The A-Z of Us (16 page)

The bed is made. On the bedside table are some women's magazines and her perfume. A skirt is strewn over the old armchair that she's had since college. Beyond, in the en-suite bathroom I glimpse a clothes rack, where several pairs of colourful panties and G-strings are dangling. These make me feel strange. With my girlfriends, the sight of lacy knickers has always been titillating – a glimpse of a wholly feminine world that every hot-blooded male wants to get his hands on. But this is different. I feel uncomfortable. Do brothers feel like this when they see their sister's knickers drying?

For some reason I can't fathom, I open the wardrobe. Inside are three of Raj's suits, and a neat series of shelves containing sweaters, socks and white cotton vests, all aligned perfectly as if measured with rulers and set-squares.

I wonder if Gemma and Raj can fix it. Or be fixed. Are they right for each other? Who is right for each other? I mean, Raj is okay. He's not the most exciting, adventurous
soul on earth. I wouldn't marry him, unless I needed the money. But he's a decent person, and that is not a quality to underestimate. But I believe Gemma needs more than that. She needs… I don't know. A spark. Fireworks, from time to time. She needs to shout and scream, someone who can bring her out of herself. Someone more like her father. Or Neil Farrelly.

I wonder if she still has mementoes of her time with Neil. Is there a hidden drawer, like my secret cardboard folder, crammed with letters and photos of ex-girlfriends?

I look around the bedroom. I try the drawer in the bedside table. It's empty apart from some official-looking letter from her doctor. I glance at it.

RE: University College Hospital Women's Health Clinic

Missed Appointment # 372

Please book new appointment urgently
.

I hate hospitals. My father went to visit sick and elderly patients in Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge quite frequently, and at Christmas time he would take his young son along to carry the presents my mother had wrapped. I couldn't breathe, I thought I could smell the death. I don't blame Gemma for not going to her appointment. Especially to a woman's health clinic. Women's health always sounds so… messy.

Then I have a thought. What if Gemma is pregnant? What if this is the reason why she broke up with Raj? Perhaps the baby isn't his? Perhaps she can't decide if she should keep it? I wonder if she's waiting for the right time to tell me.

All at once I succumb, as usual, to a racing daydream, taking me from this point to the birth of Gemma's
fatherless baby boy, whom I help raise, Hugh Grant to Liz Hurley, teaching her son about football, travelling and girls. I get to his first day at university (Sheffield, of course, to study French), when I realize I've been staring out of the window for fifteen minutes, watching two smartly dressed middle-aged women enter and then exit the black front door at number 22.

I find the picture of Neil Farrelly in the middle of an architecture textbook in the spare room.

In the photo he's smiling, confident and strong. I wonder what he's doing now. I wonder whether he's single. I wonder about getting online, Friends Reunited, or something like that. I bet there's a site for Liverpool University.

I'm not trying to meddle. But having screwed up my own relationship, I feel that the least I can do is try to help my best friend. After all, sometimes fate needs a helping hand.

I wait for my mother to finish fluttering her hands above the menu, like some pantomime geisha or the star of Horsham Women's Institute's production of
Madame Butterfly
. The tall, suave Hispanic waiter looks on with a friendly smile, which only makes my mother quiver more.

‘Stop smiling,' I want to tell him, ‘and she will cease this pathetic little girl performance that she believes is captivating you, because she considers it the role of an attractive woman of any age to express a high degree of helplessness in order to hook and reel in a man she considers good-looking enough to be worthy of her guile…'

Instead I sit, feeling the familiar and caustic embarrassment and the deeper more troublesome fear that I am now older and more mature than my mother, that Susan Cook does not understand the ways of the modern world, and that the daughter will as usual have to extricate the mother from another ignominious situation.

My mother's arrival at the office has capped off a terrible day, and it's only lunchtime. I woke once again at dawn, showering at length in a bid to wash away my dark feelings (ugh, thighs, ugh, belly, ugh, breasts).

