Hush Hush (3 page)

Lal Doherty’s
string-pulling for Angela was now ratified and official. Moreover, if
she welshed on the deal, a Nicodemite’s daughter might sneak
into the frozen food factory’s wages office instead. Non-manual
summer jobs were at a premium for students and school-leavers.

Angela’s
brother Owen (who was at university) worked each summer as a porter
at Wilmesbury Hospital. The previous summer, a nutter had stabbed him
in the hand with a syringe. But frankly, Angela would’ve traded
Owen a swivel-chair number at the frozen food factory for the casual
violence of the NHS any day.

She started at the
factory a week later.

She chafed against
life’s unfairness as she piled up verdigris’d coins under
the baleful eye of Mags, the chief cashier, then popped them into
polythene bags and finally into a blue cloth bag for Neville, the
factory gofer, to take to the bank.

At the end of that
first week, Mags and her colleagues, Joan and Florrie, made up the
pay packets in silence, testimony to the solemn responsibility of
their vocation.

Angela had her own
little pile to do. After making up and sealing twenty-two pay
packets, she noticed a fiver left over on her desk. Heat and a dull
sense of terror surged through her abdomen, a terror not felt since
she’d turned over an exam paper in the fifth year and realised
she couldn’t answer a single question.

‘
Oh my gawd,’
said Mags, eagle eye alighting on the fiver,
‘
she’s
gorn and left some money out of a packet.’

‘
For fuck’s
sake,’ puffed Joan.
‘
Ain’t
ye got the brains ye woz born wiv?’

Angela despised
Joan. She despised stupid people who went through life stupendously
ignorant of their own stupidity, and got chances to put down people
like Angela, who spoke grammatically, recycled their empties and
agonised now and then about the global distribution of wealth. Angela
started to cry, without warning and without really caring.

‘
Oh there now,
lovey, it’s not the end of the world,’ tutted Florrie,
the oldest and kindest person in the office. Angela liked her.
Florrie’s husband was called Monty, and Florrie was able to
keep a straight face while saying things like,
‘
My
Monty’s a martyr to his corns.’

‘
We’ll
have to undo those twenty-two packets and see who’s a fiver
short,’ sighed Mags with the disdainful ennui of a bomb
disposal team leader.
‘
It
would be the end of the world, Florrie, if even one of those maggots
on the floor came up so much as a penny short. Gimme those packets
over here.’

Angela carried over
the slippery little pile. This was even worse than her first-day
fiasco of
printing
three hundred and twenty clock-cards upside down on the clock-card
printing machine.
‘
D’ye
think cardboard grows on trees?’ Joan had shouted.

‘
I’m
leaving,’ announced Angela, depositing the pay packets and
wheeling round to face the room.

The silence was not
very stunned.
‘
Bout
right ’n’ all,’ snorted Joan.

‘
You wasn’t
really cut out for it here,’ nodded Mags, a shade kinder now
that Angela had done her dirty work for her.
‘
We’ve
years of experience between us,’ she added even more gently,
acknowledging that youth could be callow as well as thick.

Angela got her coat
and left at once, the weight merely slipping from one shoulder to the
other. There were now Sadie, Lal Doherty and the family honour to
consider.

‘
Bye,’
she said carelessly, closing the office door behind her.

‘
Take care,
lovey,’ called Florrie.

‘
Thick as pig
shit,’ observed Joan.

Angela walked home
slowly in the wavery heat, kicking stones. She’d made the
discovery, long-suspected, that she didn’t like working in an
all-woman environment. This posed a problem, as office work beckoned
in one form or another. Her only practical skills beyond anticipated
A levels were
stage
two typing and eighty words a minute shorthand.

Sadie did her nut.
There was much reference to ingratitude, failure to stick at things,
and even (last resort stuff) offering up a horrible job for the souls
in purgatory.

Angela sat on the
settee, pretending to listen, but peeking at Tabby the cat, who was
standing behind Sadie, four white socks neatly aligned, peeking back
coquettishly through the arched window of Sadie’s bow legs.
‘…
find yourself something else to do, so I
can let on to Lal that you got a better offer,’ finished Sadie
with a deflating sigh, like the air going out a Lilo.

‘
Fine. Rachel
Cockburn’s invited me to a wedding afters,’ remembered
Angela.
‘
She
said I can stay with her for a few days as well. She hasn’t got
a poxy summer job cos her mum and dad want her to enjoy her last
summer as a free woman,’ she added daringly.

‘
The
Cockburns! They’re made of money,’ retorted Sadie. It was
shorthand for
‘
not
our sort’.

‘
Well,’
said Angela, edging out of the room before she delivered her final
thrust,
‘
in
that case, I’ll warn them about standing too close to naked
flames.’

She took a sleeping
bag and her week’s wages from the factory to Rachel’s
house on the posh side of Wilmesbury. Angela and Rachel had spent
their school years sussing each other out. There’d been plenty
of rows, imagined slights
‒
Angela was particularly sensitive to the notion that she might be a
project, a Harriet Smith to Rachel’s sophisticated Emma
‒
and short-lived break-ups followed by effusive returns to best
friendship. It was only in the years since school that they’d
become friends on more equal terms.

