A Hundred Pieces of Me (9 page)

‘Oooh. What did he say?’

‘I haven’t called him yet.’

‘What? Why not?’

‘Because I was waiting for you. And . . .’ Gina looks round: no one’s listening. ‘Because I’m nervous?’

‘Psch.’ Naomi looks scornful but excited. ‘Get on with it!’

Gina glances at the big clock on the wall. 11.30 a.m. It’s time. She piles her coins ready. She has so much change it’s nearly falling off the ledge. The humiliation of running out mid-conversation is unthinkable. She hesitates. ‘Do you think it looks better to wait until . . .?’

‘No.’ Naomi holds out her hand for the phone. ‘Do you want me to ring?’

‘No! I’m doing it! Is anyone looking at me?’

‘Course not. I don’t know why you can’t just call Lover-boy from home. Where you could, you know,
enjoy
talking to him.’

‘Are you kidding? You know what Mum’s like. She’d go mental.’

Naomi looks amused. ‘What’s she going to do when you get to university? Glue your knickers on and tie you to a big stretchy rope?’

‘Probably. Look, it’s still OK for us to stay with Shaun if Kit’s managed to get the tickets, right? He’s definitely going to let us stay in his room?’ Gina’s eyes widen. ‘And you’re definitely up for it?’

‘Yeah. A weekend with my pain-in-the-arse brother so my best mate can get off with some blond surfer dude who looks like Kurt Cobain’s public-school cousin, totally top of my list.’ She looks wry. ‘The things I do for you.’

‘It’s not like that, Nay.’ Gina’s normally good with words, but she can’t explain this. She used to think that it-was-like-a-thunderbolt stuff was ridiculous – until she met Kit, and something clicked inside them both. They’d spent the whole weekend after the student union event just talking. Through the night, all next morning, till the second the train left. Tripping over words, shared thoughts, matching coincidences as if they might run out of time. ‘
Kit
’s not like that . . . We’ve got so much in common, he writes me actual letters. He makes me feel like there’s something special about me . . .’

‘Because there
is
, dumbo.’

‘And he really wants to see me.’ That’s the bit Gina can’t quite get her head around. That Kit wants to see her as much as she wants to see him, when he’s got the whole of Oxford University to pick from. ‘And I
soooo
want to see him.’

‘I know. It’s amazing. He’s a god. But can you please get on with it?’

Gina’s fingers tremble as she jabs the buttons. It rings at the other end. She gives Naomi a thumbs-up, and they bounce in silent, hysterical glee.

Then the ringing stops. ‘Hello?’

Gina’s heart swoops and plunges around her chest at the sound of Kit’s soft, slightly posh voice. He’s right there in her head, his voice already familiar. The common room vanishes around her as her world shrinks into the darkness of her ear.

‘Hello,’ she croaks. ‘It’s Gina.’

‘Gina! Hello!’

Next to her, Naomi rolls her eyes but still leans in.

‘Good news, I got four tickets,’ he says. ‘Are you still up for coming, then?’

‘Um, yeah. That’d be cool.’

Naomi mouths, ‘Cool,’ and looks appalled, and Gina has to turn round to stop herself giggling.

‘Fantastic. My treat, by the way,’ he says, before she can ask how much the tickets were. ‘It’s going to cost you enough to get here.’

‘That’s not a problem.’ Gina’s dipping into her savings; she’s claiming it’s another college visit. She’d better get into Oxford after all this. Although Kit will be gone by then. Graduated, and straight into the adult world. He told her he’s already been offered finance-sector jobs, but he really wants to go travelling before he settles into a career. Already Gina hates the idea of him so far away, out of her reach.

‘How long can you stay?’ he asks casually. ‘I remember you said the other night that you’d never had a proper curry. I’d love to take you to this great Nepalese place we go to a lot – if you’ve got time . . .’

Naomi taps her watch, and points to her copy of
Romeo and Juliet
, their A-level set text, then at the clock.

11.35 a.m. Suddenly the time seems meaningless.

