I’m riding a horse through the surf on a deserted beach. Sand glittering a rich golden colour. The sun warming my bare arms as I hold the reins. A shy breeze cooling my face, the tangy salt it carries perfume in my nose. The sea is the bluest blue I’ve ever seen, its waves rippling in beautiful silence towards the horizon. I’ve got nowhere to go and nothing to do; the strong and wise animal I’m riding does all the work. He doesn’t need leading or steering, he knows where he’s going and I don’t need to know. Rest back, relax and…
‘Rach.’ Philip’s voice intrudes from that long-ago summer.
My eyes punch open with a vengeance. I’m almost choking at the unexpected intrusion of his voice as I try to cope with working in the bowels of the building. Never has Philip ever been part of the images I magic up during my mindfulness visualisations that I’ve learned from the Net. Maybe it’s this new job reminding me of that other job all those years ago.
I’ve been in the basement for just over two hours, and for the last ten minutes my head’s been a dome of throbbing pain. It’s bowed, my hands shielding my eyes like a blinkered horse on a racetrack. Occasionally, I hear my heartbeat rattling like the beginnings of a chesty cold. Feel my calf muscles bulge and bunch. Now there’s a sickness inside. Inhale deeply. Another. I squeeze my eyes and it subsides for a while.
I steal a furtive glance at the masked man next to me.
Despite the fact that I’m obviously in distress and Michael instructing him to look after me, Keats takes not a blind bit of notice as he hacks away on his keyboard. I bloody well know he can hear my small gasps of air. What does he think I’m doing, having a one-on-one orgasm? The guy’s deliberately tuning me out, I know he is. I’m already regretting making excuses for him upstairs. He wouldn’t know basic human empathy if it tried to tongue him through that stupid bandana. Maybe he doesn’t like women.
I turn to him and ask in a brusque demanding tone, ‘Where’s the ladies?’
He doesn’t answer my look with one of his own or answer but types on his keyboard. A message whoops into the message box on my screen.
Keats: The what?
Instead of using the option to digitally reply, I quietly snap, ‘The ladies. You know, where women go to the loo as opposed to the gents where blokes go to have a wiz.’
I know, vulgar, but this creep’s testing all my fraying resolve.
Keats: Oh that. We haven’t got one.
I turn again to him. ‘Is this how you’re planning to communicate with me? By message box even though you’re sat right by my side?’
Keats: Yep.
I hiss, ‘You’re an idiot.’ Getting angry with Keats is making me feel better.
Keats: You can use the gents. It’s at the back there.
My gaze finds it, a battered door at the rear with the outline of a man fixed to it, rather pointless given the male composition of the staff. I hold my nose as I approach; you can smell it’s a men’s bathroom from here.
When I get inside I sit on the seat and lick my emotional wounds. The lock is an old-fashioned drop latch. The cistern one of those that you only see these days as features in back gardens with plants in them. The chain looks like brass and has a porcelain knob on the end. If you took away the desks, phones and computers, this place could be a time capsule.
I try to visualise the thousands of pounds Michael has promised me at the end of the month. The debts I will be able to pay off. Going from the red into the black. I try to control my breathing as I massage my temples. None of it works. I’m trapped as securely as a caged animal. A terrified sweatshop girl.
I don’t have the headspace to think things through but I already know this job is over if it means staying in this basement. Depression descends. How the hell am I going to pay off my debts now? It’s highly unlikely I’ll find another job that pays as well or have, for that matter, a great boss like Michael. Which leaves me where? Only one option. Making that phone call.
No, I won’t do it. I can’t.
The rest of the morning follows the same pattern: fifteen or so minutes writhing at my desk and when the anxiety floods inside me like foul water from a drain, heading off to the gents. Calming visualisations that don’t work. Then back to my desk. Rinse and repeat.
It’s nearly lunchtime and I’m on the gents part of the cycle when I hear the steel door swing open in the basement. Feel the cold breeze from the corridor sweep under the toilet door and stick against the lower half of my legs, sinking into my skin and bones.
It’s Michael. ‘Where’s Rachel?’
When I present myself, no doubt resembling someone at the end of the ghost ride at the fair, Michael peers at my face, his dipped brows showing his worry. ‘Are you all right? You look terrible.’
In fact, everyone down here looks terrible in this blue strip lighting but clearly I take the prize for most lousy-looking employee of the day.
‘Not too good actually, bit under the weather.’
He nods, expression flattening and wiped blank. ‘Right, well, in that case, you should probably think about going home. Do you want to go home?’
I know how damning this is going to appear, doing a sickie on my second week here, but… ‘That might help.’ He can’t stop the spark of disapproval he snuffs out as quickly as it’s come, so I add, ‘I’m sure I’ll be shipshape tomorrow.’
The concern for me is back on his face but I feel a barrier between us that wasn’t there before. He probably thinks being sick counts as the disloyal or unreliable behaviour he warned me about at my interview. He escorts me out along the tunnel – I’m not kidding myself this is a corridor – in long strides, which I’m grateful for; I need to get out of this underfoot world like now.
I stumble up the stairs. Make it through the trap door. The squint of my eyes against the bright light of the foyer reminds me how long I’d been in that subterranean world. Hours. The light bathes me, a baptism of being reborn again. I top up my lungs with urgent gasping wheezing breaths. Michael makes no comment; probably thinks my behaviour is down to my illness.
Upstairs, in the doorway of his PA’s office, he tells her, ‘Rachel’s unwell. She’s going home.’
Joanie’s immediately on her feet, her expression a picture of motherly concern. At least one person in this company doesn’t view being ill as some kind of character defect. Is that being too bitchy about Michael? After all, he’s got a business to run and the new girl on his management consultancy block is already playing the sick card.
‘Your colour does look a tad off.’ Annoyance flattens Joanie’s mouth. ‘I hope it’s nothing any of the lads said downstairs.’
Said? I almost bark with insane laughter. They’d have to use their vocal cords, I want to fire back sarcastically. Including Michael’s revered top guy Keats. That home truth is a lump I swallow back. Instead I lie. ‘They’ve been perfect gentlemen. I’m feeling peaky is all.’
‘You should go to a doctor, Rach. Don’t come back until you’re your wonderful self again. Isn’t that right, Mr Barrington?’
Mr Barrington’s lips are sealed.
Joanie accompanies me to the main door in the foyer, keeping up a brisk mummy bear comforting her cub patter that runs over my head.
Before I go, she leans in to my ear in the motion of our little secret. ‘Don’t worry about Michael. He’s excited about the project he’s got you and the others working on. It’s also putting him a bit on edge.’ She straightens, our just-between-you-and-me moment over. ‘Maybe see you tomorrow.’
I tip out eagerly onto the street, greedily gulping lungs of oxygen. Who’d have thought London’s polluted air would taste so sweet? Anything’s better that the fetid air of the basement. I glance at the people I pass and wonder if any of them have ever considered what might be going on under their feet in the street? Of windowless worlds bricked up in the dark? As I stumble down the narrow street, holding my face up to the lukewarm sun, I think of Joanie’s last words. One word in particular.
Tomorrow.
There’s going to be no tomorrow for me here. I can’t work down and under. Trapped in the windowless belly of a building that was once a burning sweatshop.
My only way out is to make the dreaded phone call. My trembling hand pulls out my phone.