The Year I Met You (12 page)

‘Excuse me, who are you to talk about betrayal? We started that company together, Larry,
together
…’

We continue talking over one another, the same conversation we had eleven weeks ago when I was fired. In fact, the same conversation we had before I was fired, when he’d heard that I was making preparations with Simon to put us in a good position to sell.

It is pointless, and neither of us is prepared to back down until I hear his wife in the background, a sleepy, angry interruption, and Larry apologises softly then comes back on the phone, loud and angry and clear.

‘I’m not going to waste my time with this conversation. But hear me loud and clear, Jasmine: I. Will. Not. Drop. The. Gardening. Leave. Clause. Right now, if I could make it
two years
long I would. I don’t care what you do for the year – take a holiday, go on a fucking retreat, try
finishing something you’ve started
for once in your life – I don’t care, just don’t fucking call my number again, and especially not at this hour. It’s one year. One fucking year and then you can get back to starting and selling and never finishing, same as you always do, okay?’

He hangs up, leaving me shaking, reeling with anger.

I pace the kitchen, mumbling about finishing things that I’ve started, angrily compiling a list of as many things as I can think of. He has hit a nerve. It was sudden and surprising and it has hurt me more than anything else he has said, more than the act of firing me. It is in fact, the most hurtful thing anyone has ever said to me and I am shaking. I continue to debate the point with him in my mind, but it is useless as I am me and I am him, and me as me will always win. I look at the mess of a garden, which sends me into a spiral of anger. I go outside and kick a roll of grass, my foot punctures the roll, and then I stamp on it, sending it tumbling off the pile and down on to the ground, opening and unravelling. The grass splits at the hole where I’ve kicked it. Embarrassed by my actions, and surprised, I look up and see your curtains flutter. I go back inside and slam the door.

I spend a long time in the shower, crying with frustration, the hot water stinging my skin and leaving it red and raw. I finish with one clear vow in my mind. I will not lower myself to becoming your company, particularly at night. I believe this has been my lowest point and I will not fall to this level again. I will rise above this, I will rise above you. It is not just the Larry conversation that has upset me. What got me to that point in the first place was you. It was you who caused me to charge home and pick up the phone and call him. Because it was your words that made me look at myself, at my situation, and made me want to get out of it.

I hear your voice over and over:
it was nice not to be alone out here for once
. You have brought me into your world, without my permission, without my say-so, you have included me in your crisis, in your state of mind, you have likened me to you. And by doing that you have made me feel ashamed, because I have always believed your words are poison, that they are the worst thing about you, that they are dangerous.

But when I let my guard down, your words gave me warmth.
It was nice not to be alone out here for once.
When you said those words, they comforted me. I did not feel alone then either.

I will not let you do that to me again.

11

For the first time in a very long time when I wake up my room is flooded with yellow light and a sense of calm. It is unusual, different to the blue-grey light that barely lit the room over the past few months. It is the first of February and though spring has not yet sprung, it gives cause to believe it just might win the battle. There is a sense of it in the air, or perhaps it is because for the first time in a very long time I have woken up late. I don’t like lie-ins, they make me feel lazy; even after a late night I find a long walk by the bay is the only cure for me, but after the physical exertion of my late-night gardening I am exhausted. As soon as I move, I feel the stiffness in my limbs.

My radio tells me that I have slept for eight hours and once again the country has been battered by storms, ‘storm factory’ being the new term we’re growing used to hearing, along with ‘polar vortex’ – no doubt new names for babies in 2015. They warn that there’s another fortnight of mayhem on the way, thanks to unsettled weather from the Atlantic. The calmness outside is deceiving. Three cities are underwater, five-metre swells are forecast, and the talk on most stations turns to global warming and the melting polar ice that is fuelling the storms. January rainfall was 70 per cent above the norm and the outlook for February is more of the same. But not today. I look out the window and feel revived by the clear blue sky, the wispy occasional clouds. Even though I am still sore from my late-night workout in the garden, and embarrassed about you seeing it, I bury all that at the back of my mind.

