The Feminine Art of Revenge E-Book

Celine Saintclare

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 436

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

The darkly romantic revenge thriller featuring ballet and broken hearts ____________________________ 'Dark, witty and gloriously twisted - I loved it' Joanna Wallace 'Deranged, in the best possible way' Julie Mae Cohen 'Celine Saintclare's writing is exceptional' Mirror ____________________________ He broke her heart on purpose and for that he must be punished. Forced to abandon her lifelong dream of becoming a ballet dancer, Sylvie finds herself unqualified and unfulfilled in an admin job she hates. She doesn't know what she's doing with her life - until she meets her new boss Jay. Handsome, rich and mysterious, Jay captures Sylvie's imagination. They embark on a passionate affair that consumes her every waking moment. Until Sylvie discovers he's already married. But heartbreak quickly turns to fury, and she finally knows her true purpose: revenge. ________________ PRAISE FOR SUGAR, BABY 'Darkly funny and keeps you on your toes' LIV LITTLE 'Glamorous, dark and hopeful all at once' KATIE BISHOP 'Bold, daring' HARPER'S BAZAAR 'One to watch' PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 'Smart, sexy and peppered with wit' NB. MAGAZINE

Leseprobe

Also by Celine Saintclare

Sugar, Baby

Published in hardback and trade paperback in Great Britain in 2025 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Celine Saintclare, 2025

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

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

Th is novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 83895 821 3

Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 83895 822 0

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 823 7

Printed in Great Britain

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An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

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For George

I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive

– Donna Tartt, The Secret History

Revenge, the sweetest morsel to the mouth that ever was cooked in hell

– Walter Scott, The Heart of Mid-Lothian

Act One

One

Perfect, Perfect, Perfect

Maria, the ballet mistress, leant forward and began to tell the story. Her dark eyes were wide and gleaming as she spoke, her voice hushed and rhythmic:

‘This is a story about love, about revenge, death and sacrifice.

‘The tale of a peasant girl who falls for a nobleman in disguise, Albrecht, who is already betrothed to another. When she discovers this, she goes mad and kills herself. Her spirit joins the ghosts of other young girls who’ve had their hearts broken by men they trusted, and together they take their revenge on any man who wanders into the woods at night. They seduce him with their beauty, and mercilessly they dance him to death.

‘But not Giselle; when the one she loves comes into the forest she takes his place.

‘This ballet is no Sleeping Beauty, no Nutcracker. It is a ballet with a dark heart and the part of Giselle will require a very special dancer. The role is not only technically rigorous but also emotionally demanding, and it’s vital that the dancer can make us believe she’s a spirit not a girl.

‘Which of you is up for the challenge? Which of you can answer the call?’

*

‘Thanks for coming in,’ said Jay. ‘I liked your CV.’ Sylvie didn’t know what there was to like about it; she’d left Willow Way Ballet School four years ago and then tried her luck as a waitress, a barista, a waitress again, an assistant at a tutoring centre, and finally, a nanny. ‘What made you want to apply?’

Sylvie couldn’t think of anything to say except that her parents were on her case after her mishap nannying for the Wheelers (she kept sneaking Haribos into their sugar-free household) and she’d dashed off a bunch of job applications so that they’d calm down. She didn’t actually want a job, least of all as an office admin assistant at a foam finger factory – that would be admitting defeat. That would be accepting that she’d never glitter on stage at the Royal Opera House like she’d always planned. Instead she’d drift into obscurity behind a nondescript desk along with everyone else, the people she’d been raised to consider herself superior to. She looked around at the state of the office and considered how far she’d fallen. By the look of the laminated faux-wood desktops and dust-covered PCs, the yellowing shutter blinds, the dry potted cacti and the large stains on the dark carpet, this appeared to be rock bottom. Worse still, she doubted she was even qualified to work there.

‘Uhh . . .’ Her eyes drifted to the ceiling as she tried to think. It was hard to think when he was looking at her. His good looks had caught her by surprise. He’d come around the corner, this criminally handsome man in his early thirties, and given her a shock. He had no right, Sylvie thought, springing a face like that on someone at this time of the morning without any kind of warning. She could have had a heart attack.

One of the ceiling tiles had come loose from its fixtures and hovered ominously overhead, a dark hole visible through the crack. Despite the stream of cool air emitted by the rickety air-conditioning unit, Sylvie felt her face flush warm with the humiliation of it all.

‘That’s all right,’ Jay said. ‘Sometimes I draw blanks too. That’s why I hate interviews, they’re so formal.’

Sylvie nodded, feeling like an idiot, sure that Jay was just being nice and planned to screw up her application and toss it in the wastepaper basket the minute she got out of the door. He must have known he was humiliating her with his face and his questions, Sylvie thought. He was taking pity on her.

He leaned back further in his chair, crossed one leg over the other and looked at her, his head tilted to one side as he studied her. ‘Ever worked in an admin job before?’

Sylvie thought that he was so beautiful. What she meant by beautiful was right. He was not only physically striking – curly black hair, green eyes, perfect lips, facial proportions that adhered to all the rules of golden symmetry – but there was something else that emanated from him. She didn’t know what it was exactly, but it spoke without words and pulled her in, like a finger hooked through the belt loop of her dress.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve never worked in an office.’

