The Cradle in the Grave Read Free Page B

have nothing to do with why Laurie’s summoned me.
    â€˜Do you know anything about Sudoku?’ I call after Tamsin.
    She turns. ‘As much as I want to. Why?’
    â€˜Does it involve numbers laid out in a square?’
    â€˜Yeah, it’s like a crossword puzzle grid, except with numbers instead of letters. I think, anyway. Or maybe it’s an empty grid and you fill in the numbers. Ask someone who’s got swirly patterned carpets and a house that smells of airfreshener.’ She waves and heads for Raffi’s office, shouting over her shoulder, ‘And a doll with a skirt to cover up the spare loo roll.’
    Maya leans out of her office, holding the door frame with both hands as if hoping to block the strong smell of smoke with her body. ‘You know those knitted-doll bog-roll holders are highly collectable?’ she says. For the first time since I’ve known her, she doesn’t smile, try to hug or pat me or call me ‘honey’. I wonder if I’ve done something to offend her. Maya is Binary Star’s MD, though she prefers ‘head honcho’ – that’s her nickname for herself, always delivered with a giggle. In fact, she’s only third in the pecking order. Laurie, as Creative Director, is the supreme power in the organisation, closely followed by Raffi, the Financial Director. The two of them control Maya by stealth, allowing her to believe she’s in charge.
    â€˜What’s that?’ She nods at the card in my hand.
    I look at it again, read it digit by digit for about the twentieth time.

    A grid, Tamsin said. There’s no grid here, so it can’t be a Sudoku puzzle, though the layout is grid-like. It’s as if the lines have been removed once the numbers were filled in.
    â€˜Your guess is as good as mine,’ I tell Maya. I don’t bother to show her the card. She’s always gushingly friendly, particularly to lower-ranking Binary Star employees like me, but she has no interest in anyone but herself. She asks all the right questions – loudly, so that everyone hears how much she cares – but if you take the trouble to reply, she blinks at you blank-eyed, as if you’ve bored her into an upright coma. And I can tell from her frequent glances over her shoulder that she’s eager to get back to her burning cigarette, probably the tenth of the thirty she’ll get through today.
    Sometimes when Laurie walks past her office, he shouts, ‘Lung cancer!’ The rest of us pretend to believe Maya’s story about having given up years ago. Legend has it that she once burst into tears and tried to pretend it wasn’t smoke billowing from her office but steam from a particularly hot cup of tea. None of us has ever actually seen her with a cigarette in her hand.
    â€˜I’ve worked out how she does it,’ Tamsin said the other day. ‘She keeps the cig and the ashtray in the bottom drawer of her desk. When she wants a drag, she sticks her whole head in the drawer . . .’ Seeing that I wasn’t taking her theory seriously, she said, ‘What? The lowest drawer’s twice the size of the other two – you could easily fit a human head in there. I dare you to sneak into her office and—’
    â€˜Yeah, right,’ I cut her off. ‘I’m really going to commit career suicide by ransacking the MD’s desk.’
    â€˜You’d totally get away with it,’ said Tamsin. ‘You’re her baby, remember? Maya’s got an underling fetish. She’s going to love you whatever you do.’
    Once, without irony and in my presence, Maya referred to me as ‘the baby of the Binary Star family’. That was when I started to worry that she didn’t take me seriously as a producer. Now I know she doesn’t. ‘Who cares ?’ Tamsin groans whenever I mention it. ‘Being taken seriously is seriously overrated.’
    Maya quickly loses interest in me