Don't Come to the House Tonight
Posted: July 13th, 2010, 4:55 am
I have re-pasted a new version. Comments so far tended to be - mixing of tenses, not enough punctuation, overuse of parenthesis so I have gone through and (hopefully) fixed this throughout all of my parts 1 and 2 (well I went halfies on the parenthesis - some I took out, some I liked and left in) and also added a few more details in. Does this read better? If so, I shall carry on the task for parts 3-5
Part 1
Everyday is Like Sunday
Chapter One
July 2010
Everyone has a story to tell. My boss, James, always has a story about what happened to him in the pub Friday night. "Oh you had to be there’ he always says, I’m always glad I wasn’t. My mother always has a story about what the tart next door is up to “she was only sunbathing in her back garden do you know, in a bikini, for everyone to see” she reports. Some stories are of love, some of pain, some are funny, some just plain dull. If I want to know about your trip to the DIY store and how much your new kitchen costs, Jane from accounting, I shall jolly well let you know but, until then, zip it.
I too have a story. It is a story I was hoping to bury (literally) in my past and never revisit but sadly, it is not a story that I am able to escape from as easily as I had hoped. I have the sort of mind that happily shuts out anything I don’t feel like thinking about. I have never dwelled much on the problems of others. I rarely feel guilt or remorse as much as others seem to. Selfish my mother called me once; she probably has a point.
I’m not so unemotional to be without any sort of feeling or self-perception. I do know that my character, my inward traits have affected a lot of lives drastically and occasionally I actually feel bad about some of the things I have done. Mostly I feel angry that life never seems to go my way; irritated at the unfairness of it all.
I digress; back to my story. It is a story of friendship, love and betrayal. And murder.
My name is Janie Lloyd and this is the story of how my life fell apart. Twice.
It had been one of the hot, humid summer days that brings migraines, irritability and stickiness; the sort of day where a nation wishes for the inevitable thunderstorm to clear the air. I had pushed the same piece of paper around my desk all afternoon, clicked send and receive 10 times to see if there were any new emails that would relieve my Friday afternoon blues, checked my personal email account, examined in details every single one of my few Facebook friend’s profiles and photos, checked the weather, day-dreamed of hot sandy beaches, made a mental shopping list for the grocery dash on the way home, tormented the painfully shy office junior. It was, sticky weather aside, like any other Friday afternoon over the last ten years, dull, glum, uneventful.
My job, as Office Manager, was to oversee all the facilities so I has the endlessly fascinating daily tasks of calling the photocopier repair man, making sure the stationary cupboard was full, and assigning the sought after car parking spots. I also managed all the staff that didn’t report to a lawyer. So the legal secretaries were not my domain, but the receptionist, payroll, and accounting functions all came under my rule.
I have worked here long enough that I get my own office. It was actually smaller than our stationary cupboard (no joke) and every day I would have to squeeze around my desk to get to my chair but it is my office and I’m almost happy about that. Privacy is important to me. I have always found it difficult to make real friends, my own fault I freely admit; people generally irritate me. And I generally terrify everyone I meet. I have been described, as well as selfish, as sarcastic, uncaring and a little mean. I could be right now in the kitchen myself chatting with everyone else over cakes and coffee (our boss’s birthday treat) but instead I sulk at my desk pretending I am bored by them all and as soon as our boss James leaves, he is always out of the door early on Fridays, I will break up their party and make them suffer at their desks clock watching till 6pm. Why? Because I am the Office Manager and I have to stay so why should they get an easy ride. The trick about being such a cow is to be indispensible, and I have spent my time in the work place making myself just that. I am pure sweetness and light to James, and any of my tirades are always well out of his hearing. It’s a fine line between being harsh (ok) and bullying (a fireable offence) so I have always made sure I stayed on the right side of that line. Just.
I remembered the phone ringing sharply, bringing me out of my trance and that I was irritated that a last minute work call could delay my departure. But it wasn’t my boss with a last minute request he could have given me four hours earlier, or Jane from accounting with some idiotic question she could have easily found the answer to if only she had half a brain cell (poor Jane, dull, stupid AND irritating) but my mother. It was unusual to hear from her at work, she usually saved her weekly phone calls for a Tuesday night, her only daughter being placed somewhere between Eastenders and CSI (I was always jealous of my older brother, Roger, who got the coveted Sunday afternoon slot which while interrupting his weekend showed a considerable mark of favouritism), I assumed the worst. “Are you Ok? Is Roger Ok? “
“They found a body in the old Longfield Farm”. She was breathless with the excitement that not only had there been an event in my usually incredibly uneventful home town, but that it had happened so close she could watch the spectacle from her window. My mother is the over 50 middle class voyeur, the curtain-twitcher, her arousals stemming not from sex and porn but from gossip and neighbour watching. Fortunately the tart next door gives her a lot of gratification.
