Wonder Women (32 page)

‘Fine,' said Serena, and immediately got up to go to her room. Bingo. The concerned-mum card worked every time.

As soon as she heard Serena's door close, she switched on her own machine and logged into Lauren's profile. She sat staring at it for a good ten minutes, willing something to happen. Would Serena see through it? Would she just ignore the request? Serena wasn't a stupid girl. Mel had all but given up when a little red notification popped up. She clicked
on it, her hand trembling on the mouse. ‘Serena Grey has accepted your friend request'.

She wanted to cheer. Any feelings of guilt she pushed firmly to the back of her mind. What she was doing was for Serena's own good. She wanted her to be safe, that was all. She went on to Serena's profile immediately. Right at the top of the page she saw it: ‘Serena Grey is in a relationship with Jason “Triggah” Cook'. Serena's wall was full of posts from school friends, candid photos from parties and school, and a very high proportion of messages from this Jason ‘Triggah' Cook.

So Serena had a boyfriend. She had suspected as much, but now she knew. She ignored the pain in her heart that something so enormous had happened in her daughter's life, and Serena had chosen not to share it. She clicked through to Triggah's profile. Thoroughly locked down. His profile picture was an image of the one from X-Men with the weird spectacles, so she didn't even know what he looked like. She sent him a friend request. She'd have to wait to learn a little more about this guy.

Lee now

Lee's boss, Anna, had her head in her hands. In Lee's experience of the working world, walking into your boss's office and finding her with her head in her hands was never good. It meant either she'd done something wrong, or you had, or someone had, but if it was a headache for your boss, it was going to be a headache for you. ‘Anna?' he said softly. She looked up, and the expression on her face did nothing to boost his confidence.

‘Lee, come in,' she said. ‘What can I do for you?'

Anna was a few years younger than Lee. She was a fiendishly smart, Cambridge-educated woman who had started her career in advertising as a copywriter and had soon found her real strength lay in management. She had been an enormous success since she had taken over running the font foundry – she was shrewd, witty and charming, and the clients loved her. She kept a tight rein on every project, watching the budget and the deadlines like a hawk. She was always positive, motivating the team and getting the best
out of everyone. To see her down and, Lee had to admit, looking scared, was distinctly worrying.

‘I just wanted to check what time the brownie people are coming in.'

‘Oh,' said Anna, and to Lee's horror, looked as if she might cry. ‘The thing is, Lee, they're not coming.'

‘Oh, did they reschedule? That's great. I wanted to try a new colourway.'

‘No, they're not coming full stop. They've pulled the plug. They've lost the distribution deal with Tesco and the whole thing's on hold.'

‘What?' said Lee blankly. ‘How …? What? Hell, Anna, what does that mean for us?'

The brownie account had been the best thing to happen to the company in months. Mrs Huston's Delightful HomeMade Brownies was a boutique brand of melt-in-the-mouth desserts, which would be distributed in supermarkets and delis around the country. They had come to the font foundry to have a bespoke typeface designed for their logo. They had loved the result so much they had asked the company to do all their packaging design and all the advertising. It was a massive account, the biggest the foundry had had in over a year, and it was going to save them all. And now it was gone.

‘They'll pay us for what we've done so far,' Anna said, ‘but that's not even a quarter of what we thought we'd be billing on this. It's a huge loss.'

‘How huge?' Lee asked.

‘Huge. I don't think anyone understands how close to the wind we've been sailing. But without the brownie money …'

‘Jobs will be at risk?'

‘I don't want to say too much,' said Anna, remembering her position. ‘It's unprofessional, and it's not fair to dump this on you. We'll make it work, somehow.' But her smile, normally wide and infectious, was weak and completely unconvincing.

