The Cinderella Reflex (3 page)

She reached the seashore and stood for a few minutes watching the waves breaking in white frothy patterns on the sand. It was early spring and people were emerging from their winter hibernation; an elderly couple sat on a bench on a patch of grass above the sand, their cocker spaniel wheeling around in wide circles on the strand in front of them.

A couple of joggers passed her by, earphones in their ears and their eyes firmly ahead.

Helene turned and started striding in the same direction, walking as fast as her heels would allow her, trying to work off her temper. According to the tiny tourist office the town offered stunning walks along the sea cliffs, and abundant wildlife, but Helene had never ventured into those straggling bits of it. Maybe it was time to find out what Killty had to offer apart from work and stress. Twenty minutes later she had run out of road. She was standing on the edge of the town, on a deserted, dilapidated street with just one, slightly grubby looking cafe. Helene crossed the road to reach it with a sense of relief. A strong coffee would psyche her up for going back to the office.

She pushed open the blue door of the cafe gingerly, the hinges groaning as it creaked opened. Helene stood for a few seconds while her brain made the transition from the sunny afternoon outside to the dim interior of the cafe. There was a strong smell of fresh paint and when her sight finally adjusted, Helene realised the cafe was in the process of being renovated. Damn. She’d been looking forward to a breather.

She spotted a sandy haired man standing at the counter, his shoulders hunched over a sheaf of papers he was studying. He looked up absent-mindedly, rubbing his hand on the blue and white check tea cloth tucked into his trouser waistband.

“Hi, can I help you?” He was mid-thirties, Helene guessed, clean-cut and fit looking. He was dressed casually in cotton black trousers and a blue striped shirt.

“Are you open?” she asked. He raised an eyebrow, looking around the ramshackle room. A paint-splattered wooden ladder leaned against one wall; tall stacks of books were piled up beside it.

“Er ... do we look open?” His smile softened the question.

“I just wanted a coffee.” Helene gestured at the bubbling coffee machine beside him.

“Oh, that ...” his eyes flickered to the machine. “I was just about to have one myself, so I suppose I can let you have one too. You can be my guinea pig if you like.”

“Fine,” Helene agreed. As he busied himself with the machine, Helene sank into an ancient armchair by the window. “Cappuccino,” she specified to the owner. She looked around the room critically. It really was run-down – even the cacti on the scuffed yellow-pine table in front of her looked ancient.

He poured out the coffee and ambled down to her. “You’re my first customer, so it’s on the house – I’m Matt, by the way.” He beamed as he placed the mug on her table. Helene looked at him suspiciously. What did he have to be so cheerful about, trying to run this dump?

“Thanks.” She turned away, staring out the window. All the buildings seemed to be either empty or in the process of being renovated and she wondered absently where Matt thought he was going to get his customers from. He coughed slightly.

“So?” he asked expectantly. “You’re my guinea pig, remember? What do think of the coffee?”

“Oh!” Helene glanced down at the mug of cappuccino, and noticed how there was a heart-shape of chocolate traced onto the white froth. “That’s a nice touch,” she acknowledged. She sipped the coffee. “It’s good. So when are you opening?” Matt scratched his head, looked around helplessly.

“It was supposed to be last week, but it’s all got a bit overwhelming to be honest. It’s a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.” He placed his own mug of coffee on the table and sat down opposite her. Helene looked at him with alarm. She hoped he wasn’t going to start chatting. She needed to think about how to handle Ollie Andrews and ... oh, a million and one other things. She looked at him pointedly.

“I’ve given you free coffee because chatting to a potential customer is a perfect guilt-free break for me,” he told her.

“Sorry, but I’m a bit busy.” Helene pulled a notebook and pen out of her bag. She needed a break herself – and preferably in a five-star hotel, not in this back street, run-down cafe. But she had to work out her strategy for how to revive Atlantic 1 FM’s dwindling audience. She stared into the froth of the cappuccino, one part of her brain automatically calculating its calorie content, the rest of it wrestling with what to do about Ollie.