He nodded slowly, furrowing his brow. ‘That’s okay, that’s okay,’ he said. ‘We can teach you. It’s pretty straightforward around here. All you need to do is keep track of the inventory. The account managers will make requests, and you just have to order all the materials they need, and then keep track of all the hours the people are doing down in the warehouse. It’s a general role we need, some help to pick up the slack.’

Sylvie nodded. ‘Sure, I could do that.’

Sylvie didn’t know what she’d expected. She hadn’t even known foam fingers existed outside of baseball games in American movies. She hadn’t been able to find much information about the company online, a registration at Companies House with three or four names on it, a bare-bones website with South East Foamies: We Help You Give ’Em the Finger! splashed across the header. There were four framed foam fingers hanging on the opposite wall. One of them with YOU CAN DO IT! emblazoned across it. The meeting room had a large glass panel along one side so that you could look out at the rest of the office – a few desks with people sitting at them, the lady who’d let her in, a middle-aged man and a girl in her early twenties, about the same age as Sylvie. They were talking to each other absent-mindedly as they worked away on their computers. The man was picking at a packet of Monster Munch, the girl sipped from a Greggs coffee cup, the woman had a magazine open on her desk beside her keyboard and glanced down at the pages every so often.

Jay smiled, crossed his arms. When he next spoke his voice was lower, softer. ‘You know, I . . . Have I seen you somewhere before?’

Was he flirting with her?

‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Sylvie. ‘I think I would have remembered.’

He smiled at her and stroked at his lower lip with his thumb, his eyes taking her in from head to toe and back again.

‘When can you start?’

‘I’m hired? Are you sure?’ Sylvie was elated, not by the job offer but by its meaning: Jay liked her, he wanted to see her again.

He shrugged. ‘You’ll learn quickly and besides, you look right.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You look right for the job.’

A few seconds passed as they sat, offering each other small smiles imbued with meaning. Sylvie was alarmed by the way her body responded to his eye contact alone, the quickened heart rate, the growing wetness between her legs which she slid a little further apart under the table, as if on instinct. If this was what it was like, Sylvie thought, just looking at him, imagine what it would be like to touch him, to kiss him.

‘I can start on Monday,’ she said, pushing her hair over onto one shoulder to expose her neck.

‘Brilliant,’ he said. ‘I’d better take your number then.’

He took his phone out of his pocket and handed it to her across the table. Their fingers met, just briefly. Sylvie typed her number into the contacts page and passed it back.

‘There you go,’ she said.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘All sorted here then, you can go enjoy the rest of the sun.’

‘Fantastic,’ she said.

‘Anything planned?’

‘Just some sunbathing,’ she said.

Jay raised his eyebrow but said nothing.

It had been a lie. Sylvie didn’t have the patience for sunbathing, but she wanted Jay to think about her naked. She wanted to plant the image in his mind, a tiny demonic seed. She wanted the idea of her, of them together, to keep him up that night. Her eyes, black as coal, flickered between his eyes and lips, observing him closely. He gave nothing away. His face was a veritable mask of calmness.

‘Do you want some water or a Coke for the way back?’ Jay asked her.

‘I only live ten minutes away,’ said Sylvie. ‘But sure, do you have Diet?’

‘Yeah, just grab it out of the cabinet on your way.’

‘Okay,’ said Sylvie. ‘Thanks a lot.’

She stood up. She thought they might shake hands, but they didn’t. Jay just pulled out his phone while she collected her handbag onto her shoulder, tucked her plastic wallet full of CVs under her arm and shuffled around the edge of the table towards the cabinet. When Jay thought she wasn’t looking, he let his eyes wander over her body. Sylvie could tell, and she was pleased. She sucked in her stomach slightly, arching her back. Then she opened the cabinet and frowned at the sight that met her.

On the shelf directly at eye level, pushed back further into the dark recesses, like it had been hidden there, was a small landscape photograph in a swirly, ornately patterned silver frame. In the photo was Jay, his face pressed up next to the cheek of a smiling golden-haired woman, objectively attractive, early thirties. Sylvie’s hand shook slightly as she reached for the shelf below which was stacked with cans of fizzy drinks.

‘Found it?’ asked Jay.

She held up a can of Diet Coke. ‘Got it,’ she said.

‘All right, great, I’ll see you next week.’

‘Looking forward to it.’

The same woman who’d shown her in walked her down the stairs and out into the gravelled car park where they stood in the blazing heat, exchanging a few perfunctory niceties. Sylvie wondered about the woman in the picture, surely not a girlfriend or wife, he certainly wasn’t behaving like someone who was attached, least of all in love. It was probably a sister, or a friend, nothing to worry about. She forced any doubts firmly out of her mind and by the time she turned on the ignition in her silver Citroën, she was buzzing again, invigorated by the prospect of a new love affair and with someone like Jay. His name was James, he’d explained but everyone called him Jay.

It had been so long since Sylvie had really felt anything, anything good at least. It seemed as though her world without colour had suddenly been set alight. When Jay looked at her, Sylvie didn’t think about the pregnant, dark cloud of her future, or the overgrown graveyard of her past. She only thought about crawling on her hands and knees under the table towards him. She only thought about unzipping his jeans and taking him into her mouth. After just one meeting she was hooked, obsessed, enslaved.

