The Turnback

Part one of a three-part triptych. March - end of financial year - it's the most wonderful time of the year...

It had been a long day, and Val had gone home with a migraine about three o’clock – it was that funny sort of weather, heavy, and he’d had to move rooms at short notice for the Conflict & Conspicuous Consumption seminar and that always upset him.

Anyway, she’d run him home with the waste bin from his office perched in his lap. Marcus had just been on his way up the stairs and he’d looked at Val, looked at the bin, and then just said “oh” as if a pre-decimal-sized penny had just dropped. So anyway Val wasn’t in any state to be talking about mercenary armies in the late medieval period, poor love, and Hannah tucked him up on the settee with the curtains drawn and a packet of Migraleve to be going on with.

He always got like this, this time of year. They got to the end of the financial year and there were always words like static budget and voluntary redundancy being chucked around, and Val started to operate on the sort of frequency that upset next door’s Jack Russell, and haunt the BAJR website.

It started raining about four o’clock. It was that sort of spring rain that starts off sounding like a laptop fan, where you weren’t even sure if it was actually hoofing down till you’d come down three flights of stairs without your coat and were regretting your optimism, and then once you were out in the car park it turned vicious. She watched some of the students legging it through the puddles, grey hoodies turning black in seconds. It made her smile – not in a nasty, serves you right, way, but that even after bloody thirteen years here she still wanted to make sure they were all warm, all safe, all dry. Poor little buggers.

Sean poked his head through the door. He was smiling, but it was a polite, nervous smile. “You ready, Han?”
“Yeah. Let’s get it over with.”

“It won’t take long,” he said, and sighed. “Not a lot to say, really. You want to get Eleanor?”

She closed her laptop. She could hear the HR Business Partner – nice lass, always wore shoes that in Hannah’s clubbing days you could only buy out of them send-away catalogues from the Sunday Sport – clattering up the stairs with Brian from Premises in her wake. Brian was worrying about the Health and Safety aspects of the five-inch heels, you could hear him fretting from two floors away. “I won’t print the agenda,” she said, and Sean sighed again. “Probably best. Efficiency savings.”

Photo by Oksana Maselko on Unsplash

Sean held the door for her as she stepped out into the corridor. The stairwell lights flickered in the way they’d done for the last eight months, ever since Brian had accidentally logged the ticket under “low-priority ambience issue.” Hannah could hear the muffled thump of Eleanor’s keyboard before she saw her — she always typed like she was trying to beat an old typewriter at its own game.

Eleanor glanced up as they approached, her expression already braced. “Is it time?”

“’Fraid so,” Sean said.

“Oh, brilliant.” Eleanor closed her own laptop with the air of someone mentally adding yet another straw to an already overburdened camel. “Do we get biscuits?”

“No,” Hannah said. “Saving on catering.”

Sean snorted. “We haven’t had catering since before the pandemic.”

“Exactly,” Hannah said. “More savings.”

They headed together toward the meeting room — 3.12, officially a “Flexible Learning Suite,” but in practice it was where all hope went to die between the hours of nine and five. Someone, years back, had decided to paint it the sort of bilious mushroom that made magnolia look daring. The rain hammered harder on the windows as they entered, the radiators ticking like cooling engines. Someone had decided when they were designing the Faculty block, to put big windows round all four sides. It was probably meant to communicate modernity, and flood the space with natural light. It always made Hannah feel like an air traffic controller and one of the efficiencies she’s have put in place was thermal blinds, floor to ceiling, because the draught in here was bloody shocking.

The HR Business Partner, in today’s astonishing shiny turquoise stilettos, was already seated, one heel dangling off her foot at a precarious angle. Brian hovered beside her, arms folded, gaze fixed on the shoes as though waiting for them to explode. She was all right, Vicky. She didn’t deserve Brian looking at her as if he wanted to take a fire extinguisher to her feet. From the ankles upwards she was all structured formal business wear and then – well, Hannah always wanted to ask her how she could even walk in them things, but she thought it’d be rude, so she just looked instead.

