Chapter 27
Idecided to stay late at work. In truth, I had nowhere better to be. It was Friday night and I was looking at a long weekend stretching ahead of me, filled with nothingness. All my friends were busy, I had no intention of seeing my mother and I didn’t know my neighbours particularly well. I had lived next to them for years, but only the week before had mistaken the chap from next door for the Amazon delivery man. I really needed to start making more of an effort with people.
I glanced at my watch: 7:10 p.m. I yawned deeply and rolled my shoulders back, listening to the muscles crack in protest. They felt tight and unyielding, as if they had been clenched for eternity.
It was time I called it a night and headed home. Sitting at my desk, staring into space with only the dim overhead light for company wasn’t doing me or my mood any good. I had stopped being productive hours ago.
I could hear the distant hum of Greta the cleaner’s vacuum as she worked away in one of the offices down the hall.
She was singing along tunelessly to Dolly Parton as she hoovered. She always had her big pink earphones clamped to her head, holding her mass of grey curls firmly in place. She was endlessly cheerful and happy with her lot in life. I wished I could channel Greta more. She had once told me she could be anyone and anywhere when she escaped into her music. She had a point. I might have to crank up the radio on the drive home. A few good tunes might drown out the thoughts circling in my head; maybe a bit of hard rock would silence them altogether. Unlike Greta, I wouldn’t be listening to Dolly Parton or the like; too many heartfelt nostalgic songs about liquor and lost loves. Greta really was the world’s biggest country music fan, unlike Jocasta, who I now knew was just the world’s biggest cu…next Tuesday.
Little Miss Perfect had left work at lunchtime. She had claimed to be poorly, suffering with Lie-abetes, no doubt. I had been glad to see her leave the building, hips swinging and her hair bouncing in the breeze in time with her bosom.
She had attracted an appreciative wolf whistle from a couple of men smoking outside their office. Morally I felt affronted by their crass behaviour, but in all honesty it also irked me just how easily she could turn men’s heads.
I slid my tired feet into my high heels, which I’d kicked off hours earlier, pushed my swivel chair back under the desk and turned off the light.
I was going to treat myself to a takeaway on the way home to cheer myself up. Something tasty and teeming with trans fats. There was no point watching my waistline any more. I might as well get fat: single, fat and about to turn fifty. God, that was a depressing thought.
It was probably high time I got some cats after all. And if they did end up eating me like Lottie had said, at least if I was fat, they wouldn’t go hungry.
I would watch a horror film too: some crazed maniac hunting down his poor victims with a chainsaw, or such like. It might save me from feeling like the unluckiest person in the world for approximately ninety minutes.
Greta was now in reception. I heard her well before I saw her, noisily emptying Alice’s wastepaper bin and grumbling about the spat-out wads of nicotine gum in it. I could hear her scraping them off as she sang tunelessly to Country Roads Take Me Home. I couldn’t agree more: it was time that I was out of here.
I was proud of myself for staying late, though. At least I had managed to catch up on some admin, and it would show Fluck that I was willing to put in the hours when necessary. He wasn’t to know that I had spent the last couple lost in my own thoughts. More lacklustre than litigation. But that was going to change. From now on I was going to be back on my A game. My clients deserved it, and after all, my career was all I really had.
The building felt rather oppressive and gloomy with the dim emergency lighting illuminating my way. Once I had left, only Greta would remain. But she didn’t seem bothered in the slightest at being in a creaky Victorian property on her own. She had now moved on to cleaning the kitchen, and I could hear the strains of her singing along to Glen Campbell’s Dreams of the Everyday Housewife.
I had my hand on the door handle in readiness to leave Fluck, Young Glover for the night and head out into the vast world beyond, when a sudden noise startled me and stopped me dead in my tracks. It was a faint scuffling sound, and it appeared to be coming from the vicinity of Fluck’s office.
There was only me and Greta left in the building, so what could the noise be? I heard it again, a little louder this time. My mind shot back to the night at Merv’s house and the rodent under his bed. Or at least what I had believed was a rodent. It certainly had looked like roadkill when it has been languishing on his bald pate.
