‘I think you ought to go straight to the medical room,’ said Marnie, in her best concerned boss voice which she knew would feel like a hundred bees stinging Elena’s ears. ‘Look, your ankle is swelling up terribly.’ And it was. Ballooning. It was almost a cankle. On its way to being a thankle.
‘I’ll take her.’ Vicky stepped forward and Elena put her arm around her shoulder. She couldn’t have hopped off faster if she’d tried.
‘Are you all right?’ Justin asked Marnie who was covering up her mouth and really really trying hard to look sympathetic. Had it been anyone else, it would have come naturally but not with Elena and it probably wouldn’t have with Vicky either. But then, she was wicked, she’d heard that often enough to believe it might be true.
‘I’m fine,’ she coughed. ‘Just worried about my colleague.’
‘I brought these for you to cast your eye over before the meeting in . . .’ he consulted his watch. A black-faced Rolex. As classy and striking as he was. ‘. . . ten minutes.’
‘Thank you,’ said Marnie, taking hold of the sheets of paper he was proffering, but he didn’t let go of them. Then he leaned in to her and said in a whisper: ‘Something tells me you rather enjoyed that little floorshow.’
Marnie gulped and gave a demure pat to her chest. ‘I think you are very much mistaken, Mr Fox.’ It wouldn’t have convinced a grand jury.
‘See you in . . . nine minutes and counting,’ said Justin with a lazy grin and Marnie’s heart gave a perfidious kick. No, no, no. She heard her brain protest. Not again.
Chapter 3
The day ended on a high. Elena and her fat ankle had gone home and, starved of her partner in crime, Vicky was quiet and actually did some work. Everyone in the executive meeting was impressed by the new shaped mug and Marnie received three billion brownie points. And she noticed Justin smiling at her as she talked through the pricings and argued why they should adapt this shape and ditch the old one. He had a flirtatious sparkle in his eyes and her own eyes kept being drawn to his, as if they were twin sparkly light-seeking moths. Her feet almost hovered above the ground as she walked back to her car that day, but the closer she got to home, the more that buoyant, airy feeling began to subside. The weekend loomed drawn-out and depressing in front of her as it had done for too long now. Marnie hated Saturdays and Sundays, for however much she tried to tell herself that she was married to her work and didn’t need a man in her life, those two weekend days exposed that statement for the lie it was.
It was a particularly lonely phase as she was both boyfriendless and best-friend-less and it followed the worst Christmas she’d had for years. She’d intended to spend it sharing a house with her boyfriend of twelve months, Aaron. Her on-off-on-off boyfriend of twelve months that is, who had finally decided in August that she was the one he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. So, she’d sold her furniture and her flat only for Aaron to tell her, on the day of completion, that he’d made a mistake and was still in love with his ex.
Her best friend Caitlin wasn’t on hand to pick up the broken pieces as she was besotted by a high-flying city banker called Grigori and she spent all the time she could down in London with him. He was rich and handsome and successful and very posh and Caitlin had changed in the short time they’d been together. She’d become glossier and more groomed and – though Marnie hated to admit this – less fun, more staid and worst of all, distant. She’d denied having elocution lessons, though it was obvious from the slower, more measured way that Caitlin had started to talk and the strange shapes her mouth formed on certain words, that she had. And when Marnie rang her for a chat, Caitlin always seemed to be in the middle of something and said she’d call back. She didn’t always. This, the same Caitlin who had had a real go at Marnie for not giving her friendship time when Aaron arrived on the scene.
Caitlin had been single for over two years when she met Grig-ORRR-i, as she’d started to pronounce it. No wonder she’d sucked him up like a dehydrated woman falling face down in an oasis. Marnie couldn’t have been happier for her friend – then she’d met him, and she could have been very much happier for her because Grigori was a plank.
He might have been good-looking and clever and super-brainy and drive a Maserati but it was quite obvious that he didn’t like Marnie from the off, because the disapproval came off him in waves. She had first met him in person at the night do of an old school-friend’s wedding. Caitlin left Grigori and Marnie to ‘get acquainted’ whilst she nipped off to the loo. Marnie had opened conversation, but Grigori had turned away and wended his way out through the guests instead. Marnie was gobsmacked by his rudeness and she did wonder what Caitlin had told him to provoke that reaction. She had broached the subject once but Caitlin waved it away and said he’d been absolutely whacked with tiredness that night. Marnie hadn’t bought it and what she hadn’t told Caitlin was that later on, she’d encountered him on the stairs when he was arseholed and he’d been far more friendly. Feeling obliged to give him a second chance to make a first impression, she’d asked him if he was enjoying himself and he’d pulled her towards him and stuck his tongue down her throat before she pushed him firmly off. He’d fallen down two stairs and called her the c-word and though Marnie had tried to forget it and chalk it up to the drink, she never quite had. One thing was for sure – he had come between them and their once-strong vow that no man would ever do that was crushed to dust.
She’d got into the bad habit of drinking too much at weekends to numb that gnawing hunger within her for company, for affection. She recognised she was in trouble when she began to think that sleeping off a hangover was a better alternative than being conscious, and had tried to cut down over the last couple of weeks.
But on this particular Friday, maybe because she’d been so high earlier on from her successful mug presentation and a little male attention from the hottest property on the trading floor, her spirits nosedived and she felt extra sad and pathetic that night. So, unable to satisfy the cravings of her heart, her body tried to compensate by feeding her something else and put her hands in the way of a giant bag of sweet and salty popcorn and a bottle of Tesco’s finest Shiraz.
There was nothing on the TV but programmes about house renovations and dream sheds, a crap gameshow and the big film, which was about a man who couldn’t forget his first love – far too near the knuckle for her. At times, when she was plastered, she could see herself more clearly than ever and the revelations hurt and bewildered her. Through the clarity that alcohol supplied, she saw that she had been lonely for a long time, far longer than she’d wanted to admit to herself. Even when she’d been with Jez, Robert, Harry and Aaron she’d still been lonely. It took a particular skill to be lonely in a relationship, she had noted. Sometimes she had lain in bed next to a snoozing Aaron after sex and marvelled at how alone she felt. There had been only inches between their bodies but she had never felt as if she were truly part of a couple. Even when they’d been mid-bonk, there had been none of that ‘two become one’ or ‘bodies melting into each other’ bollocks. They’d been more like two hard pieces of wood bashing together than two balls of Play-Doh squashing into a single big ball of pliant softness.