The Perfectly Imperfect Woman Read online

  Three and a half weeks after Justin Fox joined the company, Marnie arrived at work expecting nothing but a normal day. She took the escalator and made a right through the first set of double doors, where the Product Development team sat under the leadership of ‘Sweaty’ Andrew Jubb, who could only achieve eye contact with women when their pupils were situated on their tits. High on the agenda was a morning executive huddle at one of the tall tables that the superboss Laurence Stewart-Smith had had implemented around the building. Standing meetings got to their point quicker and were over faster was his reasoning, and he was right. Laurence had transformed a number of failing companies into major success stories with streamlining initiatives like this. He was a business genius, adored by shareholders, oiled over by his minions who secretly thought though, beneath their fawning smiles, that as a human being, Laurence was an utter first-class knobhead. But Marnie knew that this morning, thanks to the fabulously shaped mug she’d sourced in the far east, Laurence was going to be a suitably impressed knobhead. They’d carry the company logo much better than the very ordinary ones they used at present. She had the sample in her bag and couldn’t wait to present it to him – in front of an audience. She’d had too many of her best ideas pirated in the past, so now she made sure that they all bore a big fat Marnie Salt stamp on them.

  As excited as she was about the morning get-together, still her thoughts drifted to Justin when she passed his office. She’d noticed that he didn’t wear a wedding ring. But he had to have a partner, she reasoned. He was far too gorgeous to be on a shelf. And he was definitely straight because he flirted heavily with the canteen ladies who brought the refreshments into the boardroom meetings, sending them twittering off like a swarm of sparrows.

  Straight on through Merchandising, she took another right into her department: Beverage Marketing, which had once been a merry band of six, but was now a small barrelful of four jolly apples with two rotting, maggoty additions. There was herself, of course; Arthur, a year away from retirement and solid as a rock; Bette, quietly efficient, who did her job and went home and Roisean, the office gopher who was bright and sweet and would end up running the company one day. Then there was Vicky, a twenty-nine-year-old busybody – and the thorn in her side, the stone in her shoe, the hair in her sandwich: Elena. A cocksure graduate eight years her junior who would have garrotted her own mother to get a rung further up the corporate ladder. She was head girl in the ‘to get on in anything you have to be a cock’ school of life. She’d presented well in her interview for the job and Marnie had since cursed herself for being sucked in by her superficial charm.

  ‘Morning,’ Marnie called to them all collectively and as usual received three cheerful echoes, one grumbly mumble and a blank. Within the minute, Roisean had put a coffee on her desk, just as she liked it.

  ‘Thank you, love,’ smiled Marnie.

  Roisean coughed then gave her front teeth a discreet rub with her finger. It was code for you’ve got lipstick on your incisors, boss. Marnie swept her tongue over them and then test-smiled for Roisean who gave her the thumbs up. Little considerations like that made the day slide on a smoother track, Marnie always thought.

  Elena and Vicky were gossiping. Again. And, if the look over the latter’s shoulder was anything to go by, Marnie was the subject. Again. Marnie wasn’t a hardline boss but Vicky pushed her buttons almost as much as Elena did. They faffed about every morning chatting and drinking coffee between signing in and starting work and now those faffs were getting too long to ignore.

  Marnie, on the other hand, had logged on to her iMac and pulled up a report she needed for her meeting before she had even taken her coat off. She took a glug of coffee, pressed print and nothing happened. Her desk printer had been on the blink for a while and this time the usual bang on the side with the flat of her hand technique failed her.

  ‘Elena. I’ve sent you a file. Could you run it off for me please?’ Marnie asked her still-gossiping deputy. ‘And Vicky, ring maintenance and get them up here as soon as, to look at my printer.’ Her lips were curved upwards but she wasn’t smiling as she added pointedly, ‘If you have the time.’

  ‘What’s Roisean doing?’ asked Elena, looking down her thin ski-slope of a nose at her boss.

  ‘Yes they are urgent, thank you, Elena,’ replied Marnie with a tone in her voice that sent the folie à deux begrudgingly back to their desks.

  Marnie opened her diary and checked what was coming up next week. The yearly job reviews were pending. She would recommend that Roisean, Arthur and Bette be given pay rises and would have no qualms in telling Elena and Vicky that they needed to pull their socks up. Vicky was as slack as a prostitute’s elastic. Elena was a much better worker when she wanted to be, but sullen and difficult to get on with. Neither of them felt part of the well-oiled machine the way Linda and Annie had, both happily on maternity leave. Burke and Hare, as Marnie had privately renamed them, were more like people who would nobble the cogs given half the chance. She had an awful foreboding that Linda and Annie wouldn’t come back either and she’d be stuck with the terrible twosome.

  Five minutes later, Elena strutted across to Marnie’s desk in her really tall stilettos. Marnie hadn’t been the only one to notice that her clothes had become decidedly more figure-hugging, her heels higher and her lipstick had inched from orchid pink to slapper red since Justin Fox had joined the company. She held her hand out for the report but Elena put it down on her desk instead. Marnie tried not to let the growl inside rush out of her throat as she thanked her, albeit through gritted teeth.