Sylvie drove home along the A-road. The heat was torturous, the black car seats had absorbed all the sunlight and burnt her, even through her dress. But out ahead of her, the road was almost empty, everything was sunshine and possibility. A procession of white cars whizzed past her on the other side of the road that she took to be a kind of sign. He’ll be mine. Jay, she thought to herself. She was giddy with joy, intoxicated with it. It was all starting to make sense now. There was a reason it all happened, that mess at Willow Way. It was a redirection, she was being set on her true path.

She found the house empty when she got home.

Sylvie: Where are you?

Mum: London, going out to eat soon, will be back late

She stripped down to her underwear and went to investigate the contents of the fridge, feeling hungry for the first time in recent memory. She felt as though she could eat and eat and never stop. She wanted to gorge herself on every kind of pleasure she could find. She was awake down to the cells of her fingertips and she wanted to feel. She wanted to eat, drink, to make love. Sylvie stood in the coolness of the open fridge and surveyed it. She picked up thick pink slabs of cold ham and put them into her mouth, piece after piece until it was finished, and then she ripped open a packet of pepper-trimmed roast beef and did the same, enjoying the feel of the meat on her tongue, the saltiness of it.

There was a bottle of white wine in the side of the fridge, three-quarters full, the glass smudgy with condensation. She took down a wine glass, pressed the ice dispenser for a couple of cubes and filled it almost to the brim before taking a swig. The fruity, cold liquid flooded her mouth. She took the glass of wine with her. The ice had almost completely melted before she could climb the stairs. She set it down on the bedside table, peeled out of her knickers and lay down naked on top of her covers. The closed slatted blinds cast stripes of shadow along the length of her body. She was acutely aware of the feel of the fibres of the linen bedcovers against her bare skin. The cool air blown over her body by the fan made her nipples harden. She opened her legs and began to touch herself on top of the covers, thinking of Jay and whispering his name into the dark. She had to have him, she thought, or she might die.

Two

A New North Star

After what felt like an eternity, Monday finally arrived. Sylvie looked around her bedroom as if seeing it through fresh eyes, bathed in the lilac light of a late summer morning. She thought this was a room that belonged to somebody entirely different. Fragments of ballet shoe ribbon pasted onto a collage of Misty Copeland, a dance school acceptance letter mounted and framed on the wall above her bed like a shrine. The logo on the acceptance letter was sage green, two W’s interlinking. Willow Way. She didn’t talk about what happened there, she’d never breathed a word to anyone and never would. None of that mattered any more.

The past was over with and Sylvie had been given a gift. A new North Star. Something to wish for and my God, was she good at that. She felt as though she’d discovered the secret to ecstatic living, and she wanted to shout it on every street corner: ‘Let me show you how to yearn, how to ache with longing! Desire is the most exquisite pain, once you learn how to do it, you’ll choose it over easy pleasure again and again and again!’

‘You’d understand,’ she said, to the framed photograph on her bedside table, a hazy 1980s portrait of a glamorous red-headed woman in a pearl choker with frosted pink lipstick and blue eyes rimmed with eyeliner. Sylvie’s great-aunt, Jacqueline Gardiner. Deceased.

Aunt Jacqueline had not taken much of an interest in Sylvie until she was eighteen years old and boarding at Willow Way, and then she’d invited her for tea for the first time. To her beautiful three-storey town house with sash windows, one half of a stunning Victorian villa painted cream. When she greeted Sylvie at the door, Sylvie had been struck by her beauty.

Aunt Jacqueline had alabaster white skin and rich red hair that began in a widow’s peak at the root and ended in a blunt crop cut at her chin. She had the most striking deep blue eyes and an aquiline nose, a small, almost mouse-like face. The skin around her mouth was finely wrinkled, her lips painted soft pink. Even in her old age she was tall, and as she looked up at her, Sylvie felt herself shrinking with intimidation.

Aunt Jacqueline’s silk kimono wafted behind her as she led Sylvie into the parlour. It was embroidered with hummingbirds and petunia flowers in pinks, yellows and blues, a gift from the Prince of Liechtenstein as she explained.

The parlour was decorated in the style of a boudoir with plenty of powder pink velvet and ruched draped curtains, apparently fashioned after something Jacqueline had seen at a burlesque show in Paris. Walking carefully over the assortment of Persian rugs, Sylvie allowed her eyes to rove appreciatively over the leopard print pillows and column candles on gold candlesticks.

Jacqueline sank down into a high-backed velvet upholstered armchair, fishing a silver cigarette case out of the depth of her kimono pocket. Sylvie seated herself on the love seat opposite.

‘Cigarette?’ Jacqueline asked her.

As she held out the case, Sylvie noticed the cigarettes were bright pink, acidic, almost neon. She’d never seen anything like them before but she shook her head.

Jacqueline let out a sharp laugh. ‘I thought all dancers smoked.’

She put the pink cigarette between her lips and lit it, exhaling an elegant stream of smoke into the air above her. There was something about her, Sylvie thought, that was as if she had a camera trained on her at all times. Even the way she sat and smoked, one leg crossed over the other, her arm held out in an angular pose, cigarette dangling insouciantly from between her manicured fingers.

Jacqueline took a small sip from her teacup before placing it down on the tabletop beside her, next to a golden candlestick, an ornate box filled with the incense she’d brought back from India and a framed black-and-white portrait of her mother.

