The Life of Lee (36 page)

I ploughed through the middle of the desks. Heather jumped up, but it was too late; before she could stop me, I’d charged through the door and into his office. There he was, Chris ‘The Bully Boy Who Only Picks On Women’ Davis.

He stood across the room, hunched over, filing a piece of paper into an open drawer. He looked up at me. He had to – he was only small, four and a half feet max. In fact, I was surprised how titchy he actually was. There was hardly anything of him or for that matter his hair.
Where does he get his clothes, I wondered, Mothercare? Fancy a little weasel like that having a go at our Heather, I thought. He probably does it because he doesn’t get any attention at home and wants to take it out on other women – the bastard. I snarled at him.

I did at that juncture thank my lucky stars that he wasn’t some huge muscle-head with cauliflower knuckles and forearms like pillar-boxes. If I’m honest, it gave me a bit more courage that he was small. Right, I thought, I’m going to have a right go at this tiny man. I slammed the door behind me, so he couldn’t get out.

My muffled shouting must have sounded quite vicious to Heather and the others gathered outside. I went for him big time, not even giving him an inch. I just waded in and told him what I thought about him and where he could stick his company and his shit job. I made it quite clear that Heather wouldn’t be returning to work and that she was coming home with me right now.

Then I called him ‘Mouse boy’ – it just came to me there and then. He began whimpering like a baby. He was about to say something, when I jumped straight in, leaning down close to his face. ‘And the only reason I haven’t smacked your miniature teeth down your throat so far you’d be eating family-sized doughnuts with your arse,’ I hissed, ‘is that I don’t want you to have the satisfaction of getting me nicked.’

Leaving him cowering under his desk, I turned and violently swung open the door to exit. I was going to come out triumphantly and show Heather who the man was around here when I thumped my head on something very big and very solid. I stumbled back and looked up – I had to, as it was a huge, hefty man who towered over me.
His massive, planet-sized frame nearly filled the entire doorway. I mean, you could have shown a film on his crisp white shirt, wide-screen.

I could just see behind him over one shoulder and noticed the four secretaries all looking quite concerned. Who for? I wondered. I followed the curvature of the Incredible Hulk’s broad shoulders to a terrified-looking Heather, with her mouth agog and her hands firmly pressed against her cheeks. I thought it strange that her mouth was open, but there was no noise coming out. She reminded me of Munch’s
The Scream
.

‘So? Who, like, are you, then?’ I stammered. Funnily enough, it was already starting to sink in who he might be. He didn’t say anything at first – he just indicated with his big fat thumb the nameplate on the door: ‘Chris Davis’. Heather’s boss – gulp!

‘No!’ I pointed back at the now feeble heap of shaking jelly on the office floor. ‘So, like, that bloke … ?’ I began to ask.

‘Why are you having a pop at my accountant?’ the increasingly menacing Davis growled. I could feel the hostility and anger begin to bubble in his voice. I glanced at Heather; her face said it all.

I looked him right in the eye and spoke slowly and clearly, pointing over my shoulder at the now-whimpering mess back in his office: ‘He’ll explain everything.’ I stealthily slipped past Davis, grabbing Heather on the way out.

Then we both strolled calmly away from our only source of income.

33. Tragedy Strikes

Storming into the office – like that was the right thing to do! Afterwards, Heather told me about all the bullying of other people as well, now that was she was free to speak. Nevertheless, I wondered who the winner really was in all this.

We could survive for maybe a week at most on what Heather had earned, and with no other form of income, we faced certain ruin. There was no way we could keep up any payments on the flat. The electricity company had given us a week to settle our bill, plus our only form of heat, the gas cooker, was about to be cut off. We had no phone, so we had to make constant trips down the gas board shop to ask if we could have maybe a few more days. We had already notched up an overdraft just trying to live and were dreading the metal clang of the letterbox of doom, as that sound would hold only bad news.

To make matters worse, my job as a painter and decorator had not gone well.

‘Let there be light!’ I shouted. It was six in the morning, and I was eager to get started on painting my first ever window. Not that Gary’s dad knew that it was the first window I’d ever painted in my entire life, but I thought naively, ‘What you don’t know won’t hurt you.’

