When She Was Bad (14 page)

Charlie had never felt so happy, or at the same time so utterly afraid. It was as if someone had stripped the top layer of skin off him, leaving every nerve-ending exposed. Stefan cancelled dates at the last minute, but when they did meet, he made Charlie feel that he was the wittiest, sexiest man alive. At least some of the time. He told Charlie he wanted to show him off – and then once they were out, flirted outrageously with everyone he met – men
and
women.

Stefan called himself a freelance design consultant, but Charlie had little idea what he actually did. When Charlie got up to go to work on those rare mornings he was allowed to stay over, Stefan remained fast asleep; he seemed to spend his days flitting here and there, lunching or drinking with this person or that. He lived in a rented flat in a trendy central London neighbourhood, but he expected Charlie to pay when they went out. He asked about Charlie’s job but didn’t bother to disguise how his eyes glazed over when Charlie replied. Charlie found himself talking up his position and his level of responsibility in the department, just so he could bear to look at the image of himself reflected back through Stefan’s dismissive gaze. For the first time ever, he wished for a more impressive job title – and an accompanying pay packet. Charlie was both miserable and ecstatic and it was driving him crazy.

And all the time, he was having to come into the office and deal with the shit that was going on. Chloe seemed constantly either on the verge of tears or else adopting this grating loud and gregarious ‘let’s go and get hammered’ persona – clearly for Ewan’s benefit. Like he even noticed she was there when Rachel was around. Amira was preoccupied, Paula on edge, and Sarah, who was his natural ally in the department, was almost like a ghost person. She slipped in and out as unobtrusively as she could and spent the day with her head bent over her desk. Since the disaster of her missed meeting with Kevin Bromsgrove the previous week, she’d stopped taking lunch breaks even. He was worried about her. She had a pinched, haunted look, but when he tried to catch her on her way to the kitchen or the loo, she made it clear she didn’t want to talk. Her eyes would flit anxiously towards Rachel’s office or the door. ‘Got to be on best behaviour,’ she’d whispered the day before when he finally cornered her by the kettle.

‘She’ll forget about that Bromsgrove business soon enough,’ he’d said, trying to cheer her up. ‘It’ll be someone else’s turn to be the new whipping boy.’

But Sarah hadn’t been convinced. ‘There’s something else,’ she’d said. ‘And I’m dreading Rachel finding out.’

‘What?’ he asked. But Sarah had just shaken her head. ‘You don’t even want to know,’ she sighed.

On the Tuesday afternoon, Mark Hamilton came down from his penthouse office to talk to them all about the forthcoming team-building weekend.

‘It’ll be great fun,’ he said, his strangely colourless eyes with their sandy lashes flicking from one person to the next as if inviting agreement. ‘It’s being organized by a company who specialize in this kind of thing. It’ll be a mix of cognitive exercises, boardroom games and Outward Bound stuff.’

At the phrase Outward Bound, Charlie felt as if someone had snapped an elastic band against the inside wall of his stomach. There could be no two words more guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of a man who’d had a migraine all through school that only visited him on PE days, and who had never completely got over the pain of discovering as a teenager that his newly divorced father had failed to turn up to see him two Sundays in a row because he was standing on the touchline supporting his girlfriend’s soccer-playing son. ‘It must make a lovely change for you being around someone who understands the offside rule,’ he’d said cuttingly. But his dad – who he now accepted had been loving in his own way – had just said, ‘Ah well, that’s the thing about families – you don’t get to choose each other.’

Wasn’t that the truth!

Stefan was into fitness. He wore a lime-green plastic band around his wrist that measured his steps. Sometimes if he felt he’d underperformed that day, he’d leap to his feet when they were on the sofa – or, once, in bed – and run around the room a few times, stopping to lunge forward on to one leg. The band told him how many calories he’d burned and how well he’d slept. Charlie had come to dread a low reading, since it could send Stefan’s mood plummeting. He hated that band with a passion, feeling it to be a personal reproach, a kick in the teeth for everything he was.

Rachel had been listening to Mark’s speech with her strange flat smile. After he finished and repaired back upstairs, she approached Charlie. His mouth became suddenly dry.