‘So, Sylvie.’ Jacqueline cleared her throat. ‘Do refresh my memory, what’s it like being young?’

‘It’s okay,’ Sylvie confessed.

‘Okay?’ Jacqueline was aghast, she shifted forward in her chair. ‘My dear, you are a rosebud entering its very first bloom, a beautiful girl like you with the world at your feet. It is not okay, dearest, it’s spectacular! When I was your age, I had four boyfriends at once, I went out every night, even if I had to sneak out.’ She started to giggle then, and so did Sylvie. ‘I wore disguises, you know, if I wanted to go anywhere seedy. I danced all night with a butch lesbian in a three-piece suit once, and a monocle – Caris, she was called. And I took heroin one night at the Moulin Rouge, what a hoot, I was there two days, or perhaps three, I found myself in the dressing room and then next thing I was on stage, shimmying around in the spotlight.’ She gestured to her chest through her high-necked black dress. ‘Tassels,’ she said.

‘That’s exciting,’ said Sylvie, feeling her cheeks warm with a blush.

She couldn’t imagine herself ever being brave enough to find herself in situations like those, though she could admit they sounded thrilling.

‘So tell me,’ said her aunt, collecting her teacup and taking a sip. ‘What kind of trouble have you been getting yourself into? You can trust me to keep a secret – I won’t say a word, my dear.’

She shrugged. ‘Just dance,’ she said. ‘It takes all my time and attention. We’re getting ready for the final showcase now, and that dictates which of us get company parts next year. We’re doing Giselle.’

As she said it out loud, Sylvie felt the muscles around her throat tighten; she was reminded of the severity of what lay ahead, the crucial importance of the next few months.

‘Giselle is just right, just perfect. I must come and watch you.’

‘That would be nice,’ said Sylvie.

‘Tell me, Sylvie darling, how does it feel? Dancing, under the stage lights, for an enraptured crowd. Does it feel glorious?’

‘It feels . . .’ Sylvie hesitated – she had never shared her thoughts out loud before, at the risk of sounding deranged. It was an incredibly vulnerable thing, to be open like this about dance. It felt as though she were betraying herself, letting someone in on a sacred bond. But she looked up at her Aunt Jacqueline, her small mouse-like face, her eyes wide and waiting. She felt sure that she wouldn’t judge her, that she would never judge her. ‘I always think,’ she said, ‘it feels like transforming into a daemon, something unearthly. It’s . . . alchemical.’

‘Yes,’ Jacqueline nodded. ‘Yes, I think it is.’

*

Sylvie had returned every single week to see her, without fail. She was more than an elderly relative but also a kindred spirit, an artistic soul, a friend. Sylvie knew her aunt would have understood how she thought about Jay. Aunt Jacqueline had lived a life defined by passion, by art, by style. What she lacked in devotion (she had married five times), she made up for with an ever-burning lust for life. If she could see me now, Sylvie thought, she’d be so happy.

She found herself reaching out and touching her aunt’s photograph, imagining flesh under her fingertips and not the frigid panel of glass. She missed her.

Sylvie sat up at the edge of the bed with her feet hovering over the floor. As she pointed her toes and flexed them, all the knuckle bones cracked. She stood up and leant into her left hip to pop the socket and then into her right. She had to click all the pieces into place. Sylvie woke up most mornings with a dull pain in both sides of her ribs, with an aching back, sore hips and knees and sometimes a stabbing sensation in the ends of her fingers, under the nails where she couldn’t get at them. After an hour or two all the pain would disappear, which led Sylvie to believe that its source was psychosomatic.

But not today. Today she felt blissful. Sylvie took an enormous, delicious stretch, luxuriating in the warm breeze through the open window and the sound of children from next door, laughing as they chased each other around the end of the garden.

Her parents’ voices in the kitchen came into focus as she descended the stairs. They lived in a little village on the outskirts of a large, run-down town in the south-east of England. It was an enormous six-bedroom house, renovated to state-of-the-art spec from a crumbling 1970s build that her father, a property developer, had snapped up. But like the majority of his developments, this one lacked any soul and there were too many lights and right angles for it to be comfortable. She passed the professional photos, enormous glossy pictures fixed to the wall. Her family of three: Mum (white), highlighted, blow-dried and with an alarmed look in her eyes, Dad (black), the muscles around his mouth manoeuvred into a bizarre, Joker-like grimace. The three of them were wearing white T-shirts, jeans and bare feet for the photo at the behest of the photographer, who had remarked smugly that he’d once shot a summer holiday campaign for Boden.

Sylvie stopped at the last photo. It was a shot of her alone the year she got into Willow Way. In the picture, she’s seventeen years old and dressed in a lilac tutu, standing on the tips of her pointe shoes with her arms curved over her head in fifth position, a small smile on her lips. She could remember one of her teachers saying, ‘Sylvie Orange is going to be a principle at the Royal Ballet, you mark my words.’ It was all possible once. Never mind, she thought. She had new dreams now. She wanted things again for the first time in a long time. She wanted Jay.

The kitchen was a vast stretch of marble floors, white walls, enormous windows, and professional grade titanium appliances that were rarely used. The whiteness of the room amplified the bright sunlight beaming through the window. She slid onto one of the kitchen island stools, so completely unergonomic in design that it took a fleet of Finnish designers to come up with it. She watched her mum, Nadine, chop up cucumbers and pears. Slender slices of fruit slipped under her fingers, as she filled up her NutriBullet. A handful of spinach, chopped ginger, some coconut water, a tablespoon of Manuka honey.