Richard, her boss, was breathing down her neck about him day and night lately. He seemed to have decided that the entire future of the station depended on the success, or otherwise, of the This Morning show and that it was up to Helene to make it work. That’s why he had promoted her to executive producer he’d reminded her a few days ago – on the strength of her self-professed talent for good ideas. He had said it half-jokingly, but Helene didn’t miss the ill-concealed barb. She frowned at the memory. She had claimed to be a good ideas person, not a bloody miracle-worker. How could anyone have predicted that Ollie Andrews would turn out to be so volatile? He had been super charming when they’d first met – but that was probably because she had just agreed to double his salary, Helene acknowledged bleakly.

“Maybe I can help?”

She snapped out of her reverie and looked up to see Matt was still sitting there, looking at her quizzically.

“I doubt it.” Helene flicked open her spiral jotter and stared at the blank page, biting on the end of her biro. “I’m looking for ideas for a radio show. This Morning with Ollie Andrews – do you know it?” She looked around the cafe, realising the radio wasn’t on. By rights, Matt should have Atlantic 1 FM on, keeping him company.

“I think I’ve heard it once or twice,” he said vaguely. “To be honest, I have too many problems with this place to be distracted by the radio.”

Helene looked down at her notebook and began to write. Now he’d have to take the hint and leave her alone. She scribbled down ‘Ideas’ and underlined the word twice. Underneath she added ‘Ten Years Younger/Me’. She smiled and relaxed a little. Seeing her ideas down in black and white always cheered her up. And the Ten Years Younger project was a win-win situation for her. She’d get a break at that top spa and look a lot younger – or better anyway – at the end of it. But what else? She thought of what Matt had just said. “
I have too many problems with this place to be distracted by the radio.
” That was it! The radio version of a problem page! People were always fascinated with other people’s problems.

She looked up at Matt and smiled. “Actually you’ve just given me an idea!”

“Really?” Matt was astonished. “What is it?”

“It’s a problem slot. For radio.”

“Okay.” Matt looked mystified. “Well, I’d better get back to getting this place up and running. It has to open next week!”

Helene turned her attention back to her notebook and scribbled down the line ‘Agony Aunt of the Airwaves’. She looked at the words, her pulse quickening. It was bound to be a success. Helene alone had enough problems to fill that slot for months! As her thoughts drifted to her personal life Helene turned onto a new page and jotted some of her problems down, partly as a way of working out how the agony aunt slot might work, and partly because she thought it would be good to get them off her chest for five minutes.

One. Milestone birthdays. Helene rested her chin on her hand, eyes fixed on the middle distance. Her big Four-O was coming up. The birthday that had been hovering on the horizon for ages and now was nearly here. Is that why she’d been so unsettled lately, Helene wondered? Feeling as if she was at a particularly precarious crossroads in her life and that one false move could spell disaster.

She would wake up with a start at night, a feeling of impending doom settling like a swamp in her stomach. The clock on her bedside locker always flashed the same time – thirty minutes either side of four a.m. – the figures displayed in mocking red neon and then she’d start to panic because her alarm was due to go off at six and the panic woke her up even more.

She had spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the feeling was about exactly. It wasn’t just connected to her job. There was also the vexed question of Richard to consider. Reluctantly she scribbled down, ‘Richard’.

She sighed, trying to figure out when Richard had become a problem. She had met him five years before, when he’d interviewed her for the job in Atlantic I FM, which he was just setting up at the time. He was ten years older than her, and definitely, she had thought at the time, not her type. She had been seeing someone else back then, Derek, a nice looking dentist who had wanted to settle down with her. And yet, within weeks, she and Richard had become lovers. She had never really worked out how it had happened. He was certainly wealthy and generous but then so was Derek. But Richard had listened attentively when Helene talked about her hopes and her dreams, and in hindsight, if she was honest with herself, she had thought he might be a conduit to making those hopes and dreams come true for her. Richard had a knack of making life seem easy and for Helene, who was used to fighting tooth and nail for everything, it was a powerful attraction.

