See? The day was beginning to turn around already.
The two students got on, waving their cards briefly at the driver before turning their attention again to their phones. Mr Flasher was next, his coattails flapping dangerously as he stood on the step in the slight breeze.
‘Got a pass, mate?’ the driver asked him.
‘Sorry?’ Mr Flasher leaned forward and cupped his ear.
‘I need to see your pass, innit.’
‘You … if you what?’
‘Can see your PASS!’ Clare said loudly, fed up with waiting.
‘Oh, can you? I’m so sorry!’ Mr Flasher pulled his coat more tightly around him. ‘I thought the coat was covering everything.’
Then it was her turn. She lifted her foot towards the step, only to have the bus doors hiss shut so close to her face that the rubber seal almost touched her nose. ‘Wait!’ she said, smacking her palm against the door. Surely the driver had seen her?
The man in the driver’s seat was in his twenties, hair slicked back under a cap and sporting a beard so bushy it could well be home to several endangered species of wildlife. He wore a pair of slightly tinted glasses, and as she banged on the door again, she saw the white of a music pod in his ear. ‘Hey!’ she said. ‘Hey!’
Without even a flicker of acknowledgement, he pushed the gearstick forward and the bus pulled away, its heavy wheels sending a cold slug of rainwater into one of her shoes.
Gasping, she stepped back, nearly colliding with an elderly woman in a red jacket who had arrived while the others were boarding. ‘Sorry,’ Clare said, stumbling slightly and nearly dropping her bag. ‘Can you believe that? He was wearing earphones too. Are they allowed to do that? Surely, it’s unsafe!’
The old woman regarded her with a steady gaze. Buoyed by the attention, Clare leaned conspiratorially towards her new confidante. ‘Well, he’s got another think coming,’ she said, feeling anger still bubbling inside her. ‘Let’s just say I’ve memorised his number plate and I’ll be getting on the phone to his boss.’
The woman’s watery blue eyes looked back at her for a moment, as if digesting what she had said. Then, seeming to realise that Clare was expecting some sort of response, she nodded sagely and raised a gnarled finger to tap the side of her nose. ‘Spring onions!’ she said, looking eagerly at Clare. ‘Spring onions and a dash of red wine! That’s the secret. That’s the secret!’
Typically, Nigel was in reception when she arrived late, bedraggled, and twenty-two pounds fifty poorer after having to call a cab. ‘I can’t help the traffic,’ the driver had protested when she’d questioned the fare. ‘I have to make a living you know.’
‘Everything all right, Carol?’ Nigel asked as she entered the building, tote bag sodden, hair stuck to her head, tights a riot of muddy polka-dots.
‘Yes,’ she said, not bothering to correct him. ‘Yes. I’m sorry I’m late …’
‘Oh!’ he said, glancing at his watch. ‘I hadn’t realised you were.’
Luckily, she managed to get to her office and slip her tights off under the desk (thankfully, she’d shaved a couple of days ago so although her legs felt like sandpaper, they looked smooth enough) before Stefan Camberwaddle arrived. Which, bearing in mind the way the day had started, was an almost inconceivable win.
While the bread and butter of her work was sorting out transactional minutia between ordinary homeowners, she’d begun to take on more and more commercial work in recent months. After ten years of purely residential conveyancing it was a relief to tackle some different issues and landing Stefan as a client had been a real boon. She’d handled his personal house move – involving a particularly complicated right of way – about six months ago and now he wanted to involve her in his business. His multi-million-pound property flipping business.
When he’d said the word retainer on the phone, she’d almost wet herself. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Will, she’d thought. It’d be a tidy bonus in her pocket and surely at last the chance of a promotion? Nigel had been hinting to her about a potential partnership for the past two years.
After a little bit of diligence with a comb and the hand-dryer in the work loos Clare had also got her hair to more or less behave, and had even applied a slick of slightly strange tasting lipstick from a tiny stump she’d found in the bottom of her tote, so by the time Ann showed Mr Camberwaddle in, Clare was looking almost entirely human.
‘Hello Mr Camberwaddle,’ she said, rising to her feet and extending a confident hand for a shake. ‘How are you?’
‘Stefan, please,’ he said, then smiled, revealing teeth that were so shockingly bleached she jumped involuntarily. ‘Is everything OK?’ he said, no doubt feeling the jolt from her shaking arm travel up his. ‘You look very white.’
‘Ohhh, two million of business, ohhh, two million of business,’ she sang under her breath as she strode confidently to her boss’s room an hour later. Somehow the phrase had become set to the tune of the hokey-cokey and stuck in her head on a loop.
Nigel’s door was slightly ajar, so she knocked lightly and stuck her head around the gap. Inside, Nigel was bent over his desk, his face so close to the notepad he was writing on that had she been in the chair opposite, she’d have been tempted to draw a second face on the top of his bald head.
Luckily, it was Will, not she, who sat in front of the boss. And he seemed to have had no such temptation. Instead, he was talking about advertising. ‘Business cards on reception desks in doctors’ surgeries,’ he was saying. ‘And maybe something we can stick under windshield wipers in hospital car parks.’
‘Um, Nigel … Mr Mann?’ she said, raising her voice slightly.
Both men jumped as if they had been caught in an illicit act. Then Nigel cleared his throat. ‘Clare!’ he said,
