CHAPTER 2
Jess wiped her brow with a bare arm and returned to the task of trying to remove the stain on the carpet. Squatting on the floor, alone in the boardroom of Walkers Limited, suppliers of plastic mouldings to the furniture trade, By Appointment to Her Majesty the Queen, she dabbed at the dark patch on the carpet with her chemically doused sponge.
Clive had told her to carry out her usual vacuuming–washroom–bins–desks routine and then go into the boardroom and try and get rid of some nasty mark, coffee presumably, that the chairman’s PA had reported. She had done her best, but it would take more than one application of cleaning fluid and a lot more dabbing if she was to avoid taking the colour out of the carpet as well, so she would report progress, such as it was, and try again tomorrow.
It was 7 a.m., nearing the end of her four-hour shift, and although she had no urgent desire to get home, she knew she had other tasks to perform today and needed to get on with them. She would text Clive and no doubt he would moan at her. She could only do her best, but for Clive her best was never good enough. Given a choice, she would tell him what to do with his job. She had no choice.
She packed away her cleaning kit in the storeroom, put on her coat and left the building, touching her key fob to the alarm panel as she left. The building was still empty, and unless some extremely diligent office worker wanted to get an early start, she usually worked there alone, which was the way she preferred it. The staff at Walkers would not be arriving for another hour or so, and she had neither the time nor the desire to chitchat with anyone, at any time. She had nothing to say and work to do.
She crossed the car park just as the industrial estate was coming to life, vans arriving at various warehouse units and the occasional sound of metal shutters rattling upwards, heralding the start of a new working day. She turned left out of the factory gates, hands in pockets, and set off on her thirty-minute walk home.
She could get the bus, and provided she didn’t have to wait more than ten minutes for it, she would save another ten on the overall journey time; but that cost money, and money was something she just didn’t have. She had plenty of time, though. Plenty of time before her next job, and she was content to walk in the cool morning air and see the new day unfolding.
The traffic was building up, many commuters trying to get a head start on the motorised mayhem that was a regular feature of life in Wellingford, as elsewhere. She knew nothing about cars, had never owned one and never driven. Her dad had had one once, she recalled, and she remembered it crammed with possessions when they had moved up from London, but it had been taken away many years ago.
She passed a parade of shops, all still closed apart from the newsagents and the ubiquitous coffee bars doing a brisk trade in takeaway cappuccinos and pastries. She loved the smell of coffee, and often thought she might indulge herself in the luxury of a latte or an Americano, whatever they were, but not today. Maybe another time.
The bus she didn’t get overtook her as she passed the two giant gasometers bordering the cricket ground. It had been five minutes late and would still have been a slightly quicker option, but she had saved £1.60 and that was worth it. And she was in no hurry.
She was home by 7.30 a.m., back to her tiny two-bed terraced house in one of the myriad narrow backstreets, her quiet place of refuge, her open prison. She never left the lights on when she was out at work, she couldn’t afford it, and so the gloom and silence she had left five hours earlier was still there to greet her return.
She closed and locked the front door behind her, shrugged off her coat, tossed it over the back of the sofa and then trudged straight upstairs for a shower. Normally she would only have a forty-five-minute turnaround before leaving for the office, but today was Tuesday so she had more time. She didn’t start till 12 noon on a Tuesday and worked through till 8 p.m. – a concession generously granted by Derek, as he often reminded her, but an arrangement she knew suited him just as well.
She dressed plainly, as usual, in white blouse, black trousers. Office wear. Neutral, colourless, innocuous, anonymous. She wished she could be anonymous, wished she could simply disappear, disconnect, go off-grid, escape this miserable existence and the relentless flow of bad things that had haunted her continuously for the last four or five months. Existence was pretty much all she had, and she didn’t much care for it.
Tidy as ever, she made the bed. A double, but only one side needed attention as only one side was ever slept in. She went downstairs into the tiny but spotlessly clean kitchen, and turned on the radio. For a twenty-three-year old, listening to Radio 4’s Today programme would be regarded by most people as unusual, to say the least. But Jess had no desire to be bombarded by puerile, contrived banter and inane pop music. She would much rather be in touch with what was going on in the world, and, perversely, the incessant diet of doom, gloom and despondency – the health service, the railways, the police, prison service, teaching, the economy … you name it, it was in crisis – helped to put her own situation into some sort of perspective.
