Page 3 of One Summer

Two

Feathers

This is apparently quite the wrong thing to say, because it seems to offend Scotty quite a lot. But then, why ask the question if he didn’t want the answer?

‘Right, then,’ he says. ‘A random bird is more interesting than me – your boss – who is trying to communicate something very important to you right now – that’s what you’re telling me? Really, Lindy?’

Again, I’m not quite sure how to answer this, so I stick to the factual.

‘Some of its feathers,’ I say, with all due gravity, ‘were white.’

He turns his head to take a look for himself and the bird immediately flies away.

‘So, a magpie,’ he says. ‘Wonderful. Now I’ll have bad luck all day.’

He touches a turquoise fleck on his otherwise electric-blue necktie and says under his breath, ‘Touch green, never seen,’ which surprises me, because Scotty really doesn’t seem like the superstitious type. He seems like the type to run all his decisions through a computer algorithm before dividing his choices into sub-categories and deciding which path would be the most ‘agile’.

‘It wasn’t a magpie,’ I say, doing the correcting thing again that I really need to stop doing, because it just gets people’s backs up. ‘Trust me.’

‘I don’t trust you, Lindy, and that’s a problem. You keep messing up. Not just today, not just this week, or this month; I’m talking about since you started three years ago. I don’t know where your mind is, but it’s not here in the room with the rest of you.’

It’s true. My mind is not here. Because here is so boring that I could curl up on the hard, marble floors and cast myself into an instant sleep. My brain hates everything about this place: the smell of the polish, the buzz of the overhead lighting, even the creepily smooth feel of the keyboard under my fingers. My workday is basically me counting down the minutes until I can go home, while resentfully carrying out whatever mind-numbing tasks Scotty assigns me. I’d love to enjoy my work, but I just don’t think it’s possible in this job – not with Scotty in charge, anyway, and given it’s his father’s company, I’d doubt he’ll be leaving anytime soon.

‘Sorry,’ I say, absently.

I’m not remotely sorry. The sight of a rare crow is probably the only pleasure I’ll get in this entire working day. Of course I’m going to notice it. I can’t quite remember the name for the mutation, although it’s on the tip of my tongue. It’s not albinism, it’s something else. Leucism. That’s it. A partial loss of pigmentation. It was a leucistic crow.

My lips part as I go to tell Scotty this, to correct his error about the magpie with the scientifically accurate term, but he’s still glaring at me. Possibly even more fiercely than he was before, which takes some doing.

‘Lindy,’ he says, raising his voice to just a smidge beneath a shout. ‘Are you listening? We need to solve this problem or “this situation” is not going to work out.’

He actually does the air quotes. It’s impossible to take air-quoters seriously. He’s undermined himself completely with the deployment of four fingers.

‘I’ll redo the pages,’ I say, trying not to smile, because this all seems like a lot of fuss over twenty wasted pages of A4 paper, especially when I know for a fact that he uses the office printers to print out reams of his work-in-progress science fiction novel, the one that he’s been writing in secret for the past two years. I’ve seen it in the printer history, so of course I printed it out again and took a copy home.

It was astonishingly detailed, with some absolutely beautiful imagery and incredible world-building. But in the fifty-plus pages of description that I read – of alien worlds and the tech on moon bases – there was not a single line of dialogue. Not one. And you’d think, as a publisher, he’d know that characters talking to each other was important. But it just hadn’t seemed to have occurred to him.

I could never admit to having read it, though, as he’d have blown a gasket, so I couldn’t offer him that particular critique. He’d have fired me on the spot.

Which, I realise belatedly, is what he’s threatening me with now.

Damn it. I may hate this job, but I really need it.

‘No more mistakes, Lindy. I mean it. I’m rapidly running out of patience with your failures. You are not an ingenue starring in your own romantic comedy. You are merely a sub-standard employee.’

‘WOW. And also: ouch,’ I say, feeling my cheeks flush as I imagine having to tell Max and my parents that I’ve lost my foot-in-the-door-of-publishing job for being low-level, yet consistently, crap.

‘I’m sorry to be so blunt, Lindy, but you don’t seem to hear criticism unless it’s delivered in the meanest possible way.’

‘That kind of sounds like victim-blaming, Scotty,’ I say, before I can stop myself.

The vein in his forehead is throbbing, and I can tell I’ve really done it now.

‘YOU ARE NOT THE VICTIM! YOU ARE THE PROBLEM!’ he bellows.

‘I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again,’ I say, trying not to laugh, because he looks so comical when he’s angry. I give him a shamefaced little nod and rise to leave.

He exhales through gritted teeth, his face going from puce to its normal pink.

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