I survey my hard work and am disappointed – no, devastated by what I see. At first I think somebody has come by and deliberately ransacked my newly laid turf, but on closer inspection I realise that I am in fact the culprit. Only with the benefit of my bedroom bird’s-eye view I can see that it encapsulates perfectly my state of mind last night as I was doing it. It resembles a badly sewn, unfinished patchwork quilt, and I am horrified by what I see. It’s as though my diary has been left open for everybody to read my deepest, darkest thoughts, and now I need to slam it closed before I am revealed to the world. I can’t wait until Monday for the landscaper to return and fix my mess. There’s no way I can endure two days with my fragile mental state displayed in the front garden for all to see.

Online research – something I should have made time for last night instead of letting adrenaline and anger rule me – is the answer. It educates me in how exactly to go about fixing the problem. One hour later I have returned from the garden centre and I’m ready and armed. Never do something that can’t be undone, that’s what I always tell myself, and I repeat it now as I assess the task ahead of me. Messy, time-consuming, challenging and frustrating, but possible. The landscaper had already prepared the soil for me perfectly; it had taken him longer than he’d said, but he had done it. Even though I had foolishly trodden all over the grass last night, as I realise today that I shouldn’t have, I carefully roll each piece of turf up again before lifting it to its correct place. I lay the first row along the straight edge where the soil meets the stones, slowly unrolling it to minimise damage. The one I had kicked my heel through still lies on the driveway like a corpse at a crime scene. I place the next roll as close to the last as I can and ensure good contact with the soil by tapping down firmly with the back of the rake. All this I now know I should have done last night, but I also know that I would not have had the patience for it. Last night was about moving, being busy, doing something – not about doing it right.

As I rectify my mistakes on this oddly calm day, I feel a stillness coming over me. I forget about everything that has riled me up so much over the past few days and weeks, and devote all my concentration to the job in hand. Distraction. My mind quietens as I continue the process for a few hours, covering the area in a brickwork pattern. I’m about to turn my attention to the sides, trimming the edges with a straight-edged board and a half-moon cutting tool, both of which I have bought for the purpose, when a car drives past the house. I don’t recognise the driver as one of my neighbours, but this happens a lot on weekends when people take drives along the coast and then explore the surrounding residential streets. I am used to seeing cars passing by, the back seats filled to the brim with kids, their faces pressed up against the glass for a gawk and older couples having a browse on their slow Sunday drives. We have the perfect cul de sac for window-shopping: it is pretty, welcoming, the kind of place people like to imagine themselves living in.

The driver has to do a three-point turn as it’s only a short road. I watch him checking the numbers on the houses, which is not an easy task as everybody has chosen to display them differently in different places. You have a black plaque with pretty pink flowers to display your number, Dr Jameson has a goose in flight and next door has a garden gnome with one hand holding up a
2,
the other hand is holding up his trousers, which have dropped to display enormous red-and-white heart boxer shorts. Mine is the least exciting of all: a black letter box attached to the wall with
3
on it.

He parks outside my house and gets out. I am positive he can’t be looking for me, so I continue my gardening, but I’m unable to concentrate knowing he is looking around. Then I’m conscious of the fact his eyes have settled on me. I hear footsteps as he comes closer.

‘Excuse me, I’m looking for Jasmine Butler.’

I look up, wipe sweat from my grimy forehead. He’s tall, brown-skinned, with chiselled high cheekbones. His eyes are a striking green, which jar with his skin tone, and his Afro rises and then descends down over his eyes in tiny tight corkscrew curls. He is wearing a black suit, white shirt, green tie, shiny black shoes. He makes me remind myself to breathe.

From the way I’m looking at him dumbly, he thinks I haven’t heard him.

‘Are you Jasmine Butler?’

He is remarkably familiar but I haven’t seen him before, I would remember that. And then I realise it’s his voice I recognise. The telephone salesman.

