‘Aww, look at them…’
Suzy swivelled her phone a semi-circle and shoved it under Tessa’s nose. The accompanying waft of patchouli offended her nostrils.
An unwilling audience, Tessa nevertheless looked in the direction of the screen, where a mass of Golden Retriever puppies writhed beside an indifferent bitch, each of them fighting to get hold of one of her many engorged nipples. They reminded her of maggots.
‘So cute,’ she said, disingenuously.
‘Sure you can’t be tempted? I’ve still got three unaccounted for…’
‘No, really Suzy. The last thing I need in my life right now is a dog.’
This was lunch break. A strict half-hour sandwiched between the morning and afternoon quarter-hour tea breaks. Life in an electronics manufacturing plant on minimum wage.
How had it come to this?
Tessa was bemused by the way the same people sat together at every break. Like it was some sort of unwritten rule. No one daring to break the tea-break law. If she and Suzy had met under any other circumstances, they would not have formed any sort of alliance. But here they sat, day-in, day-out, each asking questions about the other’s life, feigning interest, searching for the vaguest hint of common ground and inevitably finding none.
Tessa changed the subject to steer Suzy away from her efforts to flog her a juvenile canine.
‘So, how was your weekend?’ she asked.
‘Yeah, not bad. Me and Billy took our bikes up to Lowestoft. Did the coast road.’
Suzy was an ageing, old-school biker. At 62, she still had the figure for leathers and had ‘Biker Chick’ tattooed across her lumbar region. An affirmation, Suzy called it.
Tramp stamp, thought Tessa.
‘And you? What did you get up to?’ asked Suzy
Tessa looked across the table and tried to think of a suitable response.
Self-indulgent weeping, was the honest answer that she didn’t give.
As Tessa assessed her colleague, she felt a mixture of disdain and envy. Suzy was her antithesis. Uncultured. Unintellectual. But definitely not Unhappy. On the contrary. Suzy, with her long grey hair, Harley Davidson and static caravan, seemed supremely content with her lot. And she talked about her 65-year-old ‘boyfriend’ Billy with the enthusiasm of a teenager.
‘Oh, you know,’ said Tessa, just a bit of gardening and stuff. Watched Strictly.’
Suzy didn’t watch Strictly.
An awkward silence descended. Tessa bit down hard on her tuna and cucumber sandwich, wishing away the next twenty-five minutes.
Both women had started at the plant on the same day, eleven months earlier. Almost an anniversary. And by dint of that particular stroke of serendipity, they were destined to share their breaks together. That’s just how it worked, here at the plant. To suddenly decide to sit alone now would require an explanation.
I no longer want to spend my breaks with you.
Not an option.
Rude.
Ruder than sitting opposite each other and scrolling through Facebook once the conversation had inevitably dried up.
Suzy looked at her phone again and let out a chuckle. Once more she turned it towards Tessa.
‘Billy’s new bumper sticker,’ she laughed.
FUCK GRETA! it read.
Suzy chuckled some more.
‘You honestly find that funny?’ Tessa wanted to say. ‘The planet’s fucked, and you think that’s FUNNY?’ But the gumption to do so failed her. A small Greenpeace sticker hung unimposingly in her bedroom window, but she was hardly an activist. Instead, she faked amusement at the hideousness of the message.
So, how had it come to this?
Tessa spent her days soldering components on to circuit boards with a mind-numbing repetition that she feared would destroy the circuitry in her brain. Not so long ago, it had all been very different.
Tessa’s quietly charmed life had fallen apart rapidly and spectacularly. She and her husband, Gordon, had never had children. Nature had dealt them a decisive hand in this respect. A full house denied them, they had seized their cards and created their own destiny. They focused on their careers and became flush with success. And in the absence of family, they had travelled.
Cruises. Villas. Luxury hotels. To an outsider, it seemed that they were living the dream.
But Gordon had harboured a ruinous secret. He had developed a serious gambling habit.
