behind me? – and my comments resulted in me being sent to Siberia.
Not the place. Even though the new owners have business interests all over Europe, so far as I know, the people of Russia are not yet obliged to be commemorated with slabs of Chinese stone. No, Siberia was our name for the back office. To call it an office was actually an insult to offices.
Thanks to Jason’s mother’s need to overshare my private conversation, I spent ten days there, closeted in a small windowless space that used to be a store room, with only the low throb of the mortuary fridges on the other side of a thin partition for company.
Jason himself cloaked my punishment with a mirthless smile. ‘This is an excellent opportunity for Nina to focus on her administrative skills without any risk of distraction,’ he told everyone.
In practical terms that translated as one mountain of paperwork swiftly followed by another. A cross between school detention and prison. Gloria insisted my incarceration breached several employment laws, and since she’s almost a qualified lawyer she’s probably correct.
Then again, my solitary confinement wasn’t entirely bad. I enjoyed breaking the office-hours monotony by going through all the product catalogues and samples that got sent to us in the post. I didn’t usually get to see these – although I have stacks of them now – so it was interesting to discover you could pick up a third-hand hearse for under four grand. Which I seriously considered once I got into the preparations for Happy Endings, although in the end I splashed out on a simple pale blue van with my business name and contact details discreetly on the side and a properly equipped interior from a company that was offering a cheap finance deal. I think it looks uplifting yet still properly respectful.
Happy Endings may be a shoe-string start-up, but if it weren’t for what happened on my final day at work, it probably wouldn’t exist at all. So I shall always be grateful Jason Chung’s mother is a sneak.
Here’s what happened on that last day.
I’d spent most of the morning on the phone, unenthusiastically informing recent clients that by completing a customer satisfaction survey they could win a weekend in Devon. Then, having finished with the post, I moved on to the next batch of papers, and discovered a pile of burial applications in need of processing. They were going to take me at least forty-five minutes – always supposing the Wi-Fi in Siberia wasn’t playing up again – and I was so not in the mood.
It was a quarter to one, fifteen minutes before my lunchbreak was supposed to start, and I was feeling peckish. I’d been trying to stick to the 5:2 diet and this was one of the days when I was not required to starve myself.
I straightened the applications, grabbed my coat and umbrella – the April showers were in full flood – and prepared to make a dash for the deli next to Queen’s Park tube station.
I knew that if Jason saw me leave so early, he’d do that annoying looking-ostentatiously-at-his-Rolex-while-tapping-the-glass thing that was supposed to remind me he’s the boss. Happily, he was nowhere in sight and by the time I got safely beyond the reception desk I was weighing the relative merits of tuna and cucumber on sourdough versus a jumbo salt beef hot wrap. And a chocolate orange cupcake, of course. Or maybe the vegetarian choice: a trio of chocolate orange cupcakes.
There was only the door standing between me and seven hundred calories, and I flung it open, umbrella at the ready. This particular April shower had turned into a full-blown downpour and the raindrops were bouncing off the pavement so hard I could actually hear them.
It must have been the thought of my lunchtime cupcake that made me fail to look where I was going. I stepped onto the street and literally fell over a woman for whom the phrase ‘drowned rat’ could have been invented.
She was sitting – slumped was probably more accurate – in the doorway.
Before I could apologise and ask if she was okay, I realised she was anything but.
And before I could speak the woman grabbed my leg and looked up into my face. She was about my age, dressed in a jacket and skirt that looked as though they’d been left out to drip-dry. Her pretty face was framed by two bedraggled blonde tendrils and her mascara was in ruins.
The pressure on my leg increased. ‘Please,’ the woman sobbed. ‘You have to help me.’
‘So two years we are here. My husband Grigor and me. We are sad to leave home but things are better in England …’
Whenever I think about the drowned rat – her name is Anna – which is often, I am grateful I took an early lunchbreak that day. It’s as if fate decided our two paths needed to collide.
Sitting in the deli with her, I had remembered her story right away. ‘Grigor Kovaks,’ I said. ‘I read about it—’ I stopped myself from reciting the details of the horrific accident that had left Anna’s husband in hospital with life-threatening injuries.
‘Yes, Grigor. My lovely Grigor.’ Her smile was so full of love it pierced my heart. ‘We find a flat in Camberwell and Grigor works nights for a bank in Canary Wharf. Security guard. And I am a cleaner. Then three weeks ago, on the Tuesday, Grigor is offered an extra shift, and of course we say yes.’
I listened carefully. It’s so important not to interrupt. Being there for someone at the worst time in their life, letting them tell their own story in their own way, can make it just a tiny bit better.
‘He is so proud of his bicycle,’ Anna continued. ‘Cleans and polishes it like it is a sports car. He needs his bike. The fares on your underground, they are so expensive. Not like in Budapest … After the accident I am living more or less at the hospital. Grigor stays in the coma. He looks asleep and I keep waiting for him to wake up. But nothing. And … last night I agree with the doctors that the machines are turned off. Then later the nurses were so kind but I could not speak to them. I need a little time on my own. So I go to the hospital chapel to pray for my man and when I come back to the ward, Grigor is not there.’ Anna started to cry. Fortunately, the deli was filling up fast, and nobody took any notice of us.
She took a sip of her now cold espresso, composed herself, and continued. ‘And that is when they tell me he has been taken already to the funeral place. Your funeral place.’
Oh God.
Please.
No.
I think I know what’s coming next. It shouldn’t happen, but it does.
A phone call to a ‘friendly’ undertaker during the night.
Money changing hands.
And someone like Anna Kovaks, a woman who’s just lost someone she loves and who has not slept for thirty-six hours, delivered like a lamb to the slaughter into the grubby paws of a business that sees every new client as a cash machine.
If this were BC – Before Chung – it would have been unthinkable. Our standards were always so much higher.
Gently, I encouraged Anna to continue.
‘When I arrive, the man seems very nice. Very full of sympathy.’
Full of something else if you ask me, but I keep my professional