“It’s on the news. It has been there years they reckon. Margie’s son, Ian, who works for the builders, you remember Ian, the one with the lisp and the moles, poor lad, not married though, you should call him, nice man, anyway he heard the forensic doctor man talking”. Notice how my mother manages to work a possible love match into a conversation about decaying bodies. This is how desperate she sees me.
To explain, some builders had been digging up the fields of an old farm across the road from my old childhood home to make a new housing estate, something my mother had deeply disapproved of and petitioned against. However, that was all forgotten about now there was some new excitement. She ranted on for what seemed like hours telling me how during the building work some poor workman had found a skeleton. I felt bad for the workman, briefly. Moley Ian came up a few times but I refused to rise to the bait. Eventually, exhausted of this she went onto church gossip and how that new young vicar was doing a terrible job. Having heard this saga many, many times before I had cradled the phone under my ear and was surfing the internet. I was looking up my home town’s local newspaper to see if this body had hit the news yet (it hadn’t) when I realised we’d come to a part in the conversation where I was required to answer.
“Janie, Janie, are you even listening to me?” She wanted me to drive over immediately, to stand next to her and be a part of her excitement, watching the police excavating the body, the activity of the professionals, the teams of white coated technicians, climbing into the deep grave but I cried off citing a migraine, declaring I was unable to make the hour’s drive after a day of work and promising to come the following day. Appeased that she would have to carefully monitor the whole event to report back faithfully every detail, every fact, every small piece of data that she could find, she told me make sure I watched the news tonight and finally hung up.
I rubbed my temples, the dull ache felt like it was going to become a full-blown migraine, I added Nurofen to my mental shopping list. It was more than the weather that was responsible for the start of the nervous nausea I could feel churning up my stomach. Despite the cool aloofness I had projected towards my mother, playing down the news, pretending it was nothing to be so excited about, I felt cold inside despite my flushed skin and sweating. “All these are symptoms of shock” I told myself dredging the information from the memory of my not so recent first aid course. Perhaps I should wrap myself in a blanket and elevate my legs six inches from the floor?
Distant memories and fears long ago pushed to a deep, secret part of my mind I tried never to visit were floating to the top. My stomach flipped and churned. I barely made it to the bathroom in time, retching till my stomach ached. Then for the first time in years I sat on the floor of the cubicle, pulled my knees up to my chest and wept silently. I knew exactly whose body had just been dug up and for the first time in many years, I was scared.
Part 1
Everyday is Like Sunday
Chapter One
July 2010
Everyone has a story to tell. My boss, James, always has a story about what happened to him in the pub Friday night. "Oh you had to be there’ he always says, I’m always glad I wasn’t. My mother always has a story about what the tart next door is up to “she was only sunbathing in her back garden do you know, in a bikini, for everyone to see” she reports. Some stories are of love, some of pain, some are funny, some just plain dull. If I want to know about your trip to the DIY store and how much your new kitchen costs, Jane from accounting, I shall jolly well let you know but, until then, zip it.
I too have a story. It is a story I was hoping to bury (literally) in my past and never revisit but sadly, it is not a story that I am able to escape from as easily as I had hoped. I have the sort of mind that happily shuts out anything I don’t feel like thinking about. I have never dwelled much on the problems of others. I rarely feel guilt or remorse as much as others seem to. Selfish my mother called me once; she probably has a point.
I’m not so unemotional to be without any sort of feeling or self-perception. I do know that my character, my inward traits have affected a lot of lives drastically and occasionally I actually feel bad about some of the things I have done. Mostly I feel angry that life never seems to go my way; irritated at the unfairness of it all.
I digress; back to my story. It is a story of friendship, love and betrayal. And murder.
My name is Janie Lloyd and this is the story of how my life fell apart. Twice.
It had been one of the hot, humid summer days that brings migraines, irritability and stickiness; the sort of day where a nation wishes for the inevitable thunderstorm to clear the air. I had pushed the same piece of paper around my desk all afternoon, clicked send and receive 10 times to see if there were any new emails that would relieve my Friday afternoon blues, checked my personal email account, examined in details every single one of my few Facebook friend’s profiles and photos, checked the weather, day-dreamed of hot sandy beaches, made a mental shopping list for the grocery dash on the way home, tormented the painfully shy office junior. It was, sticky weather aside, like any other Friday afternoon over the last ten years, dull, glum, uneventful.
My job, as Office Manager, was to oversee all the facilities so I has the endlessly fascinating daily tasks of calling the photocopier repair man, making sure the stationary cupboard was full, and assigning the sought after car parking spots. I also managed all the staff that didn’t report to a lawyer. So the legal secretaries were not my domain, but the receptionist, payroll, and accounting functions all came under my rule.
