stared at the ceiling. Her eyes felt swollen. She was very tired; much more than she would have been on a normal Monday. It was amazing how exhausting holidays were. Late nights, too much to drink, bad sleep (on one night in someone else’s bed, which was a memory she was glad she could leave behind. What happens on holiday, stays on holiday, after all), and then, on the way back, a delayed flight which meant she had finally got home shortly after midnight.
And discovered that she didn’t have her house key.
Before leaving for holiday she’d detached her house key from her key fob – on the grounds that she wouldn’t need the back-door key, electronic pass for work, keys to her mum and dad’s house or any of the other things she had attached to it – and then stashed it in a side pocket of her bag and forgotten about it, in the expectation that it would be there when she got home.
Well, it wasn’t. Under the dim glow of the interior light in her car, she’d emptied her bag onto the front seat and scrabbled around.
No key.
Then she’d unpacked her suitcase, spreading the contents all over the inside of the car.
Nothing.
So she’d slammed the car door in frustration, which had woken her neighbour, Carl, an engineer in his fifties, who, on hearing the commotion, came downstairs.
Need a hand? he said.
I’ve lost my key. Left it in Turkey. It must have fallen out of my bag somewhere.
Oh. Want me to help you break in?
Can you do that?
Sure. It’s easy. All you have to do is tell me which window you don’t mind being broken and we’ll be away.
Ten minutes later, she was in, with a broken kitchen window and a promise from Carl that he’d call a friend of his in the morning who would be able to replace it.
So, all that, less than six hours’ sleep, and now back to work.
Back to the slow commute along the M56 into Manchester, back to hours lost to the ridiculous traffic, back to the panic when you saw the red lights of the cars ahead as they braked and you thought Oh shit, what’s happened? Don’t let this be a delay, I want to get home and eat and read and go to bed.
Back to the offices of her law firm; a solid, well-respected regional company that offered a good salary and career prospects in return for your life and soul. Back to her boss, Michaela, a forty-two-year-old woman who thought she should have done better than merely reaching the level that made her Kate’s manager, especially since she had worked and worked and waited and waited to have kids and then found that she couldn’t, that it was too late, that although there were articles and advice out there claiming that pregnancy and childbirth were options for women well into their forties, they weren’t options for her.
And she resented Kate having already reached the rung below her, along with the obvious fact that she would rise further still, maybe making partner by her mid thirties, which would leave her with plenty of time to have a couple of kids and the life that Michaela thought should have been hers.
Back, in short, to the daily grind.
Kate swung her legs out of bed. She felt groggy, jet-lagged almost, which she supposed she was: her body clock had adjusted to late nights and lie-ins, and here she was, dragging herself out of bed hours earlier than she was now used to.
It was going to be a long, painful day.
She walked along the landing to the bathroom. Her feet were tanned, a white V splitting at her big toes and running up to her ankles tracing where the straps of her sandals had been. She smiled as she remembered walking through the markets in the sunshine, evading the traders who tried to get her and May and Gemma into their bazaar with the promise of cheap leather bags or real gold jewellery or – this was her favourite – the offer of genuine fake watches. She’d laughed out loud when the man, a young Turkish guy with wide eyes and an infectious smile, had stepped in front of them and gestured to his stall.
Come in, he said. Only for a look. Best watches in Kalkan. Genuine fakes!
And then he laughed, and they laughed, and went in. Gemma bought a Rolex – a real, honest to God, no messing genuine fake Rolex – for Matt. Kate would have got one for Phil, in a different life. There was a Tag Heuer that he would have loved, and she almost bought it, but no: it would have sent mixed signals, and she had enough to deal with where Phil was concerned already.
The shower took a few minutes to warm up. She wondered briefly whether the boiler was broken – Have to get Phil to look at it, she thought, then remembered that Phil was no longer an option for that kind of thing, so she’d have to call someone. She thought they – she – had a service contract, but Phil had dealt with it, so maybe she’d have to call him to find out, unless there was paperwork somewhere – in the kitchen drawer, maybe … Then the hot water came and she relegated the boiler service contract to a mental note – that she would ignore – to check it later.
When she was done she switched off the shower and grabbed a towel. It was odd to emerge to a silent house. Phil was an early riser and, by the time she finished her shower, he was normally downstairs, dressed, with the radio on, so that she dried herself and put on her make-up to the sound of the Today programme, mostly, or sometimes Radio One, the smell of coffee wafting upstairs.
Not today. Today the house was silent and scent-free.
The holiday had been fun, a blur of movement and action and laughter with her friends. Apart from when Phil kept calling – which had stopped after the morning he’d called the hotel – it had been simple to forget the break-up and all the implications it had. And that had been exactly what she needed.
But now the holiday was over, and reality was about to hit. And the reality was that this was not going to be easy.
She was at her computer, a large coffee on her desk, not long after eight.
A couple of minutes later, her neighbour, Gary, an overweight father of three in his mid thirties, arrived. The office was open-plan, each person having a small desk – paperless, which was the new office policy – divided from whoever sat next to them by a low screen. There were booths scattered around the office where you could go if you needed to have a private conversation, or concentrate on something for a while, but generally speaking you were at your desk in full view of anyone who happened to be passing. Kate didn’t mind it that much; she’d joined the workforce at a time when that kind of office arrangement was more or less the norm, but some of the older people hated it.
Gary was one of them. Prior to the move to open-plan, he had been the proud occupant of a small, windowless office which he had worked for years to obtain, and the loss of it still rankled. Kate suspected that he would have been less bothered by a pay cut than the loss of his office; there was something about the visible reduction in status that he found particularly hard to take.
He made up for it by swearing a lot. In the open-plan area everyone could hear, and it showed his younger colleagues how, even though he had been stripped of his office, he would not be cowed by the management.
