Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Sausages Read online

  Could what?

  She pulled up out of that one in a hurry, before the spin turned into a nosedive. Not all conveyancing trips are good experiences. There’s always the danger that you’ll find yourself face to face with something scary or depressing, such as a mirror.

  Now, she thought, would be a good time for the phone to ring. And, much to her surprise, it did.

  The caller was a solicitor in Evesham, and for a moment her heart crumpled with envy. Evesham, garden of England, apple blossom and golden stone soaked for centuries in pale autumn sunlight – not that she’d ever been there, but she’d seen it once on the Antiques Roadshow, a programme she heartily loathed – but, she thought, he’s just a solicitor like me. A mile from his office there may be orchards in bloom, but he spends his days doing this shit, same as I do. “Hello,” she said cheerfully. “What can I do for you?”

  It was all to do with some piece of paper, a damp-proof course inspection certificate or some such garbage. “You promised me you’d let me have it by the sixteenth,” he said (his voice was high, reedy and annoying; she pictured him as five feet four and looking a bit like William Hague). “Sorry to make a fuss about it, but I do need it before I can get back to the mortgagee.”

  Well, fair enough. “Sure,” she said. “I’ll get it in the post to you tonight.” And then she thought, Hold on. You promised me, but I’ve never heard of you before in my life.

  “All right,” he was saying. “But this time do please make sure. I’m in a chain here.”

  No, she thought, I’m not having that. “Just a moment,” she said.

  Not that she was after an apology, as such. But no, he insisted. He was adamant. He’d spoken to her the day before yesterday; no, not the receptionist, not a message while she was away from her desk. He had a note of the conversation on the file in front of him; Phoned BRHD, re dpc inspection cert. He distinctly recalled speaking to her.

  “But that’s not possible,” she repeated. “I’m sure I’ve never talked to you before.”

  “Yes, you have. On Tuesday. You promised me that certificate. I know it was you. I remember your voice.”

  Her eyebrows shot up like ducks off a dew pond. “Really? Why?”

  “It’s a nice voice.”

  Which shut her up like a clam for the next four seconds, a very long time in that context. “Thank you,” she mumble-squeaked. “But honestly, I don’t remember…”

  Her voice (her nice voice) tailed away and died, and there was another silence, long enough for both of them to grow prize entries for the Chelsea Stalactite Show, and then she said, “I’ll make sure it’s in tonight’s post,” and he said, “Look, if you could possibly see your way to getting it in tonight’s post,” simultaneously. Then a slightly shorter pause, and she asked, “Anyway, how is Evesham? I mean, is it nice?” and he said it was all right, and somehow, by a gigantic joint effort of will, they managed to kill the phone call off before it could do any more damage.

  Well, she thought, misunderstandings, misunderstandings. Obviously she hadn’t talked to the wretched man; she’d have remembered his voice sure enough, it was what you’d get if Dr Dolittle taught air brakes how to speak. On the other hand, her nice voice. So, logically, she had spoken to him and then forgotten all about it. That was, she supposed, mildly worrying, or she could make it so if she tried hard enough. She could convince herself that it was the early stages of short-term memory loss, or, if this was a movie, it’d be a clue to alert her to a missing day, leading to a storyline involving drug-induced amnesia and the CIA. At other times she might have been tempted, but today she lacked the mental energy and couldn’t be bothered. And anyway, she added to herself, I have got a nice voice, which is probably why people who meet me in the flesh for the first time always look so disappointed.

  Even the best pre-contract enquiries can’t be made to last for ever. She slung the finished form in her out tray and reached for the next file.

  Maybe it was her nice voice (she thought, as she floated through Requisitions on Title on 12 Where the Heart Is Terrace) that had got her the job in the first place. Hard to think what else it could have been. Sure, she was competent, she could do the work. Being able to do the work wasn’t the most stringent of criteria. But she knew for a fact that she’d been up against two dozen other applicants for the job, times being hard in the lawyering biz these days, and the specimens she’d met in the waiting room when she came in for interview had been vastly more impressive than her, at least in her opinion. Of course, a nice voice is a valuable asset. It can take you a long way – in radio, say, or when it comes to marrying a blind millionaire. True, a lot of her work was done over the phone, so it was probably just as well that the Voice of BRHD didn’t sound like a ferret in a blender. She weighed the argument and found it wanting. Another mystery; and that was the Recs on Title done, and that’s how we get through the day.

