My phone vibrates on the desk beside me. We're not supposed to take personal calls at work, but of course we all do, though we try to be a bit subtle about it because we've all been on the receiving end of receptionists who continue talking about their social lives when all we're trying to do is get to an appointment on time. But there's five minutes until we reopen for the afternoon rush, and I can take it if I'm quick.
I look down at the display. It's Leila. I hit reject. I don't want to talk to her. I've had enough. I don't want to hear any more about it.
I go into the back room to make the pre-surgery coffees. My head is full of cotton wool and I need the caffeine myself. I'm sick to death of it, to be honest. Right now, I think that if spoke to Leila one more time before I died, it would be too soon.
I'm drinking down a mug of extra-caffeinated (as in three spoons to the mug) with added sugar-rush and Liz comes in to check on me. It's much better working with Liz than Gloria, though we're still far too much of an estrogen nest here for good mental health. But Liz is closer to my age, anyway, and hasn't got as embittered by the world as Gloria has. "How you doing?" she says. "Still knackered?"
I nod. I was woken by Leila and her busy texting finger at three-thirty this morning and again at a quarter to six, and I am feeling the effects of the interrupted sleep. And now I'm fuming again.
"So what's going on?"
I can't stop a sigh. "The usual bullshit. He's horrible, he dumps her, she rings me at three in the morning, he cries and begs forgiveness, she goes back because she luurves him and I get it in the neck for 'crowding' her."
"Keagh," says Liz, who is doing a part-time degree in psychology. "Co-dependence. Don'tcha love it?"
"Well, I've had enough," I say.
"I don't blame you," she says. "This seems to happen every couple of weeks."
"You know what?" I say, "Women like Leila, they've only got themselves to blame in the end."
"Low self-esteem," says Liz.
"I don't really care any more," I say. The milk of human kindness deserted me sometime around half past six this morning. "It's still a matter of making choices, isn't it?"
We hear the sound of Gloria unlocking the front door and Liz hurries off to distribute the coffees. I'm on the front desk this afternoon. The usual afternoon clientele: the unemployed, the self-employed, the retired and the home-makers with their children in tow. I glance down at the phone and see that there's a message. I won't. I don't care. It can wait.
Then the door opens and Felicity Massingham walks in out of the rain. Wearing a fur coat and sunglasses. Despite the pop-star size of the sunspecs, I can see a great weltering bruise on her cheek. "Hello," I say. She's one of our regulars. Walks into a door at least once a week. Because the fact is, though people tend to think that these sorts of "accidents" are confined to the poor, a good number of stockbrokers and bankers' wives walk into doors too.
She doesn't say anything to me, just goes over to the log-in screen. It's a real corker, this bruise. Looks like it goes all the way up to the eyebrow and all the way down to the corner of her mouth. Felicity Massingham's been in with several loosened teeth over the last year, had a dozen stitches, two cracked ribs and had hospital treatment when she stupidly, stupidly broke an ankle falling down the front steps of her Georgian mansion.
I watch her as she hobbles over to a seat as far away from everyone else as she can find to wait. An isolated figure. Someone whose eye people don't want to meet because they don't like the feelings of pity and contempt she stirs in them, all at once. Women. Can't see where their own best interests lie. He'll keep on doing it, that man in the suit, and she'll keep coming back and coming back until he kills her, because she doesn't know what else to do with herself.
I wait 'til she's gone in to see the doctor. Then I pick up my phone and dial Leila's number.
(Catch up on the most recent happenings in the waiting room.)
Waiting Room