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Holly had always felt like a big sister to Lockwood. From the moment she had met him, she had realized that he was in need of someone who organized, who was efficient, who would look after his affairs and that of his business. It wasn’t as if she didn’t need something, too – an escape from Rotwell’s attentions and the stiffness of an unfriendly office environment, but she had more to offer him than he had to offer her, at a technical level. She saw how that big smile covered his uncomfortableness and uncertainty, knew that he was wondering whether he was making the right choice in hiring an assistant, as he didn’t even have any guidelines for what she would do. It was very similar to how everyone thought her neat and stylish appearance meant that she was that way in every other area of her life, although she herself could see the cracks every time she looked in the mirror – a father who hated her sexuality, a mother who was barely involved in her life. She only happened to like taking care of her appearance and to be good at it. It was soothing, something to take up time, something to love – perhaps the only thing left to love about her.
Others liked to take care of it and were bad at it, and some didn’t like to take care of it and were bad it – like Lucy. Lucy’s feelings showed on her face. She was silent about them otherwise, badgering other people away from them in ill-temper, but her frown, in which her lips tended to disappear, was frequent. Just because it looked that way, clients, especially elderly ones, tended not to like her very much; manners such as Lockwood’s were much more a thing of their own lives – the kids’ past – and they looked to Lockwood with hope and trust.
To Holly, so much was obvious – but there was so much she didn’t say. She didn’t tell Lucy that Lockwood liked her, because that would cause even more of a rumpus in a house of uneven feelings. Lockwood, who disguised all those fluctuations with his waves of energy, neglected his paperwork – and for all his genius at planning and strategizing when it came to keeping a business going (a difficult feat at his young age; Holly felt badly for and admiring of that), he didn’t realize that he could make much more money if he eliminated the stone-knockers and other Type 1 cases from his roster and focused on the prestigious, heavy Type 2 cases. He didn’t mind the change at all in concept. It was just that he was a little inexperienced and a smidge unfocused.
So when Holly sat at the typewriter and sorted the schedule out, what she thought about was not the ribbons and make-up kits that Lucy seemed to think she must obsess about, but about ways to love herself and the ways in which she hated herself. Neatly letting her pinkies fly and pointed fingers consistently press against the keys, posture ergonomically laudable, eyes diligently on her task, outfit neat despite ink spills and the occasional powdered sugar or apple core that appeared out of nowhere in her work space, Holly was utterly removed from everything, including herself.
She was reliving memories of her parents’ house in London, almost as transparent as ghosts at times, and almost as concrete as the parking garage at Fittes. Unwilling to dwell on them, she pushed them away with varying degrees of success. When the time actually came to take care of herself, with meals and baths and clothes, all those physical things became the soothing way to ignore the stress of jobs and family.
Lockwood didn’t really have a way to ignore his own stresses, because he wasn’t even willing to admit them. She hoped, entirely in a business-like way, coworker to coworker, that she was providing an environment in which he could get a little more sleep, make a little more money, and hang out with his friends a little more. For Chrissakes, the boy was sixteen! he would, if in school or not so isolated from the non-supernatural world, enjoy a girlfriend and be the instigator of countless practical jokes among a dozen vociferous, thoughtless boys. Instead, he was coming in at three-thirty in the morning, tottering from lack of sleep, to doze restlessly until eight or nine or ten, talk with George and Lucy (all of them apathetic and woozy and cranky from stress), and then go out and do all of it all over again at night.
By all of it, Holly meant, that stuff – that stuff too terrible to mention – that involved people falling off roofs, and ghosts rushing you to burn you with ectoplasm, and middle-graders screaming their death screams, and callous supervisors making you do it more, and tentative supervisors’ trembling voices letting you know that there was no reason to be brave. This was never a job meant for Holly Munro, and yet it was what she had to do to become independent, have an apartment of her own, to share with whomever she wanted. To get rid of her father’s flushed face yelling at her, eyes not even his own anymore from how much he was focused on what he hated. To get rid of her mother’s passive, downcast eyes, settled on whatever knitting project or book society for the neighborhood ladies she was putting together. Holly Munro was lonely, and capable: why not a group-job that required more specialization and tact than any other job in Great Britain?
Because she wasn’t strong enough, it turned out.
Holly liked to think she was strong. She liked to do work-outs and lift weights, to use the machines at the gym, to train, to run – but it turned out that was taking care of oneself, just oiling the machinery, not muscle-power or will-power. Calming morning yoga (she agreed with George on that) or a reflective walk at night on the beach – that was what she needed. Everything needed to calm down, and all her energy was put into de-ionizing her environment so that it could hold her without hurting her.
She really admired people who didn’t need to or couldn’t do this, such as Lucy. At her very first meeting with Lockwood, the boy had enthusiastically paraded the girl’s accomplishments, her apparent fearlessness, her power, her fortitude. Holly had – her face impassive in the moment – reflected that Lucy sounded exactly like what she should have been in her group situation at Rotwell: someone who could save her team-mates, save herself, instead of huddling in a corner, crying, not knowing what to do, not finding the strength or improvisational powers to move, for God’s sake. Lucy was much younger than Holly, but Holly daydreamed about confiding in Lucy about her rooftop experience, all her teammates’ dying, her trauma, her quaking fear, her inability to hold the past back from the present.
Lucy’s surliness had proved her to be too much an unaware teen to realize how much Holly was suffering. Whenever Holly tried to be included in group activities with the Portland Row family, all of a sudden, something was wrong, and Holly knew it was her. She didn’t belong in the family piece. She belonged in the business piece, and that was because she was aware. She was mature. She was a grown-up. She didn’t need to reach out to Lucy; what she really needed was to get on with her own life, stoically accept the diffidence she felt whenever Lucy insulted her and Lockwood was bewildered – George, she felt, could hold his own and knew, as she did, that Lockwood and Lucy had an energy between them that would threaten any group dynamic – and focus on what she could control.
Do her own thing. Be herself. Do what little she could for these poor children during business hours.