  Another file. Oh God, she thought, I remember this one: 14 Amazing Road, the bloody awkward one with the drainage easement, the one she kept putting off because it needed thinking about.

  Like a lion tamer armed with a fly whisk and a deckchair, she faced the problem and decided that today she’d be brave. It was, after all, only a matter of draughtsmanship, of finding the right combination of words to transfer a slab of territory subject to a few conditions. It couldn’t bite her or bash her over the head. True, it could make her lose her job, but so could lots of other things. The world is a dangerous place, after all. She opened the file and found the lethal document.

  She stared at it, then blinked and stared again. And thought, for the first time in years, of Terry Duckett.

  A tall ash-blond young man with a face like a pig, Terry had made salaried partner by the time he was thirty by timing his annual holiday with micromillimetre-perfect precision. Every difficult thing, everything he’d screwed up on or didn’t know how to do, he left to moulder quietly on the file, with a bare minimum of weeding and watering to ensure it didn’t actually die or turn septic, but with an eye constantly fixed on the clock and the calendar, and then he’d book his two weeks in Ibiza at exactly the point when every toxic chicken in his filing cabinet was due to come home to roost simultaneously. Result: while he was away, his co-workers charged with minding the store had to cope with a year’s backlog of poison, and Terry came back to his desk looking suitably tanned and dissipated with a squeaky-clean slate and a 100-per-cent record. Needless to say, everybody knew how he did it, but the sheer skill involved commanded unqualified respect and admiration. This man, the partners agreed, was born to delegate. We need him on the team.

  She dismissed Terry Duckett from her mind and checked the front cover of the file, just to be sure. Then she reread the perfectly, actually quite brilliantly worded drainage easement in the draft contract for 14 Amazing Road and said quietly to herself, I didn’t do that.

  The obvious temptation was to shrug, grin and get on with something else. There was, after all, an element of natural justice about it all. Why, after all, should shoemakers have all the luck? Why shouldn’t conveyancers also have kindly elves to help out with the daily chores? It was payback for all the times she’d been landed with Terry Duckett’s files. It was compensation for half a dozen cups of undrunk coffee. It was the perverse inexplicability of the universe doing something nice for a change. Don’t knock it. Put out a saucer of bread and milk, be grateful and move on.

  My mind’s going, she thought. In six months I’ll be in a home, with battleship-grey paintwork and the TV on all the time in the day room. Maybe (she shuddered at the thought) it was me all along: I drank the coffee and then forgot I’d done it.

  Thoughts don’t come much scarier than that, and the mild euphoria of the conveyancing high was gone for good. It was of course absolutely impossible that a healthy twenty-seven-year-old like her should be suffering from some ghastly brain-eating disease. She was annoyed with herself simply for letting the thought amble across her mind. She wasn’t like that, not one of
those sad people who spend their time wishing all manner of unspeakable ailments on themselves and treating medical dictionaries like mail order catalogues. On the contrary. She was so relentlessly healthy it was practically unfair. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a day off work for a cold or a sore throat or a sniffle.

  The door opened. She looked up and was annoyed to see a short, turkey-throated young man standing in the doorway. Alan Stevens, her head of department. She found the desiccated shell of a smile and put it on.

  “I thought you ought to know,” said Mr Stevens gravely. “We have a darts team.”

  His tone of voice went far beyond gravity. To get the full impression, imagine that what he’d actually said was, “Houston, we have a darts team.” Clearly there had to be more to it than that, and she waited patiently until he added, “We play in the London and Middlesex Young Lawyers’ League. Fourth division.”

  She nodded. “How many divisions…?”

