done this? Fucking Excel. Norris would explode. He was always telling us that ink cartridges were more expensive than gold.
‘Shit,’ I muttered, biting my lip at Zach. ‘I don’t know. Stop it, can we stop it?’ I hit the printer’s red button multiple times but the printer kept churning them out, the pages now spooling out and covering my feet. ‘Shit, Zach! And the layout’s all messed up, there’s no space on each one for email addresses. The whole lot’s useless. Shit, what a waste. How do I make it stop? Zach, don’t just laugh, help!’
‘Calm down,’ he said, standing up. ‘And budge up.’
I bent myself underneath the sloped ceiling as Zach tapped at a few buttons on the machine and it stopped instantly.
‘What’s going on?’ barked Norris, appearing in the doorway.
‘Thought you’d gone for lunch,’ I said quickly.
‘Forgot something I needed to post.’ He glared at the floor, a sea of A4. ‘What’s all this paper?’
‘It’s the petition which Florence has very kindly spent all morning working on to help you,’ said Zach, in the calming tone that you’d use on a child. ‘Is that OK?’
Norris reached for an envelope from his desk. ‘Yes, yes, fine.’ He stuck out his chin to peer at one of the sheets.
‘Go and have lunch, we’ll show you when you’re back,’ Zach said, ushering him out. Then he turned back to me, scrabbling around in his Doc Martens, picking up the wasted sheets. ‘Email me the document. I’ll print it.’
‘Thanks,’ I said meekly, standing up and feeling child-like myself. Hateful, hateful Excel.
The printer wasn’t my only challenge that week. On Friday evening, I traipsed along Harley Street, walked up four floors and knocked on Gwendolyn’s door.
I waited for her summoning.
Nothing.
I knocked again.
Nothing.
I knocked for a third time and cracked the door open. I didn’t want to interrupt any poor, embarrassed soul lying on the sofa while they had a spell put on them.
But instead of anybody lying on the sofa, I was greeted by the sight of Gwendolyn dancing around the room in a pair of large pink headphones, wafting a bunch of burning twigs over her head. I wrinkled my nose at the smell of very strong sweet tea.
‘Gwendolyn?’
She didn’t hear me.
‘Gwendolyn?’
‘Oh girls, they wanna have fu-hunnnnn…’ she sang, still with her back to me. She side-stepped into the corner, her bottom swinging side to side as she waved the twigs like a rhythmic gymnast twirling a ribbon in the air.
‘GWENDOLYN!’
The bottom froze and she frowned over her shoulder, then tugged her headphones off.
‘Florence, hello, you’re very early.’
I looked at my watch. It was 6.32 p.m., which meant I was two minutes late.
‘No, it’s, er, gone six thirty.’
‘Has it?’ Gwendolyn squinted at her watch as if I was lying to her. ‘Goodness me, so it has. Right, let me just sort myself out and we’ll get cracking.’
She unclipped an old Walkman from the waistband of her patchwork trousers, then dropped the twigs into a small ceramic bowl on the coffee table.
‘What is that?’ I asked. The room smelled like a hippie’s armpit.
‘Sage. I had a very troubled client before you, poor man’s wife has just left him, so I needed to purify the room, to dispel all the negative energy.’ Gwendolyn sat down on the armchair opposite me and briefly closed her eyes. ‘Mmm, it’s helped.’ She opened her eyes. ‘Did you know, Florence, that the Latin for sage, salvia, means to heal?’
‘Er, no, I didn’t.’
‘So when you burn it, it releases negative ions which neutralize the space around us. But let’s not dwell on poor Mr Nicopoulous and his runaway wife. How are you? Is your romance still blossoming like a cherry tree in April? I do hope so.’
‘It is,’ I said slowly. ‘I think so. I went to stay with his parents at the weekend.’
She clapped her hands with delight. ‘You did? And how was his mother? You wanted someone with a nice mother, did you not?’
I nodded. ‘Yes, and she was nice. Although his fath—’
Gwendolyn interrupted by clicking her finger and thumb several times and shaking her head.
‘What?’
‘Always this negativity, Florence. Have you noticed it? It’s a very pernicious habit of yours, almost as if you can’t allow anything to be going well.’
‘No, it is going well, it’s just that his father was a bit weird. And he’s got this old friend called Octavia who told me something strange.’
She sighed as if I was making this up. ‘What was it? Tell me.’