  ‘Pleasure,’ replied Elena, sounding as if her duty had been about as pleasurable as cauterising the linings of her nostrils with a red-hot poker. She turned on her ridiculous heel far too fast to keep her balance, stumbled and did a comedy walk that said, I am going to recover this and not fall flat on my face. Then she fell flat on her face in a none too graceful way whilst her left shoe flew off her foot, did a perfect double pike back in the air and came to land on the back of her head. Arlene Phillips couldn’t have choreographed it better.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said a male voice from behind Marnie. She turned to see Justin Fox striding into the department.

  ‘My ankle, my fff . . . bloody ankle,’ Elena was crying. A big pink toe bearing chipped purple nail varnish was protruding from her now laddered black tights. Justin rushed forward like a gallant knight although he was hardly crushed in the queue to help.

  ‘Here, lean on me. You came quite a cropper there. I’m surprised you didn’t make a crater in the floor.’

  Marnie had to turn around to compose herself. Schadenfreude was shameful, but just for once, she allowed herself to savour it.

  As if Elena’s embarrassment didn’t have enough elements to it, her dark blue skirt had collected a million light-coloured fibres from the relatively new carpet and she appeared to have snapped the heel of the shoe that had managed to stay on her foot.

  ‘Is this yours too?’ asked Justin, picking up not only the escapee stiletto but a floppy gel Party Feet insert.

  If Elena had gone any redder her head would have blown off her shoulders.

  He examined the long pin-heel of the shoe, which looked decidedly tatty at close quarters. ‘My goodness, no wonder you fell.’

  ‘I think you ought to go straight to the medical room,’ said Marnie, in her best concerned boss voice which she knew would feel like a hundred bees stinging Elena’s ears. ‘Look, your ankle is swelling up terribly.’ And it was. Ballooning. It was almost a cankle. On its way to being a thankle.

  ‘I’ll take her.’ Vicky stepped forward and Elena put her arm around her shoulder. She couldn’t have hopped off faster if she’d tried.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Justin asked Marnie who was covering up her mouth and really really trying hard to look sympathetic. Had it been anyone else, it would have come naturally but not with Elena and it probably wouldn’t have with Vicky either. But then, she was wicked, she’d heard that often enough to believe
it might be true.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she coughed. ‘Just worried about my colleague.’

  ‘I brought these for you to cast your eye over before the meeting in . . .’ he consulted his watch. A black-faced Rolex. As classy and striking as he was. ‘. . . ten minutes.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Marnie, taking hold of the sheets of paper he was proffering, but he didn’t let go of them. Then he leaned in to her and said in a whisper: ‘Something tells me you rather enjoyed that little floorshow.’

  Marnie gulped and gave a demure pat to her chest. ‘I think you are very much mistaken, Mr Fox.’ It wouldn’t have convinced a grand jury.

  ‘See you in . . . nine minutes and counting,’ said Justin with a lazy grin and Marnie’s heart gave a perfidious kick. No, no, no. She heard her brain protest. Not again.

  Chapter 3

  The day ended on a high. Elena and her fat ankle had gone home and, starved of her partner in crime, Vicky was quiet and actually did some work. Everyone in the executive meeting was impressed by the new shaped mug and Marnie received three billion brownie points. And she noticed Justin smiling at her as she talked through the pricings and argued why they should adapt this shape and ditch the old one. He had a flirtatious sparkle in his eyes and her own eyes kept being drawn to his, as if they were twin sparkly light-seeking moths. Her feet almost hovered above the ground as she walked back to her car that day, but the closer she got to home, the more that buoyant, airy feeling began to subside. The weekend loomed drawn-out and depressing in front of her as it had done for too long now. Marnie hated Saturdays and Sundays, for however much she tried to tell herself that she was married to her work and didn’t need a man in her life, those two weekend days exposed that statement for the lie it was.

  It was a particularly lonely phase as she was both boyfriendless and best-friend-less and it followed the worst Christmas she’d had for years. She’d intended to spend it sharing a house with her boyfriend of twelve months, Aaron. Her on-off-on-off boyfriend of twelve months that is, who had finally decided in August that she was the one he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. So, she’d sold her furniture and her flat only for Aaron to tell her, on the day of completion, that he’d made a mistake and was still in love with his ex.

  Her best friend Caitlin wasn’t on hand to pick up the broken pieces as she was besotted by a high-flying city banker called Grigori and she spent all the time she could down in London with him. He was rich and handsome and successful and very posh and Caitlin had changed in the short time they’d been together. She’d become glossier and more groomed and – though Marnie hated to admit this – less fun, more staid and worst of all, distant. She’d denied having elocution lessons, though it was obvious from the slower, more measured way that Caitlin had started to talk and the strange shapes her mouth formed on certain words, that she had. And when Marnie rang her for a chat, Caitlin always seemed to be in the middle of something and said she’d call back. She didn’t always. This, the same Caitlin who had had a real go at Marnie for not giving her friendship time when Aaron arrived on the scene.

