A Room Swept White Read Free Page A

game I’ve never played and am not likely to, since I hate all things mathematical. Why would someone send me a Sudoku puzzle? Easy: they wouldn’t. Then what is this?
    ‘Fliss?’ Laurie says, his mouth too close to the phone. When I don’t answer immediately, he hisses my name again. He sounds like a deranged heavy-breather – that’s how I know it’s urgent. When it isn’t, he holds the phone too far away and sounds like a robot at the far end of a tunnel.
    ‘Hi, Laurie.’ Using the strange card to push my hair back from my face, I turn and look out of the window to my left. Through the condensation that no amount of towel-wiping seems to cure, across the tiny courtyard and through the window on the other side, I can see him clearly, hunched over his desk, eyes hidden behind a curtain of messy blond hair.
    His glasses have slipped down his nose, and his tie, which he’s taken off, is laid out in front of him like a newspaper. I stick out my tongue at him and make an even ruder gesture with my fingers, knowing I’m completely safe. In the two years I’ve worked with Laurie, I’ve never seen him glance out of his window, not even when I stood in his office, pointedacross the courtyard and said, ‘That’s my desk there, with the hand cream on it, and the photo frames, and the plant.’ Human beings like to have such accessories, I restrained myself from adding.
    Laurie never has anything on his desk apart from his computer, his BlackBerry and his work – scattered papers and files, tiny Dictaphone tapes – and the discarded ties that drape themselves over every surface in his room like flat, multi-coloured snakes. He has a thick neck that’s seriously tie-intolerant. I don’t know why he bothers putting them on at all; they’re always off within seconds of his arriving at the office. By the side of his desk there’s a large globe with a metal dome base. He spins it when he’s thinking hard about something, or when he’s angry, or excited. On his office walls, up among the evidence of how successful and clever and humane he is – certificates, photographs of him receiving awards, looking as if he’s just graduated from a finishing school for heavy-featured hulks, his grade-A gracious smile fixed to his face – there are posters of planets, individual and group portraits: Jupiter on its own, Jupiter from a different angle with Saturn next to it. There’s also a three-dimensional model of the solar system on one of his shelves, and four or five large books with tatty covers about outer space. I asked Tamsin once if she had any idea why he was so interested in astronomy. She chuckled and said, ‘Maybe he feels lonely in our galaxy.’
    I know every detail of Laurie’s office by heart; he is for ever summoning me, asking me questions to which I couldn’t possibly know the answers. Sometimes, by the time I arrive, he’s forgotten what he wanted me for. He has been into my office twice, once by accident when he was looking for Tamsin.
    ‘I need you in here now,’ he says. ‘What are you doing? Are you busy?’
    Move your head ninety degrees to the right and you’ll see what I’m doing, you weirdo. I’m sitting here staring at you, in all your weirdness
.
    I have an inspired idea. The numbers on the card I’m holding make no sense to me. Laurie makes no sense to me. ‘Did you send me these numbers?’ I ask him.
    ‘What numbers?’
    ‘Sixteen numbers on a card. Four rows of four.’
    ‘What numbers?’ he asks more abruptly than last time.
    Does he want me to recite them? ‘Two, one, four, nine . . .’
    ‘I didn’t send you any numbers.’
    As so often when I’m talking to Laurie, I’m stumped. He has a habit of saying one thing while leaving you with exactly the opposite impression. This is why, even though he’s said he didn’t send me any numbers, I have the sense that if I’d said, ‘Three, six, eight, seven’ instead of ‘Two, one, four, nine’, he might have said, ‘Oh,