Suddenly she couldn’t face standing in the claustrophobic lift. She needed some air. Turning away from the lift, she hurried to the stairs and practically ran down four flights to the street. Curtis was there already, lighting up a cigarette.
‘Can I scab a cigarette from you?’ Sam asked, hating herself for having one after all these years.
‘I didn’t know you did,’ Curtis remarked, handing her the pack.
‘I don’t. Not any more. That was a bit rough, wasn’t it?’
He nodded silently.
‘I don’t know how I’m going to sack four people. Sorry, “lose four members of staff to keep us in line with company guidelines”,’ Sam said bitterly. ‘I haven’t been here long enough to make any judgements on the staff and yet, now I’m going to be the bitch from hell and get rid of some of them. That’ll be great for morale. And Steve looks as if he doesn’t give a shit about them. He almost smiled when he said I had to lose four people. I swear he hates me.’
Curtis smiled slowly. ‘Steve doesn’t like anybody,’ he said. ‘Understand that and you’re going to be fine, although it’s no secret that you’re not on his Top Ten list because he wanted someone else to get the job.’
Sam rolled her eyes. ‘Tell me about it.’
‘I’ve known Steve for ten years and he’s always been the same,’ Curtis added. ‘He’s good at his job, though. This company was screwed up when he took over. He’s hell to work with but he gets the job done.’
‘He enjoys making people sweat,’ Sam sighed. ‘He deliberately told us there was a redundancy meeting this morning but never said who was going to be made redundant so that everyone would be nervous.’ She didn’t mention that since she’d just signed a three-year contract, she’d known that she, personally, wouldn’t be on the list. Just her staff.
‘Psychology,’ Curtis shrugged. ‘Steve’s plan is that by the time he tells you that you have to fire four people, you’re so pleased that your name isn’t on the list, you agree to it like a shot. Steve rules by fear. He likes terror and arguments among the staff: divide and conquer are his management rules. That’s the way he learned and he thinks it’s the only way things work. He’s terrified that if he ever tries to be nice, he’ll be taken over in a bloody coup.’
Nauseated after her forbidden cigarette, Sam went back to her office feeling nervous. She shouldn’t have said anything to Curtis about Steve Parris. That was stupid, unprofessional behaviour. She hadn’t been at Titus long enough to understand where allegiances lay and was only guessing that Curtis and Steve didn’t get on. They could be bosom buddies behind it all. She really was losing her marbles when it came to how to behave in the corporate jungle. What was happening to her? It must be the after effects of the flu. She’d better get some perk-you-up supplement in the chemist.
At three o’clock, Sam steeled herself to enter the lions’ den. Steve and the personnel director were sitting in front of a list of names and the personnel director launched into the list of people Sam was to make redundant even before she’d sat down.
Sam listened calmly, hiding her distaste. One of the women on the list had just made it public that she was four months’ pregnant. A young guy in publicity Sam had been very impressed with had just bought an apartment and had signed up for a huge mortgage. Sam’s insides did their clenching routine.
What could she say? Nothing. She was a boss now, she had to make tough decisions and implement them if necessary. Four people from her department had to go and if she balked at it, all she’d be doing was undermining her own position. The personnel guy kept talking and Sam listened, feeling wooden.
When he was finished, she coolly pointed out that there was a pregnant woman among the names. ‘You should check whether she could sue us for getting rid of her at this time,’ Sam said unemotionally, as if she was talking about squashing a spider instead of discussing another person’s life.
Steve laughed from behind his vast desk. ‘I told you Sam Smith would be able to sack her entire department and it wouldn’t bother her in the slightest,’ he said triumphantly to the personnel guy. ‘We did good the day we hired you, Sam. We needed somebody who understands the game. Not some dumb cow who’s going to sob her eyes out whenever she has to sack people.’
Sam blinked. She remembered back to her final interview, the one where Steve had delicately – well, as delicately as someone as bull-headed as Steve could manage – tried to find out her views on kids. They couldn’t ask outright, of course. Asking a woman if she planned to have children, and was therefore looking for maternity entitlements and leaving them with six months of a problem, was illegal. Sam had always understood this interview difficulty and had made it plain to prospective employers that she was not one of those biological-clock-about-to-go-off women. It was an advantage and she used it. Always had.
She remembered giving Steve and the other board members her steely look as she had said ‘I’m not the mumsy type.’
They’d all breathed a sigh of relief, and Steve had given her a matey look.
‘Tough as old boots,’ he said now, looking as if, under other circumstances, he’d pat her shoulder in a friendly manner. But Sam wasn’t the demonstrative type. Shoulder patting, double kissing and all that stupid, fake affectionate stuff drove her mad. She shook hands. Why pretend to be best pals with people you didn’t know? It was hypocritical.
‘That’s what I like about you, Sam. You don’t take any prisoners. That’s what they say and it’s true. I like that in my team. Sacking people isn’t easy but we’ve all had to do it.’
Steve waved his cigar, leaving a trail of smoke. Sam was dismissed.
She went back to her office thinking of the irony of Steve saying there was anything about her he liked. Yeah, right.
She also wondered what else people said about her. Tough as old boots. You don’t take any prisoners. Hell, she sounded like a hoary old sergeant major at a boot camp who scared the hell out of the rookies and who could drink rotgut with the best of them. Smith is tough as old boots but boy, can she do the job. There’s a heart in there somewhere, if you can find it. Not bad looking but too tough for any man…Women like her always end up on their own.
Being tough had seemed like a good idea when she was twenty or thirty and desperate to prove herself in the corporate jungle but now, with forty facing her like the north face of the Eiger, she wasn’t so sure. Tough but able to carry off a trendy designer dress was one thing. Tough but wrinkled like an old chicken was another thing entirely. How would she come across at sixty-five when she was tougher, older and with a hard little face grooved into a lifetime of wrinkles?
At that moment, she thought of Aunt Ruth. Ruth Smith, civil servant and scourge of those beneath her in the planning department, had not been the maternal type either and having two small children unceremoniously dumped on her hadn’t changed that. She’d continued to live her life exactly the same way as before her brother and his wife had been killed. To cap it all, Ruth had never even looked motherly: she’d looked like an eccentric maiden aunt from a novel.
Sam could remember the boys across the road teasing herself and Hope about their mad aunt.
‘She’s a witch, she is, eye of bat and leg of toad!’ they’d chant nastily at the girls.
Secretly, the girls had to admit that their aunt bore more than a