“Thanks for coming,” Vicky said brightly, as if they were honoured guests of the HR team. “Before we even start, I want to reassure you that as things stand at the moment, we’re not looking at crisis management in the new financial year –“ she smiled at Sean, “ – no redundancies in the pipeline, you’ll be pleased to know.”

That was all Hannah had needed to know. She sat down and popped her laptop open again, ready to minute the meeting. (He was all right. She would have been all right anyway, she’d been here nearly fifteen years and she was far too expensive for a redundancy package. But Val – Val, four years into his six-year tenure-track contract, Val with his fizzy head catastrophising for the last fortnight – oh, bless him, it was going to be a relief to him.) “There will still be quite significant impacts on staff,” Vicky carried on, her voice dropping to that medicinal croon. This is going to hurt. “But we can workshop how that’s going to work out – put some support in place going forward for frontline teams who are likely to be most affected.”

“You mean zero hours contracts,” Eleanor said flatly. “I can’t recruit to my team on zero hours contracts, Vic. Not at just above minimum wage. The Hub’s running on fumes and goodwill as it is, I can’t keep offering overtime –“

“No,” Vicky said, and suddenly the corporate gloss was gone and she was just a sad girl from Leeds in nice shoes who hated doing this. “No, you can’t.”

“And that’s how we’re going to do it, is it? By shafting the cleaners and putting school leavers and single mums on zero hours contracts?”

“Unless you want to identify some posts to put at risk,” Vic said, and blinked, “- yeah, those are your options. We need to make savings, baseline ten per cent budget cut. You know where we are. Student loans, cost of living, inflation. You don’t need me to tell you how it is. I’m going round seven faculties this week with the same figures. My role is as much at risk as anybody’s.”
Sean held his hands up in a universal peace-offering. “We get it, Vic, no one’s shooting the messenger. So basically the message I’m giving to staff is we’re safe, for the next twelve months, but don’t get complacent, and would the last person out of the building please turn the lights off?”

Vicky sighed again. “It’s not the message we’d want to send out, Sean, no, but –“

“But unless the economic climate shifts dramatically by this time next year it’s the most realistic one I’ve got. OK. What are we working with?”
Hannah dropped her head back to her laptop, feeling a knot of tension loosen between her shoulders. It wasn’t brilliant. It was going to mean watching every penny – if they thought she was tight with the gel pens now, she was going to have to start sending back the stationery orders for the brilliant white printer paper, to be replaced by that bloody horrible beige stuff that was like institutional toilet paper – but something would come up. Something always did. Every year she’d worked at the university they’d had this awful panic at the end of year, and every year someone somewhere managed to wrestle something out of the financial abyss, even if it was something as miserable as the staff buying their own washing up liquid for the kitchen.

She looked at Vicky’s turquoise patent heels again.

Yeah, someone somewhere like Vicky, quietly rearranging things into the Staff Wellbeing budget underspend with a smile whilst taking the flak for the message that no one wanted to hear.

“Thanks, Vic,” she said softly, over the sound of the rain on the windows in surround-sound, and Vicky looked at her as if no one had ever thanked her before. Eleanor took a deep breath, the lines round her mouth that hadn’t been there a year ago suddenly going white.

“Yeah,” she said, “thanks.” And then stopped and shook her head and muttered something that might have been sorry. Sean didn’t say anything. He looked like anything he might have said would have been unprofessional, and he’d been in this game too long for that.
“I’ll let you have sight of the email first thing in the morning,” he said, “ – before I send it. Just in case there’s anything that’s not on-message.”

The heavy fire door to the admin corridor slid shut behind them, cutting off the sterile silence of the Flexible Learning Suite.

Eleanor didn’t make it five steps. She slumped back against the wall, right next to a poster advertising a Cycle to Work scheme that had been closed for three years, and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes.

“Oh God,” she said into her palms. “Oh God, Hannah. What am I going to tell them?”