I left the house (which, for the first time, felt like it might actually be on the verge of falling down) into an early morning August rain squall. I was wearing a denim
skirt and H & M blouse, and I'd forgotten my umbrella. I should have turned round and gone back to the bedroom and pulled the blanket over my head. But I had to go to the office. I had to be strong.

For the first time since Raj's departure, I was worried about work. The final drawings for the bar project were due by the middle of September, and I sensed we were behind. It was silly, I knew, but under the circumstances the bar project seemed more important to me than ever. I needed to feel like I could accomplish something, before it was too late.

This is my first project as a team leader. Initially I was overjoyed at the mini-promotion, even though it was only a refit of a Soho bar called The Place, a £150,000 project which pales into insignificance in comparison to much that KPSG works on – big corporate headquarters, the odd internationally renowned museum, and several cutting-edge shopping malls in Europe and the Far East.

The company employs ninety-five staff, with three different departments – corporate, commercial and residential. I've been working on the commercial team since joining two years ago, and I know being made team leader, albeit on a small inconsequential project, has ruffled some feathers amongst those who've been here longer. I'm lucky that most of my co-workers seem to like me. I'm deferential and keep my head down. I know I've been given the bar project because I'm the commercial department boss's favourite, but everyone needs a lucky break at some stage in their careers, don't they?

I like these smaller commercial projects. My speciality, the talent that got me the job (so unexpectedly – KPSG
is ranked in the top five most desirable architecture firms to work for in the UK, and I'm far from a genius, unlike some of my colleagues) is my ability with 3D Studio Max and AutoCad – the two computer design programs beloved by modern architecture firms. Whilst others in the office, who graduated five years before me still do drawings by hand, taking them days, I can sit at a keyboard and plot intricate designs on the screen in a matter of hours.

‘Miraculous!' Duncan Archer proclaimed when he saw my first drawing, a rendering of a new restaurant in Fulham, south-west London. He took me out for a lunch-time drink and it didn't cross my mind that the way he looked at me had anything to do with factors beyond his admiration for my plotting skills. His attention to me didn't surpass ‘friendly' for two years, although he once put his hand on my arm whilst talking about changes to a smoke vent design, but he was married to a pretty English teacher, the mother of his two small girls.

It wasn't until rumours began to spread that Duncan's marriage was on the rocks, that I began to wonder if his insistence that I move from a desk at the back of the office to one next to his at the front might not be purely influenced by work concerns.

I arrived at the office in Shoreditch shortly after seven, and let myself in. I'd been hoping to have an hour or so there on my own, to collect my thoughts, to review anything I'd missed during the two days I'd hidden away at home. To my surprise and dismay, Duncan was already in the office, alone. He looked as if he'd not slept much – his eyes were puffy and jaundiced and his hand trembled as he held a styrofoam coffee cup. He smiled widely on
seeing me enter and insisted on making me a cup of coffee. As he flustered over the machine, I glanced at him from my desk. He wasn't so bad-looking for a forty-eight-year-old – grey only at the temples and he didn't have the belly of most men his age. He was short, but not stocky, there was a litheness to his movements. And he was talented, of this I was sure. Shortly after I started at the office, he showed me some designs he'd done when he owned his own company (‘before we needed to make the house payments'). They were beautiful – glass and concrete living spaces which allowed the meagre London light to flood in as if in California, or Provence, much as I dreamed of doing at the house on Raleigh Street. Working within the confines of a big multinational company, in which he had to answer to two directors and six board members, was evidently a little trying for the great Duncan Archer.

As I flicked through my files, trying to get up to speed on things I'd missed the previous two days, Duncan sat on the edge of his desk and talked. And talked. He chatted about a tender for a new bar and dance complex in Manchester and a luxury shopping plaza in Frankfurt with impressive enthusiasm, considering the early hour. I tried to concentrate on my work, whilst giving the impression that I was listening to every word he said, but he kept finishing his sentences with a rising question mark that invited response.

‘… And the floor is cantilevered on two levels?'

