Sweet Agony

All of which seems pretty silly, until I actually start my attempt. I bunch my skirt up into my fists and begin to step over, and just as I do I hear the person who lives here. They make a sound like someone moaning from inside some terrible abyss, so cold and alien that for a second I barely recognise it for what it really is.

Then it rushes over me in a hot flood: laughter. The person inside is laughing at me, in the bitterest, haughtiest way possible. You could stick that awful noise in the House of Lords and have it shout at the Prime Minister. It could attend a swanky soirée entirely independent of the person it comes out of, and no one would blink an eye.

But I do my best not to care. I grit my teeth and keep going, no matter what he does to throw me off. I think he actually snorts when I almost lose a shoe to a particularly vicious patch of brambles, and I know he laughs again at the state of my tights after a fight with the lost bike. This time it rings out as clear as a bell, if bells were super haughty and filthy rich.

Yet somehow I still make it to the door.

Only to be told:

‘Not today, thank you.’

He even sounds delighted to get the opportunity to say it. I can hear it in the back of his voice, buried beneath what can only be described as the most cultured accent the world has ever known. I swear my social standing plummets seventeen levels just listening to it. I feel as though I need to bow, and not just because of the sheer wealthy weight behind each of his words.

There is also the fact that he sounds amazing.

Oh, my Lord, no one in the history of the world has ever sounded as amazing as he does. For a second I actually overlook the ludicrous rudeness and just drown in that rolling, velvet-lined tone. He could probably read the news, if the news was specifically designed to make women come on command. Every syllable seems dipped in smoke, so deep and rich I stand there speechless for a second.

And it may well be a good thing that I do.

I think I would probably have gushed over that voice, if he’d given me another second. The words holy crap you could sear skin with that thing are on the tip of my tongue, and only stay there because he goes first.

‘You must be aware that you are completely inappropriate for the position,’ he says, at which point I realise that I’m supposed to be angry. He might sound like sin itself, but he is also quite clearly an enormous arse. I mean, I know that my tights are laddered and my clothes have holes in and I have the broad, plain features of a person not fit to shine his shoes.

But he need not have pointed that out so bluntly.

He could have pretended to be polite, like a normal person.

‘I had no idea dusting a shelf was such an advanced science these days,’ I say, and it comes out so dry it startles me. I had no idea that tone of voice was in me. Most of the time I back away from an argument, and it seems like that should go double here. I am standing on the expensive doorstep of a man with a voice like cigar smoke, trying to get a job that might possibly save me from starvation.

I should really feel more fear – and most likely would.

If I had anything in the world left to lose.

‘If you were appropriate you would be fully aware that it was.’

‘I was just testing you. Really I know how to use the lasers.’

‘You intend to use lasers to remove dust from my shelves?’

‘All the most professional dusters are doing it these days.’

‘I get the distinct impression you believe you are amusing. Therefore I feel I should inform you that I find amusing people tedious in the extreme.’

‘Oh, you need never worry. This is a shocking amount of amusing for me.’

‘Why do I suspect that is supposed to be a joke too?’

‘Possibly because you’ve never heard anyone being funny before? I bet most people just bow and scrape and tell you about their time at Eton.’

‘Yes, and they were all wildly inappropriate too,’ he says, and I’m ready to answer back. In fact, I think I might even be enjoying answering back. It makes my bones rattle and my dad’s words ring in my ears – ‘why do you have to be so clever?’ – yet somehow I don’t want to stop. I want to see what he says next. I want to be free to say silly things about lasers, and somehow his pomposity lets me.

I would probably keep poking and poking it for ever, if it were not for the sudden realisation that sinks into me, after those words of his. He said ‘all’, I think, as though it might not just be me and my awful coat and my Yorkshire accent.

‘How many people have you turned away, exactly?’

‘I hardly see how that is any concern of yours.’

‘You hardly see how it might be a concern of mine that I drove all the way here with my last drop of gas to get a job I desperately need only to discover that the person hiring might be completely unwilling to ever hire anyone?’ I ask, and then there is a sullen-seeming silence. Clearly, I hit on the right thing here – but he refuses to admit it.

‘I will have you know I let in many, many applicants. And despite her numerous flaws I almost hired the girl from Sweden.’

‘I feel like you are making up the girl from Sweden.’

‘That is a frankly outrageous charge.’

‘But you did though, right?’ I try, expecting further failure.

Yet I get this wonderful reply instead:

‘Yes, and I would appreciate you explaining how you managed to discern such a thing through a door while being harangued by a man who expects you to use lasers to dust.’

I just love that he takes the laser thing and runs with it. I feel as though I lobbed a ball of insanity at him and he just caught it and lobbed it back. No one has ever lobbed my ball of insanity before. I barely dared reveal I had one in my possession, prior to this discussion. Usually I keep it hidden, beneath seventeen layers of pretend ignorance.

But why pretend with him? He clearly values smartness.

I even hear the eagerness in his voice, after I tell him that it was a fairly obvious guess to make. ‘Tell me all the ways in which it was obvious,’ he says, like some word vampire starved of sentences by boring girls from Sweden. And, luckily for him, I am almost bursting with every letter in the English language. I’ve spent my whole life feasting on books and books and books, with no one to talk to about what I’ve found there.

He can have it all. Right now, right here on this doorstep.

Here are my guns blazing. Here is me going out in a blaze of glory.

‘If you intended to hire someone you would not be enjoying haranguing me quite so much. And you might have cleared your path. And you definitely would never have laughed when I stepped over the gate, or told me I was inappropriate before I spoke a word, or made up a girl from Sweden. Also you probably would have opened the door,’ I say, and for just a second I feel sure I’ve blown it. I spent too long being too smart. Now I’m no longer smart enough. I failed at the final hurdle, and will have to go away and starve in my car.

I even start to turn, but then I hear his voice. It’s like heavenly shades of cigar smoke falling. Like the trumpeting of a dozen angels, come to save me from this abyss.

‘I have no hope that you will succeed,’ he says.

I guess he has no idea that I already have.

Chapter Two (#u6c47605b-80b4-5bf1-a1d2-d115fdc067db)

I try to respond in a normal manner to all of this. But the trouble is, everything just gets more fascinating from there on in. For a start, he somehow disappears before I can get through the door and see his face. I find myself in a narrow, slightly slanting hallway, so utterly alone I could have stepped through a portal to the netherworld.

And the room past the open door to my right does nothing to dispel this impression. I am ready to gasp when I see it, and probably not in the right way. Most people, I expect, faced with this, would be appalled or amused or feel some other emotion that I apparently don’t possess. Instead I think I reach something like giddiness. A grin immediately tries to smear itself all over my face, and only the sense that he must be watching somewhere hauls it back.

He must be behind some secret wall, spying.

Because that is what the room looks like – as though it has secret walls that someone could spy behind. It seems to have around twenty-seven corners, even though I could swear that twenty-seven corners are not possible for a fairly small rectangle. There should be no more than four, I think, yet, when I take a step in, twelve more jump out at me. I could swear the sides of the fireplace are that illusion where you step closer and a passageway is revealed.