Gary’s Dad, Kevin, believed that I was a professional painter. Oh, there was no doubt I was experienced in the classics, all right. Rembrandt, Monet, Constable – I suppose I could boast that I sat right alongside those great painters myself, as none of us four would know one end of a tin of emulsion from the other, let alone where to get a decent cup of tea and a bap in the fag break.

‘What you going on about, you idiot?’ Kevin sighed to me. ‘Right, bollock chops, all those windows have to be painted in pronto. The stuff you need is in that lock-up over there. And don’t muck about. Get it done, yeah?’ Slapping a key in my hand, he got into his white van and sped off.

I looked around – still no other painters, just me. I held the rusting key in my hand. It was starting to get light, so at least I could just about see what I was doing, even though I had no idea what that was meant to be. I strolled over to the lock-up, shrugged my shoulders and said to myself, ‘I’ll just blag it. I mean, how hard can it be?’

When Kevin ordered me to ‘Paint the windows in’, that’s what I did. I painted in the actual glass windows and not the frames. But the moment he saw my handiwork, Kevin erupted in fury.

As a sort of defence mechanism, I threw the roller-brush to the floor like some great artist having a strop that his precious work had been insulted. ‘Well, I didn’t know, did I? I’m not a painter, am I?’ I slumped to the corner of the room and crossed my arms like a school kid with the right hump. But it was too late. Kevin had found out I wasn’t actually a painter at all.

He sacked me on the spot, and informed me to go
away immediately – well, in fact, his words were a bit stronger than that, if I’m honest. He then said that if he ever saw me again, he would stick the roller-brush and tray so far up somewhere that they would be surgically impossible to remove and I would suffer distemper for the rest of my life. That was just the start of it. Kevin went on to give me a really good blasting of some serious bile. He delivered it directly into my face, until my flattened features looked like they were experiencing high forces of acceleration.

But after Kevin had calmed down and I had cleaned all the windows back to how they were, I told him that I was still desperate for the work as I had a baby on the way. Kevin said he understood that – and he also understood that I was quite well known at school as an imbecile. So he found it in his heart to offer me a couple of days’ work cleaning public toilets in Southend, readying them for his boys to decorate.

This time, Gary came down and showed me what to do. He was very helpful, demonstrating exactly how to prepare for the redecoration of these horribly dilapidated toilets. They were in desperate need of restoration – even the sign outside had been sprayed with a new title: ‘Wank Central’.

Gary told me I had to clean them from top to bottom with hot soapy water. I also had to fill in and rub down all the woodwork and doors, including what I was told by Gary were glory holes in the cubicle walls. I thought they sounded quite exciting; I even tried explaining what a glory hole was to Heather later that night. If we ever get any money, I said, lying back on the couch, I wouldn’t
mind a few of those glory holes myself. She did not, it has to be said, look very impressed by my plan.

Then I had to chip out any cracked or broken tiles, so new ones could be fitted. I also had to dig out any old discoloured mastic, so it could be renewed. I didn’t relish that job as mostly that was around the bottom of the toilet pan, and one could tell that there were whole new species living down there.

Making sure I was completely OK with what I was doing, Gary left me to get on with it. I got to work straight away and, making up for the window debacle, never stopped until Gary reappeared at seven o’clock that evening. We closed up the toilets and he took me home. Dropping me off, he told me he would pick me up in the morning. Then, before driving away, he told me I had done a really good job. He added that he was getting plenty of work in at the moment doing jobs for Southend Council and would soon need to take people on, which I took as a hint.

I was so happy. I was doing OK at last. I reckoned if I worked hard – and there was no doubt I was getting on really well with Gary and was making him laugh a lot – I thought that he might even take me on permanently. Things just might be looking up for us at last.

Do you ever have those dreams where everything is so vivid that you awake with a start, gasping with fear and dread and believing that the events actually happened? Well, I had one of those dreams that night. Heather had suddenly from nowhere entered my dream and screamed – something was wrong with her! I cracked open my eyes
and – relief, thank God – I was just dreaming. Here was the bedroom, our bedroom. I turned over to check that Heather was next to me, but she was already up. Was it her turn to make the tea perhaps? I couldn’t remember.

