Chapter Twenty One

It wasn’t magic, but they did a competent enough job. The worst of it was that Sorcha actually found it easier with Norman with her: they fell into a well-practiced double act, with her supplying the detail as he lead the way. As the meeting finally broke up, she heard Norman suggest to Gordon that he needed to pull multiple cats out of a large number of bags, fast: Gordon didn’t respond to the comment at all, and just stood, motionless, with his eyes looking slightly damp. Norman also encouraged the client to meet with them again in a couple of days to take stock. But the reality was that the deal was dead, and she was going to have even more of a problem with her billings than she had thought. Which meant that there were at least two good reasons why she was likely to be fired, to add to the pains in her head, the scars on her body, and a rather scrawny pop star who kept getting muddled up in her thoughts.

Her attempt to make a quick escape and find some thinking time was thwarted at the lifts: the doors had almost closed when Norman’s foot thrust between the doors and forced them back. Even inanimate objects seemed to be conspiring against her.

“Team drinks this evening, little one.”

Sorcha shut her eyes and groaned. She had been telling herself that all she needed to do was keep her act together for another couple of hours, and that the torture would at least then stop for a while. The drinks were in her diary, but she had got used to ignoring them.

“You haven’t been to one for months. Tim and Neil are away, so we both need to show our faces. And it’s about time you paid, too, otherwise the rest of us are going to start billing you for your share.”

The cost wasn’t the issue, and he knew it.

“I was hoping to spend the evening looking for a very small hole to crawl into. I’m really not sure that I can face drinks.”

Norman was in steamroller-professional mode, and deliberately not seeing her distress. Sorcha was cowering in the back corner of the lift, looking ashen, with her arms crossed defensively over her chest, which made her distress hard to miss.

“Of course you can. I think this lot is at Spoonbills: they do at least do decent martinis.” They had got to Sorcha’s floor, and Norman held the lift doors to deliver his final salvo. “I’d keep an eye on young Mr Marshall, though. I’m not sure whether he’s got it in for you, or whether he’s just particularly stupid, but he knew that we were trying to get hold of you this morning and chose to ignore the messages.”

Young Mr Marshall was the trainee who currently shared her office, and who had been sitting next to her for most of the day. Her guess was that it was abject stupidity, rather than anything else, but she still didn’t trust herself not to assault him, too, and to make a rather better job of it than she had with Norman. She retreated to the ladies, and spent ten minutes doing breathing exercises behind a locked cubicle door, before once more reaching for the lipgloss, and then facing the world again.

Admittedly, later in the bar, when young Mr Marshall started quizzing her particularly insistently about the partner remuneration structure, she could quite cheerfully have glassed him. The worst of it was that he seemed to have chosen it as a topic of conversation because it was something that he thought would be of particular interest to her. Somehow Sorcha managed to take another very deep breath, and just tell him ever so nicely that she would rather have root canal work than carry on talking to him for even another ten seconds. Norman had shown up at the beginning of the evening, made a lot of noise to make sure that everyone noticed that he was there, and had then disappeared again, which had at least removed one potential hazard. But even without him, it was still hard work: Sorcha moved on, only to get stuck in a slightly surreal conversation with one of the senior associates about how exciting she had found it that Sorcha had nearly died. The senior associate wasn’t even that drunk, which made Sorcha wonder if she needed to get HR to check her out.

It was almost a relief when her phone rang, until she saw Norman’s name flashing up on the screen. She also had two missed calls, presumably because it was noisy with chatter and jazz and she just hadn’t heard it ring. She had to tiptoe between the laptop bags to get away from the bar, but it wasn’t until she was out on the street that she could actually hear what was happening at the other end of the line. Norman seemed to be protesting, slightly muffled, in the distance, but it was a woman’s voice speaking.

“Soooorcha. Long time no speak, deary. Will you come and join us? Norman would love to see you again, wouldn’t you love.” the noises in the background suggested that he wasn’t wholly in agreement, but that something was stopping him getting to the phone. “He’s decided that scars suit him, you see.”

Whoever it was, they were teetering on the brink of finding themselves very, very funny.

“I’m sorry. Who’s speaking? I think you may have the wrong number.”

Laughter at the other end of the line descended into giggling.

“Don’t be stupid, deary. Of course I haven’t got the wrong number. I phoned it at least fifteen times a day for three years. And I’d just love to see you strutting your stuff with Normy: I reckon he’s different with you. More masterful.”

She lingered over each syllable, just to make sure. Whatever else it was, it wasn’t funny.

“Caroline?”

“Who else? How the hell are you, my dear?”

“What the hell do you want?”

“Well, a bit of girl-on-girl action would be nice, but I’d be happy just to sit and watch.”

Sorcha suddenly ran out of innocent hypotheses to explain what was going on. Her response was not exactly sophisticated, but then nothing else about the situation was either.

“Are you out of your mind? Just fuck right off!”

“Oooooo. No need to be tetchy about it. I just thought you could do with some fun.”

Sorcha poked hard at the hang-up button, and stood staring at the sky, which was at least rather more interesting than her kitchen ceiling. Her phone rang again, and again it was Norman’s number flashing. She answered in the hope that he was calling back to apologize, but it was Caroline again.

“I hung onto your old Blackberry on the last replacement round. I’ve fished it out of the cupboard and left it on your desk. If you put your SIM in there, it should at least work for messages until you get a new one.”

Then she hung up, before Sorcha could think of anything to say.