‘It’s the working girl!’ Nadine exclaimed. ‘You’re up early! Must be excited for your first day.’

‘Yeah,’ said Sylvie with a shrug.

‘We’re so proud of you, aren’t we, Clive?’

‘Mm,’ said Sylvie’s dad, Clive, who sat in his favourite leather armchair, scrolling on his phone, submerged in sun’s rays. ‘You’ll be working till retirement paying us back for all those intensive dance courses and Italian costumes.’ He laughed then. He was the kind of father who didn’t generally take his daughter very seriously. ‘Never mind, eh. Kept her out of trouble, didn’t it, Nads?’

‘You were a beautiful dancer,’ said Nadine. ‘I always thought the costumes were so pretty, pink tights and ribbons, just gorgeous. And it kept you in good shape, didn’t it?’ She let out a deep sigh. ‘Oh, well.’

‘What’s this?’

Nadine had left a leaflet for adult ballet classes on the kitchen island. Sylvie picked it up at the corner between her thumb and forefinger, disposing of it in the kitchen bin as if it were a dead rat.

‘You may as well admit it, Sylvie,’ said Clive, smirking, big arms crossed over his chest, ‘the real reason you left Willow Way.’

Sylvie was frozen still, glued to the spot. She was sure that the wrong word, the wrong breath, would give her away – any minute now it was going to come rolling out of her like a dam breaking. Finally, somehow, someone had found her out.

‘You couldn’t hack it in that dormitory, sharing a shower with a dozen other girls, slaving away in a ballet studio with only canteen food to sustain you! No wonder she wanted to come back, Nads, we’ve spoilt her, only got ourselves to blame,’ and then he laughed again.

‘Oh, that reminds me,’ Nadine said brightly. ‘I had a confirmation from Grove Park about Aunt Jacqueline’s memorial, it’s all booked for next spring.’

She handed Sylvie a green smoothie.

‘Brilliant,’ said Clive, absorbed once more in something he was looking at on his phone.

‘I was thinking, Sylvie,’ she said in the same gentle, coaxing voice she’d used since Sylvie was an infant. ‘How would you like to do a dance at the memorial? Just a short solo. Would be nice. Aunt Jacqueline loved to watch you.’

‘I don’t dance any more,’ Sylvie responded, taking a gulp from her glass.

‘But you could, just once, it’s such a shame to let all that hard work, all that training . . .’

‘And money!’ Clive piped up from his armchair in the corner.

‘Such a shame to let that all go to waste.’

Sylvie felt the smoothie curdle in her stomach. There was a tightening in her jaw and an ache behind the eyes that cautioned her she was dangerously close to breaking down into tears. Giving up dance had been like losing a body part, and when reminded of the loss she responded badly. She had spent many nights crying into her pillow, feeling as though her life, her real life, had ended with her ballet dream. She couldn’t put any of this into words. If she parted her lips to speak, she knew she could summon nothing but tears, so she gave her mum a small shrug and walked swiftly from the kitchen, into the downstairs toilet where she blinked hard at herself in the mirror.

It’s different now, she said to her reflection.

She needed to focus on the good things. Meeting Jay had been a seismic and defining moment in her existence, which could now be divided into two halves. Before Jay and After Him. Before, her empty days had spread out in front of her, long and wide with nothingness. Only last week she’d been so lonely that she’d fucked a stranger in the toilet cubicles at the local park. The isolation was suffocating, it had sprung up around her like a glass dome and she had to do something to shatter it. Sylvie thought summertime must be the loneliest season, when the days stretched out without the punctuation of routine, the bugs hummed and everything bloomed with life, reminding you that you were alone. In the parks and swimming pools and fields, she could feel her own smallness against the wild expanse of the outdoors. That was loneliness. The smell of other people’s barbecues, festivals beyond slatted wooden fences. A stranger’s laughter vibrating in the evening. A cluster of girls going through the self-service checkout, voices trembling with excitement.

It had happened quite incidentally. She’d just been lying there on the grass and looking up at the sky, feeling as though she were drowning in the blue heat. It had been months since she’d been fired from the Wheelers, the cord had been cut and she was floundering, untethered and, more importantly, unwanted again.

Sylvie had repeated the mantra that had seen her through her darkest times. I am nothing. I am nothing. I am nothing. She whispered it over and over like an incantation. The phrase made the pain dissipate like sea foam on wet sand. It made her feel watery, changeable and soft. She felt the numbness cocoon her. Breathe, two-three-four. Like the start of a port de bras, the beginning exercise of every dance class. If you’re good enough, her teacher Maria had told her once, you can perform a simple port de bras and bring a grown man to tears.

Sylvie had felt the nudge of a football at her thigh. She grabbed hold of it with both hands. The owner of the ball came chasing after it and when Sylvie tossed it to him, he scooped it up into his arms and looked down at her, grinning. First at her legs, bare in short-shorts, and then the strip of stomach between her shorts and her shirt which had risen partway up her ribs, the triangle of cleavage, damp with sweat, and then, at last, her face.