Hannah shifted the laptop in her arms, like cradling a fractious baby. She knew exactly what Eleanor was seeing right now. It wasn’t a spreadsheet. It was faces. It was twenty-odd people on the lowest pay grade in the building, mostly on fixed-term contracts that were barely worth the paper they were printed on. “You tell them the truth, but the boring version,” she said firmly. She reached out and squeezed Eleanor’s upper arm, feeling the tension vibrating through the muscle of a woman who did weights three nights a week. “You tell them budgets are tight, same as every year, but jobs are safe for now. Which is true. Sean can do the doom-mongering email tomorrow. Let him be the bad guy. You just be the one who keeps the lights on.”

Eleanor let out a shaky breath that was half a laugh. “I feel like I’m lying to them. I’m looking at them and I’m counting heads. ‘One of you won’t be here next year’. It’s like The Traitors but with pensions.”
Hannah didn’t laugh. “Yeah. I know. I minute this shit every year, remember? Go home. Have a glass of wine. You know what Val would say.”

Eleanor shoved a hand through her hair. (That was never a thing she did lightly, the amount of time she spent on straightening it. That was how bothered she was.) “Do I want to - know what he’d say?”

“Sufficient unto the day, is the evil thereof. Come on. The cleaners’ll be up in a minute.”

Sean was just putting his coat on, in the corridor. (As if he couldn’t even bear to be in his office a minute longer than he had to. Someone else Hannah felt for.) “Don’t worry about getting the minutes to me tonight, Han,” he said, shoving his arm into the sleeve with a venom that did not bode well for the lining. “I don’t think we’re going to forget any of what was discussed, overnight.”

She cocked her head. “Aye. Well. If he’s still badly, I’ll make a start on ‘em. I’m not doing owt else tonight, other than fretting.”

They could hear the cleaners in the foyer downstairs, the whine and thump of the floor buffers polishing out the footprints of a thousand muddy boots and trainers and ballet flats. She didn’t think she could bear to look at them tonight. “See you in the morning,” she said, and Sean called something after her as she trotted down the stairs.

“Night, Han!”

Rav on the security, doing that daft thing he did every night when he stood to attention, grinning, and saluted her as she passed, like the Queen.

“Give over, you daft bugger. See you ‘morrow.”

“Drive safe, it’s beastly out there. Was on the radio a minute since, there’s been a bad one on the ring road.” He shook his head sadly, “Bit of rain and they all drive like nutters.”

Not that that was in any way ominous, Rav, cheers for that. She edged out onto Woodhouse Lane, cursing cyclists who thought wearing black was an edgy lifestyle choice rather than a bloody death wish. Seven o’clock on a wet Wednesday night, you couldn’t move fast enough to do the buggers any damage, anyway – the traffic was bumper to bumper coming out of town. It was eight o’clock gone before she was home.

The lights were on in the hall and in the kitchen, through the stained-glass in the front door, but the big light in the front room was off – just the little side-light that stood on the table next to the window, that was too dim to read by but always looked really warm. The door was open. His boots were kicked off - one standing up, one on its side, any old how – and she could see the golden light of the lamp on his trailing ponytail. And he was snoring, that little dry hitch that meant he was sleeping with his mouth open.

She let out a long breath and slumped her laptop bag down in the kitchen. He was asleep. He was all right. (He’d managed to survive five hours without her watching him.)

His reading glasses were in the kitchen, next to a mug with a dry teabag in it, and an empty packet of his migraine meds. She thought he’d left the mug primed for her to make herself a brew when she got in, rather than that he’d started to make his own and passed out. There was a cheese and Branston sandwich next to it, sheltered with an upturned plate. There was unmistakable evidence of mucky paws on the worktop, so, you know. Val and that cat had reached an understanding already. Val didn’t leave temptation in Whiskers’ way, and Whiskers didn’t chuck the good crockery onto the kitchen floor.

“Oh, you daft bugger,” she whispered, and her eyes burned with tired tears. Been a day. Just as well he wasn’t conscious. She’d have cried on him. She couldn’t handle kindness, not at this time of night.

She ate the sandwich standing up. She started off and she couldn’t taste it, her throat was too dry, but two bites in and she remembered she hadn’t eaten since lunch. She fed the cat, which Val had probably already done – like chonky boi here would have let him forget, and the ancient warlord leaned his tom-cat chops into her hand purring as a reminder – and then she went and sat down.

