Page 2 of One Summer

‘Cocaine was perfectly legal then,’ she reads off my screen. ‘Hmm. Well, clearly I’d drink Coke if it actually contained coke – especially if you could get a two-litre bottle for £1.95.’

I hear my name. My boss is calling me, at maximum volume, which is never a good sign.

I pause outside his office door and look at his nameplate. Scotty Sandlington-Loveband.

What even is a ‘loveband’? It sounds… euphemistic, to say the least.

And not ‘Scott’, no: Scotty. Beam me the heck up already.

I slide my hand into my jacket pocket and my fingers find the trader’s token from the 1650s that Max gave me one Valentine’s Day. It’s weirdly comforting. This tiny coin, privately issued by the owner of a pub called the Blue Bell, near the terrible Newgate Prison, was made when small change issued by the government was in short supply and traders made their own tokens, for use in the local shops around their premises. Max plucked this little coin from the Thames mud – something that had been sitting there for hundreds of years until his sharp eye picked it out, and might have sat there for hundreds more. He told me afterwards that he’d discovered the Blue Bell pub was named after the blue-toned hand bell that tolled twelve times at the stroke of midnight, as a death knell, outside the cells of condemned prisoners who would be sent to the hangman’s noose the next day. We could actually go and see the infamous bell, Max told me, because it had been preserved and was on display in a local church. As he spoke, I could see in his eyes that he hadn’t realised the specialness of what he was giving me as a Valentine’s gift and that he longed to take it back, but when I offered to return the token, he wouldn’t accept – his sense of chivalry was too refined to allow it – and now that little coin makes me feel connected to him whenever we’re apart, and we seem to be apart a lot lately.

‘We have a problem, Lindy,’ Scotty says, not looking up from his computer monitor. His yellow hair is centre-parted with a liberal application of strong-hold gel and he’s munching his way through a tube of Pringles. He doesn’t offer me one. It’s this sort of self-centred, Pringle-hoarding meanness that I’ve come to expect from Scotty. Whenever I bring in food, I always offer it around to everyone, and Scotty always takes me up on a free crisp – a handful of crisps, in fact – but he never shares his own snacks, which fosters resentment in the office. At least in my corner of it.

‘I said we have a problem,’ he repeats, breaking my silent communion with his Pringles.

‘Oh dear. Another one?’ I say, faux cheerfully, but inwardly bracing for impact. I can tell by the tone of his voice that he’s going to give me a bollocking, most likely for some minor offence that wouldn’t bother him in the slightest if Henny did it. He likes Henny. She doesn’t grate on him the way I do. He finds her personality traits quirky and refreshing. Whereas every element of my character seems to leave him exasperated.

‘You’ve made another mistake, yes,’ he says, clicking his mouse button and sending off an email with a whoosh. ‘I know this is not your first choice of occupation, but this is the one you have, and it would be nice if you put some effort in.’

‘Not my first choice of occupation?’ I echo, trying to sound nonplussed, as if I have no idea what he could possibly be referring to.

I mean, he’s right: this isn’t my first choice of occupation, but how does he know that? Is he telepathic? Is that how he’s climbed his way up the greasy pole of publishing – reading everybody’s thoughts and blackmailing them?

‘Henny mentioned that you’ve been taking a jewellery-making course in the evenings with a view to starting your own business. Silversmithing and semi-precious gemstone-setting, correct?’

Bloody Henny. You just can’t tell her anything. A shameless blabber. This is exactly why I have to stop going for after-work drinks when she invites me. She’s just so fun, though, that I can’t resist her.

‘It’s a hobby,’ I say, trying to ignore his smirk. ‘It’s not like I’m going to make a career out of it, which Henny knows.’

She’ll just have said it to wind him up. He already thinks I’m flaky and this will tip him over the edge.

‘Well, until you’ve leased premises in Hatton Garden, perhaps you could pay more attention to your actual job instead of sexting your boyfriend and chatting to Henrietta about absolute drivel?’

He’s got a point about the drivel, but Henny starts it and it’s not like I can just ignore her. She’s my colleague. ‘If she tells me something, I have to respond. Sitting in silence would just be rude. And I never sext in work time,’ I say. ‘That would be unprofessional.’

He raises an eyebrow at me. Once, shortly after I first started, he caught sight of a slightly risqué selfie on my phone and he hasn’t stopped alluding to it since, which I think must be a breach of the employee handbook, but I can’t find the relevant paragraph, despite quite a lot of looking.

‘Your whole modus operandi is unprofessional,’ he says. ‘Hence the problem.’

‘What did I do this time?’ I ask, a touch of hauteur in my voice.

‘You’ve photocopied completely the wrong material.’

I try to work out how I’ve managed to achieve this particular cock-up, but come up blank, because he was the person who told me which material to photocopy.

‘You said in your email the pages to photocopy and that’s exactly what I did,’ I point out. ‘I checked the numbers at least three times.’

‘That’s what I said in the first email, yes, but I sent a follow-up email with different information. Did you even bother to read my second email?’

I didn’t, but only because Henny was appalling me with her frogspawn beverage and dating disasters.

‘Um…’

I look over his shoulder to a bird sitting on the window ledge. It seems to be a crow of some kind, but it has a mutation, because a few of its wing feathers are white.

‘Please tell me, Lindy,’ he says, ‘what are you looking at that’s so much more interesting than what I am saying to you right now?’

‘A sort of… mutant crow.’

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