  Caitlin had been single for over two years when she met Grig-ORRR-i, as she’d started to pronounce it. No wonder she’d sucked him up like a dehydrated woman falling face down in an oasis. Marnie couldn’t have been happier for her friend – then she’d met him, and she could have been very much happier for her because Grigori was a plank.

  He might have been good-looking and clever and super-brainy and drive a Maserati but it was quite obvious that he didn’t like Marnie from the off, because the disapproval came off him in waves. She had first met him in person at the night do of an old school-friend’s wedding. Caitlin left Grigori and Marnie to ‘get acquainted’ whilst she nipped off to the loo. Marnie had opened conversation, but Grigori had turned away and wended his way out through the guests instead. Marnie was gobsmacked by his rudeness and she did wonder what Caitlin had told him to provoke that reaction. She had broached the subject once but Caitlin waved it away and said he’d been absolutely whacked with tiredness that night. Marnie hadn’t bought it and what she hadn’t told Caitlin was that later on, she’d encountered him on the stairs when he was arseholed and he’d been far more friendly. Feeling obliged to give him a second chance to make a first impression, she’d asked him if he was enjoying himself and he’d pulled her towards him and stuck his tongue down her throat before she pushed him firmly off. He’d fallen down two stairs and called her the c-word and though Marnie had tried to forget it and chalk it up to the drink, she never quite had. One thing was for sure – he had come between them and their once-strong vow that no man would ever do that was crushed to dust.

  She’d got into the bad habit of drinking too much at weekends to numb that gnawing hunger within her for company, for affection. She recognised she was in trouble when she began to think that sleeping off a hangover was a better alternative than being conscious, and had tried to cut down over the last couple of weeks.

  But on this particular Friday, maybe because she’d been so high earlier on from her successful mug presentation and a little male attention from the hottest property on the trading floor, her spirits nosedived and she felt extra sad and pathetic that night. So, unable to satisfy the cravings of her heart, her body tried to compensate by feeding her something else and put her hands in the way of a giant bag of sweet and salty popcorn and a bottle of Tesco’s finest Shiraz.

  There was nothing on the TV but programmes about house renovations and dream sheds, a crap gameshow and the big film, which was about a man who couldn’t forget his first love – far too near the knuckle for her. At times, when she was plastered, she could see herself more clearly than ever and the revelations hurt and bewildered her. Through the clarity that alcohol supplied, she saw that she had been lonely for a long time, far longer than she’d wanted to admit to herself. Even when she’d been with Jez, Robert, Harry and Aaron she’d still been lonely. It took a particular skill to be lonely in a relationship, she had noted. Sometimes she had lain in bed next to a snoozing Aaron after sex and marvelled at how alone she felt. There had been only inches between their bodies but she had never felt as if she were truly part of a couple. Even when they’d been mid-bonk, there had been none of that ‘two become one’ or ‘bodies melting into each other’ bollocks. They’d been more like two hard pieces of wood bashing together than two balls of Play-Doh squashing into a single big ball of pliant softness.

  None of the men she’d gone out with had made her feel secure, cherished, needed, not after the initial courtship period was over anyway and they had full access to the contents of her underwear. She often wondered if any man ever could. Maybe the men who still held doors open for you after you’d been together for over thirty years only existed in books – written by women fantasising about the same thing. Maybe that’s why Midnight Moon romance stories were so popular, because they contained the sort of mythical beings who rubbed your shoulders without thinking that it constituted foreplay, whipped you up a hot chocolate on cold winter nights, made you laugh till your cheeks hurt or set all your nerves jingling like the bells of St Clements simply by placing a hand on your waist.

  In books men energised women; in her experience they sapped your energy to below zero level. Give or take the thump to the ego, it was almost a relief when the relationship limped across the finish line, but then she was left with just herself for company. During the week she could work late, plough everything she had into the job but nothing seemed to fill the chasm of emptiness that weekends brought – not even Candy Crush. She couldn’t continue as she was, she’d decided, and forced her brain to come up with a rescue plan, and so it did. For years, she’d toyed with the idea of writing a definitive cheesecake recipe book but had never got around to it. Maybe that was what she needed to get her teeth into and transform her weekends into a brighter brace of days.

  So, with a notebook at her side, that night Marnie refilled her wine glass, switched on her laptop and typed ‘
cheesecake’ into Google and before long she had been dragged into the deep quark web of baking. Within a few clicks, she’d happened upon an amazing American site which led her to the Sisters of Cheesecake club where fanatics all over the world sent in pictures of their mad creations and recipes or asked for advice. It was a defining moment when Marnie realised that it was nearly 2 a.m. on Saturday morning and she was more than half-pissed and involved in a three-way heated argument with a woman from Calgary and another from Memphis about the base to topping ratio. Sad didn’t even come into it. Weren’t women of Marnie’s age supposed to have wild dirty cybersex, not rows about baking?