As it was happening, Sylvie thought to herself that having sex in a cubicle at the public park loos was not actually that odd. Surely, stranger things had gone on there. All the surfaces were metal and when she caught her distorted reflection, she thought to herself, if these walls could talk. He fucked her from behind, hands holding softly on to the flesh of her hips like he was scared to hurt her. Strange hands, Sylvie had thought, so unfamiliar. Then they changed positions, this time Sylvie had her back pressed up against the cool, metal wall with one leg wrapped around his waist. They were face to face and he was smirking. Sylvie wondered if all the time she’d been bent over and he’d been behind her, really letting her have it, if he had had that manic smile on his face. The thought made her chuckle and she managed to disguise it with a well-timed moan.

When it was over, she watched him sprint across the park to join his mates. His face was jubilant, he couldn’t believe his luck. I wonder what he thinks about me, Sylvie thought to herself as she wandered home. She trudged through the thick, humid afternoon heat feeling cheated. Easily won pleasures didn’t satisfy her, the thrill was in the striving, the agonizingly slow ascent, the dreaming, the fantasy.

It was too hot for office wear. Her polyester trousers were already damp at the seat when she climbed down into the car. As she neared the office, her sudden nerves were abrupt and embarrassing. She felt as though she’d been out of the world for so long, and now she was entering a new world where things mattered again.

Jay was outside the building when she arrived, like he’d been waiting for her. He dashed his cigarette butt into the gravel as she shut her car door. Their eyes met, his green and translucent, hers dark and searching. He was just as she’d remembered him, better even. Shiny hair, a strong nose, lips that could almost be pretty, a heavy brow. She’d never been drawn in by good looks alone. There always had to be something more, something ungraspable. Jay had that something else, Sylvie thought, something dark and gleaming. He seemed to vibrate at a different frequency to the world around him, to ordinary people. He was special.

‘You showed up then,’ he said, taking a few meandering steps towards her and stopping close.

‘Of course I did.’

‘Welcome to the mad house.’

Sylvie didn’t know what to say to this. Jay gestured for her to follow him inside the foyer. He held the door open to let her pass through first.

‘After you, Sylvie.’

She wanted him to say her name again and again and again.

She followed him up the stairs, her hand trailing after his on the banister rail. She could smell him – sandalwood, vetiver, citrus. She wondered what he’d say if he could read her mind or see her weekend dreams. The dreams had been so graphic they bordered on disgusting. The memories made her blush.

The office was the same as she remembered it, that is to say, quite depressing. It was as hot inside as it was outside. Sylvie was sweating, the humidity pooled in her shoes and under her armpits. Meanwhile, Jay looked tranquil. Cool emanated from him.

‘You can sit down there –’ he pointed to a worn upholstered sofa pushed up against the wall – ‘the guys are downstairs. They’ll be with you in a minute. We’ll start with a production meeting, basically just the schedule for the week.’

Sylvie nodded.

Jay disappeared downstairs, leaving Sylvie alone to take in the surroundings that would become her new habitat for the foreseeable future. She tilted her watch face back and forth under the fluorescents. Aquaracer. A Well Done gift from Mum and Dad for getting the job. While she waited, she watched the second hand tick.

They emerged suddenly, offering her handshakes and welcomes. There was Karen, a middle-aged woman with a platinum blonde pixie cut; Derek, a man who wore his dark hair in a plait down his back; and Sapna, who was close to Sylvie’s age but gave the impression, in her buttoned-up blouse and suedette brogues, of being much older.

‘Should we get started?’ asked Karen.

They wheeled their desk chairs into a circle and the production meeting began. Sylvie, who hadn’t been assigned a desk chair yet, had stumbled about uncertainly before sinking into the sofa, which meant she was about a foot below the eye level of everyone else. She sat silently as they discussed deadlines and targets, used technical words that might as well have been a foreign language. She felt intellectually (and vertically) inferior.

When the meeting was over, Jay took his laptop into the meeting room while Karen gave Sylvie the HR spiel about fire exits and break time, career progression, training and industry. Sylvie forced herself to make eye contact for eight seconds at a time with Karen, and then allowed herself to look over Karen’s shoulder at Jay in the air-conditioned meeting room. An oasis. Jay’s room. His face was luminous behind the soft light of his laptop screen.

It was like he was talking to her through the glass. Sylvie felt drawn to him across the office, so much so that her mind drifted mid-sentence and all she could think about was what it would be like to have him put his arms around her and kiss her.

‘Sorry, what?’

Karen repeated herself, with great effort and a begrudging sigh. ‘Weekends. Would you mind working the odd Saturday? Only when it’s really busy.’

Sylvie glanced back at Jay and said sure.

Next, Karen and Derek took her on a tour of the warehouse while Sapna went on a coffee run.

‘Latte good for you?’ she’d asked Sylvie, leaving without waiting for a confirmation.

Jay stayed behind. Sylvie turned back to look at him and he glanced up, holding the contact for just a second. I want you, Sylvie thought, I want you so much I can barely breathe around you.

Downstairs, they passed through a busy warehouse full of machinery and people in hi-vis jackets. The ceilings were tall, but the heat was stifling. There were electric fans set up and aimed directly at some of the workers as they ushered sheets of foam under the electric printer and queued up with their crates and pulleys in front of the industrial-sized guillotine.