I have worked here long enough that I get my own office. It was actually smaller than our stationary cupboard (no joke) and every day I would have to squeeze around my desk to get to my chair but it is my office and I’m almost happy about that. Privacy is important to me. I have always found it difficult to make real friends, my own fault I freely admit; people generally irritate me. And I generally terrify everyone I meet. I have been described, as well as selfish, as sarcastic, uncaring and a little mean. I could be right now in the kitchen myself chatting with everyone else over cakes and coffee (our boss’s birthday treat) but instead I sulk at my desk pretending I am bored by them all and as soon as our boss James leaves, he is always out of the door early on Fridays, I will break up their party and make them suffer at their desks clock watching till 6pm. Why? Because I am the Office Manager and I have to stay so why should they get an easy ride. The trick about being such a cow is to be indispensible, and I have spent my time in the work place making myself just that. I am pure sweetness and light to James, and any of my tirades are always well out of his hearing. It’s a fine line between being harsh (ok) and bullying (a fireable offence) so I have always made sure I stayed on the right side of that line. Just.
I remembered the phone ringing sharply, bringing me out of my trance and that I was irritated that a last minute work call could delay my departure. But it wasn’t my boss with a last minute request he could have given me four hours earlier, or Jane from accounting with some idiotic question she could have easily found the answer to if only she had half a brain cell (poor Jane, dull, stupid AND irritating) but my mother. It was unusual to hear from her at work, she usually saved her weekly phone calls for a Tuesday night, her only daughter being placed somewhere between Eastenders and CSI (I was always jealous of my older brother, Roger, who got the coveted Sunday afternoon slot which while interrupting his weekend showed a considerable mark of favouritism), I assumed the worst. “Are you Ok? Is Roger Ok? “
“They found a body in the old Longfield Farm”. She was breathless with the excitement that not only had there been an event in my usually incredibly uneventful home town, but that it had happened so close she could watch the spectacle from her window. My mother is the over 50 middle class voyeur, the curtain-twitcher, her arousals stemming not from sex and porn but from gossip and neighbour watching. Fortunately the tart next door gives her a lot of gratification.
“It’s on the news. It has been there years they reckon. Margie’s son, Ian, who works for the builders, you remember Ian, the one with the lisp and the moles, poor lad, not married though, you should call him, nice man, anyway he heard the forensic doctor man talking”. Notice how my mother manages to work a possible love match into a conversation about decaying bodies. This is how desperate she sees me.
To explain, some builders had been digging up the fields of an old farm across the road from my old childhood home to make a new housing estate, something my mother had deeply disapproved of and petitioned against. However, that was all forgotten about now there was some new excitement. She ranted on for what seemed like hours telling me how during the building work some poor workman had found a skeleton. I felt bad for the workman, briefly. Moley Ian came up a few times but I refused to rise to the bait. Eventually, exhausted of this she went onto church gossip and how that new young vicar was doing a terrible job. Having heard this saga many, many times before I had cradled the phone under my ear and was surfing the internet. I was looking up my home town’s local newspaper to see if this body had hit the news yet (it hadn’t) when I realised we’d come to a part in the conversation where I was required to answer.
“Janie, Janie, are you even listening to me?” She wanted me to drive over immediately, to stand next to her and be a part of her excitement, watching the police excavating the body, the activity of the professionals, the teams of white coated technicians, climbing into the deep grave but I cried off citing a migraine, declaring I was unable to make the hour’s drive after a day of work and promising to come the following day. Appeased that she would have to carefully monitor the whole event to report back faithfully every detail, every fact, every small piece of data that she could find, she told me make sure I watched the news tonight and finally hung up.
I rubbed my temples, the dull ache felt like it was going to become a full-blown migraine, I added Nurofen to my mental shopping list. It was more than the weather that was responsible for the start of the nervous nausea I could feel churning up my stomach. Despite the cool aloofness I had projected towards my mother, playing down the news, pretending it was nothing to be so excited about, I felt cold inside despite my flushed skin and sweating. “All these are symptoms of shock” I told myself dredging the information from the memory of my not so recent first aid course. Perhaps I should wrap myself in a blanket and elevate my legs six inches from the floor?
Distant memories and fears long ago pushed to a deep, secret part of my mind I tried never to visit were floating to the top. My stomach flipped and churned. I barely made it to the bathroom in time, retching till my stomach ached. Then for the first time in years I sat on the floor of the cubicle, pulled my knees up to my chest and wept silently. I knew exactly whose body had just been dug up and for the first time in many years, I was scared.