Page 1 of The Wishing Tree Beside the Shor
Chapter 1
How can one man have so much dry-cleaning?
I hold the array of garment bags above my head as I step out of the tube train and go in the direction of the escalators. The platform is crammed even in the middle of the day and I can’t see where I’m going, so I’ve got a fair fifty-fifty chance of making it to the escalators or tumbling onto the tracks, which really would be the cherry on top of what was supposed to be my lunch break but has actually been spent arguing with a dry-cleaner who couldn’t grasp that a sequinned evening dress wasnotthe designer suit my boss made me drop off last week and took half an hour to find the correct dry-cleaning while I leaned against a washing machine and stuffed my sandwich down my throat amid looks dirtier than the laundry from customers and the tonsil-clenching acrid dust cloud from multiple sprinklings of laundry powder.
Even while trying to keep the bottoms of the garment bags off the floor, I tread on one and yank it taut, accidentally tripping over it and stumbling into a grumpy-looking man who turns and growls – actually growls – at me. I mumble an apology and try to fold the bags over my arm as I finally make it to the escalator and grip the side gratefully. The growling man is on the step above me and he turns around to give me another glare and I involuntarily take a step back and accidentally tread on someone’s toe. As I turn around to apologise profusely, the garment bags slip and get caught between the moving stairs, causing the entire escalator to let out a loud grinding noise as it hits the zip and judders to a halt with such a jarring screech of metal-on-metal that it’s almost as loud as the collective groan that goes up from the other passengers around me. I shrink into the side, trying to protect my boss’s trapped dry-cleaning, until the station staff finally close off the escalator and an engineer comes to cut the garment bags loose and repair the escalator while muttering about idiots trying to carry too much.
It feels like hours later when I finally emerge into the afternoon sunshine and hurry down the busy street towards the grey and foreboding office block, managing to keep the garment bags off the floor and only bump into a record number of people. Once I get into the building and through the foyer, I eye the lifts to take me up to the fourteenth floor but quickly think better of it. The way my day is going, there’s absolutely no way itwon’tget stuck. The stairs it is.
I regret the decision by the time I’ve made it up two flights, never mind the next twelve. It’s early August and the London heat is stifling. By the time I eventually crawl out of the stairwell, sweat is dripping down my face and there are wet patches under both arms, which makes meextraglad I wore a lilac shirt today. I’ve produced enough moisture that each plastic garment bag is stuck to me like someone’s liberally coated them in Pritt Stick.
I daren’t look at my watch. I’m going to be so lat—
‘Felicity!’
I know that tone in my boss’s bellow. Iamlate.
Conference room three, I repeat over and over in my head. My boss has got an important meeting this afternoon and being late will be another notch on the ever-increasing list of ways I’ve annoyed him lately. I keep my head down and pick up my pace as I hurry down the hallway, throw open the door of the conference room, tread on the bottom of a garment bag and trip myself up. I go careening into the room and land with a splat on top of the plastic and skid along like I’m on a homemade water slide.
‘Ah, there you are.’ My boss, Harrison, appears in the doorway behind me, looking down disdainfully while twirling his curly moustache around a pen. ‘I was waiting for you in the office but I see you’ve decided to barrel straight in. How nice of you to make time for work in your busy schedule.’
Harrison strides into the room, sidestepping me so expertly that it seems like flailing around on the floor is a regular occurrence.
‘Sorry, gents.’ He addresses the group of business-suited men around the long table, who are looking down at me with sneers on their haughty faces.
At least they can’t tell how embarrassed I am because my face is already red with heat and dripping with sweat as I pant to get my breath back and push myself upright.
Harrison uses his pen to point to a chair behind him like he’s training a dog to go round an obstacle course. I consider wagging my tail and offering him my paw, but the group of businessmen look like they’re in no mood for jokes.
I stumble to my feet and sink gratefully into the hard plastic chair, and after all the effort of keeping the garment bags smooth and straight, I drop them to the floor and kick them underneath, like if I can somehow hide them, all the embarrassment they’ve caused will go away.
I don’t even know why I’m here. It’s not like I bring anything to these meetings. Well, apart from the tea and coffee. That’s my job – sit at the edge of the room, take notes of anything my boss might need to remember, and also magically divine exactly what sort of things he might need to remember and usually get it wrong. I also refill anyone’s water glass when it looks a bit empty, and offer refreshments if there’s a lull in conversation or if a PowerPoint presentation stalls. A monkey could do my job, but a monkey would consider itself better qualified.
