She smiles and shakes her head. ‘You know these slots are confidential. I’m here for you, April, and only you. I’m saying this for your benefit. I can’t force you to stop.’
‘I just don’t think it’s fair, what you’re saying. Making out that my reaction is wrong. I think hating men considering everything men do is a completely normal response. I shouldn’t have to “work on myself”,’ I air quote, ‘in order not to get upset when men routinely rape women.’
She reaches out her finger to punctuate my rant. ‘But they aren’t all the same.’
‘Yes they are!’
Suddenly I’m standing and I’m yelling, with sweat dripping down the back of my legs. I’m also shaking and trying not to cry and my throat feels stitched shut and Carol is looking worried, trying to get me to sit my hot flesh back down on the sticky chair.
It takes a moment or two to pass, for me to gain control of whatever’s just happened. I keep saying ‘I’m fine, honestly I’m fine’, which isn’t very convincing.
‘April,’ she says, once I’m sitting down and my breathing is vaguely back to normal. ‘Be kind to yourself. Maybe at least think about taking a break from your shift work.’
‘I can’t.’
‘You can, and it doesn’t have to mean anything. It’s just a break.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ I tell her, when I know I won’t. But I play good employee and allow the supervision to return to normal. Carol and I go through some of my answers to the email questions I found tricky, and we tweak a template answer for the virginity questions that wasn’t quite working.
What if revenge is good?
Do we ever allow ourselves to ask that question? What if turning the other cheek is not the answer? Because I’ll tell you what. I’ve lived my whole life as a girl and I’ve turned so many goddamned cheeks I’m surprised I have any skin left on my face. And yet it’s never once made me feel better. Not like how I feel when I think about Gretel.
‘Do have a think about what I’ve said,’ Carol says when the fifty minutes is up.
‘I will.’ I stand up to go back to the office. I can see Matt waiting through the glass wall, pulling that nervous, ‘trying not to look like I’m about to go into therapy’ face, as he sits on the chair outside. I push through the glass door and high-five him, like we’re on a WWF tag team. ‘You’re up,’ I say. ‘Want some tissues?’
‘You’re hilarious,’ he mutters, but he smiles as he steps in. I hear Carol say, ‘Welcome Matt, take a seat’, before the glass door closes again.
I walk around a bank of desks and arrive at my own, where Katy has left a slice of cake with a note: ‘post supervision treat’. She’s in a meeting, so I can’t thank her. Instead I sit down to emails and more emails, just as my phone vibrates.
Josh: So Gretel, how about we do that thing where we actually meet in person and politely try to decide if we fancy one another?
It’s such a smooth message that you could spread it on toast. Credit where credit is due.
I wait an entire day before I reply.
It’s not even hard. I have back-to-back meetings the rest of the afternoon. I go out for drinks after work, and then meet Kerry, a friend from the charity I used to work for, and we sit through an hour of OKish theatre at Soho Theatre. We go for drinks afterwards and she complains about her husband being so busy and stressed since his promotion.
Megan’s still up when I get in, mood-boarding the launch event she’s just been chucked into doing, magazines cut up and discarded all over the flat, so I stay up and help her, and we finish a bottle of wine, and say we can’t believe we are up this late on a school night, and shit, we’re going to be hungover tomorrow. I fall into bed without taking my make-up off, and wake up way too thirsty at 3.30 a.m., down a pint of water and then manage to get back to sleep, kicking my covers off in the muggy heat. Then I press snooze three times instead of two, which throws off my morning routine, and I have to rush around, layering on the deodorant because this heat will not break, and run out the door to the