‘That’d be amazing,’ says Gina. ‘I’m not very good with spices, though. My mum thinks garlic’s a gateway to all sorts of trouble.’

He laughs, a charming, inviting sound, right in her ear. The corners of her soul curl up, tingling with anticipation.

‘We. Are. Going. To. Be. Late,’ Naomi hisses. ‘It’s Psycho Marshall.’

Gina sighs and reaches forward with a finger to tap Naomi’s set text.
Romeo and Juliet.
Then she points at herself and swoons.

‘I’ll say you’re having lady troubles,’ Naomi whispers, and leaves her to it.

Gina’s project-management company, Stone Green, was based in a converted warehouse overlooking the Longhampton canal. She had the smallest office, just one large room full of her mood boards and two old maps of the area on the bare brick wall, but it had the best windows, stretching around two sides of the room.

On a good day she could sit and watch the tawny ducks with their strings of ducklings weave along the bank, battling stoically against the wind. On a less than good day she could gaze down at the iron-grey water and wonder how many shopping trolleys had passed under the bridge since the last barge had cruised through in 1934.

Whatever the weather, Gina liked staring out of the long window at the leisurely ripples of the water. When she had awkward phone calls to make to the planning department about her clients’ projects, and five different tradesmen’s diaries to mesh together, and frazzled homeowners to calm down, the canal put things in perspective: winter came and went, the ducks always returned. Something about the shapes picked out in the brickwork on the opposite bank made her feel better, too: there was no need for the ornamental work there, not on an industrial canal, but some Victorian architect had clearly thought it worth doing. When the flat grey water mirrored the pale diamonds, Gina found the energy to chase up the most tedious final details. One day they might matter too.

A month after she’d been made redundant by the council, Gina had taken a year’s lease on the office and set up on her own as a freelance project manager for renovations like the one she’d organised on her own house. She’d dealt with enough confused applicants drowning in paperwork (usually the wrong paperwork) to know that there were people out there willing to pay someone else to handle planning applications, as well as hunt down double-booked plumbers and translate builder-ese into something understandable.

Her first job, via a recommendation from a colleague in the planning department, had been co-ordinating a barn conversion in Much Larton for a young family. The eco-barn had featured in a house-building magazine, and since then, a steady stream of work had come her way, mainly via the builders she’d used herself, none of whom particularly enjoyed dealing direct with inexperienced clients. The office had been Stuart’s idea. When she’d signed the unit-rental contract, Gina had immediately felt a lurch of terror and pride that she hadn’t had when she’d signed the wedding register or the mortgage agreement for her own house. This was hers. Her vision, her responsibility.

Downstairs, there was a communal kitchen area with a microwave, a kettle and a cupboard for mugs next to a noticeboard that occasionally had a handwritten note about items for sale. As the year wore on, Gina got to know the others in the units above and below: Sara the wedding planner, Josh and Tom, the web designers, David the tax accountant. They shared a nervy camaraderie, joking as the kettle boiled about the madness of setting up on their own in a recession. Sara was a brisk networker and chair of Longhampton Women In Business; she had organised a Christmas party at the pizza place nearby, and after a few glasses of wine, Gina had gazed at her random office-mates with real affection. They were all loners like her, escapees from bigger workplaces where they had never quite fitted in. But she drew the line at joining the pub quiz team Sara set up. After the constant hum of speculation about everyone and everything that had buzzed round the planning department, she liked the sense of being almost in an office but not quite.

If I were going back into Planning now, she thought, as she let herself into the foyer with her swipe card for the first time since she’d moved into her new flat, they’d be like lemmings peering over their cubicles trying to work out what was wrong that I’d had to have time off work. There’d be a sweepstake on how long I had to live by lunchtime.

Gina pushed open the door to the kitchen, thankful that she didn’t have to run the gamut of what she’d called the Coffee Coven back at the council, particularly Sheila the office manager and her ‘Are you okay, hon?’ eagle eyes that never missed an absent engagement ring or blood-test plaster. Naomi had told her to ignore the murmurs in the kitchen when she’d first returned after her sick leave, but she couldn’t: once you were labelled, that was it. You weren’t you, you were the Thing That You’d Done. She was the Cancer Survivor. It could have been worse: her old colleague Roger was Mr Thai Bride, even though Ling, his wife, was actually from Wolverhampton.

