Perfect on Paper by Gillian Harvey (top 20 books to read txt) 📕

again. All her life, she’d played by the rules – worried that if she slipped up, if she did something forbidden or wrong, the world would come crashing down around her. Had she got it all wrong? Had blending into the background just made her disappear?

Arriving at the office, she strode in and went immediately to Nigel’s room. Foregoing her usual knock (the height of daring), she opened the door to see him sitting at his desk, glasses on the end of his nose, working from the light of a tiny desk lamp, like a character from a Dickens novel.

‘If the law supposes that,’ she imagined him saying, ‘then the law is an ass.’

‘Good morning, Nigel!’ she gushed, feeling almost high on a surge of adrenaline, anxiety and a weird sense of surrealism. ‘Did you get my memo about the retainer?’

He looked up from his computer screen. ‘Oh, yes. Yes. Well done, well done,’ he said, nodding his head but not entirely convincing her that he knew what she was talking about. ‘So …’ he gestured at the pile of papers as if to suggest she buggered off now and let him get on with it.

Sod this, she was getting his attention no matter what. Ignoring this social cue, she stepped fully in, strode over to his desk and picked up his cup of coffee in his precious ‘The Boss’ mug. ‘Don’t mind if I have a quick slug?’ she said, ‘I’m gasping.’ She lifted the cup to her lips and drank deeply. It was cold, and there was a skin of milk on the top which stuck to the roof of her mouth. Yesterday’s coffee. She coughed, spraying a cappuccino-like foam onto his paperwork. A small bubble landed on the back of his hand and they both stared at it for a moment.

‘Actually,’ he said, wiping his hand on his sleeve and looking at her as if nothing unusual had happened, ‘I wanted to talk to you.’

‘Oh yes?’ she said, trying to fight the feeling of post-stale-coffee nausea that was spreading through her body. She sat down on the edge of Nigel’s desk, still clutching the mug and feeling a file crumple satisfyingly beneath her bottom. Perhaps this was it, perhaps he was finally going to throw her a crumb of praise for her recent phenomenal turnover.

‘We’re moving things around a bit in the office,’ he said. ‘With Will and I spending so much time strategising, it makes sense that he takes the office closest to mine.’

‘Right?’

‘In fact,’ Nigel continued, clearly not finished, ‘I think he’s rather a rising star – someone to nurture. Full of ideas. And so much energy.’

‘Yes, well,’ she said, almost drinking another slug from his cup but then thinking better of it.

‘Well, anyway. We thought we’d move you to the corner office – you know?’ he looked at her, his eyes searching her face for a reaction.

The corner office? she thought. What corner office?

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Which corner office?’

‘Er, the one … well, it needs a lick of paint of course. But next to the … um, the loos?’

‘There isn’t a …’

‘Well, we’d be repurposing it of course. New chair, et cetera.’

‘The … the coat cupboard?’

Nigel’s cheeks flushed. ‘Well, I suppose. Well, it is where we hang our coats at present of course. But originally … I mean, it’s actually quite …’

They were moving her office to the coat cupboard.

‘There’s no window …’

‘No? Erm. Oh dear. Well, perhaps it won’t be a long term … er … thing?’ he trailed off.

‘Right.’ Trying to retain some sense of dignity, Clare got up, smoothed down her skirt and left.

Later, she wondered why she hadn’t taken him to task on his proposition. Refused to budge. Challenged him about the fact that Will was newly qualified and quite capable of walking down the corridor to Nigel’s office without the need to boot her out of hers.

It was, she realised, just because it was so awful. So irredeemably surprising and awful. She’d been stunned into silence; acquiescence.

She understood suddenly what made people shoplift, or run naked across football pitches, or send pictures of their private parts to potential partners over the internet. She knew that people loved her, in their way. She knew that she was important, that the balls she kept juggling could not be dropped without seriously impacting her work or family life. But despite the fact she was integral to at least three people’s home lives and several people’s working lives, she was actually just a cog in the works; an essential part of the engine but not something anyone gave any thought to unless it suddenly stopped whirring.

She didn’t want to stop whirring. She liked being a mum, most of the time. It had been more fun when her children actually acknowledged her existence, and needed her, and wanted her to kiss them goodnight once in a while; but she knew deep down that they were evolving, that it was natural for them to grow away from her; that the relationship she had with her children would alter as they grew.

She didn’t want to quit her job and do something else – her role was a bit monotonous at times, but she was bloody good at it. And there was satisfaction in seeing how well her department was performing – even if no one else noticed.

She didn’t want a red carpet, bunches of flowers or a fanfare each time she went into a room. She didn’t expect everyone to bow at her feet or offer to carry her to work in a golden litter.

But it would be nice if, say, once every couple of months, someone acknowledged that she was there; that she was not just a backstage worker in their life, but had an existence of her own.

That she wasn’t entirely invisible.

She stopped.

Because in all her failed attempts at self-promotion, all of her nudging of boundaries; in all her self-pitying contemplation she’d overlooked the most important thing of all.

Invisibility wasn’t great if you hated