The One Before The One. Katy Regan

from the shower scene in Psycho, interrupts us.

      ‘What the hell’s that?’ exclaims Toby.

      ‘What?’

      ‘That noise like the shower scene from Psycho.’

      ‘I’ve no idea.’

      Toby looks around him. ‘Well, it’s not coming from me.’ The noise continues, grows louder, more urgent.

      ‘I didn’t say it was coming from you.’

      ‘So where is it coming from, then?’

      ‘I don’t know!’

      ‘It’s coming from you, Steele!’ Toby slides back on his chair, pointing at my bag.

      I pick up my bag and open it, look inside.

      ‘Have you got a rape alarm in there? That’d be typical of you.’

      ‘What the hell do you mean by that?’

      ‘A bomb, then?’

      ‘Don’t be bloody ridiculous.’

      ‘What is it, then?’

      ‘I don’t know!’ I hold up the bag a metre away from me. ‘But I’m not looking – you can.’ And I walk over and thrust it onto his desk.

      ‘Oh, nice. So I get the bomb-in-a-bag,’ says Toby, shaking it up to his ear. He opens it. ‘Jesus, there’s like a whole ecosystem in here.’

      He rummages a little and then, a smirk spreading across his handsome face, lifts out my mobile phone, the ‘Eek! Eek!’ becoming ear-splitting as he does. He stands up and hands it to me. LEXI is flashing in silver.

      ‘Hello?’

      ‘Hiya!’ says the Yorkshire voice on the end of the line. ‘What d’ya reck to what I’ve done with your ringtone? It’s awesome, isn’t it?’

      ‘So how long is she staying?’

      Toby is highly amused but trying not to show it. Shona is sitting on her desk, biting hard on her pencil, trying to come up with a solution, because this is what Shona does in every problematic situation.

      For some reason, Toby seems to have orchestrated a ‘crisis’ meeting and skidded over next to me on his office chair, which is causing all manner of problems, mainly in the pelvic region, since I can smell him: a clean, just-had-a-shower smell, but made purely of pheromones and mixed with something reminiscent of fresh, sugary bakery goods. Something delectable. Something flutters between my legs.

      ‘The whole summer,’ I say, pretending to look conscientiously at my emails, when really I’m picturing Toby, in bed, naked, and me, burrowing my head in his chest hair.

      ‘What, like July and August?’

      ‘That’s the whole summer, isn’t it?’

      Toby sucks air between his teeth. ‘Oh, Steeley,’ he says, squeezing my shoulders. The something fluttering between my legs is positively flapping now. ‘Sharing your space with a whole other person? How are you coping?’

      ‘Not very well, actually. There’s stuff all over my flat.’

      ‘Oh no. Not stuff. In flat?’

      ‘Piss off!’ I nudge him in the side.

      Shona groans. Poor Shona. She’s worked with Toby and I nearly a year now and the constant sexual tension by proxy must be beginning to wear thin.

      ‘And what about her not leaving the cushions lined up symmetrically? Leaving the tap dripping? Spoiling your one-woman efforts to save the Great Barrier Reef?’

      I slap him over the head as he twinkles his swimming-pool-blue eyes at me.

      ‘You’re so rude! And this morning she dyed her hair in my bathroom – purple dye all over my brand new Italian bathroom.’

      Toby bursts out laughing. ‘Fuck, I’m surprised you made it into work.’

      ‘How old is she?’ asks Shona

      ‘Seventeen.’

      Toby almost falls off his chair.

      ‘Seventeen?’ Health and Safety Heather swings around and sighs dramatically, but we all ignore her since she does this several times a day. ‘You didn’t tell me you had a seventeen-year-old sister!’

      ‘Half-sister,’ I correct.

      ‘That is so cool,’ says Shona. ‘I would have killed my three brothers for a sister when I was a kid.’

      Toby and I frown. Shona often saying things that make people frown.

      Toby put his feet up on my desk. ‘So what’s she like? Is she a—’

      ‘Delaney!’

      ‘God, Delaney,’ agrees Shona.

      ‘What?’ he says, wide-eyed at the injustice of it all. ‘A student, was all I was going to say. Thanks a lot, you two.’ He stabs at a ball of Blu-Tack with his pen ‘What do you two take me for? I’m a responsible, married man.’

      ‘Well, since you’re such a fan of responsibility, maybe you’d like to volunteer as a fire marshal? Eh? Clever clogs. Whaddya think about that?’

      Our ‘crisis meeting’ – obviously just an opportunity for Toby to laugh at me – is suddenly cut short by Heather, playfully hitting Toby across the head with her Fire Safety manual.

      ‘Fifty quid for the first three takers and an hour with me, to show you the ropes.’

      ‘That, H, is a very hard offer to refuse,’ says Toby, as Heather swings back and forth on her court shoes, clearly delighted by her opening gambit. ‘But I think I’m going to decline, on this occasion. It’s more Caroline’s sort of thing, isn’t it, Caroline?’ And then he smiles in a way that makes me want to punch and snog him all at the same time.

      So that’s how I get roped into being one of the office’s three fire marshals – me, Heather and Toupee Dom from payroll. I spend the next hour learning how to use the fire extinguisher and sitting in a special chair used to evacuate disabled people from the office, whilst Toupee Dom almost knocks me out with his body odour. I try Lexi several times but, worryingly, get no answer until, finally, around lunchtime – just as I get stuck into my PowerPoint presentation, in particular a very well-executed pie-chart, detailing what’s currently driving the growth of oral hygiene goods in Asda – comes the shower scene noise from Psycho. I immediately grab my phone from the table, but it flips about in my hand like a live trout. There’s a text.

      Am up town. This oldie just tried to flog uz xtc! I

      WMPL!

      C u l8r

      DWBH. [smiley face] Ha ha. lol. Lex xxxxxx

      What?

      ‘Am up town’ is all I can make out. So she’s in town, but where in town? Soho? Shoreditch? The arse-end of Hackney?

      I immediately email Toby. He’s got a nineteen-year-old brother. He’ll know what she’s on about.

      To: [email protected]

      From: [email protected]

      This text from Lexi, do I need to worry?

      Am up town. This oldie just tried to flog uz xtc! I WMPL!

      C u l8r

      DWBH. [smiley face]

      Ha Ha. lol. Lex xxxxxx

      Five seconds later, an email pings into my inbox.

      Subject: translation services from down-wiv-the-kidz From: [email protected]

      She’s been offered class A drugs by a geriatric. This made her wet herself laughing. She says, don’t