Janice

Sometimes we miss the clues… A dozen ordinary things that seem unconnected until it is too late. I don’t know if I will ever understand what really happened. I know what I hope – that I can never truly understand Emile.

He seemed a normal enough workmate at the time. He did his job when he had to and skived off when he could. We all learned to be a little bit careful around Emile. There was nothing simple about him, no one description that fitted. A lot of people saw his open smile and the lack of guile in his eyes. It was easy to trust Emile and hard to believe that he wasn’t just another laddish colleague. It was a mistake that I made and I know that others were no wiser. Janice made the worst mistake of all.

I first met Janice when we all went for a drink after work. She had been living with Emile for a couple of months by then. When you first meet someone, you get a feel for how they are but without knowing them, you can’t tell how much is their nature and how much is their situation. Maybe if I had paid more attention to her and less to the office chatter then I might have seen the warning signs but it had been a long day and the beer seemed more important than a rather nervous looking stranger.

    We were all around one of the corner tables in one of the pubs on the square. I was on the opposite side from Emily and Janice who were sitting with Tom. That was no surprise. Emile and Tom got on well and watched each other’s backs. There was always a lot of office politics and we were always a little wary around the more senior grades. I had been talking about the latest witch-hunt when it all kicked off. There was a sound like someone clapping and a strange noise, half a sob and half a cry. I looked over and saw Janice half off her seat, half on the floor. Emile was standing above her, hissing soft obscenities that I could only just make out. She looked very slender and fragile just then, a sharp contrast to the thickness of Emile who was stocky and running to fat. Someone needed to say something and I wish that I could say it had been me but wasn’t; I took the coward’s option and just stared. Janice started to talk, her words muffled by the tears and the hand that she held to her face. It wasn’t my business but I heard enough to know what had made Emile so angry. Janice had been talking to Tom and Emile didn’t like that one bit. I didn’t see that there was anything wrong with talking and Emile had been right there but that was about all there was to it.

We all left after that and I walked through the town to work off a little of the beer before risking the drive home. I didn’t like what had happened that night and it made no sense. Tom was a bit of a skirt chaser, true enough and Emile would have to know that since they had often tried chatting up the same girl. It didn’t matter who the girl was or whether she was pretty. It seemed a game to that pair. A lot of the office was single and we were all blokes. I have to admit that there was a lot of testosterone in the air. I never much cared for the games, myself. I have always been a bit shy around women and maybe I have been a bit naive but anyway, Tom and Emile were quite the opposite. Janice had seemed a bit meek to me while Tom just might have taken a few liberties. I couldn’t understand why Emile hadn’t assumed that Tom was just being his normal misogynist self.

The Monday after, I saw Emile in the office. I didn’t know what to say about the Friday night but he broached the subject.

"Look, I am sorry you had to see that. Just a lover’s tiff and perhaps a beer or two making it worse. She has no head for drink. Anyway, she is fine now so no harm done."

    I wasn’t so sure but I was his junior and it wasn’t my place to tell him how to run a relationship, especially since I knew nothing about it. I don’t recall Janice drinking much but, like I said, I hadn’t been paying much attention. Anyway, I didn’t have much time to think about it since the workload got heavier after that week. Some of Emile’s accounts had proved to be more work than expected and so management had shifted some of his routine work to me. I can’t say that I was pleased about it, especially since some of the accounts were in a bit of a mess but nobody asked me and I just got on with the job. I didn’t give much thought to anything except the work until the offsite meeting.

    The company had two offices; one in Winchester which served the south and another in Manchester for the north. There were about twenty of us in each. Every year, they would shuttle half of us to meet up with the rest for two days of powerpoint slides and pep talks. That year, we went up to Manchester and, as usual, we were all put in the same hotel. A group of us gathered in the hotel bar on the first evening; one of the managers had put a card behind the bar and the first hour or so was on the company. There was a group of girls at the tables off to the side, mostly in their twenties and they obviously knew each other. It wasn’t hard to guess that they were all from the one company and just here for the day like us. It was that sort of a hotel. I was happy enough to drink my free beer and relax but Tom and Emile were like predators that had smelled blood. Emile was always the first with a dirty joke or crass comment but get a beer inside him and all traces of civilisation were gone. At first it seemed funny as he chatted up first one girl and then another, getting nowhere at best and getting a mouthful of abuse at worst. It stopped being funny as he started to change. At first, it had all been a bit of a joke with Emile in on it but after the first three or four rejections, he started to slow down and became less brash. At first, I thought that he was going to come back to the bar and forget about it but I had misjudged him. He wasn’t playing any more. He wanted to get one of the girls to go with him and he wasn’t going to let himself fail. I thought about Janice and wondered if they were still together. If they were then Emile wasn’t thinking about her. I stopped watching about then but we got a blow by blow account from Emile on the coach back. A lot of it seemed like bullshit at the time. Given what he said, I hope that it all was.

