you saw the red lights of the cars ahead as they braked and you thought Oh shit, what’s happened? Don’t let this be a delay, I want to get home and eat and read and go to bed.
Back to the offices of her law firm; a solid, well-respected regional company that offered a good salary and career prospects in return for your life and soul. Back to her boss, Michaela, a forty-two-year-old woman who thought she should have done better than merely reaching the level that made her Kate’s manager, especially since she had worked and worked and waited and waited to have kids and then found that she couldn’t, that it was too late, that although there were articles and advice out there claiming that pregnancy and childbirth were options for women well into their forties, they weren’t options for her.
And she resented Kate having already reached the rung below her, along with the obvious fact that she would rise further still, maybe making partner by her mid thirties, which would leave her with plenty of time to have a couple of kids and the life that Michaela thought should have been hers.
Back, in short, to the daily grind.
Kate swung her legs out of bed. She felt groggy, jet-lagged almost, which she supposed she was: her body clock had adjusted to late nights and lie-ins, and here she was, dragging herself out of bed hours earlier than she was now used to.
It was going to be a long, painful day.
She walked along the landing to the bathroom. Her feet were tanned, a white V splitting at her big toes and running up to her ankles tracing where the straps of her sandals had been. She smiled as she remembered walking through the markets in the sunshine, evading the traders who tried to get her and May and Gemma into their bazaar with the promise of cheap leather bags or real gold jewellery or – this was her favourite – the offer of genuine fake watches. She’d laughed out loud when the man, a young Turkish guy with wide eyes and an infectious smile, had stepped in front of them and gestured to his stall.
Come in, he said. Only for a look. Best watches in Kalkan. Genuine fakes!
And then he laughed, and they laughed, and went in. Gemma bought a Rolex – a real, honest to God, no messing genuine fake Rolex – for Matt. Kate would have got one for Phil, in a different life. There was a Tag Heuer that he would have loved, and she almost bought it, but no: it would have sent mixed signals, and she had enough to deal with where Phil was concerned already.
The shower took a few minutes to warm up. She wondered briefly whether the boiler was broken – Have to get Phil to look at it, she thought, then remembered that Phil was no longer an option for that kind of thing, so she’d have to call someone. She thought they – she – had a service contract, but Phil had dealt with it, so maybe she’d have to call him to find out, unless there was paperwork somewhere – in the kitchen drawer, maybe … Then the hot water came and she relegated the boiler service contract to a mental note – that she would ignore – to check it later.
When she was done she switched off the shower and grabbed a towel. It was odd to emerge to a silent house. Phil was an early riser and, by the time she finished her shower, he was normally downstairs, dressed, with the radio on, so that she dried herself and put on her make-up to the sound of the Today programme, mostly, or sometimes Radio One, the smell of coffee wafting upstairs.
Not today. Today the house was silent and scent-free.
The holiday had been fun, a blur of movement and action and laughter with her friends. Apart from when Phil kept calling – which had stopped after the morning he’d called the hotel – it had been simple to forget the break-up and all the implications it had. And that had been exactly what she needed.
But now the holiday was over, and reality was about to hit. And the reality was that this was not going to be easy.
She was at her computer, a large coffee on her desk, not long after eight.
A couple of minutes later, her neighbour, Gary, an overweight father of three in his mid thirties, arrived. The office was open-plan, each person having a small desk – paperless, which was the new office policy – divided from whoever sat next to them by a low screen. There were booths scattered around the office where you could go if you needed to have a private conversation, or concentrate on something for a while, but generally speaking you were at your desk in full view of anyone who happened to be passing. Kate didn’t mind it that much; she’d joined the workforce at a time when that kind of office arrangement was more or less the norm, but some of the older people hated it.
Gary was one of them. Prior to the move to open-plan, he had been the proud occupant of a small, windowless office which he had worked for years to obtain, and the loss of it still rankled. Kate suspected that he would have been less bothered by a pay cut than the loss of his office; there was something about the visible reduction in status that he found particularly hard to take.
He made up for it by swearing a lot. In the open-plan area everyone could hear, and it showed his younger colleagues how, even though he had been stripped of his office, he would not be cowed by the management.
‘Welcome back,’ he said. ‘Fucking traffic was abysmal as usual this morning.’
‘Not too bad coming from my side,’ Kate said. ‘The normal slow-moving car park.’
‘It was total shit coming from Glossop,’ Gary said, shaking his head. ‘Total fucking shit. Anyway, no bother. How was your holiday?’
‘Great. Really good.’ She would have said that if it had been a shocking disaster; it was how you responded in an office, especially to people who you didn’t know outside of a professional setting. It was odd; she sat with Gary every day, heard him talk to his wife about the bills they had to pay for private schools, heard him arrange beery nights out with his friends, knew that he was a fan of Leeds Rhinos in rugby league and Sheffield Wednesday in football and hated Arsenal with a passion, but, for all that, she didn’t know him at all. Despite the time they spent in close proximity to each other, they never shared more than pleasantries, general chit-chat. He didn’t even know that she and Phil had broken up.
He probably didn’t know they’d been together. She left her private life, as many of her colleagues did, at the door.
‘Good week to be gone,’ Gary said. ‘It was mad. An audit blew up.’ He puffed out his cheeks. ‘I was in here all hours. Got home Friday and I was fucking whacked. Then I had to wake up early on Saturday to take the kids to some fucking party.’
‘Hope it’s calmer this week,’ Kate said, suppressing a smile at his horrendous swearing.
‘Doubt it. Anyway, welcome back to the jungle.’ He tapped his login details into his computer. ‘I’m going to the canteen, get a bacon butty. You want anything?’
Kate nodded at her coffee. ‘That’ll do me. Thanks, though.’
She watched him walk off, his trousers loose and saggy around his buttocks, shirt partially untucked, shoulders round and slumped. Was that her future? Was this what life had to offer? Rotting away in an office, doing a job she hated, or, at best, found repetitive and boring?
That was what she feared. Maybe it was because she had just come back from holiday, but watching Gary walk away she thought, I don’t want to be like that. There has to be something more.
There had to be. Surely she could do something she found more inspiring. Become a cider-maker or a pilot or a photographer.
And the thing was, it felt possible, now that she had broken up with Phil. With him, her life had been mapped out for her, a gentle progression from wife to mum to grandma. Now though, she could do what she wanted. She had some money saved up; she could go travelling for a year. Or two. Or three. Maybe go to Nepal, meet someone and stay there, or move to New Zealand to work on a sheep farm. Who knew what would happen? That was the beauty of it. No one knew. All she had to do was make the decision to go and then the world