The Gift. Cecelia Ahern

      ‘Well then, no, sir.’

      ‘What’s with the sir thing?’

      ‘I just thought,’ her face flushed, ‘that if you’re going to treat me like a stranger, then that’s what I’ll do too.’

      ‘How am I treating you like a stranger?’

      She looked away. ‘Not something He lowered his voice. ‘Alison, we’re at the office, what do you want me to do? Tell you how much I enjoyed screwing your brains out in the middle of discussing our appointments?’

      ‘You didn’t screw my brains out, we just kissed.’

      ‘Whatever.’ He waved his hand dismissively. ‘What’s this about?’

      She had no answer to that but her cheeks were on fire. ‘Perhaps Alfred mentioned something to me.’

      Lou’s heart did an unusual thing then, that he hadn’t experienced before. A fluttering of some sort. ‘What did he mention?’

      She looked away, began fidgeting with the corner of the page. ‘Well, he mentioned something about you missing that meeting last week –’

      ‘Not something, I want specifics here, please.’

      She bristled. ‘Okay, em, well, after the meeting last week with Mr O’Sullivan, he – as in Alfred –’ she swallowed, ‘suggested that I try to stay on top of you a bit more. He knew that I was new to the job and his advice to me was not to allow you to miss an important meeting again.’

      Lou’s blood boiled and his mind raced. He’d never felt such confusion. Lou spent his life running from one thing to another, missing half of the first in order just to make it to the end of the other. He did this all day every day, always feeling like he was catching up in order to get ahead. It was long and hard and tiring work. He had made huge sacrifices to get where he was. He loved his work, was totally and utterly professional and dedicated to every aspect of it. To be pulled up on missing one meeting that had not yet been scheduled when he had taken the morning off, angered him. It also angered him that it was family that had caused this. If it was another meeting he had sacrificed it for, he would feel better about it, but he felt a sudden anger at his mother. It was her that he had collected from hospital after a hip replacement, the morning of the meeting. He felt angry at his wife for talking him into doing it when his suggestion to arrange a car to collect his mother had sent her into a rage. He felt anger at his 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