Anyway, life and work went on… mostly work if I am to be honest. It was about a month after than when I next saw Janice. I had taken the afternoon off to see the bank manager about a loan when I saw her hurrying along the high street. I don’t know why but I called her name. I thought that she might pretend that she hadn’t heard but she turned to me and smiled, a fragile little smile that didn’t look happy but some of the tension seemed to go out of her. I walked over to her and there we were, standing face to face without a thing to say to each other. More to break the silence than anything, I asked if she wanted a coffee and she seemed so eager to be somewhere with someone that we almost ran to the café. It was one of the places that tries to look Italian but doesn’t quite make it but it served coffee and there were places to sit and that is all that we seemed to need. Now, I know what you thinking but it wasn’t anything like that. We just talked. We sat down and she asked me to talk to her. She seemed afraid and lost, desperate for anything to grab hold of so I did what she wanted. I asked her what she wanted to talk about and she told me that she wanted me to talk to her about anything, ordinary things just so long as I was talking. So, I did talk. I didn’t have anything special to say so I talked about where I went to school and my parents and just everyday things. She seemed to relax as I talked a lot of nonsense about things that didn’t matter. I didn’t talk about work though. I couldn’t have done that without mentioning Emile and I didn’t think that she wanted to talk about Emile. Not that she did say much about anything. She just listened as if she hadn’t heard anyone speak for so long. Eventually, I stopped and just sat there like an idiot until she said that she had to go. She looked at me in the strangest way and said "Thank you". Just "Thank you". I still don’t know what she was thanking me for.

    Work started to get really bad just about then. Some of the figures in my accounts started to come out wrong and it looked like I had made crazy mistakes, really stupid things that were going to lose the company money. I was called up to the managing director’s office and given a formal warning and a pay cut. I started working evenings just to check and double check all my accounts every day. I didn’t like the job and I didn’t like working with Emile but I needed the money. He started to become a real bastard around then and made a point of telling me that I had made an error that the MD didn’t know about. I was sure that I knew what he meant but he made sure that I understood. Later that week, he got Janice to come in to the office with his lunch. He was making a point, you see. She had done her best to cover it with makeup but she had some bad bruises. I didn’t need to ask where they came from.

    After that, I kept my head down. I did my work and made sure that I didn’t talk with Emile if I could help it. I certainly didn’t look for Janice after what had happened last time. It seemed that she had troubles enough without me making it worse. I would have quit my job if I thought that I got have got another one but I didn’t think that I would be walking out with a good reference.

It must have been 6 months before I saw Janice again and that was only for a moment. It was in town again and this time she and Emile were together. He was walking beside her with his arm around her shoulders. She was smiling but it didn’t reach her eyes. It was very obvious that she was pregnant and I was pleased for her. I suppose that I thought that she and Emile and managed to make things up a bit. I thought that maybe I should try to make peace with him too so I waited until he and I were alone in the office after work.

I cleared my throat and spoke to Emile. My voice sounded high and strained, even to me.

"I gather that congratulations are in order", I said. I know that I must have sounded like an idiot.

"What for? What have you heard?" snapped back Emile.

"I saw you in town with your girlfriend. Looks like there is some good news coming"

Emile grunted. "Yeah. Best not to say anything about it to the others though. I don’t fancy them talking about it." He paused. "Understand?"

I understood.

I went back to keeping my head down and I kept out of Emile’s way. I started taking files home with me at night and that seemed to help keep things straight. Life became a bit more bearable, well, until it happened. It seemed like such a good day at first because Emile wasn’t in. I was happy and it seems strange now. I didn’t find out until the evening when I picked up the paper. I always got the evening paper in case there was a better job advertised in it but there never was. Anyway, It was on page 4, just a little item, "Pregnant woman dies in stair fall". Janice’s life was worth less than 40 words to them. Of course, there was no proof that it was anything but an accident, nothing that would stand up in court but I knew. It was my fault. I let him do all this.

    After that, I knew that I had to do something. I had to make sure that he couldn’t hurt anyone some other time. I don't feel bad about it - in a way, it was Emile who made the choice. Even after everything, I don't feel that I can be cruel to him. That is the difference between us and I don't ever want to be like he is. No, I have taken care and chosen the perfect place. It is a quiet woodland glade and the bluebells grow there in the season. It is very restful, the perfect place for a grave. I will try not to hurt him, I really will, but there is only so much that you can do with a knife. At least he will have plenty of time to get over it.