Lee went back to his desk and sat down. He'd had his head down, working furiously all morning, but without the brownie deal, he had nothing to do. He assumed there'd be housekeeping to handle soon: the final transfer of any files and suchlike, but that was not a job for now. He glanced at his watch. Ten to twelve was early for lunch, but what the hell. He grabbed his jacket and set off into the watery February sunlight. He got a sandwich and a cup of coffee and found a bench in the square. There were very few people out and about: it was early for the lunchtime crowd. There was a homeless man sleeping on the next bench, and a couple of trendy types in square-rimmed glasses talking loudly and pointing at an iPad … obviously some sort of out-of-office brainstorm. Nothing like a spot of cold and damp to focus the creative impulses, Lee thought wryly.

What he'd witnessed in Anna's office was serious. Even if she wouldn't say it, he knew they'd have to lay someone off. As senior designer, he thought his job was probably safe for now, but one, or maybe both, of the remaining juniors would have to go, and possibly some support staff as well. Awful news in these difficult times. There just weren't the jobs out there at the moment.

A young couple came into the square, the man pushing a pushchair. He was wearing a suit and tie, and his wife was
more casually dressed. Lee guessed she had brought the baby in to visit Daddy at work and they were having an early lunch. Jo had often brought Zach in when he was small, but once Imi was born, she found the Tube journey with two kids and a pushchair too stressful, so she stopped. The mum sat down on a bench and unwrapped sandwiches, and the dad lifted the child out of the pushchair and swung him into his arms, swooping him round and making him fly like a plane. Lee smiled, seeing the delight on the little boy's face and hearing him chortle. He was used to being away from Zach and Imogene during the day, but seeing this sweet little red-faced chap made him miss them.

The mum had got up now, and all three of them were playing a silly game that involved one of the parents hiding behind a tree and jumping out to scare the little boy and the other parent. Lee found himself observing the yellowish rays of sunlight and the way the little boy's bright red coat stood out against the iron-grey trunks of the bare trees. It would make an amazing photograph, or even better, a spectacular painting. He scrabbled in his coat pocket and came out with a stubby IKEA pencil and a receipt from the sandwich shop where he had bought his lunch. Resting the scrap of paper on his thigh, he sketched the scene in outline. Maybe he could turn it into a little painting later … something in bright, opaque acrylics perhaps. He was dying to snap a photo with his phone, but he knew the couple would think he was some kind of freak, taking pictures of their kid. He'd have to remember the colours and details of the scene.

He supposed he should get back. Word of the brownie account would have filtered through the office and the
mood would be dark. He really should go. He'd been away a good while, and the bench he was sitting on was freezing. But he couldn't bring himself to move.

Lee then

At nineteen, after a year of living in uni halls, Lee moved into a room in a house in New Cross, near the station and within walking distance of all of his lectures. The house was at the very bottom end of the range of student digs: draughty, cold, in poor repair, with black mould on the walls and ceilings in the bathroom and an immovable layer of sticky grime over everything in the kitchen. Lee didn't know or particularly like his housemates, but his room … he loved his room. He'd been lucky enough to get the big front bedroom. He paid a bit more than his housemates, but it was totally worth it. The room was enormous, with an expanse of bare wooden floor and a high ceiling, and an enormous bay window overlooking the street, which allowed light to pour in. The wallpaper was dingy and peeling in places, the window was not double-glazed and was so ill-fitting it let in icy winds and even rain, but the space and the light were amazing.

Lee didn't have much stuff: he had a single bed, which he kept pushed right into a corner, and his few clothes were neatly folded away in the small wardrobe he had brought from his parents' house. The room was always swept and dusted, and he had a little handheld floor polisher that he used once a week. He liked it to be neat and clean, but not for show, just because then he had all the expanse of floor
ready to be covered in paper at a moment's notice. And it usually was. He spent every spare minute drawing and painting.

