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It was oddly hypnotic, staring down at the rapidly growing pile, as Finn’s image shot out fifty times a minute. It was hard to look away from his face, although, to be fair, the building in the topmost corner of the photograph drew my attention every bit as much. Mushroom Cottage. Just thinking about it made my heart beat a little faster.
It’s impossible to say how much more ofGlow’s stationery I might have depleted if there hadn’t been a sudden rush of legitimate users for the photocopier. I quickly slid my printing into a box, aware that someone from Accounts – whose name I’d forgotten – was staring with interest at the word ‘Missing’ emblazoned across the top of the sheet. I rammed the lid on to the box and made a rapid retreat before someone asked me a question I wasn’t prepared to answer.
Jacqueline’s office was on the other side of the open-plan floor, and a quick look at my watch confirmed it was almost the time when many of theGlowworkforce took a trip up to the rooftop cafe for a break. Silently congratulating myself on my excellent timing, I turned instead towards the Ladies’, which had dropped its unisex access several years earlier.
My luck was definitely on a roll, for the room was empty. Even so, I chose the furthest cubicle from the entrance. I heard the swish of the door opening and closing several times in the minutes that followed and realised there was probably little chance of avoiding every single person I knew on this visit. Sooner or later I’d either have to face everyone or find somewhere new to work. Oddly, the latter option didn’t sound entirely unappealing. Was it time to move on, I wondered?
I could hear a low buzz of conversation, but over the hum of the hand dryer and water splashing into the basins it was difficult to identify who was in the Ladies’ with me. There were three or possibly four different voices. I drew in a steadying breath and had just placed my fingers on the bolt, ready to slide open the cubicle door, when I heard my name.
I froze.
‘Did you guys see that Gemma was here today?’
I frowned, trying and failing to identify the voice.
‘Nooooooo,’ replied one of her companions, with more ‘o’s than I’d thought it possible to add to that word.
‘Yeah. God, if it was me, I’d be sitting in a darkened room somewhere with a tub of ice cream and a bottle of vodka.’
They laughed, and my jaw tightened, which at least prevented me from saying what I was thinking.
‘She must feel awful, though,’ added someone, who I was pretty sure was Melanie, one of the junior staff writers.
I should make a move, let them know that I’m here, I thought.Before it gets too awkward to emerge from the stall altogether.And yet instead of sliding open the bolt, my hand dropped to my side.
‘Lucy was there, you know, at the wedding on Saturday. She said it was excruciating. Apparently, Gemma kept insisting that something dreadful had happened to him.’
‘Like what?’
There was a silence, which I imagined was filled with an expressive shrug of the speaker’s shoulders.
‘I dunno. It’s a shitty thing to do to someone. I mean, fair enough if Finn had changed his mind and didn’t want to marry her any more, but he shouldn’t just have buggered off and done a runner.’
‘What makes you think he did?’ asked the person who I was now positive was Melanie. Ifshehadn’t asked that question, it would have been an excellent moment for me to have emerged from the stall and done so. But I’d missed my moment, and what I heard next made it unlikely I’d be going anywhere until they’d all left the room.
‘Do you really need to ask that? You’ve seen Finn, haven’t you? I mean, Gemma’s pretty enough, in a girl-next-door kind of way, but surely she must have known that she was batting. Big time. A friend of mine went out with Finn a couple of times a few years back and said it was like dating a film star. And that was before he became a successful author. Women are always going to be falling all over him. Guys like that aren’t the settling-down type.’
A fourth voice piped up for the first time.
‘I don’t think you can dismiss other people’s relationships purely on who’s more attractive than who. And I always thought Gemma and Finn were kind of cute together.’
The other woman, who’d clearly been the inspiration behind the originalMean Girlsconcept, gave a decidedly pig-like snort. ‘Well, if you’d seen what I saw a couple of weeks ago, you might want to rethink that idea.’
My heart dropped like a broken lift into the pit of my stomach, as though it fancied trying out a new location.
From the girls at the basins, I could sense an excited clamour, like crows picking at the unfortunate remains of something that never made it to the other side of the road. It felt very much like the thing they were pecking at was my heart.
‘What? What have you heard?’ someone asked.
‘It’s not what I heard, it’s what I saw.’
I felt sick, literally physically sick. As I was in close proximity to a toilet, that was handy, but the need to stay very, very quiet was never more important than it was right then.
Too late, I remembered my mother once telling me never to listen in on other people’s conversations, as eavesdroppers rarely heard anything good about themselves. What she’d failed to mention was that they never heard anything good about the people they loved either.
‘I saw Finn getting into a car with a very attractive woman with long blonde hair a couple of weeks ago. They looked pretty “up close and personal”, in my opinion.’
‘That doesn’t prove he was fooling around.’