Rather than investing his disposable income, he had squandered it. And when that money had escaped him, he had cashed in his company pension, and before long he had flittered that away too. And when all the funds were spent, and the banks were closing in, he had taken the quickest route out of his predicament and thrown himself off the Orwell Bridge. His ruses of remortgaging and equity-share had left Tessa with very little. Enough to secure herself a modest one-bed terrace in Walton, once all the debts had been settled. It was a far cry from their double-garaged, 5-bed detached in Old Felixstowe.
Along with their home, the Land Rover and Merc were repossessed. She’d managed to find a buyer for her personalised number plate – it would look out of place anyway on her second-hand Skoda. Plus it would draw attention to her. Identify her. When all she wanted to do was shrivel and hide. She could no longer afford the membership fees at the tennis club. Nor could she face the pitying looks of the other members.
Yes, her fall from grace had been swift. But not as swift as Gordon’s. A matter of seconds, by all accounts. She often wondered how it had felt for him, in those final moments…
Tessa considered Suzy now. There still remained a good twenty minutes of lunch break and she refused to allow her to dominate that time with mindless chat about dogs and motorbikes.
‘Oh, I went to London too,’ she added, swallowing hard on a mouthful of bread and tuna. ‘On Saturday. To that Frida Kahlo exhibition at Tate Modern’. She had gone alone, of course.
Suzy looked non-plussed.
‘Freda who?’
‘You know, that Mexican artist…’
The expression on Suzy’s face implied ‘I really don’t know and I definitely don’t care’.
‘Nice,’ she said. Her eyes reverted to the squirming puppies on her phone.
Indifferent bitch.
But who was Tessa to sit in any form of judgement? A 57-year-old-widow, it would be another 10 years before she could draw the state pension. She may not enjoy the job at the plant – the drudgery of the assembly-line, the tedium of the refreshment breaks with Suzy – but she was bloody grateful for it.
Her career had taken a dive some years prior to Gordon doing the same on that ill-fated bridge. She had been chief editor in a magazine publishing house. But the pressure of deadlines, along with the hellish commute from Felixstowe had conspired to bring about a breakdown. Gordon had been extremely kind under the circumstances.
‘Just pack it in,’ he’d said. The only words she’d needed to hear.
‘Are you sure?’ she’d asked. ‘Can we really afford it?’
‘Of course,’ he’d lied. ‘Just leave it to me.’
And, somewhat naively perhaps, she had just left it to him.
Maybe that was the catalyst for his gambling. Perhaps he had wagered that he could fill the void left by her lost income with some educated bets. Finance was the sphere he worked in after all. But it was all smoke-and-mirrors. And now he was gone. It was all gone.
She missed Gordon. Missed the sensation of shared experience. Missed intelligent conversation. Missed the warm contact of another living being. She hated the change in her fortunes brought about by his death. Hated that he had left her in such dramatic fashion. Hated that he had left her full-stop. But she could never hate him. She had only ever loved him. What she hated most was the loneliness.
There were only 5 minutes left of their break.
Suzy had finished her lunch and was scrunching up her tinfoil. Tessa knew from experience that she’d chuck it straight into the bin marked ‘General Waste’ rather than the one marked ‘Recycling’, but in 11 months she’d never challenged her behaviour. And she probably never would.
‘Let me see those puppies again,’ said Tessa.
Suzy looked up in surprise.
‘Really…?’
‘Yeah.’
Suzy turned the screen towards her. Maybe a dog wasn’t the last thing Tessa needed after all. She pointed at the smallest.
‘How much is that one?’
Alaco Doyle is a London-born, Felixstowe-based artist and writer, whose output includes blogging, copywriting, poetry and short stories. Some years ago, wrung out by the rat-race of commerce and business, she swapped her career in media and advertising for academia, securing herself a degree in French and Art History at University College Dublin (UCD). She’s done absolutely nothing with it since, but boy did it feel good achieving that 1st! She is currently compiling ‘Snapshots’, a short story collection, and is working on her first novel
Urban Pigs Press 
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