Lost in Manchester - 15. The Lawyer. February 2010. Paul.

“Carolllll” Paul’s voice trilled, carrying it through to the desk outside.

Paul’s PA, a 30-year old immaculately presented brunette, appeared in the doorway of a door labelled 'Paul Griffiths. Head of Litigation, United Tobacco'.

“Carol, have you seen this?” he said, brandishing a letter in his hand.

“Yes”

“They want to fucking sue us because we’ve used red letters on our cigarette boxes”

She opened her palms a little. “We did use red letters...”

“I don’t give a fuck. They don’t own red. Anyway, we sell about 300 times as many cigarettes a year as them. They should be flattered we stole their font”.

“It’s surprising they don’t see it like that”.

“This guy is such a cunt. He didn’t even call me to let me know this was coming.”

“You know the word cunt has been around since the Middle Ages?”

“I’m going to take him and his lawsuit and rip them both to fucking shreds, set them alight and watch them burn down to dust…”

“In the Middle Ages, the red-light districts in cities like York and Oxford were often named Gropecunt Lane”

“…then i’m going to arrange for the dust to be sprinkled in amongst our next million packs of cigarettes.”

He looked up at her.

“York has a street called Gropecunt Lane?”

“Not now, obviously. It’s called Grape Lane now.”

Paul shook his head. “Why are you telling me this?”

“You use the word cunt a lot. I thought you might have wanted to know where it comes from.”

“I didn’t”

“Fine. Did you want anything else?”

“Yeah, I want a gin and tonic. Then I want a twink from Eastern European porn on a chain under my desk”

“I’ll get you a tea”

He rolled his eyes. “Fine. Now get out, some of us have real fucking work to do.”

As Carol walked out through the door, another voice came, like an echo in the distance.

“Can I get you another coffee sir?”

He could see a lady, as if in a dream, dressed in a café brand uniform and white half-pinny. He tried to shake the thought of her away.

Carol came back with the tea then returned to her desk.

Paul worked quickly and Carol had to be efficient to keep up. Much of the work he tasked her with involved translating his antagonistic notes into acceptable legal correspondence. He wasn’t one for mincing words, so she added the careful wording that he left out.

He liked Carol and he felt that the feeling was mutual. He had always taken the time to involve her in his work and his life. He had also brought in a lot of money for the company in recent years, which had led to generous bonuses for all of them there. So she really should like him.

One of the tasks he set her this week was working on the arrangements for his move to London. The bosses had been pushing for this for at least six months, and he had finally relented. Things had moved quite quickly since he told her about it a few weeks ago. She had already arranged his temporary accommodation in United Tobacco’s rented rooms, but he was going to need something permanent, and he had given her the job of finding a suitably high-spec, one bedroom flat, ideally not too far from the office.

She had barely been gone for two minutes when he called her through again. She appeared once more in the doorway.

“Hi”

“What time is Ed coming over?”

“10am”

“And what time is it now?”

“Nine seventeen”, she said, without even needing to check her watch.

He nodded.

“Cool. So you’re sorting me a flat today?”

“I’m on it”

“It has to be fucking nice”

“I got it”

“So when i’m in a club at 4am and there’s some mind-blowingly hot sweaty shirtless guy grinding his six pack against me while we’re both on a mind-altering high, I can whisper in his ear that he should come back to my flat, and it’ll be in a block that’s so well known for being totally fucking fabulous that he will beg to come back with me and do depraved things”

She smiled and wrote a note on the pad in her hand.

“I’ll add that to the specification”.

“I don’t want to be in those fucking asylum rooms at HQ for long”.

“I’m on it.”

“I’ve already spent two nights there this week, and i’m almost fucking crazy already.”

“You’ll be there two weeks, tops”

He nodded. “Did you dry clean the Paul Smith suit?”

“Yes, it’s hanging in the cupboard.”

“And did you get the contract finished for Ed?”

“Sent it across to him yesterday.”

“And those letters?”

“Working on them now.”

“They have to be out today.”

“Yes.”

“Because if they’re not, it could cost the company a five-figure sum, and I will get literally fucked and thrown in a skip.”

“They’ll be done and out by lunch.”

He nodded again. “Cool. You get my lottery ticket?”

“It’s in your drawer.”

“Cool.”

“You won ten pounds last week”.

“Yeah?”

“You want me to pick it up?”

He considered it for a second. “Nah. Wait ‘til I win something worth the fucking walk to the newsagent”

She nodded and started to walk back to her desk.

That voice from the dream returned.

“Your coffee sir. Shall I put it on your tab?”

He tried to shut it out of his head and concentrate on the office before him.

“Carol...”

She emerged once more at the door.

“Yes?”

“You could move down to London too.”

“We’ve been through this.”

“I know. It’s just that Alexandra won’t even know what my fucking lottery numbers are.”

“I have a fiancé up here.”

“Yeeaahh. Dump him?”

“That’s an interesting idea, but unfortunately, he’s really hot.”

“True” he said, in a momentary reverie, “I’ve seen him naked.”

“Actually you’ve seen him in speedos, and that’s only because I showed you a picture of him in speedos.”

“Hmm. In my memory he was naked.”

“He was playing water polo.”

“Yeah. Tell you what, you go to London and be a lawyer. I’ll go fuck the water polo player.”

“No deal.”

“Fine. Ugh. Fucking London. Ok, fine, go.”

Carol returned again to her desk. Over the next eight hours she typed up five letters, prepared all of the notes Paul needed for his meetings tomorrow, found five flats in London within Paul’s price bracket and that met the specification perfectly, fetched him a salmon salad lunch, introduced Paul to the four people he was meeting with that afternoon and slipped him a note with their names on so he wouldn’t forget by the mid-way point of the meeting, ordered a table for Paul and Sam at the Radisson for that evening and called up Alexandra in London to make sure she knew what his lottery numbers were.

She was perfect.

Paul thought about it for a minute.

Maybe she was too perfect?

Maybe he should change a few details.

Paul had already told Adam all about how Carol covered for him on the numerous occasions when he was still drunk or high when he got into work. He had told Sam about how she had almost single-handedly booked his two-week trip to Australia including flights, hotels and excursions, and even looking up the best gay bars in each city he went to. He’d told Simon and Mark about the time his boss had found a jockstrap in his office belonging to some random twink that Paul had taken back there one night and shagged over the desk, and Carol had emerged and claimed it was her own.

Maybe it was too much. Maybe it wasn’t believable. After Chester he knew he had to start being a bit more careful.

The movement in the office around him stopped. The image of Carol through the glass sitting outside his office, froze. And then the picture blurred in his head, like the loss of a reflection in a puddle as a gust of wind passes across. Her face, the layout of his office, the view from the window, they all disintegrated. Suddenly he was no longer there and those images were locked again in the impulses dashing between synapses in the wilderness of his brain.

Paul refocused on the real space around him. A cup of luke-warm coffee, not yet touched was on the table in front of him. A briefcase with nothing in but a few magazines sat on the chair to his left. His immaculate and entirely unnecessary Paul Smith suit jacket was draped over the back of the café chair on which he sat.

He looked out of the cafe window at the looming London offices of United Tobacco across the street. Somewhere in there was a door marked Head of Litigation, but the name on the door was not his.