Maybe a rat had been living in the old walls of this building and felt somehow drawn to Fluck’s office. It was the King Rat’s lair after all.
I knew Greta was oblivious to the noise. I could hear her happily singing away, completely oblivious. Her song choice had now moved onto Joe Nichols and Tequila Makes HerClothes Fall Off. True wordsindeed.
I was in two minds what to do: ignore the noise and head off home, or morph into Miss Marple and play the ‘shero’, doing a little investigating of my own. Curiosity got the better of me, and with a sigh I turned back to walk down the corridor to my boss’s office.
I knew Fluck was not one for working late nights. He felt he was of an age and position in the firm that he could set his own hours. He was often teeing off at his golf club when he should really have been behind his desk. For him to stay at work beyond 4.30 p.m. was completely unheard of, especially on a Friday.
My hand was on his office door handle when I head the scuffling noise again, this time accompanied by a definite squeak. My blood ran cold. It was a rat after all. Seb might have a fear of wee woolly lambs, but it was rats that terrified me. Their sharp teeth and beady eyes plagued many of my nightmares.
My first impulse was to run away, find a stool to leap on, clutching my skirt and wailing, like you would see in an old episode of Tom and Jerry. But no, I was going to be brave. I was going to have to learn how to be a little braver in life, so why not start now?
I grabbed my heavy tote bag off my shoulder, ready to whack Mr Ratty around his furry face if needs be, and burst into the room.
I really wished I hadn’t. What I saw was far worse than a hundred rats. I really longed to turn the clock back to five seconds prior. I was going to need to bleach my eyeballs after this.
Fluck was sitting back in his office chair with a contented look on his face and his eyes firmly shut. At first glance I had worried he was dead, but that was not the case. As he leant back further, and a contented sigh escaped his ancient old mouth, the chair squeaked slightly under his weight. That explained the noise: it probably needed a bit of WD40.
I still had the door handle in one hand and the strap of my bag wrapped tightly around the other, ready to attack. It was clear that he hadn’t heard me come in. Neither had Jocasta, who was knelt on the carpet in front of him. I had been wrong about her leaving early for the day, as quite clearly she still had a job to do.
It was like one of those really scary moments in a film when you’re desperate to look away but can’t, as morbid fascination keeps your eyes glued to the screen. The last thing I had expected to see this evening was Jocasta Jennings flossing her teeth with Fluck’s greying ball hair.
They still hadn’t seen me. Fluck’s expression was one of pure rapture, Jocasta not so much. She also had her eyes shut, but looked about as happy in her work as when I had asked her to descale the kettle.
I slowly backed away and out of the room, letting the door silently close. I was on autopilot as I made the short walk to retrieve my car from the multi-storey car park. As soon as I was safely away from work, I began to doubt what I had actually seen. It seemed too horrendous to be true. But true it was. There was no mistaking what I had witnessed, and that was Jocasta giving our boss a blowie.
There was no way that could be explained away as innocent. She wasn’t just picking up spilled pens from the floor. No, it was his penis that was about to spill. I felt queasy at the memory of it, worried that my lunch might make a sudden reappearance. But considering I hadn’t had any, that would have been quite a feat in itself.
I shuddered in my coat and wrapped it a little tighter around myself. I wasn’t going to bother with a takeaway after all. My appetite had well and truly gone.
I had always known that Jocasta was a wrong ’un, but this was on another level. OK, I realised it could be some women’s fantasy, sex in the office with the boss. But when that was portrayed on screen or in a book, it would be with the gorgeously grumpy boss, who just happened to be infatuated with his underling and was a billionaire into the bargain. Now Fluck wasn’t short of a penny or two, and he was certainly grumpy. But gorgeous? Give me a break. There weren’t enough paper bags in the whole of England to make that man shaggable.
Fluck was no billionaire dreamboat. He was the stuff of nightmares. Giving him a gobble was like fellating Nosferatu with nostril hair.