The wedding afters,
held in a local hotel, was memorable for two key incidents. First,
Angela got locked in a toilet cubicle in the Ladies at the pounding
height of the evening disco. After rattling the bolt back and forth,
it broke off in her hand. She shouted for ages above the steady throb
of a distant drumbeat, before footsteps tapped her way.

‘
Help, I’m
stuck!’ she squeaked.
‘
The
bolt thingy has come right off and I’ve cut my finger.’

‘
Hang on,’
said a male voice.
‘
Stand
back and I’ll kick the door in.’

Angela cowered by
the toilet bowl, thrilled.

Her rescuer kicked
the door viciously and groaned.
‘
Must
be made of solid titanium,’ he growled in a face-saving mutter.

‘
Try again,’
encouraged Angela, who knew the door was flimsy plywood.
‘
You
nearly had it then.’

This time, when he
kicked, his foot came right through the wood and waved about
helplessly, trapped between jagged splinters.

‘
Stop kicking
and I’ll disentangle your foot,’ ordered Angela and,
grasping the polished black shoe, she shoved him outwards. She heard
him collapse in a noisy heap on the other side.
‘
OK?’
she called.

‘
Oh yeah,
never better. I’ve just missed cracking my head on a sink.’

‘
Well, excuse
me, but I’m still trapped in here,’ snapped Angela. She
was usually tongue-tied with boys, but it helped when you couldn’t
see them. It did occur to her that she might be making a fool out of
a hunk.
‘
Actually,’
she went on, eyeing the hole in the door,
‘
I
can wriggle out through this gap. I’m pretty limber and my
dress has no ruffly bits to get snagged. Here I come!’

She thrust her arms
through the hole and began to clamber out, then twitched in surprise
as white-cuffed hands encircled her waist. As he pulled her towards
him, the continuing shock of his touch made her arms go limp and her
legs unhelpfully stiffen.
‘
Jesus,’
he puffed manfully,
‘
heavier
than a sack of spuds.’

She gathered herself
off the freezing floor tiles and wiggled her spaghetti-strap dress
back over her hips.
‘
I’m
actually quite small-boned and underweight for my height, not a sack
of millet.’

Then she risked
looking at him. Not a hunk
‒
way too short for a start, and wearing an awful lilac-coloured
cummerbund around trousers with mummy’s boy creases. He
explained later that the cummerbund was standard issue for the
ushers, a job he’d been corralled into as a friend of the
groom’s.

But even at that
first encounter, Angela had been mesmerised by his eyes. Deep brown
eyes with chocolate-dark irises, fringed by girly lashes. They gave
his ordinary face a soulfulness, a depth that she subsequently never
tired of falling into.

His brown eyes met
and held her prosaic grey-blue ones.

‘
Oi!’
said a hotel person, stomping onto the scene and surveying the
wrecked door.
‘
You’ll
have to pay for that. That’s wilful destruction of property.’

‘
Huh, we
should sue you for faulty door locks,’ said Robert, standing up
for both of them and using the magical
‘
we’
pronoun.
‘
This
lady’s cut her finger badly. I assume you have a first aid box
at reception?’

He successfully took
command of the situation. That was the moment Angela fell in love
with him.

A week later, Angela
got a jiffy bag in the post, containing a limited edition tin of
mints to celebrate the frozen food factory’s centenary. It was
clear from her scrawl on the compliments slip that Florrie had gone
to courageous lengths:
‘
These
mints were earmarked for you by management who didn’t realise
you’d left and I don’t see why you shouldn’t still
get them even though the others wanted to keep them with the biscuits
for elevenses.’

Angela
had been saddened to see an obit for Monty in
The
Wilmesbury Herald
a couple of years later.

Sitting
up in bed, Angela s
witched
on her laptop and browsed the jobs section of
The
Guardian
website, vaguely recalling a job that might still be on it …
here it was!

Everybody loves
Goss!

It’s what makes
the world go round.

Wanna be a part of our
world?

Goss!
is looking for a super sub who

can spot a litiral at 50
paces, write

sassy heads and
captions, keep to tight

deadlines and maintain a
tip-top sense

of humour at all times.

Think
you fit the bill?

Goss!
was a downmarket women’s weekly, big on makeovers, diets that
let you eat chips, and tips on how to stuff cushions and lag pipes
with rolled-up pairs of old tights. They were obviously desperate.
Angela could tell from the sense of humour reference, though
surprisingly, there was no mention of
‘
team
member’.

Team-member was
ad-speak for,
‘
must
be prepared to be humiliated and crapped on by people who’ve
been there longer than you, so they can get a bad mood out of their
system.’

Angela was skilled
at pretending to be a team member, though. It meant sloughing off
every semblance of your individuality, like a snakeskin, the minute
you revolved through that office door, and enduring the slings and
arrows of some PMT-raddled cow (invariably your boss) without letting
her see that you cared or that you fantasised about killing her.

Angela had actually
worked for a male boss once. God, what a treat that had been, like
the Elephant Man living it up on a colony for the blind. Lazlo, chief
sub at
Women Today
,
had been gentle and patronising, compensating fitfully for his sexism
by promoting Angela beyond her carefully concealed abilities.

He was nice to her
and to his other female subordinates, because he didn’t see
women as his equals, and therefore wasn’t threatened by them.
Angela reckoned that all women were born equal in each other’s
eyes and would cheerfully slit each other’s throats for the key
to the stationery cupboard.