  “Four. It’s a social activity,” he explained. “We feel it fosters a sense of community and teamwork, and there are first-rate opportunities for networking and establishing contacts within the profession.” He paused for a very long time, then added, “Can you play darts?”

  “My parents run a pub,” she replied. “Yes,” she translated. “Actually, I’m pretty good.”

  “Ah.” Mr Stevens frowned, giving the impression that dart-throwing ability wasn’t his main selection criterion. “Only,” he went on, “we’re playing Thames Water tomorrow evening, and Leo Fineman’s got an important meeting at half seven, so he’s had to drop out.”

  “Ah. Tomorrow evening.”

  “You’re busy, I’m sorry.” The speed with which Mr Stevens spoke annoyed the hell out of her for some reason. If he was disappointed, it was in the same way that water is dry. Silly, she thought; if he didn’t want her on the team, why’d he asked her in the first place? Answer: because she’d admitted to being good at the game, and it probably wouldn’t go down well, from a networking and contact-establishing viewpoint, if Thames Water’s star player got beaten by a girl. Not on my watch, his little piggy eyes were saying. In which case…

  “Nothing I can’t cancel,” she said, perfectly truthfully as it happened. “Tell me where and when, and I’ll be there.”

  Mr Stevens was wearing a wounded look, as though he’d just been tricked into doing something ghastly by someone he believed he could trust. “That’s great,” he said. “We’ll meet up here at seven and go on together.”

  He left, looking very sad, and about thirty seconds after the door closed behind him she felt the another-fine-mess reaction that she knew so well. Idiot, she told herself. You could have lied. You could even have told the truth. But no. Instead, you volunteer to join the office darts team, just because an annoying man annoyed you. Must stop doing things like that.

  She sighed. The world would be an OK sort of place if it wasn’t for people. It was just as well, she thought, that she’d taken her I-don’t-really-want-to-be-here party dress in to be cleaned the day before yesterday. It was the only garment she possessed which was anything like suitable for such an occasion. The thought of going to an office darts match in an article of clothing she actually liked was rather more than she could bear.

  (And then she thought, Yes, but it’s taken your mind off that other business, hasn’t it? And now you’ve got over the panic you somehow contrived to whisk yourself up into, you don’t really believe it any more. See? All for the best, really.)

  The hell with it, she thought, and went to the kitchen for another coffee. She took it back to her office and put it down on her desk, where she could keep an eye on it while she was working. Then, after about five minutes, she deliberately got up and left the room.

  In the corridor she ran into the boss. The great man himself, not a spokesman or a representative, not a lookalike hired to foil kidnappers. She knew it was him because his picture was everywhere: framed on walls, smiling gleaming-toothed from brochure covers and in-house newsletters. Actually meeting him was faintly surreal. You’re supposed to be flat, what are you doing in three dimensions? Also, he wasn’t smiling, Mr Huos was like the Mona Lisa and the Cheshire Cat. He was the smile.

  She tried to slip past, but her personal invisibility field wasn’t working. He noticed her. Worse, he spoke.

  “Polly Mayer?”

  Oh shit, she thought. “Yes, that’s me.”

  “Ah, right. I was just coming to see you.”

  “Me?”

  Slight frown. “Yes,” he said. “Got a minute?”

  This from the man who owned her daytimes. “Yes, of course. Um, come into my office.”

  Of course, it was his office really. Rumour had it that BRHD actually owned the freehold to this vast, centrally located castle of commerce. If true, it was a staggering display of reckless indulgence. She opened the door for him, but he didn’t go in. There was an awkward pause while she wondered what the matter was.

  “After you,” he said.

  She went in but didn’t sit down. She couldn’t figure out which chair to sit in. Normally, of course, she’d sit on the far side of the desk, in her chair, because it was her chair, in her room. But you couldn’t very well expect the owner, master of all he surveyed, to park his bum in the visitor’s chair (small, plastic, stacking) while she luxuriated in foam-backed swiveldom. It’d be like Captain Kirk taking the ops station while Chekov sat in the centre seat.

  Get a grip, she ordered herself. “Please,” she heard herself say, “sit down.”

