Chapter 52
I wiped my eyes and looked around. Her basement had the same whitewashed walls as mine.
The same bare floor. The same barely concealed door in the wall, only flipped, of course.
It even smelled the same. Fresh paint. Cold stone.
Old earth. There were none of the illusions of the other rooms above. But none of the dilapidation either.
I felt for the thread in my pocket.
Three knots. Three challenges.
I frowned. After my chat with Callie-Ann, I’d expected a lot more…
rage-inducing moments. But none of the interactions so far had made me that angry.
Sad, yes. Terrified, definitely. Horrified, most certainly.
But angry to the point of snapping? To the point of wanting to split someone’s skull open, to push a needle through their eye? No.
Maybe my neighbour was losing her touch.
I looked at the outline of the door in the wall. Through there was 1b Sgàthan Sìth. One last challenge and I would be home. Done. My side ached and I was finding new bruises upon bruises. I’d seen enough horror to last me a lifetime. I was ready to be done.
I pried the edge of the door open with my fingertips, then pushed it aside and walked through.
I stepped into the foyer of a bright modern office, all glass dividing walls and funky furniture. But not just any modern office.
Oh no.
There were the same orange lilies the director liked. The pictures on the wall displayed work for past clients. I’d worked on a good few of them myself.
I walked down the corridor to the left as if on autopilot. My bruised skin and dirty clothes stood out against all the clean, bright lines of the open-plan office.
There were the red sofas where the rest of my team would gather for lunch and talk about what TV show they were watching or what trainers they wanted to buy.
The secretary’s liver-spotted spaniel came bounding past my legs, followed quickly by the secretary herself in one of her rainbow jumpers.
I’d always hated those jumpers, though I could never quite pinpoint why.
Now I knew it was because she always looked so happy.
It felt like a front. A lie. I never thought that maybe she just liked rainbows and wearing one made her smile.
Or that she liked her job. Or the people she worked with.
I’d always assumed that everyone was secretly just as unhappy as I was, only they were better at hiding it.
Come to think of it, she’d always been nice to me. The Dev Team, too, had never seemed shy about chatting with me. Maybe I’d been a little too focused on my own misery to see it.
A happy chattering bubbled in the air. It was coming from a bank of desks in the corner. I followed the grey carpet round, knowing what I’d see.
All of my colleagues were gathered around their workstations in the afternoon light.
They held bottles of beer and cans of cider.
Some were wearing beanies. Some had forearms covered in tattoos.
Some wore bright clothing inspired by the girls of Harajuku.
Bright and talented and chatting among themselves.
It was four o’clock on a Friday, or “Beer o’clock” as the team called it.
They had all gathered around a top hat full of folded papers.
As if on cue, the director passed by my shoulder, shining bright in a fitted sunshine-yellow suit.
Her prematurely grey bob was streaked through with neon blue, and her lips were sporting her trademark matte lip paint.
She was the very picture of feminine confidence.
A girl-boss. A she-ro. A grade-A leaner-inner.
The director of my old work was the paragon of what a post-feminist woman could be.
At least, that’s what she emanated. She could tell dirty jokes just as well as the bawdiest men.
Her go-to drink was a Cosmo. Her nails were short but always immaculately painted.
That day, they were hot pink.
She was everything I thought a modern career woman should be.
And everything I was not. Maybe she sensed that tension coming from me.
Maybe that’s why I was never one of her favourites.
Maybe it was because I’d been a bit of a nervy weirdo, and she had no time for nervy weirdos.
Maybe it was because I overthought everything around me. Just like I was doing now.
I followed her over to her waiting audience.
Let’s get this over with.
“Alright, you shower of bastards,” she addressed the crowd, wide-mouth smile projecting her it’s-actually-a-compliment-get-a-sense-of-humour greeting.
The congregation raised their drinks to her and brayed.
“I know what you’re all gathered here for, and it’s not clips from Alan’s latest porno appearance. Wink wink!”
She laughed. Alan, muscular arms crossed over his barrel chest, laughed. Everyone laughed. I didn’t. The me-in-this-moment probably did laugh. Wanted to ‘get it’. The me-here-now didn’t laugh. I didn’t even pretend this time.
“You know I love you, Alan. Meet me in the car park later.” This time she managed to wink without saying ‘wink’.
Cut it out, Tamsin, I scolded myself. Don’t be like that. You know what we’re here for.
I knew what perceived rejection I was waiting for.
“It’s Star Awards time!” the director announced. “And I’ve got fifty quid in digital vouchers for our lucky winner.”
The Star Awards was our version of Employee of the Month. In essence, it was exactly the same though, as if a topping of cherries might change the stinking shit pile of presenteeism and poor work-life culture that usually got rewarded.
That said, I had been feeling pretty confident that month.
I’d worked with the Dev Team to come up with a word processor template for our clients’ CRM programmes.
Instead of having each email go through the creative department to be designed from scratch, I could use tags in a document to populate a pre-designed template complete with layouts, colours and client branding.
All it would need was a quick tidy from an art worker, a check from QA, and it was good to go.
