Picture Imperfect (7 page)

Mrs Goddard, the manager, or manageress if you prefer,
likes to write her letters in longhand as opposed to using some sort of
dictating machine. I’d prefer the dictating machine, as her writing is
absolutely awful and I always having to ask her what certain words are meant to
be, which I know she doesn’t like as it disturbs her thoughts. She’s
forty something
and is divorced. Whenever you have to go
into her office, she’s swivelled her chair around so she can look out of the window.
The only view is that of a big chemist across the road and the traffic.
 
I get a terrible vibe of unhappiness from
her.

I can only imagine that her marriage must have been
bloody great and it’s almost killed her that it’s over. It all happened about
five years ago, according to Kristin, and no one knows what happened. I don’t
know if kids were involved. I don’t think they were. The awful thing is
is
that’s she’s really, really attractive.
Beautiful, even.
She has a real
va-va-voom
figure that reminds me of a fifties pin-up girl. You could easily imagine her
as one of those Gil
Elvgren
paintings. She’d be
wearing some tight-fitting blouse and a short skirt which the wind has blown up
to reveal black stocking tops and matching suspenders. I don’t ever mention
this to her, though. I somehow don’t think it would be a good idea.

Kristin, on the other hand, is the complete physical
opposite to Mrs Goddard. When I first came to work here I thought she must have
been over six foot five. It was only when I was standing next to her that I
could see that she was slightly shorter than me, and I’m five foot six. I have
no idea how this effect is achieved. She wears heels, but only two inch ones,
so it can’t be that. She’s very thin, has short, jet black hair, long legs and
no boobs. Men go crazy over her, and she’s been bouncing from one hot bf to the
next since I’ve known her. I can only assume that she has ‘it’.

I sit down and switch on my computer, checking all my
stuff while it goes through all the crap it has to do before it starts up. When
I finally start typing, I must be hitting the keys exceptionally hard, as
Kristin looks over and raises her eyebrows.
 

‘Bad journey in, Chloe?’

‘No, no. No. Just,
er
, the
same as usual.’

‘OK. I won’t ask. You sit there fuming like you just
sat on a cactus and I’ll complete ignore it. Your petty, uninteresting personal
issues are nothing to do with me. You just go on taking whatever it is out on
that poor little keyboard that has never hurt anybody and I’ll just sit here
smiling to myself and admiring my razor-sharp perception of other people’s
moods.’

‘Do you want a coffee, Kristin?’

‘What do you think?’

I get up and go to the coffee machine and get a coffee
for Kristin and a hot chocolate for myself. Like everything that comes out of
coffee machines like this, they don’t taste anything like what they’re meant to
be, but at least they’re hot.

I hand Kristin her coffee and go back to my desk. I
prop up one of Mrs Goddard’s handwritten missives next to my keyboard, so it
looks like I’m doing something and swirl some hot chocolate around my mouth. My
tongue recoils in fear. Kristin looks right at me, an amused expression on her
face.

‘
So.
Is there anything you want to talk about, miss?’

I tell her about Mark and his sudden holiday and her
eyes widen in theatrical shock. I’ve managed to convince myself that I’ve been
very cool and laid back about all of this and that there’s nothing out of the
ordinary about something like this happening. We’re a mature, adult couple in
our early thirties. I’ve arrived at an emotional plateau with the whole thing,
barring my mother’s ridiculous views on the subject.

But the expression on Kristin’s face as the tale
unfolds is something to see. It’s as if my first reaction to Mark’s surprise
announcement is manifesting itself on someone else’s face. She takes a gulp of
coffee, pulls a face and shakes her head from side to side. She’s almost
laughing.

‘The little shit!’

She pronounces it ‘sheet’.

‘Well, it’s only for five days like I said.’

‘Don’t make excuses for him. I’ve never heard anything
so bloody outrageous in my whole life! Only five days? Let me get this
straight. He left on Sunday and he’s coming back on Saturday? That’s a week in
my book, not five bloody days. But I’ll tell you something: even if it was just
one bloody day it’d be one day too many and that’s a fact, girl.’

‘Well, I thought, you know, he’s been working hard
recently…’

I sound pathetic. I sound defeated. I sound like a
mousewife
from the 1950s.

