conditioning stream. She had started sweating more lately, waves of it attacking her like some foreign invasion. As if being forty-four wasn’t demeaning enough, her body had to start protesting at her driving to work. Whenever she thought about her bastard husband Joel the sweats would come on, flights of anger and scorn rising up in her. Her old university friend Liz counselled her to not be bitter and so she woke every morning saying it to herself like a mantra. But it didn’t work, it did not work. Joel, aged forty-five, her husband of twelve years, had left her for a 25-year-old who ‘really understood him’.
The queue shunted forward and she saw the press corps and the BBC vans and Sky and all the rest of them. She had known they would be here, of course; Olivia had pulled a pretty spectacular stunt yesterday. This interested her. Why that, why now? She pulled down the visor to check herself in the mirror. One day she’d probably be rumbled as the doctor, a woman no less, who treated Olivia. It could be today and she didn’t want to look anything less than professional.
She watched a couple of cars do the aggressive leave-the-queue manoeuvre. They were always men, throwing their hunks of metal around self-importantly and holding everyone up, as if they all didn’t have places to go, things they had to do. Any other route was much longer and they already knew that; they just liked to temporarily hog two lanes of traffic. She knew she shouldn’t generalise about the sexes, but as she got older she was thinking more and more that clichés existed because they were true.
The first man roared away. The next car to come past was Darren’s. He had the window down on an old blue hatchback and his tanned arm on the window ledge, a thin band of hippy string round the tattoos on his wrist. He was a strange one, Darren – bent and haunted, yet surprisingly articulate and with a strength of character. The way he’d handled her in the chaos post-Linda had been masterful, in fact. She wondered idly how long he’d stay here; the cleaning staff were always moving on to other, usually also low-paid jobs. Not long, she reasoned, as he seemed to be shirking his shift on this hot day. Probably getting out of town and going to the beach to get high. She realised she didn’t know what people his age actually did – she’d read somewhere that they no longer drank. Could that be true? That they didn’t get plastered? They had no money, she knew, and according to the press were all living with their parents, wanking to online porn twenty-four hours a day, piercings everywhere. His abs would be rock-hard. A pleasing change from Joel’s middle-aged sag.
She watched the news crews do their thing. The hang ’em flog ’em brigade would be frothing over this latest development. One of the bodies recovered, one family with closure at last. Oh how she would love to be on a talk show, pitted against Orin Bukowski, and run his arguments into the ground! They would never understand her job and how valuable it was, what amazing results could be achieved. Helen felt her bitterness recede. God she loved her job. It had been the great revelation of her life, that she enjoyed work as much as she did, especially now that Joel had done the dirty and left.
It was a bloody outrage that he could pull a woman so young, a woman who by rights should be with someone Darren’s age. Women accepted such low standards while subjecting themselves to such high ones. It was always men foghorning their bad breath at you while they pontificated about something every woman in the room already knew.
Helen was at the gates now and pulled in past the press chaos. Work was her saviour, work was what brought self-respect and economic power. She thought of Becky, her sister, mired in faux complaints about her kids and her husband. Becks needed to get up off the sofa, duck the coffee mornings and get to work.
Helen was angry, that was why she was sweating, she
The queue shunted forward and she saw the press corps and the BBC vans and Sky and all the rest of them. She had known they would be here, of course; Olivia had pulled a pretty spectacular stunt yesterday. This interested her. Why that, why now? She pulled down the visor to check herself in the mirror. One day she’d probably be rumbled as the doctor, a woman no less, who treated Olivia. It could be today and she didn’t want to look anything less than professional.
She watched a couple of cars do the aggressive leave-the-queue manoeuvre. They were always men, throwing their hunks of metal around self-importantly and holding everyone up, as if they all didn’t have places to go, things they had to do. Any other route was much longer and they already knew that; they just liked to temporarily hog two lanes of traffic. She knew she shouldn’t generalise about the sexes, but as she got older she was thinking more and more that clichés existed because they were true.
The first man roared away. The next car to come past was Darren’s. He had the window down on an old blue hatchback and his tanned arm on the window ledge, a thin band of hippy string round the tattoos on his wrist. He was a strange one, Darren – bent and haunted, yet surprisingly articulate and with a strength of character. The way he’d handled her in the chaos post-Linda had been masterful, in fact. She wondered idly how long he’d stay here; the cleaning staff were always moving on to other, usually also low-paid jobs. Not long, she reasoned, as he seemed to be shirking his shift on this hot day. Probably getting out of town and going to the beach to get high. She realised she didn’t know what people his age actually did – she’d read somewhere that they no longer drank. Could that be true? That they didn’t get plastered? They had no money, she knew, and according to the press were all living with their parents, wanking to online porn twenty-four hours a day, piercings everywhere. His abs would be rock-hard. A pleasing change from Joel’s middle-aged sag.
She watched the news crews do their thing. The hang ’em flog ’em brigade would be frothing over this latest development. One of the bodies recovered, one family with closure at last. Oh how she would love to be on a talk show, pitted against Orin Bukowski, and run his arguments into the ground! They would never understand her job and how valuable it was, what amazing results could be achieved. Helen felt her bitterness recede. God she loved her job. It had been the great revelation of her life, that she enjoyed work as much as she did, especially now that Joel had done the dirty and left.
It was a bloody outrage that he could pull a woman so young, a woman who by rights should be with someone Darren’s age. Women accepted such low standards while subjecting themselves to such high ones. It was always men foghorning their bad breath at you while they pontificated about something every woman in the room already knew.
Helen was at the gates now and pulled in past the press chaos. Work was her saviour, work was what brought self-respect and economic power. She thought of Becky, her sister, mired in faux complaints about her kids and her husband. Becks needed to get up off the sofa, duck the coffee mornings and get to work.
Helen was angry, that was why she was sweating, she
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