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Meeting dismissed.

      Lou felt like he was in the middle of a nightmare; everything was falling apart, all his good work was being sabotaged.

      ‘Well, that was a disappointing meeting. I thought he was going to tell us about who was taking over when he leaves,’ Alfred said lazily. ‘Not a word out of him, would you believe. I really think he owes it to us to let us know, but I have been in the company longer than you, so …’

      ‘Alfred?’ Lou stared at him with amazement.

      ‘What?’ Alfred took a packet of chewing gum out of his pocket and threw one into his mouth. He offered one to Lou, who shook his head wildly.

      ‘I feel like I’m in the twilight zone. What the hell is going on here?’

      ‘You’re hungover is what’s going on. You look more like the homeless man than the homeless man himself,’ Alfred laughed. ‘And you should really take one of these,’ he offered the mint gum again, ‘your breath stinks of vomit.’

      Lou waved them away again.

      ‘Why didn’t you tell me about the dinner, Alfred?’ he said angrily.

      ‘I told you,’ Alfred said, smacking the gum in his mouth. ‘I definitely told you. Or I told Alison. Or was it Alison? Maybe it was the other one, the one with the really big boobs. You know, the one you were banging?’

      Lou stormed off on him then and headed straight to Alison’s desk, where he threw the details of that evening’s dinner on her keyboard, stopping the acrylic nails from tapping.

      She narrowed her eyes and read the brief.

      ‘What’s this?’

      ‘A dinner tonight. A very important one. At eight p.m. That I have to be at.’ He paced the area before her while she read it.

      ‘But you can’t, you have the conference call.’

      ‘I know, Alison,’ he snapped. ‘But I need to be at this.’ He stabbed a finger on the page. ‘Make it happen.’ He rushed into his office and slammed the door. He froze before he got to his desk. On the surface his mail was laid out.

      He backtracked and opened his office door again.

      Alison, who had snapped to it quickly, hung up the phone and looked up at him. ‘Yes?’ she said eagerly.

      ‘The mail.’

      ‘Yes?’

      ‘When did it get here?’

      ‘First thing this morning. Gabe delivered it the same time as always.’

      ‘He can’t have,’ Lou objected. ‘Did you see him?’

      ‘Yes,’ she said, concern on her face. ‘He brought me a coffee too. Just before nine, I think.’

      ‘But he can’t have. He was at my house,’ Lou said, more to himself.

      ‘Em, Lou, just one thing before you go … Is this a bad time to go over some details for your dad’s party?’

      She’d barely finished her sentence before he’d gone back into his office and slammed the door behind him.

      There are many types of wake-up calls in the world. For Lou Suffern, a wake-up call was a duty for his devoted BlackBerry to perform on a daily basis. At six a.m. every morning, when he was in bed both sleeping and dreaming at the same time, thinking of yesterday and planning tomorrow, his BlackBerry would dutifully and loudly ring in an alarming and screeching tone purposely uneasy on the ear. It would reach out from the bedside table and prod him right in the subconscious, taking him away from his slumber and dragging him into the world of the awakened. When this happened, Lou would wake up; eyes closed, then open. Body in bed, then out of bed; naked, then clothed. This, for Lou, was what waking up was about. It was the transition period from sleep to work.

      For other people wake-up calls took a different form. For Alison at the office it was the pregnancy scare at sixteen that had forced her to make some choices; for Mr Patterson it was the birth of his first child that had made him see the world in a different light and affected every single decision he made. For Alfred it was his father’s loss of their millions when Alfred was twelve years of age that forced him to attend state school for a year, and although they had returned to their wealthy state without anybody of importance knowing about the family hiccup, this experience changed how he saw life and people forever. For Ruth, her wake-up call was when, on their summer holidays, she walked in on her husband in their bed with their twenty-six-year-old Polish nanny. For little Lucy at only five years old, it was when she looked out at the audience of her school play and saw an empty seat beside her mother. There are many types of wake-up calls, but only one that holds any real importance.

      Today, though, Lou was experiencing a very different kind of wake-up call. Lou Suffern, you see, wasn’t aware that a person could be awakened when their eyes were already open. He didn’t realise that a person could be awakened when they were already out of their bed, dressed in a smart suit, doing deals and overseeing meetings. He didn’t realise a person could be awakened when they considered themselves to be calm, composed and collected, able to deal with life and all it had to throw at them. The alarm bells were ringing, louder and louder in his ear, and nobody but his subconscious could hear them. He was trying to knock it off, to hit the snooze button so that he could nestle down in the lifestyle he felt cosy with, but it wasn’t working. He didn’t know that he couldn’t tell life when he was ready to learn, but that life would teach him when it was good and ready. He didn’t know that he couldn’t press buttons and suddenly know it all; that it was the buttons in him that would be pressed.

      Lou Suffern thought he knew it all.

      But he was only about to scratch the surface.

       17.

       Bump in the Night

      At seven p.m. that evening, when the rest of his colleagues had been spat out of the office building and then sucked in by the spreading Christmas mania outside, Lou Suffern remained inside at his desk, feeling less like the dapper businessman and more like Aloysius, the schoolboy on detention, whom he’d fought so hard over the years to leave behind. Aloysius stared at the files on the desk before him with all the same excitement as being faced with a plate of veg, their very green existence presiding over his freedom. On discovering there was absolutely no possibility for Lou to cancel or rearrange the conference call, a seemingly genuinely disappointed Alfred had given Lou his best puppy eyes and gone into damage-limitation mode, sucking up any hint of involvement in the cock-up with all the strength of a Dyson, and worked on the best methods to approach the deal. As convincing as always, Alfred left Lou unable to remember what his issue had been with him in the first place, wondering why he’d blamed him for this mess at all. Alfred had this effect on people time and time again, taking the same course as a boomerang that had been dragged through shit yet still managed to find its way back to the same pair of open hands.

      Outside was black and cold. Lines of traffic filled every bridge and quay as people made their way home, counting down the days of this mad rush to Christmas. Harry was right, it was all moving too quickly, the build-up feeling more of an occasion than the moment itself. Lou’s head pulsated more than it had that morning, and his left eye throbbed as the migraine worsened. He lowered the lamp on his desk, feeling sensitive to the light. He could barely think, let alone string a sentence together, and so he wrapped himself up in his cashmere coat and scarf and left his office to get to the nearest shop or pharmacy for some headache pills. He knew he was hungover but he was also sure he was coming down with something; the last few days he’d felt extraordinarily unlike himself. Disorganised, unsure of himself; traits that were surely due to illness.

      The office corridors were dark; lights

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