Killing Me Softly Read Free

washed up on a beach. It seemed harmless but the person who prodded it in the wrong place would get blown up. It wasn’t going to be me, not today.
    People filed into the conference room. I had already seated myself with my back to the door so that I could look out of the window. The office lay just south of the Thames in a maze of narrow streets named after spices and the distant lands where they had come from. At the rear of our offices, always on the verge of being acquired and redeveloped, was a recycling facility. A rubbish dump. In one corner there was a giant mountain of bottles. On sunny days it glittered magically but even on a horrid day like this there was a chance that I might get to see the digger come along and shovel the bottles into an even larger pile. That was more interesting than anything that was likely to happen inside Conference Room C. I looked around. There were three slightly ill-at-ease men who had come down from the Northbridge lab just for this meeting and evidently resented the time away. There was Philip Ingalls from upstairs, my so-called assistant Claudia, and Mike’s assistant Fiona. There were several people missing. Mike’s frown deepened, and he pulled on his earlobes furiously. I looked out of the window. Good. The digger was approaching the bottle mountain. That made me feel better.
    ‘Is Giovanna coming?’ Mike asked.
    ‘No,’ said one of the researchers, Neil, I think he was called. ‘She asked me to stand in for her.’
    Mike shrugged in ominous acceptance. I sat up straighter, fixed an alert expression on my face and picked up my pen optimistically. The meeting began with references to the previous meeting and various droning routine matters. I doodled on my pad, then tried a sketch of Neil’s face, which looked rather like a bloodhound’s, with sad eyes. Then I tuned out and looked at the digger, which was now well at its work. Unfortunately the windows cut out the sound of the breaking glass but it was satisfying all the same. With an effort I tuned back into the meeting when Mike asked about plans for February. Neil started saying something about anovulatory bleeding and I suddenly and absurdly got irritated by the thought of a male scientist talking to a male manager about technology for the female anatomy. I took a deep breath to speak, changed my mind, and turned my attention back to the recycling centre. The digger was retreating now, its job done. I wondered how you could get a job driving something like that.
    ‘And as for you…’ I became aware of my surroundings, as if I had suddenly been disturbed from sleep. Mike had directed his attention to me and everybody had turned to survey the imminent damage. ‘You’ve got to take this in hand, Alice. There’s a malaise in this department.’
    Could I be bothered to argue? No.
    ‘Yes, Mike,’ I said sweetly. I winked at him, though, just to let him know I wasn’t letting myself be bullied, and saw his face redden.
    ‘And could someone get this fucking light fixed?’ he shouted.
    I looked up. There was an almost subliminal nicker from one of the fluorescent light tubes. Once you became aware of it, it was like having somebody scratch inside your brain. Scratch, scratch, scratch.
    ‘I’ll do it,’ I said. ‘I mean, I’ll get someone to do it.’
    I was drafting a report that Mike could send to Pittsburgh at the end of the month, which left plenty of time, so I was able to spend the rest of the day doing not very much. I spent an important half an hour going through two mail-order clothes catalogues I’d been sent. I turned the page back on a pair of neat ankle boots, a long velvet shirt, which was described as ‘essential’, and a short dove-grey satin skirt. It would put me £ 137 further into debt. After lunch with a press officer – a nice woman, whose small pale face was dominated by her narrow, rectangular, black-framed spectacles – I shut myself into my office and put on my headphones.
    ‘Je