‘Maybe just take it all in,’ Derek suggested, halfheartedly, giving her a squeeze on the shoulder. He had a friendly face, his dark eyes sympathetic as he noted Sylvie’s simmering anxiety. The noise, the heat and the pace of the warehouse were overwhelming. The workers there were cactus flowers who survived in spite of their surroundings. ‘There are some training materials in the store cupboard over there.’

‘Sure, okay,’ said Sylvie.

‘I’ll come and get you in an hour,’ Karen added.

Sylvie let herself into the tiny, dust lacquered store cupboard and collected the ring-bound folder with TRAINING written across the front of it in capitalized Sharpie. She found a quiet corner with plenty of empty crates to sit on, and close enough to a rotating fan to catch a little breeze. From where she sat on the warehouse floor, she could look up at the meeting room and see Jay working at the table, the silhouette of his head. Sylvie flicked through the binder which was full of the stock images of lurid cartoon smiley faces in hard hats and lengthy safety procedures for operating machinery. She watched as the factory workers packed boxes of foam fingers and stacked them in rows by the back door, and she watched as they wafted in and out of the back door for cigarette breaks.

How long had it been? Sylvie checked her watch. Still twenty minutes until Karen came to collect her. She looked up at the meeting room window. Jay was still there. She wondered if they’d get the chance to talk today. Perhaps it had been stupid to take a job because of a man, perhaps he’d only been flirting with her to get her to take it. It was too early to tell, too early to give up hope. She could do it. He was probably just waiting for her to make a move. He was her superior after all, it had to be her, lest HR come beating down his door, or Karen.

A tall man in hi-vis carrying a crate paused to introduce himself. He’d been trying to make eye contact with Sylvie since she came down from the office upstairs. He was very skinny, his arms looked stick thin by contrast to the wide cuffs of his dirtied work gloves. He was in his mid-twenties, which made him stand out among the other factory staff.

‘Hi, I’m Brett,’ he said.

He had eager, watery blue eyes that took her in appreciatively, like she was the best-looking thing he’d seen in a very long time.

‘Sylvie,’ she said.

She couldn’t have been less interested in Brett. He reeked of gawky, boyish inexperience and over-keenness that repulsed her.

‘First day?’ he asked her, smiling relentlessly.

‘Yes,’ said Sylvie, gritting her teeth.

‘Working up in the office?’

‘Yep.’

‘Cool.’

‘There’s only been one other new start in the office,’ he said. ‘In all the time I’ve been here. Sapna, you’ve met her. Sometimes we go out. Not dating or anything, we go out in a group, some of her mates, some of my mates.’

She wished more than anything that he would give up and leave her alone. She was worried that Jay would see her talking to him and think there was something going on between them.

‘How long have you been here?’ Sylvie asked him.

‘A couple years,’ he said. ‘I was here when there were different managers, before Jay bought the place.’

Sylvie glanced up in the direction of Jay’s room. His figure was gone from the window. She felt a pang of loss in her stomach, a sense of panic.

‘There you are!’ Suddenly Karen was waving at her from across the factory floor. ‘Come on!’

‘I’m being summoned,’ said Sylvie.

‘Good luck,’ said Brett. ‘Good to meet you.’

When Sylvie reached her, Karen turned and started up the staircase without so much as a word, humming a tune to herself as her sandals whacked against the stairs.

‘Oh, good, you found the folder,’ she said, looking at the dusty ring-binder under Sylvie’s arm. ‘This will be your desk – why don’t you just sit there for a bit and go over the health and safety.’

‘Sure,’ said Sylvie.

Her assigned desk was on the edge of the row of PCs that went Sapna, Karen, Derek and then her, up against the wall. Sapna was nowhere to be seen, neither was Jay but Derek looked up and smiled at her, while he continued his conversation on the phone. He pulled her wheelie office chair out as he said, ‘If they’re behind on delivery again tell them we won’t just give ’em the finger, we’ll give them the whole bloody fist, mate. Oh, yeah . . . and I’m six-three, I’m a big fella, big hands. They won’t enjoy it one bit.’

Slightly unsettled, Sylvie sank into her seat and flicked open the binder to where she’d been reading about machinery-related injuries. Someone had put a latte in a paper cup on her desk and she picked it up and took a sip that burnt her tongue.

‘Sorry about that,’ said Derek, once he’d hung up. ‘How are you doing? You all right?’

‘No worries,’ she said. ‘Good thanks, just . . . hot.’

Sylvie looked out of the window at the red kites circling. There was a truck reversing around the corner, a woman in a white hijab holding her groceries loose in her arms, stopping to scoop up a stray orange from where it had fallen onto the tarmac on the edge of the road.

There was a quiz playing on the radio station, the radio tingled with static, the presenter’s voice was barrelling and melodic. Karen put down her clutch of papers to shout out answers across the room at the radio player.

‘Any news about the proofs from Jane?’ Derek leant back in his chair to speak to Karen.

‘Hmm?’

‘Proofs. Jane.’

‘Nothing,’ said Karen, wiping her lipstick off roughly with a tissue and then reapplying it.

Jay appeared, passing under the fluorescent lights and into his room where he turned off the lights and the AC. He held his car keys in his hand.

‘I’ve got to be off,’ he said. ‘Have a good rest of the day, everyone. Welcome aboard, Sylvie. Before you leave, Karen will get you all set up on the system. All right with you, Karen?’