‘Or perhaps you’re Penelope Paddington,’ he says, and as he purses his lips together to hide his smile, two enormous dimples appear on his cheeks.

I smile, knowing I’m caught out. ‘I’m Jasmine,’ I say, my voice coming out in a croak. I clear it.

‘My name is Monday O’Hara. I called you a few times on the phone during the last couple of weeks.’

‘You didn’t leave your name or contact details,’ I say, wondering if I heard his name correctly.

‘True. It’s a private matter. I wanted to talk to you myself, and not … your housekeeper.’

I continue to look at him. So far he hasn’t given me enough to get off the grass for, or even welcome him into my home.

‘I work for Diversified Search International. I’ve been hired by DavidGordonWhite to find suitable candidates for a new position, and I think you more than meet the requirements they are looking for.’

I feel myself floating as he continues.

‘I called your office quite a few times but couldn’t reach you. I didn’t leave any messages there, don’t worry. I didn’t want to raise a red flag so I told them it was a personal matter. But they were stronger gatekeepers than I assumed they’d be; you may or may not be happy to hear that.’

I struggle with how to respond to that. It was clear when we spoke on the phone that he doesn’t know I’ve been fired. I am unsure as to why nobody told him that, perhaps because technically I haven’t been fired, I am still contractually tied to them even though they won’t let me past the front door.

‘You’re a difficult woman to find,’ he says, with a smile, which is a beautiful thing to behold. Two definite dimples and a tiny chip in his front tooth: even his imperfection is perfectly perfect. In my humble opinion.

My house is a mess. I haven’t got around to cleaning the muck I trampled into the floor during my rampage last night and my dirty knickers are in a pile on the kitchen floor in front of the washing machine, waiting for my towels to finish their cycle. I cannot bring him into the house.

‘I’m sorry to bother you on a Saturday, but I find out-of-work hours are the best time to deal with people. I’m very conscious of the need to keep your office from finding out about our contact.’

I’m still thinking about the state of the house, a long pause that he mistakes for mistrust, so he apologises and digs in his pockets and retrieves a business card. He hands it to me. He has to lean his long arms across the grass to reach me; he knows not to step on the grass and I like that. I examine the card.
Monday O’Hara. Headhunter. Diversified Search International.
The whole thing makes me smile.

‘We don’t have to talk now, I just wanted to make contact first and—’

‘No, no, now is perfect. Well, not
right now
…’ I run my hand through my scraped-back dirty hair and find a crusty leaf in it. ‘Would you mind if I took twenty minutes to quickly change? We could meet at the Marine Hotel around the corner?’

‘Perfect.’ There’s a flash of that gorgeous smile, but then it’s all locked away in a very square jaw and he nods, business-like, at me and makes his way back to his car. I have to work hard not to dance into my house.

I sit in on an oversized couch in the Marine Hotel lobby, feeling refreshed and looking more human, while Monday heads off in search of a waiter. I feel nervously excited about what’s to come. At long last, something that feels like a step forward. He has no idea that I’ve been fired, and I still haven’t told him, or even let on that I’m no longer working there, and if it does slip out, he doesn’t need to know that it wasn’t my decision to leave. I know exactly why I’m keeping it to myself: because I want to play. I want to play along, feel like the desired woman with two companies fighting over her, instead of the loser, fired from her job and with nothing on the horizon. Or maybe, just maybe, in an embarrassing bout of ego and weakness, I don’t want the handsome man to see me as the fired failure that I currently feel like.

A woman and a little girl, her daughter, around four years old, sit at the table in front of me. The little girl picks up her spoon and lightly taps on the glass.

‘I’d like to make toast,’ she says, and her mother howls with laughter.

‘
A
toast, Lily.’

‘Oh,’ she giggles. ‘I’d like to make
a
toast.’ She clinks the glass again, stretches her neck and puts on a posh, serious face.

Her mother cracks up laughing again.

The little girl is funny, but it is her mother’s reaction that makes me join in the laughter. She is laughing so hard, she’s crying and patting at the corners of her eyes to stop it.