I’d calculated I’d shaved twenty-five per cent off our production costs.
It also saved the designers’ time for more creative work than replicating the same emails over and over.
It was a small idea, but it made us more competitive, more innovative and more efficient—everything the director had waxed lyrical about in our monthly all-hands meeting.
I had envisioned myself giving talks at the biannual conference in London about how innovation could be something small and clever like this.
I’d already planned my outfits. At the very least I was convinced I’d be a shoe-in for a Star Award, or at the very least some amount of praise.
Perhaps the beginning of a conversation about a raise, a promotion.
Perhaps my standoffish-ness would work better in management.
It’s okay, I was never meant to be everyone’s friend. But I could be a good boss.
For the first time in a while, I’d felt hope. I’d felt like maybe there was a place for me here after all.
The director picked up the top hat.
“Let’s see who our nominees are this month,” she announced with a smile.
God help me, I still felt the rising spark of excitement in my chest.
“We’ve got Callum from Creative for absolutely smashing it and working so hard for Crystal Vodka. You know he’s been working late for… God, I just thought you lived here now, pal! When was the last time your wife saw you for dinner? Maybe you’ll get to take her and the kids out with your winnings.”
The crowd applauded. She sorted through more of the paper slips.
“We’ve got Felicity from Client Services for…
” The director laughed that wide-mouthed laugh again.
“No! You lot are so naughty! I’m not reading that out.
Although I’ve got to say I do agree. Okay, I’ll read it out.
Felicity from Client Services for wearing that rather fabby pair of short shorts last week. You cheeky girl!”
Laughter from the crowd. Felicity waved her hand like she was the queen. The director pulled out another slip. My heart thundered in my chest. This must be me. The Dev team had all said they were going to vote for it. It had to be me.
“And finally, we have”—she raised her eyebrows in surprise—“Tamsin from CRM Services for”—she squinted at the paper and leaned on Alan’s standing desk—“developing a template to automatically populate customer emails with tags.”
She said each word as if it were the name of an exotic dish on an unfamiliar menu, or the taxonomy of some long-forgotten lizard.
The director shrugged. “Whatever that is.”
I thought watching it from a distance would feel better, that time would have softened the hurt, that I would find it funny even.
I did not find it funny.
The buzzing in my ears was a fine ringing. Without even thinking my hands had tightened on the axe’s handle. The director swung lazily against Alan’s standing desk, her hand draped over the crossed struts beneath its crowded surface.
“In which case, this month’s Star Award goes to… Felicity! Come here and bring your gorgeous behind with you, you lucky bitch!”
Felicity danced as she leapt up to collect her vouchers. The crowd was applauding. My hands were shaking.
Come on, Tamsin. I breathed deep. You can do this.
“I see you and I understand,” I said. “You, uh… the way you try so hard to pal about with the younger ones. The clothes, the hair, the nails. When you were coming up through the ranks, the answer was to be tougher than the men. Take the jokes with a laugh and then out-do them. You never realised you were pulling the ladder up behind you.”
I squeezed my fists to try and bring the shaking under control. Over the ringing in my ears, I could hear the crowd laughing around me.
“And can I blame you? You don’t get many women in their fifties directing a company like this. You had to sell confidence and creativity and now-ness all while facing the same shit you’d had to fight through to get where you are. I don’t know how much you must have worried. We all worried.”
The laughter got louder. I felt the rage rising. Hot tears came to my eyes.
“It’s a hard industry with new competition all the time. No one wants to be seen as stale, but no one wants to take the risks. And no one wants to admit they’re scared, like admitting it means making it real.”
The realisation dawned on me.
It was okay. I got it.
I looked up at the director, watched her laugh with her mouth. But her eyes darted about the other faces, nervously.
“You didn’t understand what I’d made. You said it like we were putting tags into emails. You got it wrong. You didn’t know what it was. You didn’t understand and it scared you not to understand. So, you made a joke instead.”
I looked around at my old colleagues.
“It was a tough job. You were all working so hard. You just wanted to enjoy yourselves when you could. I just wasn’t the partying type.”
My fists relaxed. Oh my God, I was going to do it. The sting of the memory was released and cool relief washed through me. I reached for the thread.
“It was never about me. You—”
But I was wrong. This was exactly about me.
I watched as I appeared at the back of the crowd. Not the me-watching-this-happen. The me-back-then. The me-shuffling-purposefully toward the desks.
The me-that-did-what-I-did.
Helpless, I watched as I skirted a few steps behind the crowd toward Alan’s standing desk. The desk was overloaded as usual, with monitors and books and all those rattling mugs and whatever weights he repped while he marched back and forth during a client call.
The desk that shuddered under the force of his typing.
The desk raised with springs and weights and the same sort of crossbeams I’d seen in the clotheshorse.
The desk the director had carelessly threaded her hand through, fingers resting right at the crossing of those beams, the X that marks the spot.
I watched myself grab the safety latch.
I watched my face, expressionless, my mouth a thin line.
I watched myself pull.