LITMIR.BIZ

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sister Marcia and his older brother Quentin for not doing it instead. He was a busy man, and the one time he chose family over work, he had to pay the price. He stood up and paced by the window, biting down hard on his lip and feeling such anger he wanted to pick up the phone and call his entire family and tell them, ‘See? See, this is why I can’t always be there. See? Now look what you’ve done!’

      ‘Did you not tell him that I had to collect my mother from the hospital?’ He said it quietly because he hated saying it. He hated hearing those words that he despised other colleagues using. Hated the excuses, their personal lives being brought into the office. To him, it was a lack of professionalism. You either did the job, or you didn’t.

      ‘Well, no, because it was my first week and Mr Patterson was standing with him and I didn’t know what you would like me to say –’

      ‘Mr Patterson was with him?’ Lou asked, his eyes almost popping out of his head.

      She nodded up and down, wide-eyed, like one of those toys with a loose neck.

      ‘Right.’ His heart began to slow down, now realising what was going on. His dear friend Alfred was up to his tricks. Tricks that Lou had assumed up until now that he was exempt from. Alfred could never get by a day doing things by the book. He looked at things from an awkward angle, came at conversations from an unusual perspective too; always trying to figure out the best way he could come out of any situation.

      Lou’s eyes searched his desk. ‘Where’s my post?’

      ‘It’s on the twelfth floor. The work-experience boy got confused by the missing thirteenth floor.’

      ‘The thirteenth floor isn’t missing! We are on it! What is with everyone today?’

      ‘We are on the fourteenth floor, and having no thirteenth floor was a terrible design flaw.’

      ‘It’s not a design flaw,’ he said defensively. ‘Some of the greatest buildings in the world have no thirteenth floor.’

      ‘Or roofs.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘The Colosseum has no roof.’

      ‘What?!’ he snapped again, getting confused. ‘Tell the work-experience boy to take the stairs from now on and count his way up. That way he won’t get confused by a missing number. Why is a work-experience person handling the mail anyway?’

      ‘Harry says they’re short-staffed.’

      ‘Short-staffed? It only takes one person to get in the elevator and bring my bloody post up. How can they be short-staffed?’ His voice went up a few octaves. ‘A monkey could do his job. There are people out there on the streets who’d die to work in a place like …’

      ‘In a place like what?’ Alison asked, but she was asking the back of Lou’s head because he’d turned around and was looking out of his floor-to-ceiling windows at the pavement below, a peculiar expression on his face reflected in the glass for her to see.

      She slowly began to walk away, for the first moment in the past few weeks feeling a light relief that their fling, albeit a fumble in the dark, was going no further, for perhaps she’d misjudged him, perhaps there was something wrong with him. She was new to the company and hadn’t quite sussed him out yet. All she knew of him was that he reminded her of the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, always seeming late, late, late for a very important date but managing to get to every appointment just in the nick of time. He was a kind man to everybody he met and was successful at his job. Plus he was handsome and charming and drove a Porsche, and those things she valued more than anything else. Sure, she felt a slight twinge of guilt about what had happened last week with Lou, when she had spoken to his wife on the phone, but then it was quickly erased by, in Alison’s opinion, his wife’s absolute naiveté when it came to her husband’s infidelities. Besides, everybody had a weak spot, and any man could be forgiven if their Achilles heel just happened to be her.

      ‘What shoes does Alfred wear?’ Lou called out, just before she closed the door.

      She stepped back inside. ‘Alfred who?’

      ‘Berkeley.’

      ‘I don’t know.’ Her face flushed. ‘Why do you want to know?’

      ‘For a Christmas present.’

      ‘Shoes? You want to get Alfred a pair of shoes? But I’ve already ordered the Brown Thomas hampers for everyone, like you asked.’

      ‘Just find out for me. But don’t make it obvious. Just casually enquire, I want to surprise him.’

      She narrowed her eyes with suspicion. ‘Sure.’

      ‘Oh, and that new girl in accounts. What’s her name … Sandra, Sarah?’

      ‘Deirdre.’

      ‘Check her shoes too. Let me know if they’ve got red soles.’

      ‘They don’t. They’re from Top Shop. Black ankle boots, suede with water marks. I bought a pair of them last year. When they were in fashion.’

      With that, she left.

      Lou sighed, collapsed into his oversized chair and held his fingers to the bridge of his nose, hoping to stop the migraine that loomed. Maybe he was coming down with something. He’d already wasted fifteen minutes of his morning talking to a homeless man, which was totally out of character for him, but he’d felt compelled to stop. Something about the young man demanded he stop and offer him his coffee.

      Unable to concentrate on his schedule, Lou once again turned to look out at the city below. Gigantic Christmas decorations adorned the quays and bridges; giant mistletoe and bells that swayed from one side to the other thanks to the festive magic of neon. The river Liffey was at full capacity and gushed by his window and out to Dublin Bay. The pavements were aflow with people charging to work, keeping in time with the currents, following the same direction as the tide. They pounded the pavement as they powerwalked by the gaunt copper figures dressed in rags, which had been constructed to commemorate those during the famine forced to walk these very quays to emigrate. Instead of small parcels of belongings in their hands, the Irish people of this district now carried Starbucks coffee in one hand, briefcases in the other. Women walked to the office wearing trainers with their skirts, their high heels tucked away in their bags. A whole different destiny and endless opportunities awaiting them.

      The only thing that was static was Gabe, tucked away in a doorway, near the entrance, wrapped up on the ground and watching the shoes march by, the opportunities for him still not quite as equal as for those that trampled by. Though only slightly bigger than a dot on the pavement thirteen floors down, Lou could see Gabe’s arm rise and fall as he sipped on his coffee, making every mouthful last, even if by now it was surely cold. Gabe intrigued him. Not least because of his talent for recalling every pair of shoes that belonged in the building as though they were a maths timetable, but, more alarmingly, because the person behind those crystal-blue eyes was remarkably familiar. In fact, Gabe reminded Lou of himself. The two men were similar in age and, given the right grooming, Gabe could very easily have been mistaken for Lou. He seemed a personable, friendly, capable man. It could so easily be Lou sitting on the pavement outside, watching the world go by, yet how different their lives were.

      At that very instant, as though feeling Lou’s eyes on him, Gabe looked up. Thirteen floors up and Lou felt like Gabe was staring straight at his soul, his eyes searing into him.

      This confused Lou. His involvement in the development of this building entitled him to the knowledge that, beyond any reasonable doubt, from the outside the glass was reflective. Gabe couldn’t possibly have been able to see him as he stared up, his chin to the air, with a hand across his forehead to block out the light, almost in salute. He could only have been looking at a reflection of some kind, Lou reasoned, a bird perhaps had swooped and caught his eye. That’s right, a reflection was all it could be. But so intent was Gabe’s gaze, which reached up the full thirteen floors to Lou’s office

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