  Mr Huos sat on the visitor’s chair and smiled at her. Normality at least partially restored.

  “Um,” she said, perching on her chair (not sitting back and stretching the spring, just in case it broke), “what can I do for you?”

  It turned out to be nothing more than routine enquiries about the progress of half a dozen ordinary, everyday sales. As she answered the questions, he nodded, frowning slightly. He looked ever so slightly worried, which scared the life out of her, but when the interrogation was over, he smiled again, thanked her politely and stood up as if to go.

  “How are you settling in, by the way?” he asked.

  If she’d been a cat, her ears would’ve been right back. She knew that question, or at least she knew the way in which he’d asked it. The Columbo technique: make ’em think they’ve got away with it and you’re going, then at the last moment turn round and hit them with the real question, the one you can’t answer without giving the game away.

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Splendid.” He frowned again. “No problems, then.”

  “No.”

  He nodded. “All the files in good order?”

  She had to replay that a couple of times in her mind before she figured out what it meant. “Fine,” she said.

  “That’s good. Only,” he went on, and the frown deepened, “the girl who was here before you left in a bit of a hurry. I was afraid she might have left you with a bit of a mess.”

  “No, not at all. Everything’s…” She ran out of words and did a goldfish impression.

  “Fine?” he suggested.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s all right, then.” A slight pause, during which he didn’t leave the room. “Alan Stevens tells me he’s recruited you for the darts team.”

  Now she was being a goldfish with a sore throat trying to do long division in its head. No words, not even a grunt. So she nodded.

  “Great stuff,” said Mr Huos. “Best of luck. I’ll try and look in on the match if I’ve got time. When’s kick-off ?”

  She heard herself mutter something about the team meeting up in the lobby about seven. It seemed to do the trick. He smiled, said, “Drink your coffee before it gets cold,” and left, closing the door behind him.

  She sat quite still for ninety seconds, then reached for the phone and dialled a number.

  “What?” a man’s voice snarled at the end of the line.

  “Don.”
/>   “Sis?” A moment of bleary confusion followed by an explosion of righteous fury. “Sis, for crying out loud, it’s the middle of the bloody night.”

  She sighed. “Draw the curtains,” she said.

  “What? Oh. Hold on.” Short pause, whizzing noise offstage. Then, “What’s the time?”

  “It’s a quarter to one, you idle sod. Don’t tell me you’re still in bed.”

  “Of course not,” her brother replied haughtily. “I had to get up to answer the phone. What’s up?”

  She hesitated. “So, how’s things?”

  “What? Oh, fine. You didn’t call me in the –” he paused “– in the early hours of the morning just to ask after my well-being. What’s the matter?”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Finished,” he replied smugly. “Well, nearly. Just needs a final polish.”

  Her brother Donald composed jingles for radio stations, for which he got paid what Polly considered to be obscene amounts of money. It was ludicrous, she maintained, that he earned the equivalent of a quarter of her annual salary for juxtaposing seven musical notes. He rebutted her accusations by saying that compressing the very essence of a daily two-hour radio show, listened to by millions, into a mere seven notes was a work of genius, which should be remunerated accordingly. Just needs a final polish probably meant he’d made up his mind to start work on it tomorrow. He was, in short, the most aggravating person she’d ever met: infuriatingly lazy, unforgivably talented, luckier than a shedful of cats. It wouldn’t be so bad if he lived a life of reckless dissipation. But he didn’t smoke or drink, he only ate organic vegetables, and he hadn’t been on a date in three years. The last item, she had to concede, wasn’t through choice. He wasn’t so bad-looking, in a bony, unfinished sort of a way (seated, he tended to remind her of a dismantled tent); his problem was a total refusal to compromise for the sake of making himself agreeable. He didn’t do small talk. If he was bored, he yawned or looked out of the window while scratching his ear, or (if the assignation was in a pub) leaned slightly sideways so he could see past her and watch the football on the big screen. He had all the social skills of a hand grenade; what was worse, he knew it and didn’t seem to care.