down, turned her back on her, and started work to a soundtrack of incessant typing.

  The morning passed slowly in a low monotone of boredom. Halfway through, the phone rang, and Jane reached out without looking. When her hand felt the cradle the sound of typing had stopped, and the phone was no longer there.

  ‘FreeDot,’ sang Camilla. ‘Certainly. May I say who's calling?’ She held the call and said, unnecessarily loudly, ‘It's for you Jane. A personal call.’

  Jane took the phone. She found that it was Lucy on the line before she noticed that the din of typing had not recommenced. She turned to Camilla, who was covertly watching her, and the girl started to type immediately.

  She wanted to talk to Lucy – an old friend and someone who might understand the way she was feeling – but not with Camilla in the background. It made her too conscious that this was office time. Instead she arranged to call her in the evening and settled back once more to her screen. The new FreeDot corporate brochure was still at least a day's work away from completion, and each time she looked at it she felt an increasing sense of dull frustration, bored beyond belief at the task of designing yet another leaflet saying the same things in the same way for the same organization. If she did anything unconventional it would be rejected by one of the innumerable committees, but if it looked the same as last time it would seem that anyone could do her job. She couldn't afford for it to look that way, especially now.

  Egerton popped his head in during the afternoon. Grinning inanely, he asked Camilla if she'd like a cup of tea.

  ‘Hmm, lovely,’ she replied, turning and favouring him with a winning smile. Egerton disappeared. Then a beat later his head reappeared, less energetically this time.

  ‘Jane?’ he said.

  * * *

  She stopped at Sainsbury's on the way home, and struggled back up Agar Grove with a heavy bag in each hand, sure that her arms were actually lengthening. The bags were full of things she liked to eat, including a tray of fresh brownies. Standing at the checkout she'd been filled with a complex mixture of feelings: guilt at buying so much fattening food, and a sad defiance. She could afford to put on a few pounds – and after all, who was there to care? If no one else was going to spoil her, she'd do it herself.

  Some phantom or shade which inhabited the house liked to sort the mail in the morning, and when she stood outside the door to her flat, fumbling for her keys, she saw that a pile of letters had been propped up against her door. It was all for the owner, apart from a Barclaycard bill.

  There was a message on her answering machine. It was for Mr Gillack.

  Jane had purposely not brought a copy of the brochure file home with her, feeling that she ought to get into the habit of only working the time she was paid for. But as she sat on the grubby sofa letting banal television wash in front of her, she wished she had some work to do, anything to inject some purpose into the wasteland of the flat.

  Instead she ate three brownies, swearing each was to be the last, and tried moving the furniture in the bedroom around. No new arrangement seemed any better, and the pieces of heavy pine furniture seemed to feel a pull from their original positions, as if the owner's arrangement was the only one they would accept. In the end, hot and irritable, she put them back the way they had been.

  Mid-evening, she called Lucy back but barely had time to tell her about the way things were going at work before she heard a doorbell down the line. Lucy's boyfriend Steve had turned up unexpectedly to take her out. As she hurriedly signed off Lucy sounded delighted and alive, and Jane wondered if Andrew had ever had the same effect on her.

  Without thinking, she picked the phone up again and her finger was millimetres from the button which would speed dial his number before she stopped herself.

  At eleven, she decided that there wasn't any point staying up any longer. She did quite well on the lock, only checking it three times. Then she went to bed.

  Half an hour later she found herself suddenly awake, without knowing why. Then she heard a creak, and another, even louder. Turning very slowly in her bed, Jane held her breath. There was another creak from the hallway, this one quieter. It was followed by three more, each soft and at regular intervals, as if someone was walking in her hallway. Then they stopped.

  This time there was no sound of the door of the flat opposite being opened, and Jane remained poised, lying tense as a board. In the end, she knew she wouldn't be able to sleep unless she checked it out, and quietly slid out of bed. Peering into the hallway she saw a light in the bathroom, a kind of blue glow. Keeping her feet at the edges of the corridor, where the boards creaked less, she crept towards it and pushed the door open tentatively.

  Just a streetlight seeping through the blind. Sighing heavily, she went back to bed.

  ‘What the hell?’

  ‘Profanity, Jane?’ Whitehead said, from the doorway.

  Jane glared up from her screen. She was early again, and still had the office to herself. Camilla usually got in at ten on the dot. Somehow that was punctuality in her, not ‘sloping in at the last moment’ as it would have been for Jane.

  ‘Someone's been messing around with the file.’

  ‘ “Messing around”?’ asked Whitehead airily, coming closer, hands held behind his back.

  Struggling to keep her voice steady, Jane gestured at t
he screen. ‘There's new lines all over the place, and the rest of the copy's been typed in, it's … Christ – the pictures have all been shifted around too.’

  ‘It's been finished, you mean.’

  Jane turned to stare at him. ‘Finished?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Whitehead, and then expanded with patronizing clarity, ‘those things which remained to be done have been done.’

  ‘You knew about this?’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘Camilla, yes?’ Furious, Jane turned back to the screen.

  ‘She stayed late last night, decided to have a go. I think she's done rather well, don't you?’

  Jane took a deep breath, and decided to let herself be angry. ‘Two points. Everyone here works on computers. They have their files on their computers. If I hung around late at night messing around with their work, I'd get the sack. Camilla does it, and she gets a brownie point.’

  ‘She wasn't “messing around”. She asked permission.’

  ‘And you gave it?’

  ‘Yes.’ Whitehead looked calmly back down at her. ‘And the second point?’

  ‘These lines aren't aligned properly. I'm going to have to redo all of them. This text isn't locked to the baseline, so redo that – including repositioning all the pictures. Moving that logo has skewed the whole layout, which will have to be put back, and she's somehow mangled all the leading. Tidying all that up will take me three times as long as it took me to do it in the first place, and I can't even go back to the way I left it last night, because she's done it to the master copy. Yes,’ Jane spat, feeling dangerously light-headed, ‘she's done really well.’

  ‘Jane.’

  ‘Doing this isn't as easy as it looks, you know.’

  ‘I know it isn't,’ said Whitehead, abruptly and transparently switching into conciliatory mode. ‘Look. She's got a bit to learn, and she shouldn't have altered the master. I'll tell her off for that, okay? She's learning.’ He smiled meaninglessly at her and left.