‘Could you come with me for a moment, Charlie?’

Reluctantly he got to his feet. He could see Sarah darting hollow-eyed glances at him from her desk and felt unaccountably guilty.

‘Have you had a chance to think?’

‘What about?’

Rachel frowned. She was leaning against her desk with her arms crossed across her chest, and her posture stiffened with disapproval.

‘About the deputy position. I do hope you’re taking it seriously, Charlie. I had a good feeling about you. I hope it wasn’t misplaced.’

‘No. Of course not.’

Charlie cursed himself for sounding so obsequious. What he should do was tell her to stuff her job. He was conscious of Paula sitting outside in the office, just feet away. She wasn’t exactly the kind of deputy that set the world on fire. They all knew that. But that didn’t mean to say Rachel could just get rid of her.

‘You’re not getting any younger, Charlie.’

That stung. Charlie wasn’t vain though he had minded when his hair started to thin and spent a chunk of his monthly pay on a hormonal treatment that was supposed to stimulate new hair growth. But being with Stefan had made him sensitive to the lines around his eyes and the way the skin puckered around his belly button. It was as if Rachel Masters was tapping into the thing that lay at the very heart of his self-doubt.

‘Is this enough for you? Really?’ She gestured at the desks in the office outside and the bent heads, and Charlie mentally added in the strange new deadened atmosphere that had descended since she arrived.

‘I’m talking about you giving yourself the chance to get ahead and start building a career, before it’s too late. Do you want to still be out there in ten years’ time, plodding along? “Good old Charlie,” the bosses will say. “He’s got no ambition but at least he’s reliable.”’

‘But Paula . . .’

Rachel made a
pff
sound with her mouth, as if she was blowing a small fly off her lower lip.

‘Paula is my concern. Obviously we’ll make sure she’s well provided for. All you have to think about is whether you’ve got the guts to lift yourself out of the rut you’re in. I need somebody with a bit of get up and go as my right-hand person. If it’s not you, I’ll have to bring in someone new. And obviously there’s no guarantee you’re going to like them. What are you afraid of, Charlie? What’s stopping you from stepping up?’

Normally Charlie hated that whole Californian thing about stepping up and making the grade and going the extra mile, but something in Rachel’s little speech resonated. He saw himself through Stefan’s eyes, a mid-ranking worker in a not particularly exciting sector, treading water until retirement. But if he was deputy, he could be running his own department within a year or two. Charlie had no illusions about the glamour, or lack of it, of the industry he’d somehow ended up in, but if he made manager it would in theory be easier to shift across into another managerial role in a different, perhaps more stimulating working environment.

‘If I was interested what would I have to do?’

Afterwards, he felt grubby. Passing Paula’s desk, he pretended not to see her thin, almost non-existent eyebrows raised in question. The spurt of adrenaline he’d felt in Rachel’s office when he’d seen a more dynamic version of himself materializing in front of him had died away, leaving a sour aftertaste.

Clicking open his computer screen, he noticed he’d had two emails while he’d been in with Rachel. The first was a dull round-robin from Security about how they all needed to get updated passes. Yawn. The second looked like spam and he was just about to bin it when something about the address – a random selection of numbers and letters – struck a chord in his mind. He double-clicked.

Have you asked her yet? Have you asked Rachel what she did?

A chill ran through him as if he was swallowing ice. He called up the anonymous email he’d received before, the one calling Rachel a bitch who destroyed people. Same address. Someone really had a grievance against his new boss. He could understand how Rachel’s abrasive management style might have ruffled a few feathers, but to go to the effort of creating a fake account just to send these creepy messages . . . Should he contact HR or even Rachel herself? He forwarded the email to Sarah with a line saying,
Look what I just got. Should I report it?

Seconds later, he had a reply.

Shit. That’s a bit OTT, isn’t it? Not surprised R has enemies though. Bitter ex-employee perchance? I would bin it.

Charlie let out a deep breath. Sarah was right. It was sour grapes from someone Rachel had rubbed up the wrong way. Nothing to do with him. He deleted the message and got up to go to the kitchen.

‘Fancy a cuppa?’ he asked Sarah on the way.

