“Have you changed your mind about wishing to sell the watch?”
“No.”
“Then the answer is yes, they’re necessary.”
She goes back to her own paperwork, black ballpoint scoring hard into the old-fashioned receipt. “Unless you want to sell fortwo-and-a-half, then we can perhaps dispense with the form-filling.” She doesn’t miss a beat as she says it, doesn’t look up at me, her pen still moving across the form with rapid strokes. Almost as if she hasn’t spoken at all.
“That’s OK,” I say. “Four thousand is fine.”
When I’ve finished filling in the form, she disappears into the back room again, returning to count the money out in front of me, all red fifties, before smoothing the notes into a hefty quarter-inch stack, and putting them into an envelope. I slide it into my jacket pocket, the money a solid mass resting against my heart during the nervous five-minute walk down to Lower Parliament Street where I pay it into my bank. I haven’t made a cash deposit for years and the rigmarole of it—find a counter with a pen that works, fill in the deposit slip, stand in the queue for a cashier—feels like an echo from a different century.
I start to relax as the cashier stamps the slip and hands me the stub.
Maybe it was karma, I told myself. A little balancing of the cosmic books after my trouble at work. I had told Jess that my boss is fine with me working flexibly while we settle into the new house, as long as team targets are hit.
The truth is slightly more complicated than that.
The truth is that I don’t have targets anymore. Or a boss.
It was a fortnight before we were due to move that the redundancy notice came around, the email landing like a bomb in my inbox. A confidential invitation to the human resources department at 9 a.m. the next day to receive a white envelope with my name on it and a meaningless ten-minute chat full of HR doublespeak. It was arestructuring, adownsizing, areallocation of staff and resources in light of changes in project requirements.Andregrettably some difficult choices had to be made.All the usual corporate weasel words for when the accountants get nervous and a certain number of employees get singled out to walk the plank. This time, it had been my turn, along with half a dozen other software developers on my team. Pretty awful timing, to be honest, and a statutory minimum payout, which meant I needed to get another job lined up as soon as possible.
The second time it’s happened, too.
Maybe it’s me. Maybe I ask too many questions; I don’t like being deceived. That was certainly the case first time around. And this time? Who knows.
Maybe it wasn’t just bad luck that got me singled out.
It’s ironic because for most of the time Jess and I have been together, she has earned more than me. It was only last year, when I’d gotten this job, that I finally overtook her and we started to think about moving out of our cramped semi-detached house so we could give the children a bedroom each.
I didn’t tell her. I still haven’t.
I’ll tell her when I get a new job, but until then, there’s no point in freaking her out with the news that we’re one salary down when she has enough on her plate with her own job, with the kids, the new house, and everything else. When she’s spent so long looking forward to this move and creating the dream home we have always talked about. At least her job seems pretty secure. People will always need insurance.
It’s not as if we could have pulled out at that stage anyway. We had already signed on the dotted line—we were going to move, whatever happened. Just bad timing, that’s all. It’ll be fine.We’llbe fine. The money I made in the jeweler’s shop will help us make the first credit card payment for the furniture Jesshas ordered; it will help me keep my side of the mortgage payments going for at least another month, enough to bridge the gap between my old job and the next one.
The house, the watch—the little hidden room on the top floor—would help me keep my secret until then.
9
I get lunch at a café in Sneinton Market with good Wi-Fi. It’s on the eastern edge of Nottingham city center, far enough away from my old office to minimize the risk of bumping into any former colleagues. Over a cheese sandwich and a cup of strong tea, I spend an hour on my laptop looking for jobs, firing off my CV to a handful of companies, and following up with a couple of IT recruitment agencies that already have me on their books. Over a second cup, I open a new browser window and search for anything to do with the history of our new house or its previous owners, anything that might hint at the strange layout of the top floor room, whether it was a peculiarity of Victorian houses built at that time. There’s plenty of general stuff about The Park—the exclusive neighborhood we had just joined—but nothing specific on the history of 91 Regency Place.
On the Land Registry website, I click through to find out how to access information about a property, but the cheapest option—a title register—has a price tag of £19.95. Surely there’s a cheaper way? I send a text to the estate agent who handled the sale instead and open a new browser window to register with another couple of recruitment agencies. There are a handful of job alerts in my inbox and I go through each one, firing off my CV to a couple of places looking for immediate starters.
It’s mid-afternoon when my mobile rings, Jess’s number appearing on the screen. I’ve decamped to another café, a little place tucked away behind the ice-skating arena; the ringtone is very loud in the enclosed space.
“Hey,” Jess says. “Can you talk? Are you on your way home soon, or can you be?”
“Should be able to.” I don’t bother checking my watch. “Why, is everything OK?”
“We’ve got a bit of a… situation,” she says, an edge of tension in her voice. “In the garden.”
“What kind of situation?” I say, standing up from the table.
“You’ll see when you get here. Are you in the office?”
I ignore her question.
“You sure everything’s all right? Are the kids OK?”
