Browne - Narrow Margins

Published by Accent Press Ltd 2009

ISBN 9781908917508

Copyright Marie Browne 2009

The right of Marie Browne to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers: Accent Press Ltd, The Old School, Upper High St, Bedlinog, Mid-Glamorgan CF46 6RY.

Cover design by Red Dot Design

Also Available by Marie Browne

Four Little Words

ROVER HAS GONE BUST.

Its a strange phenomenon, but there are certain times in every adult life where, for various reasons, the language you have spoken since birth becomes completely unintelligible.

Each individual word is clear but when placed within a sentence makes no sense at all and needs to be repeated again and again, the verbal equivalent of someone smacking you over the head with information taped to a hammer.

Rover has gone bust, Geoff muttered.

Sorry, didnt get that, I looked up from drying the cutlery.

Rover has gone bust, he spoke slowly and succinctly, holding eye contact throughout the sentence.

Just four little words, but, to us, whose entire and rather nice lifestyle was funded by the car manufacturer, they were an absolute death knell.

My subconscious was obviously far quicker on the uptake than my conscious and I found myself carefully hanging up the tea towel and very deliberately putting the carving knife that I had been holding into the fridge. Presumably my intuition felt that all sharp objects should be well out of reach at a time like this.

I turned to face my husband who had assumed a defensive position behind the table.

Im sorry, I said slowly, say that just one more time. Im still having trouble here.

I followed his gaze to the well-read and slightly grubby letter he was holding and waited; he took a deep breath and repeated the words that, even with my subconscious now gibbering that life was just about to go horribly pear-shaped, I really hoped Id misheard.

What do you mean, Rover has gone bust? Finally bullying my mind to accept his words, I breached Geoffs defences at the table and took the letter from his hand. And ... how odd, now it seemed I couldnt read either. The crisp type flowed like film credits across the page; it may as well have been Ancient Greek for all the sense it made.

Geoff sighed; he had lived with me long enough to recognise the beginnings of a long trip down de Nile when he saw one. Leaning forward, he gripped the letter between thumb and forefinger and with only a slight tug managed to reclaim it. Making sure he had full eye contact he slipped into lecture voice and explained.

It means were stuffed.

Three hours later I was still at full rant and showing no signs of even taking a breath, let alone actually stopping.

How can they do this to us? We have an outstanding invoice with them for over 50,000! Were at the end of our money! They were supposed to pay tomorrow, tomorrow! For Gods sake. Why now? Why us? What about the mortgage? What about the bills? What are we going to DO?

Anybody who has been in a similar position will understand this predicament only too well. There are no easy answers. You go through the procedures of closing down your company; you apologetically fire the staff; you explore all avenues real and imagined; you delude yourself; you shout at invisible people inside telephones; you wait for someone to tell you that its all a joke, that huge mistakes have been made and your moneys in the post.

After about a fortnight, I was exhausted and had to admit that Geoffs early assessment had been totally correct. We were royally stuffed!

When you have finally faced up to what is going on in life, you can start to think of the future, but it didnt look like we had one, at least not much of one anyway. In times of crisis my mother always used to trot out the well-worn clich When life hands you lemons, make lemonade and it is in times of severe lemonade-drought that my personality flaws start to show.

I am, without doubt, a control freak. I am also completely convinced that with positive thinking and a little bit of ingenuity you can achieve anything. It is a great source of pride to me that over the years I have come up with some bizarre and ingenious ways to get us out of situations. I am also very proud of my useful ability to ignore all indications that it is usually one of my great ideas that gets us into these situations in the first place.

After ten years, some of my more creative solutions to an impending disaster make my poor, long-suffering husband nervous very nervous. I cant really say I blame him because as bad plans and ill-thought-out schemes go, I have come up with some corkers.

So when I plonked myself down next to him on the sofa, my face pre-set in a caricature rictus grin and uttered the immortal words, I have a cunning plan, Lord Blackadder, I got exactly the response I had come to expect. A soft groan, before he leant forward and gently banged his head on the nearest hard surface. I had his attention.

The banging ceased after about 20 seconds and strangled tones emitted from under the hair, Yes, dear?

Ignoring the rampant sarcasm, I leant forward and grabbed one of his ears to raise him into an upright position.

Listen, I took a deep breath (positive thinking, gallons of lemonade and a set of lungs like a blue whale have got me a long way over the years). As far as I can tell, we have a couple of choices: we can find work and eventually pay off our debts and the mortgage but this will mean both of us working full-time, which means we will have to pay childcare and travel to Birmingham every day because the last thing youre going to find in Herefordshire are big multinational companies that need project managers. Even then there is no guarantee both of us can find a job because, lets face it, neither of us have been working much over the last three years, the staff did all the work and we charged vast amounts for it.

The other option is that we dont find work, we lose the house and end up in a scummy flat, still with huge debts, no work and general misery all round. Have I summed it all up OK?

Geoff pursed his lips and muttered, I dont think its that ba

Cutting him off before he could pour reality onto another of my plans, I continued, or we could sell the house, pay off the debts and still have enough money to buy a boat.

A what? Geoff frowned.

A house boat. You know, to live on. Ive been looking on the net, and talking to Sarah and Drew they love theirs we could buy one, too. Just think, no neighbours, no one telling us where to go. We could move it down to Cambridge to be with Arwen and Carl and all that crowd, Sam could go to school with their kids; it would be great and just think Light-headed from lack of oxygen, I took a much-needed breath and callously played my trump card ... we would own it outright, no mortgage, no rates in fact, no debts at all!

With the trump card played, there was nothing to do but sit back and wait out the ensuing silence. If I can just touch again, briefly, on personality traits, anyone who knows me would say being quiet isnt one of mine, and patience is on the B list as well. But you dont live with someone day in, day out, and not know when to shut up.

Geoff does thinking in silence so well that over the years his silences have actually become rateable; with one being a short silence with raised eyebrows to portray Yes, dear not a chance in hell to a ten, with a complete range of facial expressions. This one broke all previous records and went to about a twelve, lasting about four or five minutes, which is an eternity to sit still, looking innocent.