Then he asked to see my latest computer renderings, and pulled a chair close, and I could smell stale cigarettes and coffee and body odour, and I wondered if he'd been in the office all night.

I had no choice but to show him my drawings, and as I clicked on each plan and he seemed to shift closer to me in his chair, I heard Raj's voice:

‘You just have to stand up to him!'

I felt a painful mixture of emotions, all at once: anger at Raj for his insensitivity in having repeated this to me so many times, irritation with myself that I was unable, once again, to do what he suggested, and a nostalgic yearning for the time when he and I used to talk about such things.

I wanted to be alone, but Duncan Archer continued to talk, praising my drawings, encouraging me to take ‘as many creative risks as you feel you need to,' which I knew was his way of pretending to himself that all his staff were as adventurous and innovative as he was.

And then, without warning or encouragement, he put his hand on my naked knee.

I jerked away instantly, knocking the styrofoam cup of coffee, which spilled on to the computer keyboard.

‘Oh. Sorry.'

I lunged at the keyboard, trying to dab at the coffee with my sleeve. With surprising alacrity, Duncan Archer yanked the cord from the back of the computer, whipped the keyboard from under my hand and turned it upside down so the coffee ran on to the floor.

‘It was just an accident, Gemma.'

Was he referring to my clumsy spilling of the coffee, or his blatant grope of my knee?

I stood quickly, muttered another apology and hurried to the toilets, just as Sophie entered the office with two other architects.

I sat on the closed toilet seat, staring at the grey-white door for ten minutes. When finally I exited, make-up reapplied, breathing normally, at least half the workforce had arrived and the office was gratifyingly busy. Duncan Archer was in a meeting with Gwen, the Welsh office manager, and the other two department heads. He didn't look up as I passed his desk. At my own desk, my keyboard sat morosely in the bin. I spent twenty minutes asking if anyone had a spare one, which of course no one did. Eventually I was forced to plead with Sophie, who, true to her hoarding nature, had a spare keyboard at the back of her cupboard.

‘What happened to yours?'

‘Some coffee got spilt.'

‘Really? Are you sure you're okay?'

‘Fine. Thanks.'

I spent the rest of the morning reviewing my files, telephoning the bar's two owners in Dublin, going over drawings with the three junior members of my team, and taking a call from Ben Keane, the contractor who was working on the house in Raleigh Street. Keane wanted to know when more money would be available for the next phase of the work on the roof and the garden. I'd been dreading this call ever since Raj left, but I found myself telling him, calmly and professionally, that due to unforeseen circumstances the work needed to be postponed for a few weeks. The contractor started to laugh.

‘Don't worry Ms Cook. We all have cash-flow problems.'

Cash-flow, I thought ruefully. Mine is more of a lifeflow problem.

Trying to keep my annoyance in check, I returned to the
file on my desk. I picked out the letters from Westminster Council Planning Department, from Bob Wright, Assistant Planner, who was refusing to accept our proposal for an all-glass frontage to the bar, saying it would set a dangerous precedent for other commercial property on the street, and all the time I felt my anger expanding, billowing, like a balloon filling with toxic gas. Men were so arrogant. They never thought around a problem, they never attempted to put themselves in the position of others! And they never revised their decision, even if this refusal to change things meant harming the project, or the situation! I hated them, I decided.

Bob Wright, Duncan Archer, Raj Singh, even Ian Thompson.

All so stubborn, all so sure of their own righteousness, of their own position in the world. Why did I always feel so hesitant, in the face of male certainty?

For a moment, I entertained a brief fantasy involving all four men and a machine gun. It was as I was blasting the last one, Ian, in the stomach, blood and guts splattering in all directions, the rat-tat-tat of the gun deafening in my ears, that my mother appeared in front of me. I shook my head involuntarily, wondering, terrified, if I'd descended into twenty-four carat madness and was conjuring up more devils to torment me from the tortured recesses of my mind. But then the vision of my mother, dressed in a summer dress and wispy chiffon scarf spoke. The vision said: