A Room Swept White Read Online Free

organisation, closely followed by Raffi, the Financial Director. The two of them control Maya by stealth, allowing her to believe she’s in charge.
    ‘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.
    ‘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.
    ‘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
wholehead
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—’
    ‘Yeah, right,’ I cut her off. ‘I’m really going to commit career suicide by ransacking the MD’s desk.’
    ‘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 and withdraws into her smoky lair without so much as a ‘Bye, sugar!’ Suits me fine; I never asked to be the object of her frustrated maternal urges. I hurry down the corridor to Laurie’s office. I knock and walk in simultaneously, and catch him whizzing his model globe round on its axis with his right foot. He stops and blinks at me, as if he’s struggling to remember who I am. In his head, he’s probably already had whatever conversation he wanted to have with me, I’ve agreed to whatever he wanted me to agree to, and done it, and maybe I’ve even retired or died – maybe Laurie’s mind has transported him so far into the future that he no longer knows me. His brain works faster than most people’s.
    ‘Tamsin says Helen Yardley was murdered.’
Nice one, Fliss. Bring up the thing you least want to talk about, why don’t you
?
    ‘Someone shot her,’ Laurie says expressionlessly. He starts to manipulate the globe with his foot again, kicking it so that it goes faster.
    ‘I’m really sorry,’ I say. ‘It must make it even harder . . . Than if she’d died naturally, I mean. To cope with.’ As I’m speaking, I realise I have no idea how to pitch my condolences, towards what sort of loss. Laurie spoke to Helen Yardley every day, often more than once a day. I know how much JIPAC means to him but I’ve no idea whether he cared about Helen personally, whether he’s mourning her as a fellow campaigner or as something more than