I lifted my head and checked the time. Four o’clock? I thought, wait a minute, that’s too early, we never get up until at least 6.30. There it was again, a scream. It was muffled this time, but it was clear who was in distress: Heather!

I jumped out of bed, not even thinking about how cold it was. I didn’t care, there was obviously something wrong. We have that connection, Heather and I. If she was on the other side of the world and something happened to her, I would know about it.

Seriously concerned, I ran from the bedroom and began shouting urgently. ‘Heath? Heather?’

‘Lee.’ It was her, in the bathroom. ‘Lee.’ The way she said it made my stomach twist into a tight knot. I crashed through the door to find Heather sitting scrunched up in a little ball on the floor in a giant pool of blood. She looked up at me, her exhausted face begging for help. My entire body sank, my legs instantly turning to lead. Wait, I told myself, snap out of it, Lee. Come on, come on!

Suddenly all my instincts burst into action. It was as if I had just been hit with a full charge. I thought, I mustn’t let Heather know I’m afraid – because I was so, so afraid. I knew what was happening and so did she. Women know as soon as it starts. Poor thing, she would have known hours ago, but had probably hoped it wasn’t true. Perhaps she didn’t want to worry me or tempt fate.

The most frustrating thing in situations like this is that
you can do nothing to ease the pain of the person you love so dearly. Even though you have sworn you will gladly throw yourself from a mountain for them, the only thing you can do is try to comfort them. I dropped to my knees, grabbed her, held her as tightly as I could and told her I loved her more than anything else in the world. Heather began to cry.

‘We’ve lost it, Lee. It’s gone. I’m so sorry.’

‘Come on, H, you don’t know that, do you? Don’t worry, everything’s going to be all right, I swear. You just wait and see.’

‘I already know, Lee,’ she cried. ‘I’m so sorry.’ She began to bawl uncontrollably.

When all is said and done, you’re all alone. There is no one else, it’s just you. That’s what I concluded as we sat there, just us, huddled in a pool of Heather’s blood on the hard floor of our shitty bathroom-cum-crap-kitchen, or whatever the bloody room was meant to be.

I looked up to the sky for something, anything. ‘Come on, mate,’ I pleaded. ‘Help us out a little bit ’ere, will you? We’re in a bit of a jam.’ I’m not sure who I was talking to, but I was hoping someone was listening.

It was freezing, and I was worried Heather was getting cold. I lifted her up, cradling her in my arms. The blood was still pouring down – I could feel it as it got colder and began running down my legs. I carried her, her head on my shoulder, into the bedroom. I bent over and was just about to lay her down when she started worrying about the stains on the bed. It’s funny, she seemed more concerned about that than what was happening to her. ‘No! The bed! We’ll ruin it, Lee.’

‘Listen, I’ve got to put you down, love. You’re ruining my back at the moment.’ That made her laugh a little.

I laid Heather gently on the bed, pulling the covers over her. She instantly doubled up into a tiny ball. She was in obvious pain. I whispered in her ear that I was going to call her an ambulance. I told her I wouldn’t leave her alone for long and would be straight back with the cavalry. I didn’t want to leave her, but I had to.

As fast as I could, I whipped some clothes on, bolted down the stairs and out the door into the dark, wet, freezing early hours of the morning. My arms pumping like a steam train, I ran flat out along the middle of the deserted road, the white lines zipping under my feet. The dull yellow street lights, the unlit houses, everything whizzed past until I knew I was halfway between our flat, where Heather lay waiting for me to return, and the red call box that would get help.

But the phone box seemed to be getting further away with every determined stride. It was at that point that the weight of what was happening all of a sudden flashed into my mind. It was like I’d hit a wall. I burst into uncontrollable tears. My head was spinning, my whole body racked with grief. I was losing my stride, finding it difficult to run as my breathing was irregular. I put my head down and cut through the biting frost.

I felt such anger and resentment, but who do you direct it at? There’s nobody. As I ran, I punched out at the air in front of me as if it were the god of fate that had just dealt us this devastating hand. I was so furious, furious at everything. ‘Why us, why choose us?’ I wailed. ‘We have nothing, we’re nobody. Why pick on us, why Heather?
She’s never done anything to anybody. She’s a lovely girl. Why?’