Chapter Two
Well, Monday was a new week and as always on a Monday we were insanely busy in the office, catching up with whatever has piled in by phone, email, or post. Sean and I hardly had a moment to speak to each other.
By rights, no one should have a moment. We are meant to be a team and that means all hands to the pump on a Monday morning. But that didn’t stop several of the others sauntering round the office as if they were on holiday.
Gareth, my sidekick and desk-mate, and I sat together, the other two desks in our pod empty.
I wouldn’t have known Gareth was in at all that morning were it not for the pile of personal items—phone, keys, wallet, headache pills—he always poured out of his pockets and onto his desk on arrival each day.
I looked around and spotted him talking to someone in our neighboring department—Gareth always seemed to know everyone—waving his hands in the air and doing what looked like a belly dance, to the hilarity of all.
It was not yet nine o’clock, but already, his shirt was creased and his hair looked as if it hadn’t seen a hairbrush for weeks.
Gareth, it seemed, had had a particularly racy weekend involving an inflatable flamingo and a male model from Basildon. How the other half live. I’d thought I’d seen some sights on my streaming service, but Gareth made Hollywood sound tame by comparison.
Eventually the room settled down, Gareth found his way back to his own desk, and wrestled himself into his seat.
“Does my bum look big in this?” he asked, as the chair seemed to close in around him.
He had put on some weight in the time he had worked with us, although he was big by nature.
He could probably have been a rugby player, if he’d had any coordination, speed, strength, aggression, or aptitude for sport whatsoever.
A big, disheveled rugby player, in bright clothes that always tested the limits of the office dress code.
When he was sat down, you could see that his eyes were very pale blue, his nose rather long, and his skin always very smooth, hardly troubled by stubble.
But the main thing you noticed about Gareth was that he was always smiling.
Even in the middle of a last-minute batch of scanning that was going to make him late, he was always smile, smile, smile.
Once settled at his desk, Gareth and I were nose-to-grindstone catching up for the rest of the day. I left the office somewhat dazed at having exchanged not a word with Sean.
Consequently, I wasn’t my cheery self when I returned to the house. But it was only Monday, and I resolved to have a pleasant evening. Tomorrow would be another day.
The weather was still fine that evening, more like summer than mid-September, so I took my easel and paints out into the garden for an hour before dusk to make the most of the remaining September sunshine.
I set myself up facing toward the back of my small garden, in close proximity to the hutch that housed the guinea pigs, Bert and Mabel Jackson. They had the same names as my next-door neighbors, but that was just a coincidence.
After some time, I heard a wheezing from behind, and when I turned round, Bert—the neighbor, not the guinea pig—was leaning over the fence.
“Evening,” he said.
“Evening.” I turned back to my painting.
“Beautiful weather.”
“It is.”
“More like August than September.”
“It is.”
I paused in my work and stared straight ahead, hoping he’d go away, but he just rubbed a hand over his florid face.
Bert once told me he’d had a career in the civil service, but he looked like he’d lived a life in the great outdoors: his hands and face were leathery and weatherworn.
He cleared his throat and continued. “You know, if you don’t mind my saying, my niece had some dark times.
She could put you in touch with someone who could help. ”
I turned around and he was staring at the picture I was painting.
“I’m not having dark times,” I said. “I’m just not very good at painting shrubbery.”
“Oh,” he said. “Alright. It’s just with the talking and everything…”
“Talking?”
“We can hear you. When you’re in the house. Alone in the house.”
“Mr. Jackson, I have a budgerigar. How will he learn to talk if I never speak to him?”
“Oh,” he said. “Oh. I didn’t realize. He’s very quiet, your budgerigar. I hear you, I never hear him.”
“I told you, he’s still learning.”
“Doesn’t he sing? Birdsong?”
“No, Mr. Jackson. Apparently, he does not.” I turned my back and dipped my brush to the paint to signal the conversation was over, and presently I heard him whistling on the other side of his garden. Should budgies sing? I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember. I’d have a look on the internet later.
I’d lost some of my enthusiasm for painting after Mr. Jackson’s rather harsh critique, so I went back inside and checked my emails—none. Texts—none.
I think it was the heat that made it so hard for everyone to concentrate.