There’s something intimidating about the office being full of businessmen wearing suits that cost more than my yearly rent, with their smooth, slick hair that’s never so much as a breath out of place and the overpowering smell of their eye-wateringly expensive cologne – both eye-wateringandexpensive. I can’t tell the difference between the seven men sitting around the table – they could be the same man cloned. They’ve all got the same beady eyes, like they’re constantly looking out for the next money-making opportunity. People like me may as well not exist. As far as they’re concerned, despite my unmissable entrance, Harrison is the only person who’s walked into the room.
Which is probably a good thing considering I’m still so hot that I must be glowing, and not in a good way. In a sticky way, my face is so red that I feel like a lighthouse with a pulsing light on top, warning ships to stay away.
Despite being told to sit down like a naughty dog that’s just rolled in something nasty, I’m grateful to have a chance to rub the sweat out of my eyes and take a few minutes to try to regain some composure. I like that term. “Regain” makes it sound like I ever had any in the first place.
I have no idea what the meeting is about and I’ve forgotten who it’s with, but it’s someveryimportant client in the property development business, and this meeting is to secure a site that will be the first of many if it goes well. It’s one in a long line of meetings that are duller than actual dishwater – a regular occurrence when you work in the property acquisitions department of Landoperty Developments. We source land with development potential for big businesses who want to expand. Businesses come to us saying what they want to open and my boss finds a good area for them; alternatively my boss finds areas with untapped potential – like a busy tourist area that doesn’t have a café or a bar – we acquire it and then pitch it to businesses who might be interested in opening there. Usually they snap my boss’s hand off in their rush to accept and there’s often a bidding war over who gets to buy the space.
Something’s gone wrong with this one though. Harrison keeps muttering something about protesters and has groaned every time he’s looked at his computer in the last couple of weeks. I don’t blame protesters for protesting. We see so many beautiful, natural areas, and it always seems wrong to buy them up and sell them off to the highest bidder. I don’t know how I ended up in this job. It’s been four years since I started here, and still the only promotion I’ve ever had is being given a bigger desk.
I was hoping to work my way up from being an assistant – to prove my worth, and maybe one day, get projects of my own and get to travel the UK to scout locations for clients. I’d get to go out to sites in the beautiful Scottish Highlands or the Cornish coast and oversee sales of land and development. I picture myself striding along a beach with a clipboard and a hard hat … I don’t know why I picture either of those things because everyone uses tablets instead of clipboards these days, and our firm is out of the picture long before any construction begins so there’d be no need for a hard hat, but it’s a nice fantasy. It makes me feel like I could be important one day, and it’s more interesting than listening to my boss drone on about protestors.
There’s a little side table beside me, and the intern responsible for filling the drinks has thought to put out a box of tissues, so I surreptitiously reach over to grab one and try to mop my forehead, which is still prickling with sweat. I can feel it sliding down my spine and pooling at the base of my back. I’m going to stick to this chair if I try to get up. I make a squelching noise as I reach across, and the businessman nearest to me looks up. I freeze like a wild rabbit when you put the outside light on, like if I stay still, he somehow won’t notice me. It’s completely normal for assistants to sit in on meetings while striking a pose with a tissue in their hand as sweat drips casually down their face. He gives me the kind of look he’d give a bluebottle buzzing around the fruit bowl and looks back at the folder on the table in front of him.
Sweat chooses that moment to drip into my eyes, and I suck in a breath as it stings, causing the businessman to frown in my direction again. The bluebottle would probably be less annoying. At least he could squirt a fly with Raid. He can’t do that to me. With a bit of luck, anyway. I didn’t think this day could get much worse but a quick blast of Raid would certainly finish the job.
They must think I’m so unfit. Despite the smog and oppressive heat in the city today, the two fans at the other end of the room are not plugged in, and the sun is hitting the glass windows and turning everything inside into such a roasting greenhouse that we could grow coconuts and oranges indoors if we were so inclined, but not one of them looks hot or sweaty or uncomfortable in the slightest, and those wool-silk suits areheavy.
I mop my forehead yet again and while my boss is still going on about protestors and no one’s looking at me, I undo a button that’s stretching apart over my boobs and slip my hand inside my shirt, trying to reach across to an armpit to mop those as well.
And then one of the businessmen mentions “Lemmon Cove”. The words break through the overheated haze in my brain. Lemmon Cove is a place I try to think about as little as possible. Its name doesn’t belong in a London business meeting. One of the main reasons I live here is because it’s about as far as you can physically get from Lemmon Cove without crossing the channel.
‘That’s my hometown.’
Not only have I interrupted a Very Important Businessman, but I’ve got one arm behind my head and the other through the gap in my shirt, trying to mop up the opposite armpit with a disintegrating tissue. I am clearly the image of professionalism and poise.