She put a cup of water in the kettle and flicked the switch. She opened the fridge door. Half a bottle of milk, half a white sliced loaf, a couple of yoghurt pots and a small piece of cheese. The fridge was never full; it didn’t need to be. She didn’t eat much, and she was on her own. She popped a single slice of thin white bread into the toaster and took a small jar of Marmite from the cupboard it shared with a half jar of marmalade, some tea bags and a couple of tins of baked beans.
She sat at her kitchen table, sipping her tea, her wet hair slowly drying, looking out at the back garden through the half-glass kitchen door. The radio burbled on in the background with an item about poverty.
“Define poverty,” the presenter asked the lady from the Joseph Rowntree Trust.
“Poverty is when you don’t have enough to get by, when you have to make a choice between heating and eating.”
Jess heard the words but they didn’t register. She didn’t need anyone to explain. That was just for the ones who didn’t know, so they could feel a rush of concern before they got back to their comfortable lives.
“The official definition is living on less than sixty per cent of the average income,” she continued. Jess heard that one and looked at the radio with a frown. She was no maths scholar, but poverty as this woman had defined it sounded pretty good to her. She knew what poverty was. She had her own definition, and it had little to do with money.
Her eyes strayed to the framed photograph of a young girl, three years old, which sat permanently on the kitchen table. Long brown hair, big brown eyes, smiling, happy. It wasn’t a complete picture as it only filled the left-hand side of the frame, a ragged edge the boundary between it and the black backing card. And on the little girl’s shoulder, an adult hand. Large, brown-skinned, a signet ring and a fragment of gold watch at the edge, its owner invisible, expunged from the scene.
Jess often looked at the picture and thought about packing it away out of sight, or even throwing it away, but couldn’t bring herself to. The picture was there, and it would always be there, a lesson from the past, for as long as she lived; however long that might be. Leila would stay with her forever.
Her attention was also drawn to the letter that lay on the table in front of the photo. It had landed on the mat yesterday while she was at work. She had read it once last night and much of the small print made no sense to her, but that didn’t affect its meaning or her understanding of it. It bore the official seal of Wellingford County Court and the heading was unambiguous: “Notice of Eviction” addressed to “M Y Khalid and J A Khalid” as well as “The Occupiers”, a catch-all in the event the owners were not the only residents of 14 Spencer Street.
She had received many letters over the past few months warning about non-payment of mortgage arrears, each stronger and more threatening than the last, but she had not been able to do anything about them. She knew it was simply part of a process, and she had no idea how long the process would take; but, inevitably, time was up. The bank had applied to the court and, according to the letter in front of her, she had to leave the house within four weeks with all her belongings; otherwise, they would be taken out for her and stacked on the pavement.
She scanned the letter again and gazed out of the kitchen window at her ramshackle back garden. This could have been a nice house – was a nice house – with a nice family, and things could have been so much better, but what little hope remained had dissolved in the text of the letter. It was final and there was no going back. Not for the first time in her life did she reflect on the fact that the actions of others had driven her to the edge of a precipice and were about to push her off. And not for the first time did she feel numb and impotent in the face of this latest adversity.
She put the letter down on the kitchen table next to the photograph of the young girl and went upstairs to finish drying her hair and prepare herself for the Tuesday morning ordeal. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror and made a vain attempt to smarten her long brown hair, first tying it back with a band and then flicking out a few strands in an effort to counter the starkness of her pale, emaciated face. There was an attractive young woman under the ghostly pallor, but it was rarely seen.
When she had done all she could do, she returned downstairs to the sitting room. She heard the 9 a.m. pips on the radio. It was time to go. She switched off the radio, threw on her tatty black coat and, picking up a supermarket carrier bag containing her few personal possessions, let herself out of the house.
It was a forty-minute bus ride to Brinfield, and she sat alone on the top deck as the fields flashed by outside. It was turning into a bright and sunny day. She should be feeling good, she thought.