Only a couple of weeks before we’d had a real taste of autumn, and this last flash of warm weather had made everyone a bit giddy.
Each time I glanced up at Sean he was gadding about, chatting to a colleague, not the industrious man I had fallen in love with.
But who can blame us? We all knew we had a long, hard winter coming up. There was no harm, for once, in a relaxing of the protocol.
“You not feeling the heat, Jools?” Sean asked me. It took a moment before I realized he was commenting on my jumper. It may have looked a little odd on a hot day, but you never knew what the air-conditioning was going to bring.
“She’s acclimatizing herself for hell,” Gareth said. Sean seemed to think that was funny and walked away, laughing like a drain. He was called back seconds later though, to look at something on Gareth’s phone.
They were fans of the Facebook, and it had uploaded a short video of amusing giraffes. I didn’t think they were quite as funny as Sean and Gareth found them, but I was in the minority: within minutes most of the department were huddled around Gareth, guffawing with laughter over it.
“Can’t believe you’re not on Facebook yet, Julie,” Gareth said when the fuss had died down. “My gran’s on it. There’s loads of stuff like that, and you can see what people you know are up to when you’re not with them.”
“How do you mean?” I asked. I’d heard of the Facebook but had thought it was just a collection of animal videos. I had no idea it was also a surveillance tool.
Well, it wasn’t quite the in-depth insight I’d imagined when Gareth said I could see what people were up to: I couldn’t track them minute by minute, I couldn’t see into their homes, and some people provided more information than others.
But it certainly was an eye-opener. We looked at the profiles of a few of our colleagues and I had to admit, I had had no idea Jayne from the mailroom was a ballroom dancing champion—she looked so frumpy round the office.
“What do you have to do?” I asked Gareth. “Do you have to subscribe? Do you have to apply?”
“No,” he said. “Watch.” And within minutes he’d set me up an account of my own. All I had to do when I got home was fill in the details and request a few friends.
He showed me how to add pictures to my profile. I had experimented with the camera on my phone in the past and had taken a few around the office: Sean at the coffee machine; Sean at the printer; Sean at the coat stand.
Gareth stared at them for a moment. He looked as if he was going to say something, but instead of speaking, he just scrolled between them again.
“You can’t use any of them,” he said in the end.
“Julie, you can probably get sued for this.” Finding nothing suitable, he said, “Smile,” and took a picture of me.
He added it to my page next to my name, and I had my first proper look at it.
I recoiled: I thought I’d smiled, but it turned out I’d grimaced and the angle made it look as if I had a double chin.
My hairstyle is timeless, early Princess Diana but brunette: the light here made it look flat and shapeless.
No one who knew me would recognize me from that!
Luckily, Gareth then explained how to change it.
That evening, I logged on to my laptop and opened up my “Pictures” file for a better photo.
My options were limited. The only real contender was from Sean’s late wife, Susannah’s, funeral.
It didn’t seem entirely appropriate, but I wear black most of the time anyway; you’d have to be pretty eagle-eyed to notice that I was wearing a funeral outfit.
It was the best photo I had: glass raised, big smile for the camera, and a great outfit.
I’d bought it especially for the occasion; the last funeral I’d been to was Angela’s, and I was just a young slip of a girl back then.
So up it went. Then I went to the search box, typed in a name: Sean O’Flannery—and there he was!
He’s very photogenic, really knows how to pose for a snap.
My hand shook a little as it hovered above the “Add Friend” button, but I took a deep breath, stabbed my finger down, and off went my request. I spent a few minutes scrolling through the others in the office, but none of them really interested me.
I returned to my page, looking for any change, but there was nothing from Sean.
I read the news headlines, Tony Blair would be at the Labor Party Conference.
Nothing from Sean. I was about to switch off my laptop when there was a ding and a small red circle appeared on the top bar on the Facebook.
HE HAD ACCEPTED MY REQUEST! And so quickly!
It must have meant as much to him as it did to me.
But when I looked more closely at his page, I found out something else about Sean.
Someone had posted on his page the heading “HAIR OF THE DOG!!!!!!!” above a picture of Sean with four other gentlemen of a similar age and state of inebriation.
It had been posted the night after Pink.
While I was waiting for him and wondering what he was doing.