‘And you haven’t? What’s working too hard got to do
with this? I’ll tell you, shall I?
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
Zilch.
You’re
dumping him, of course?’

‘Dumping him?’

The idea had never occurred to me, mainly because I
still can’t work out whether this is a serious, relationship-threatening event
or not. Kristin’s personality can be so overwhelming that I feel I should say
something quickly before she jumps in again.

‘
Er
, I, I haven’t…
dumping
him?’

I think that got my point across.

‘He’s a worm, darling. No one treats their girlfriend
like that! God – can you imagine…’

Kristin rolls her eyes around, trying to think of some
sentence or three that will break through her exasperation.

‘Try and imagine what he’d have to say if you went on
an ex-bloody-
otic
, sexy holiday with an old
university girl pal and a couple of hot guys? And the reason you were going on
this holiday was just that you fancied it (pronounced ‘
eet
’)
or apparently thought you
deserved
a
nice break. You knew he couldn’t afford it, so you decided to have one without
him with people who could! He would be quite justified in describing you as a
major bitch. He’d almost certainly walk out on you.’

‘OK, but it wasn’t quite like that. His friend Danny
had booked the holiday, and his friend dropped out at the last minute.’

‘Oh, well boo-
hoo
.
So poor old Danny has to go on holiday to Greece for a week with a
couple of girls.
Poor old Danny.
My heart
bleeds for him.’

‘I think it had all been paid for and it was too late
to cancel any part of it.’

‘Well that still isn’t Mark’s problem, is it? Did Mark
push the other guy off a cliff or whatever happened to him? No. I’ll tell you,
if you did something like this to Mark, he’d be sitting at home, stewing in his
own paranoid juice for a week, imagining you getting up to all sorts of
shenanigans in every combination possible with two guys and another girl and
that’d be just on the first day. Actually, this is beginning to sound pretty
erotic. Sorry.’

‘But the girls aren’t that great looking. I wouldn’t
describe them as hot.
 
I don’t think…’

‘But that’s even worse. These plain-Jane girls go off
on their own looking for a couple of virile Greek fishermen with no taste, huge
libidos and two words of English, Mark and whatshisname are left drinking by
the pool, ogling every bit of suntanned foreign tail that goes by – it’s a
disaster waiting to happen! God, if I had a boyfriend who did this to me, I’d
kick him in the balls so hard they’d come out the top of his head. How could
he? How could he do this to you? Bottom line – you’re a couple. You should
share stuff. If one of you can’t afford expensive foreign holidays, then you
don’t go on expensive foreign holidays.
Unless, of course,
he’s a generous, non-materialistic type who pays for both of you.
Simple as that.
I mean – what the hell?’

‘I don’t know if I’m just being intolerant by…’

‘Stop defending him all the time. Are you mad? This is
unacceptable, full stop. This is him, not you. He could have said no, couldn’t
he? He could have said that he had this beautiful girlfriend and if he was
going to spend x amount of money going on holiday with anyone, it would be with
her. But he didn’t.’

I flop back in my seat. I’m getting exhausted with all
of this. It’s like having a hurricane-level blast of righteous indignation that
you can’t turn off.

Kristin picks up a pen, scribbles with it on a piece of
paper to make sure it’s working and sits up, staring at me, pen poised in
mid-air.

‘Right.
Let’s work out how
much this flatworm has spent on this so-called cheap holiday shall we?’

‘I really don’t want to get into all this. I don’t want
to think about it.’

I can tell she’s going to do this with or without my
cooperation.

‘You said the holiday was a little over three hundred
pounds, yeah? Let’s call it three hundred and fifty. Did he tell you how much
the return flight was?’

‘I don’t remember.’

She narrows her eyes, knowing I’m lying.

‘Alright, it was two hundred and seven.’

She scribbles this down.

‘How much spending money?’

‘I really don’t know. We didn’t discuss it.’

‘Fair enough.
Conservative
estimate, then, let’s say two hundred, make it three hundred. This is only
going to be a ball park figure, after all. How much do you think he spent on
your shopping spree?’

‘Well, he did buy quite an expensive bag and some
hundred quid sunglasses.’

‘How much did he spend on stuff altogether?’

‘Something like five or six hundred pounds, maybe?
Possibly more?’

