Fly in the Ointment by Anne Fine Read Free Book Online

columns balance or don’t. It’s the most satisfying and soothing of occupations. There are no trailing ends. You can be happy. And if each time you raise your head you see a swan float past, or moorhens dabbling on the far bank, or a young mother pushing a child in a stroller alongside the canal, then it is possible to feel all’s right with the world.
    For over a year I worked there, snug as toast. Audrey and Dana were pleasant company. Nobody pressed me for details about my life. (I had the feeling that, sensing I might have secrets behind me, they made a point of not prying.) From time to time young Mr Hanley or his father would ask a question about my plans for the weekend and, without telling lies, I’d manage to create the impression that I was busy with distant family. I wondered if the other two women had me down for something dramatic – perhaps a murderess out on licence, given the job through the good offices of both kindly Hanleys? But then once, when I put my hand on Dana’s back as I squeezed past between two sets of filing cabinets and she moved sharply aside, I wondered if they’dformed the view that I might be a lesbian, and that was the reason why they never pressed me, as they did seem to be constantly pressing one another, on the matter of men, and children, and how I spent my time at the weekends.
    But it is possible, of course, that their reserve sprang from the fact that they simply found me boring: a woman whose passage through the office could raise no ripples and could leave no wake. I wasn’t bothered. It all suited me, and I felt so content that it even made me smile when, walking behind the cabinets one day well into the lunch hour, I heard a snatch of Trevor Hanley’s conversation with his father.
    â€˜Of course I like her. Why would I have agreed to take her on if I didn’t like her?’
    There was a muffled reply from further in the room, and then a burst of laughter.
    â€˜Invite her out? Lois? Jesus Christ, Dad! The woman’s far too cool a customer for someone like me!’

8
    TOO COOL A customer. Was I? Yes, probably. Back in the worst time, when Malachy was still in school and I was mad with anxiety about him and his future, Mrs Kuperschmidt suggested a course of family therapy. Stuart refused point blank. ‘The only problem in this family is that boy mixing with all those losers and druggies.’
    I couldn’t budge him so I decided to go alone with Malachy. It took forever even to get an appointment, and that was for some weeks ahead. When I reminded Malachy, two days before, he irritably claimed he couldn’t make it – off to a gig in Sheffield with some mates.
    â€˜But it’s a school day.’
    He gave me one of those ‘you sad, sad woman’ looks I spent my whole life trying to ignore. I foughtback. ‘I’m really sorry, Malachy. But you’re just going to have to tell your friends that you’re not going. This has been fixed for weeks.’
    He didn’t show up, of course. So I went in by myself – mostly, I told myself, to try to explain how an appointment I’d fussed so much to get had ended up being treated so lightly. But in my heart I knew I’d come for solace. The therapist looked the sort – restful and elegant in the strangely shaped chair she told me was ‘ergonomically designed’ and which allowed her to lean forward in apparent ease while I was telling her the sorry tale of how things with my son had gone so painfully wrong. In the whole forty minutes I was sitting there, she can have interrupted only once or twice to steer me up some fresh path, or, to my astonishment, ask me a question that gave me reason to believe she’d even put aside the time to read the file.
    And then, to my surprise, instead of spooning out advice on stubborn husbands or on wayward sons, she’d told me that each time I found myself surrounded by worries I was to stop in