She wanted to wake him up. She wanted to stroke the messy hair off his face, away from the hollows at his temples that hadn’t been there a fortnight ago. She wanted to say it’s all right, love, you got another twelve months and then you’re so close to tenure anyway. But she couldn’t. Not till Sean sent out the email tomorrow. It wasn’t fair, else. He wasn’t the only one worrying.

But she did take his hand, where it was dangling limp and inky, fingertips against the carpet, and tuck it back under the throw. Freezing, like usual. He wasn’t going to deal well with Brian overriding the Hub thermostat to twenty degrees. Val wasn’t just the Book Dragon in name, he was a bloody lizard by nature – there wasn’t the fat on him to retain heat.

He was going to be miserable. He was going to be cold, and his book budget was going to be decimated, and hotdesking and online tutorials upset his fizzy brain: he liked things to be in the right place, bless him, and it bothered him when things got mixed about. Bothered her, too, but she was the Head of Faculty’s PA: it was her job to keep them tidy.

She couldn’t do owt. It was all of them, tonight. His cold fingers twitched, then closed round hers. He didn’t wake up. She withdrew her hand, gently, and sat in the chair by the little light. Watching him sleep – holding him in the light, like that lass from Batley who left her crystals on the front desk always said.

Watching him sleep. Reaching behind her, quietly, for her big tapestry knitting-bag, and the bamboo needles, and the good wool. Grey, but flecked with green and gold. She was measuring him by eye, the breadth of his big bony wrist and the length of his forearm. Good long ribbed cuff, to fit snug over them long bones, and a nice plain glove: she thought about making it fancy, cables maybe to look like bones, but –

It wasn’t about making it pretty. It was about keeping his hands warm. A turnback, that you could fold over to your fingertips if you were rummaging about in a hole in the ground in the early spring. Or in an office with metal-framed windows, three floors up against an exterior wall made out of cheese. It was I can’t stop this from happening, but I can try and make it as not-awful as I can, one stitch at a time.

She knitted till her wrists ached, in the gold light.

“Han?” he mumbled, “you not gone bed?”
He sat up, squinting a little without his glasses. “You had something to eat?”

“I have, love. Thanks for that butty. Filled a hole, that did – just what I needed.” She smiled, even knowing she’d be a bit fuzzy. “How’s your head?”

“Gett’n there.” He blinked at her again. He looked so young and fragile without his glasses. She forgot, sometimes. “We all right, Han?”

She put her knitting down, slid out of her chair and kissed his forehead. “Tell you in the morning, love. Longest meeting in history. My arse went numb about an hour in.”

“Warm it up for you?” he suggested drowsily, and she yawned, and laughed.

“Reckon you’re out of luck there. Sleep.”

“Reckon you need a hug, owd gal.”

“Cuddle, then sleep. Aye. All right. I could do wi’ that hug.”

He put his head on her shoulder, and wrapped his arms round her. “Come on,” she said, finally. “Bed. Before the cat decides you’re a heated blanket and nests in your ponytail.”

That got an actual snort out of him. He let her stand, eventually, blinking up at her with that soft unfocused look that always turned her inside out a bit. She held out her hand. He took it. His fingers were still cold – rough, with twenty years of digging, and callused with pens and trowels and bones.

Upstairs, he was asleep before she’d even turned the lamp off. Just out, as if someone had switched him off at the wall. She lay beside him, listening to the little ticks of the house settling and the distant hiss of tyres on wet tarmac outside, and thought: another year. They’d bought another year. And tomorrow there’d be questions and panicking and timetabling spreadsheets that made her eyes cross.

But for tonight — just tonight — she curled closer, tucked the duvet up over his chilly shoulders, and let her mind drift on the soft rasp of his breathing.

She’d done up to the turnback, on the first glove. Keeping her own fingers busy, out of mischief. No Googling redundancy packages or senior admin jobs Leeds central. Not yet.

She had her own house. He didn’t have a mortgage. They’d find a way. They’d make it work. (He’d hate it, until he didn’t, because that was how Val worked.)

Sufficient unto the day, was the evil thereof.