The main door swung open and Sheila, my new manager and one of the three partners, strutted into the office in a power suit and sky-high, red-soled stilettoes. Just looking at her walk in those deathtraps made my ankles ache. I wished I was the sort of woman who looked sexy and powerful, but the best I could do was pretty and cute, with my huge, round eyes and signature dimple on my right cheek. Ma loves telling everyone the story of how when I was born, she and Dad had a big fight immediately after her C-section because he wanted to name me Dimple. It’s not unusual for Bengalis to give their daughters nicknames like Lucky, Baby, Beauty and so on, which everyone in their extended family uses. Their real names were often Arabic ones, but only for official purposes.
Ma, who had been born and raised in the UK and had no interest in honouring quirky Bengali traditions, burst into tears and refused. Still hormonal and in agony after her emergency surgery, she was hysterical and made such a ruckus that the midwife burst into the cubicle she was in and kicked my dad out for upsetting her. My younger brother, Malik, still calls me Dimple to wind me up, which often earns him a whack with a pillow.
‘Shh, they’re coming this way,’ Lucy hissed, staring intently at her computer screen. Arjun did the same and I quickly pulled open one of the case files I was working on.
‘Morning,’ Sheila greeted us stiffly as she clacked past. ‘Maya, do you have everything for the meeting at eleven?’
‘I do,’ I confirmed, smiling warmly at her. ‘The room’s booked from 10.30. I’ll set the tech up then.’
‘Great.’
Once all the partners were safely in their glass offices, the three of us let out a collective sigh.
‘Tea?’ Arjun asked. I nodded and followed him to the kitchenette, where I proceeded to recount the morning’s events as the kettle boiled.
‘You have to read the notebook,’ he said, throwing two extra-strong PG Tips into a big mug with some milk, cardamom and a cinnamon stick before heating it in the microwave. ‘I don’t do “white man’s tea’’,’ was his usual response whenever anyone questioned his method.
‘I feel bad,’ I replied, my resolve getting weaker with every passing moment. ‘What if there are really personal things in there?’
‘Like what?’ he scoffed as we waited for the kettle to boil, as part of the second step of his pseudo-masala chai. Ma made it at home all the time, but she did it over a stove and it took ages. There was no stove in the kitchenette of Wiser, Hall, Steadman and Associates. I watched as he took the teabags out of the now-beige milk, infused with spices and put the bags into individual mugs. Pouring the hot milk into the two mugs, he added boiling water and let it all brew for a while, before reheating both mugs in the microwave. Two heaped teaspoons of sugar completed the process and, honestly, it was so good. I personally couldn’t be bothered to make it like this myself in the office, or even at home. Yorkshire Tea with a dash of cold milk was perfectly adequate. But Arjun’s milky, spicy number was pretty epic for a microwaved job.
‘Personal stuff. You know, family dramas, a broken heart . . .?’
‘Maya, this is a grown-arse adult man we’re talking about, not a teenage girl. It’ll probably be meeting notes or something equally banal.’
I hadn’t thought of that. ‘But it’s a proper leather-bound book, embossed with his initials. It looks too important to be work stuff.’
‘If you don’t look inside, you’ll never know.’
For the rest of the day, while I prepared meeting rooms and AV equipment, wrote up minutes and completed mindless admin tasks, my mind kept drifting to the notebook that was slowly burning a hole through my desk.
Arjun was right. It could contain something as ordinary as work notes. I had known Noah for less than half an hour, but I could tell he wasn’t the type to pour his heart out onto a piece of paper.
At 4.56 on the dot, Arjun grabbed his jacket and bag and left the office before anyone could stop him and ask him to do something that would take him over the 5.00 p.m. threshold.
‘What are you doing tonight?’ Lucy asked, like she always did, as if the answer was going to be anything other than, ‘Not much, just going to chill with my family.’
‘Are you seriously not going to peek inside?’ she continued, slipping on her jacket and stuffing her phone and charger into her bag.
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘I really want to.’
Lucy put her bag back down. ‘Er, well you’re not doing it without me. Let’s do it.’
‘What, right here? In front of everyone?’
I looked around the sparse office. It was past five now and only a handful of people remained on the other side of the room, where the family law lot sat. They took their jobs a lot more seriously than those of us in commercial and employment and never left before six.
‘No one will know, it’ll look like we’re working. Let’s do this.’ Lucy sat down and wheeled her chair closer to mine. Inhaling nervously, I pulled the notebook over to us. The leather felt softer than the first time I held it and I waited a moment, because once I did this, there was no undoing it. Then, muttering ‘Bismillah’ – in the name of God – I opened it to the first page.
It was blank.
‘What the hell?’ I looked over at Lucy in a panic. ‘Is that it? Have I been stressing over this bloody thing all day for no reason? Now I’ll never know who he is! He’s gone, forever!’
‘Calm down, turn to another page,’ Lucy said soothingly and I could tell from the tremble in her lip that she was desperately trying to stop herself from laughing. I turned the page and let out a breath.
There, on the top, in scrawling blue ink, was written ‘30 BEFORE 30’. And below it:
1. APPLY FOR PHYSIO COURSE
• UEL (open day: 24 Nov)
• KCL (open day: 11 Nov)
• SGUL (open day: 1 Dec)
• LSBU (open day: 14 Dec)
Find out application deadline.
Fees?