‘Well call it five hundred. Let’s be conservative on
that one. Add on things like snacks and magazines at the
airport,
taxi the other end and other sundries. Let’s make that, say fifty pounds.’

I watch her moving her lips as she makes the
calculation.

‘Crap. That comes to close on fifteen hundred! Now I’m
not a lesbian, even though I experimented at school for a while, well – more than
a while, but if I had a beautiful girlfriend like you and was going to spend
that sort of money on a holiday, I’d spend it on you and take you away to some
luxury spa hotel in the Cotswolds for a few day’s pampering and frequent sexual
intercourse with scented candles and exotic massage oils.’

‘Thank you. I’m flattered.’

‘You’re welcome.’

Mrs Goddard suddenly appears. I realise that her office
door has been open while Kristin and I were having our little chat and I’m
worried that she’s steeling herself to tell us both to shut up and get on with
some work. I don’t like to upset her as she’s obviously upset enough already. I
don’t know if I mentioned it, but it was down to her that I got the job here in
the first place. I came here as a so-called graduate girl, but explained that I
only wanted a job for a couple of days a week. She said they were very hard to
come by, but she had an idea…

 
Instead of
firing us both, she sits down at the side of my desk and lights a cigarette. I
had no idea she smoked. I look around for an ashtray, but there isn’t one. I
guess as she’s the boss she can flick ash on the floor.

‘It’s an aggressive, insulting gesture to you.’

‘Sorry?’

‘He resents the fact that you’re not pulling your
weight financially. Money is very important to an insecure man like the one
you’ve been describing. So is status. He probably thought it was very exciting
going out with a beautiful girl who was also a working artist at first. It made
him look good, but he wasn’t aware of the realities of such an occupation, or
if he was, he chose to ignore them at the time. I’m sorry, Chloe, I was
listening to everything you said. I couldn’t help it.’

‘That’s alright. So you think it was only a matter of
time before something like this happened?’

‘Kristin said something a few minutes ago that hit the
nail on the head. She said that your boyfriend could have said ‘no’ to the
offer that his friend made him. But he didn’t. He would have known immediately
that going away on a holiday to Greece would hurt your feelings. The fact that
there were two girls involved, hot or not, would just have rubbed salt into the
wound. He was given the opportunity to do something rather nasty and petty to
you and he took it.’

Kristin is nodding her head enthusiastically. ‘And the
little grub knew that you had plans for this week, as well. All the stuff you
told me you were going to do – those things were just casually discarded like
they were nothing.
Like they didn’t matter a toss.’

Mrs Goddard expertly flicks the remains of her
cigarette right across the room and out of the window. ‘Kristin’s right. What
you wanted to do and what your feelings might be were of no importance. Right
from the start he put a spin on what had happened. He didn’t really want to go
on this holiday particularly – he was just playing the Good Samaritan to his
friend. Yet you told Kristin that he hadn’t even seen this friend for years.
And this Donny…’

‘Danny.’

‘Whatever. He wanted some male company. Maybe it was as
simple as wanting someone to get drunk with all day and night. But once he
discovered that Mark was living with someone, he should have retreated, not
persisted. Mark was living a different life now and he should have respected
that.’

She stands up and strolls back to her office. ‘Anyway,
I could be wrong. Mine is just one opinion. There could be things going on that
I don’t know about. Take it or leave it.’

She closes the door behind her and returns, I would
guess, to staring out of the window of her office. A second later she comes
back out again.

‘My ex-husband was an unsuccessful writer. I was so
stupid and materialistic that I used to work myself up into a terrible anger
that he wasn’t like my friend’s husbands, who all had conventional jobs and
could afford to pay for holidays abroad, nice cars and all the rest of it. I
left him and then we were divorced. I’m still in love with him. I’ve regretted
it ever since and I haven’t been seriously involved with anyone else since. I
don’t think I ever will be. I used to have lots of affairs to punish him when
we were together. I was stupid and immature and I’m still paying the price for
it. If I could go back in time, I’d have behaved more reasonably, more
sensibly. I certainly wouldn’t have screwed around. When I was talking about
your Mark, it started to sound as if I was talking about myself as I was back
then. I don’t know if this is useful to you in any way. You’ve got to have a
really good think about your life, Chloe. You can’t waste it on the wrong
person.’