She rose effortlessly from her original position as administration clerk to her current job as an executive editor. But as her salary and status had increased so had her responsibility and stress levels and now her life didn’t begin to resemble what it had been like at the beginning. Back then, work had seemed like one long, glorious holiday. Richard invited her to attend glamorous work dinners and product launch parties and Helene had been enthralled by it all – by the feigned but fawning adoration of the glamorous PR people who pressed goody bags of beauty and fashion items on her and invited her on weekends to promote whatever product they were plugging at the time. And always there was Richard in the background, flattering her, telling her she was fantastic, telling her that one day she would have her own show. Of course, that hadn’t worked out either. She was too busy working on other people’s shows to get a moment to herself, never mind figuring out how she could get herself on-air.

Back then everything had seemed so easy. Richard told his wife he was working late so they could get together, and because Helene lived alone and didn’t have the sort of friends who called unannounced, they had both the time and the opportunity to be together. Of course, she had known he was married from the beginning. She had noticed the photograph on his desk at their very first meeting, the day he’d interviewed her for the job. There was Richard, looking younger and more hopeful somehow than he did today, with his arm draped around a dark-haired voluptuous beauty – who, Helene later learned, was his wife, Louisa – and his eyes resting fondly on the two gawky teenagers who turned out to be his children.

Why hadn’t she paid more attention to them, she asked herself ruefully now, stirring a spoon aimlessly around her coffee. Because Richard’s offspring had turned out to be the most demanding teenagers in the history of adolescence. A collage of memories flooded through Helene’s mind.

There had been the driving lessons Richard had to personally provide himself, because “Anna wants her daddy to teach her”, even though it must have taken a hundred lessons before his idiot daughter was finally able to put away her L plate. There were the teenage discos Anna and David had to be escorted to and collected from every Saturday night for what seemed like years. There had even been David’s “little drug problem” which had only involved the youngster smoking a bit of hash but which had been blown into a full-scale crisis by Louisa and ended up with the entire family strong-armed into co-dependency counselling. Oh, and what about the hysterics when Anna didn’t get enough points in her exams to study psychology? And the drama when David was caught driving over the limit?

On and on it had gone – was still going on, actually – taking up Richard’s valuable time,
time
he was supposed to be spending with her, the only time they had together until the time was finally right for him to leave Louisa. So far Helene’s goal of becoming the new Mrs Armstrong – which Richard had agreed was a logical, if long-range one – had been continuously postponed because the time never seemed right for Richard to leave the ‘children’.

The fact that the children were now of an age when most people were out busy building their own lives seemed to be lost on Richard, who was as endlessly besotted with Anna and David as ever. What surprised Helene most was that she had allowed all this to happen.

She doodled idly now on her notebook, trying to figure it out. She liked to think of herself as possessing a sharp and analytical mind. She would not have survived the cutthroat nature of the business she was in otherwise. She thrived on competition and frankly, the contest between herself and Louisa should have been over ages ago. And would have been, she reminded herself, if it hadn’t have been for Anna and David.

Through the years whenever she’d had a horrible day – like today for instance when Ollie Andrews was being his usual despicable self, and Andrea McAdams was preoccupied with one of her interminable domestic crises, and Tess Morgan was at her most irritating – Helene had always soothed herself with the thought that it wasn’t going to be forever. Richard would eventually make good on his promise, leave Louisa and marry her.

There had been a few scary moments along the way, mind you, when Helene had been forced to question her beliefs. Like the time Louisa had gone in for a boob job, for instance. What had all that been about? Helene had lain awake at nights at the time, worrying about it. But Louisa’s boobs, Richard had been quick to convince her, were irrelevant in a relationship that had been on the rocks for years.

“She’s feeling her age because the kids are growing up and away,” he had explained fondly, as if he really liked his wife! “Louisa doesn’t have a career like you and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. She says the surgery makes her feel better about herself but I think it’s a distraction because she’s dreading the time when David and Anna leave home and she will be left facing an empty nest.”