‘Oh God, yes, please.’ She really didn’t look well. Her complexion was pale and waxy.

As a special concession, he washed up the one decent mug left in the cupboard, the deep one with flowers on it. Most of the others were cheap promotional things with the company name emblazoned on the side, that chipped easily and stained brown at the base. He made Sarah’s tea in the flowery one – remembering to take the teabag out in good time so it didn’t go that orange colour she hated. In his own he put a spoonful of instant coffee and then two heaped spoonfuls of sugar from the packet that was out on the side. He knew he needed to cut down. It had never really bothered him until he started seeing Stefan, but now he felt a twinge of guilt every time he made a hot drink. A few years ago there were lots of them who had sugar in their tea or coffee, but now you felt a bit of a social pariah asking for it. It was like smoking, he supposed. It had just gone out of fashion.

When he gently placed the mug of tea on Sarah’s desk, she gave him a look of pure gratitude and he could have sworn he saw her eyes film over with tears. He would have to persuade her to come out for a drink so he could find out what was wrong with her.

Back at his desk he took a swig of coffee.
Holy crap, that was bitter.
He wondered how long the coffee jar had been sitting there. Once, they’d checked the sell-by date on a container of hot-chocolate powder that had been at the back of one of the kitchen cupboards for ever, and found it was four years out of date. No one threw it away though.

He took another sip. Briefly he contemplated going back to the kitchen and making another cup, and hated the little voice inside his head that said, ‘But what would Rachel think if you got up again?’ He glanced at his phone and saw, with a rush of excitement, that Stefan had texted him. They’d had a tentative arrangement to go out tonight, but he’d learned quickly that all Stefan’s arrangements were fluid, and Charlie had been gearing himself up to be disappointed. His joy at reading Stefan’s confirmation of the date was slightly tempered by his insistence that they try some new hip Lebanese-Thai fusion place in Soho where you couldn’t book. Stefan had dragged him to one of those places before and they’d ended up having to stand in line and wait for an hour glaring at other diners while music blared out so loudly they had to shout over the top, and all for the pleasure of sitting side by side at a bar facing forward, eating tiny portions of food in huge bowls, feeling the eyes of the people in the queue behind boring into their backs. But Stefan had wanted to try out this new place, and as usual Charlie gave in. What he really wanted was to go round to Stefan’s house, order a takeaway and watch a box-set, and then rip each other’s clothes off. Or, better still, rip each other’s clothes off first. But at least Stefan wasn’t cancelling him.

Occasionally, Charlie forced himself to look at the whole situation with Stefan objectively. If he was his own best friend, he’d have serious words with himself. He could see he was getting in too deep with Stefan far too quickly, being too needy. But the truth was, he was just so bloody lonely sometimes, and it felt good to be with someone. And Stefan already had this hold over him he couldn’t even really explain. Just knowing he was going to see him this evening set his nerves buzzing in a most pleasurable way – even though he knew he’d hate the restaurant and resent paying the no doubt astronomical bill.

His desk phone rang and he checked the clock on his computer. 2.45. Margaret Hoffman. Right on time. Margaret was a client he’d been wooing for ages. It was almost impossible to get to speak to her. This phone meeting had been booked for days.

‘Margaret? How nice to talk to you again.’

As they exchanged pleasantries, Charlie rifled through his in-tray before extracting the paperwork he’d already set aside for this much-anticipated call. Margaret Hoffman ran a string of highly successful shops selling fashion accessories and had just bought up a smaller jewellery chain which she needed to re-staff from top to bottom. If he landed the contract, Charlie would potentially be bringing in many thousands of pounds’ worth of future commission. Tens of thousands. But he knew he wasn’t the only recruitment agent she was talking to so he’d really done his homework, gathering in all the statistics and facts he could find about her company and the accessories market in general, creating an ideal personnel profile and setting out his ideas for a restructuring of staff hierarchy in each of the shops.

‘So tell me, Charlie, how you envisage a possible long-term contract might work,’ Margaret said in her peculiarly masculine voice. ‘I haven’t got long so you have twenty minutes to convince me to hire you rather than any of the other agencies.’