They only talked for five minutes and Diane didn’t tell her what to do, but Margaret felt better than she had in weeks when she hung up. Diane didn’t have an opinion. It really was up to Margaret. Diane talked about her experience – how it was hard to know where to get sex when you didn’t drink. Talking about it shone some light on it and in the light Margaret could see it for what it was – there were corners she hadn’t seen into before. Sometimes she went to the old solutions for new problems. Sometimes, when you’d used a hammer for a long time, even if it was a long time ago, every problem still looked like a nail.

32

32

Margaret looked at the clock at the bottom of the screen. It was 3:30am.

It had been a busy night on the sports website. She was barely getting away with just working at night. Every couple of days there would be a message from the head moderator saying something like ‘Did you see this?’ and ‘I think this needs faster attention’. She’d reply. Buy herself more time. Sometimes she logged in to the moderation board at work, at lunchtimes. She wasn’t supposed to, had to do it in secret, minimising the screen to the point it was useless anyway. Really all she was doing was logging in, so it looked like she was working. She wasn’t able to work. They monitored everything at the call centre. Duncan called her in and showed her the log and the first few times she said she must have done it by mistake. It was a lame excuse, but she just needed a bit more time.

‘Greta,’ he said. ‘You can’t do this.’

She nodded. The next time he called her into the office he gave them both a verbal warning. She was going to say ‘It was an accident’ again, but they both knew she’d signed in and visited a couple of pages and that was not what people did when they were accidentally somewhere.

She continued to be weird at work. The tiredness was adding to it. She couldn’t carry on even the most mundane conversations. Donna and Mira had stopped asking if they wanted to go out for lunch in the weekend. She sat by herself in the staffroom at the short breaks, or went for a walk outside. She gave everyone a bad feeling.

Eventually no one stopped by Peggy and Greta’s desk anymore and Margaret started eating lunch at it every day, so she never saw anyone in the staffroom and she always made sure to walk to the train station by herself. Sometimes she’d get on the train early and one of their workmates would come on the train, see her and pretend they hadn’t so they could sit somewhere else.