Fireproof Read Free Page B

conclusion; it needed a beginning.
    Her boss's name was John Fisher. He was one of the Fishers from the sign on their building, "Fisher and Fisher Solicitors". The other Fisher was his father, William. "Daddy" Fisher, a demented old codger who locked himself in his office and, judging by the muffled sounds from within, watched a lot of porn. He no longer admitted clients, but came to the office every day to escape his wife. John ran the firm by proxy. He demanded that everyone call him John because, here at Fisher and Fisher, everyone was "Family". William was the father figure and John considered himself to be the uncle. Cathy worried about John's family values, as it seemed to her that he enjoyed sleazing around his young "nieces" and bullying his "nephews" a little too much.
    Physically, John stood about five foot four. His big slab of a belly spilled over the buckle of his belt and what hair that hadn't receded had turned a tatty salt and pepper colour that never looked clean. His permanently flushed face burned in an angry red glow. His sloped forehead and oversized nostrils gave him an apelike countenance. This caricature was not helped by his obsession with cleaning out his nose with chubby, hairy digits and fumbling in his underpants to check on his genitals at regular intervals. Casanova, he was not.
    "Actually," John said, "I'm not really in the mood for this case and I don't know what I should pick up instead. You look even paler than usual. Want to go for a bite to eat? Put some colour in those cheeks?"
    It was only eleven o'clock, and Cathy had eaten breakfast at her desk at nine, but she agreed to go. She thought it the easier option. She could put up with John's lecherous comments and his tendency to lean a little too close when he asked her a question, but she was not in the mood for one of his sulks today. She had polished off a bottle of Tesco Merlot with her microwave dinner-for-one and a fiftieth viewing of Luc Besson's Leon the previous night, and she felt too delicate to put up with aggressive body language and snide comments. Solicitors were much too well trained in these skills, and seem to use them as reflex. Besides, John always paid for her meals to make himself look like a sugar daddy. Sometimes it felt like a second cousin to prostitution, but mostly she just enjoyed the food.
    They ate at Clements, a small and classy coffee shop in the city centre, not too far from the office building. Cathy still marvelled at the Americanisation of Belfast in the last few years. It was a sad sign of a television culture gone wild. Kids walked about in baggy jeans, carrying skateboards that they couldn't actually ride. Plastic surgery clinics advertised in the local Sunday papers. The University no longer split their academic year into terms, but now called them semesters. The Golden Arches called to the masses for a quick fix of fat food, and families arrived in their thousands with overweight kids and high cholesterol. But the most irksome thing of all was the growth in flavoured coffee in pretentious little shop units on the high street of Belfast city.
    It was enough to make her poker-straight hair curl.
    Patrons could buy vanilla coffee in a giant, white cup with a honey and prune scone, smothered in low fat cheese spread, and gabble about the latest artistic flick showing in the Queen's Film Theatre, as they sat in uncomfortable plastic and chrome chairs around too small plastic and chrome tables. This privilege cost most customers half of what they would earn that day, but that didn't matter because it was all so chic.
    Cathy watched one such crowd as she tried to avoid eye contact with John. She faded out John's monologue about the pressures of work and weakness of the Northern Ireland judicial system and tried to pick up the conversation from another table. Three middleclass female students sat around the table behind John. Cathy could tell they were middleclass by their North Down accents. They spoke in