Sleep was a luxury Lee couldn't afford. There was so much to do. He loved his lectures and practical classes and devoured everything that he learned, but he believed that the only way he would develop as an artist was to keep creating. His brain went at a thousand miles an hour, bursting with ideas, overflowing with what-ifs, and he had to get them down on paper, or gather people to create collaborative works, or write, write, write into the night. He wanted to do everything, be everything, make everything. Other students around him saw uni as a time to get drunk and get laid, to cruise along doing as little work as possible in order to maximise the time for partying, but to Lee, that made no sense at all. He had a powerful sense of urgency … he couldn't shake the feeling that if he hadn't created a major artwork by the time he was thirty, it would all be over and he would be a failure. The problem was, he didn't know what form this artwork would take. He loved to draw, especially in charcoal, but then he also loved to paint in oils or acrylics: bold, bright works. He found theatre immensely inspiring, and music filled his soul. He wrote too, compulsively and prolifically. He had read somewhere that to get really good at something, you needed to spend ten thousand hours practising it. So if painting, drawing, music, writing and theatre were his five passions – imagine if he gave twelve hours a day to practising one of these. Fifty thousand hours, divided by twelve, divided by three hundred and sixty-five days in a year (weekends off were
for wimps …) he would be proficient in roughly eleven and a half years' time. That would be too late. He'd be thirty-two and hopelessly past it. He needed to focus more. But how could he focus when he didn't know which of his passions he could be best at?

His mum had laughed when she'd come down from Pinner to visit him in his digs, bringing a basket of food and a blanket, because she knew he didn't have one and would never go out to buy one. ‘Good grief, Lee!' she'd said when she saw the room. ‘You're living like some kind of mad monk!'

‘I love it, Mum,' he said defensively. ‘I've got it just the way I want it.'

‘Well, I can't imagine the girls are flocking to share it with you,' said Betty tartly. ‘As for the rest of this house …' It seemed there were no words in Betty's schoolteacher vocabulary to finish that sentence. ‘A flame-thrower's too good for it,' she said eventually.

‘I know it's not smart or clean or anything,' said Lee earnestly, ‘but I do such amazing work here. I think I could stay here forever.'

‘Maybe, love. But life does move on. You're so sure about what you want now, but you might find that changes. Life has a way of making decisions for us.'

Lee now

No point in getting up now, Lee thought. He felt certain that his bum had actually frozen to the bench and he'd do himself
an injury if he stood up suddenly. The couple with their toddler were long gone and the square was beginning to fill with local workers, grabbing a few minutes of sunshine over lunchtime.

Life had made a load of decisions for him, he thought. Skinny, Afro-headed nineteen-year-old Renaissance Man would have despised thirty-seven-year-old font-designer Lee, with his suburban home and family and secure job. He'd have called him a total sell-out, and while Lee would defend to the hilt every choice he had made, his concern was not the choices he had made, but the ones he hadn't. He had willingly chosen his career path, his marriage to Jo and his children, and he wouldn't change any of that. But he hadn't chosen to give up on being an artist. That had just happened. Somewhere along the line, his dreams of creating something arresting, meaningful and beautiful had fallen by the wayside. And here he was, on the cusp of middle-age, sitting on a bench in Über-trendy Hoxton, worrying about brownie packaging. Well, if the deadline for doing something awesome by the time he was thirty had passed him by, what about setting a new deadline? What about forty? Maybe it was time to change the course of his life, forcibly and dramatically. And in the process, could he help Jo to realise her dreams too?

Gingerly Lee stood up from the bench. His legs were stiff and cold. He shook them out and walked briskly around the square three times. Then he went back to work, walked into Anna's office and said, ‘Can we talk about voluntary redundancy?'

*

‘You fucking what?' Jo exploded, when he told her that evening, after the kids had gone to bed. ‘My God, Lee, have you lost your mind? You can't just chuck in your job on a whim. You know what the market's like – there are no other jobs out there. We've got a mortgage to pay … I can't believe …' She stopped, quite clearly at a loss for words.

‘Okay, firstly, I didn't chuck in my job. I said to Anna that I might consider voluntary redundancy, but I would have to talk to you.'

Jo took a deep breath. ‘So talk.'

Lee sat and looked at his hands for a minute. ‘I think … sometimes the universe, or God, or whatever, gives us a sign that it's time to make a change. And I think we've had loads of signs over the last while and I don't want to ignore them.'