She’d come in early this morning, but from the faint sound of Radio 1 in the unit above, the web designers had beaten her. Gina opened the crockery cupboard and lifted the jute bag full of mugs onto the counter. She hadn’t told Naomi the whole truth about her mug purge: yes, she’d given a lot to the charity shops, but there had been some she couldn’t bring herself to throw away. Fifteen, in total, sitting in mug limbo under the sink.

Gina didn’t intentionally collect mugs, just as she didn’t intentionally collect scarves, or wooden spoons, but there was something about them that she couldn’t resist. They were like postcards, keeping a reminder of happy times in her everyday life: the ‘I
ª
NY’ mug from her first trip there with Naomi, the Oxford University mug, the Love and Kisses cup that had been her first Valentine’s present from Stuart. Echoes of her old life that were too personal to spot, unwanted, on the shelves in the Oxfam shop but too personal to keep in her new flat, reminding her of what she’d lost.

Gina lined them up in the crockery cupboard, and stood back. To her surprise, they already felt a bit less personal. They looked . . . random. She frowned. A bit ugly.

As she stared at their jarring colours and slogans, something slowly loosened its grip on her heart. Once David had made his newest client a coffee in the ‘I
ª
NY’ mug, she wouldn’t own it any more. It wouldn’t mean she and Naomi hadn’t been there, that they hadn’t clutched each other in fits of giggles at the gusts of hot air from the subway, and at the fire hydrants and yellow cabs, everything just like the movies. Gina remembered the giddiness of that long weekend with a sudden pang; there’d never be another trip like the ones she and Naomi had made in their carefree, careless twenties. That time had gone.

There was a commotion outside the kitchen window as a man and his dog jogged past on the towpath. The little white terrier set the ducks quacking on the canal, its joyful barks ricocheting off the red-brick walls.

Gina peered out to check her duck family were OK, and when she turned back to the cupboard, it was as if the mugs had always been there in the office. A collection of random office mugs. Familiar, friendly. Someone else’s. She took a deep breath, and felt another piece of her past floating away. She wouldn’t miss this one.

The faint lightness of a good mood crept around her, as she pinned her list of kitchen gadgets for sale (most of her wedding list) to the noticeboard, then went upstairs to start the first Monday of her new life.

The morning sun streamed in an uplifting lemony wash through the tall warehouse window on the landing, but there were only four letters and a lot of junk mail in the pigeonhole outside her door, which put a dampener on Gina’s mood.

She was trying not to worry but January had been quiet. There’d been the usual burst of activity before Christmas, mainly wives calling her at the end of their tether, determined to get unfinished DIY projects tidied away before the family arrived, but apart from some conversations about a listed-building renovation in Rosehill that sounded problematic already, Gina didn’t have much lined up. She hadn’t had the energy to chase leads as she’d done in the autumn, when work was the only thing that blotted out the growing sense of impending doom that swamped her the second she put her key in the door at Dryden Road at the end of each day. So far Gina’s diary for February contained only the pencilled dates of her meetings with her solicitor, and a project Naomi had commissioned before Christmas – a timber outhouse for their garden that would be half a playhouse for Willow and half a man-house for Jason, their joint birthday present in April. The file on that was already half as thick as a finished project, thanks to Naomi’s very specific instructions.

Gina sorted through her in-tray, filed her receipts for the previous week, then turned to the paperwork she’d brought from home. There were some letters that were better dealt with here than in her new place. She had started to feel quite protective of her fresh white nest, and its growing clear spaces.

The envelope was franked with the name of the other big firm of solicitors in Longhampton, the one she wasn’t using. Gina took a deep breath and opened it. It ran to several pages, three of which were checklists. Stuart, it seemed, had changed his mind about ‘keeping things amicable’ and was now going for the sort of forensic examination of their joint finances usually conducted by the meaner outposts of HM Revenue and Customs.