‘When I’ve got a minute,’ she said.

‘Cheers,’ said Jay, and then without looking back, let alone a glance at Sylvie, he left the office.

Sylvie felt her heart sink. She looked out into the car park where Jay was getting into the driver’s seat of a beautiful, shiny black Jaguar.

‘Nice car, isn’t it?’ said Derek. ‘Jay’s obsessed with it, can’t say I blame him.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ said Sylvie.

She couldn’t have cared less about cars but even she could see the Jaguar was a thing to behold, and elevated by being owned by Jay, enchanted almost. She watched as Jay pulled out of the car park in one smooth movement. When he disappeared at the bottom of the road, she felt a sense of loss.

‘All right,’ Karen said with a heavy sigh, taking off her glasses and putting them beside her on the desk. ‘I’ll get you set up on the back system, there’s a notepad and some pens and highlighters and things in your drawer if you want to get them ready. You’ll want to keep a note of your logins and passwords.’

‘Yeah, sure.’ Sylvie reached under her desk, pulled the top drawer of the little wooden cabinet open.

She got out an A4 Pukka pad and a fresh packet of black ballpoints. Flicking open the cover of the notepad, she almost did a double take at the sight that met her. At first, she thought it was a mistake, and this wasn’t a new notepad at all. Someone had already used it, or the first page at least. But then she looked closer – it wasn’t a mistake at all, it was a message. Sharp little capitalized letters that read:

YOU LOOK REALLY GOOD TODAY

J

Three

The Other Brother

Sylvie went for a run when the heat had cooled. There was a sizeable wood at the back of the close, it was thick with green leaves in the summer and thinned out to a great mass of ash-coloured branches in the winter, criss-crossing against a white sky. Sylvie loved the sounds of the wood pigeons and the woodpeckers, even the crows. Occasionally, there was a graceful tawny deer that last year brought its baby and Sylvie had watched spellbound from her bedroom window as the creatures, which seemed plucked from a fairy tale, curved their lithe necks to nose in the hedges for berries.

She’d run through those woods a thousand times. If she didn’t run, Sylvie’s body would become restless with unspent energy that felt like it might turn on her any minute and start to rot away her muscle, gnaw on her bones. The movement of her body had a direct impact on her mind and spirit. Being still for too long, she could feel death drawing in, steely and quiet as a ghost.

Sylvie’s feet came down hard and fast one after the other as she picked over the craggy woodland floor. The looped tree roots almost caught hold of her trainers, threatening to drag her down into a pit of crumbly soil. She was running like a madwoman, driven by an electricity that emanated from her core and shocked her arms forward, lifting her by the backs of her knees, propelling her forward. She passed quickly through the wood and out the other side into the park. The sun was shining its last hopeful beams through a fast-amassing cluster of dark, malevolent cloud. The wood pigeons were cooing, and Sylvie was approaching the bridge over the river. She had almost run out of park, and if she kept going she’d find herself pressed up against a wire fence, or she might go over the waterfall, and smash her brains out on the weeded rocks in the water below – the stones were covered in green algae and looked deceptively soft from above.

Then, Sylvie felt it begin, the collective gasp of relief in the air as the heavens opened. She turned over her shoulder in the direction of the green where the tennis courts and football field had opened out. There wasn’t even a single hardened dog-walker. It was a matter of minutes before her trainers were soaked through, rain saturated her hair and ran down into her eyes, and her clothes were plastered to her skin.

The downfall was heavy but brief, and droplets of water sparkled like polished gems from the tree leaves that Sylvie passed on her way home. Everything shone new, sunshine lit the rain-washed tarmac.

Her parents were celebrating Sylvie’s first official day of salaried employment with party food in the garden, even though they were all exhausted from the relentless heat of the day. Sylvie’s dad opened up the folding back doors and hauled chairs out of the shed, propping their wooden legs up on the patio, organizing them like bits of doll’s furniture. Sylvie’s mum put out artisan crisps, cherry tomatoes on the vine, hummus with sunflower seeds. She folded red paper napkins into triangles even though it was just the three of them. She gave Sylvie a wet sponge cloth and told her to clean the garden table. They barely used it and it was all frosted with scum, sap from the leaves of next door’s tree.

Partway into dinner Sylvie realized she was tipsy. She didn’t usually drink. Her dad topped her glass up with more wine. Everything tasted acidic, including the breaded mushrooms that her mum spooned tentatively onto Sylvie’s plate. More wine, a couple of crisps, more mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, a spoon of hummus. Sylvie spent the whole time dissociating and dreaming of him. Of Jay. It had been a while since she’d unfurled her imagination to its full wingspan. What was it about Jay? He was a big, shiny red button begging to be pushed. He was something with its own magnetic force, a small planet, a demigod.

When the wine was done, Sylvie’s dad mixed up some Pimm’s and kept refilling her glass like some benevolent medieval king. Sylvie savoured the sweet, fizzing raspberries and strawberries at the bottom of her glass. Fruit juice on her tongue. She looked down at the garden, the wide span of trimmed grass beyond the patio, the birds hopping along the fence at the end of it, animals calling to each other from deep in the woodland. The smell of wet grass and the sun setting over a purged sky, washed with periwinkle watercolour. Sylvie thought that the sky looked the same way she usually felt after a long cry, all damp eyelashes, renewal and peace.