The Gift

  Inside, there was a collective intake of breath at the sight of him. It wasn’t that he looked so bad. It was just that, for Lou, he wasn’t perfect. He took a seat opposite Alfred, who beamed with astonishment and absolute delight at his friend’s apparent breakdown.

  “I’m so sorry I’m late,” Lou addressed the table more calmly than he felt. “I was up all night with one of those stomach bugs, but I’m okay now, I think.”

  Twelve faces nodded in sympathy and understanding.

  “Bruce Archer has that very same bug,” Alfred smirked, and he winked at Mr. Patterson.

  The switch was flicked, and Lou’s blood began to heat up, expecting any minute for a loud whistling to drift from his nose as he reached boiling point. He sat quietly through the meeting, though fighting flushes and nausea while the vein in his forehead pulsated at full force.

  “And so, tonight is an important night, lads.” Mr, Patterson turned to Lou, and Lou zoned in on the conversation.

  “Yes, I have the audiovisual conference call with Arthur Lynch,” Lou spoke up. “That’s at seven thirty, and I’m sure it will all go without a hitch. I’ve come up with a great number of responses to his concerns, which we all went through last week. I don’t think we need to go through them again—”

  “Hold on, hold on.” Mr. Patterson lifted a finger to stall him, and it was only then that Lou noticed that Alfred’s cheeks had lifted into a great big smile.

  Lou stared at Alfred to catch his eye, hoping for a hint, a giveaway, but Alfred avoided him.

  “No, Lou, you and Alfred have a dinner with Thomas Crooke and his partner. This is the meeting we’ve been trying to get all year,” Mr. Patterson said, looking concerned.

  Crumble, crumble, crumble. It was all coming tumbling down. Lou shuffled through his schedule and ran shaky fingers through his hair. He pointed his finger along the freshly printed schedule, his tired eyes finding it hard to focus, his clammy forefinger smudging the words as he moved it along the page. There it was, the audiovisual conference call with Arthur Lynch. No mention of a dinner. No damn mention of a damn dinner.

  “Mr. Patterson, I’m well aware of the long-hoped-for meeting with Thomas Crooke.” Lou cleared his throat. “But nobody confirmed a dinner with me, and I made it known to Alfred last week that I have a meeting with Arthur Lynch at seven thirty tonight.” He looked at Alfred with confusion. “Alfred? Do you know about this dinner meeting?”

  “Well, yeah, Lou,” Alfred said in a mocking tone with a shrug that went with it. “Of course I do. I cleared my schedule as soon as they confirmed it. It’s the biggest chance we’ve got to make the Manhattan development work. We’ve all been talking about this for months.”

  The others around the table squirmed uncomfortably in their seats, though there were some, Lou was certain, who were enjoying this moment profusely, documenting every sigh, look, and word to rehash it with others as soon as they were out of the room.

  “Everybody, you can all get back to work,” Mr. Patterson said, looking forward. “We need to deal with this rather urgently.”

  The others emptied the room and left Lou, Alfred, and Mr. Patterson at the table; Lou instantly knew by Alfred’s stance and the look on his face, by his stubby fingers pressed together in prayer below his chin, that Alfred had already taken the higher moral ground on this one. Alfred was in his favorite mode, his most comfortable position of attack.

  “Alfred, how long have you known about this dinner and why didn’t you tell me?” Lou immediately went on the offensive.

  “I told you, Lou,” Alfred responded calmly.

  With Lou a sweaty, unshaven mess and Alfred appearing so cool, Lou knew he wasn’t coming out of this looking the best. He removed his shaky fingers from the schedule and clasped his hands together.

  “It’s a mess, a bloody mess.” Mr. Patterson rubbed his chin roughly with his hands. “I needed both of you at that dinner, but I can’t have you missing the call with Arthur. The dinner can’t be changed; it took us too long to get it in the first place. How about the call with Arthur?”

  Lou swallowed. “I’ll work on it.”

  “If not, there’s nothing we can do, except for Alfred to begin the dinner, and Lou, as soon as you’ve finished your meeting, you make your way as quickly as you can to join Alfred.”

  “Lou has serious negotiations to discuss with Arthur, so he’ll be lucky if he makes it to the restaurant for after-dinner mints. But I’ll be well able to manage it, Laurence.” Alfred spoke from the side of his mouth with his usual smirk. “I’m capable of doing it alone.”

  “Yes, well, let’s hope Lou negotiates fast and that he’s successful; otherwise this entire day will have been a waste of time. This is the second time this week there’s been a mix-up with meetings, isn’t it?” Mr. Patterson asked.

  “No, no, this is the first. Alfred scheduled the other meeting after I told him I wasn’t available.” Lou felt drips of perspiration rolling down his back. His shirt clung to him, his tie choked his neck, and his hair felt matted to his head. He hoped neither of them could smell, like black coffee, the stench emanating from his underarms.

  Alfred turned to Lou in surprise. It wasn’t like Lou to throw something like that at Alfred in front of Mr. Patterson. But the accusation was like blood to a shark, and Alfred was done with circling and was ready to bite. The corner of his lip turned up in a snarl as he said, “I know, Lou, and I apologize for that, but it was a development deal worth one hundred million euros. I couldn’t hold back on that just because you needed to take the morning off.”

  Mr. Patterson looked to Lou.

  “I didn’t take the morning off.” Lou leaned in, his voice breaking as it rose in pitch. He realized he sounded like a teenager standing up to his parents, but he couldn’t help it. He wiped the sweat from his lip with the back of his hand. “It was an hour. Just to collect my mother from the hospital. Then I was straight back in. You could have waited. That was the first hour I’ve taken off in five years working here.”

  “Wow.” Alfred smiled. “Then you really know how to choose your hours. You could have picked a lunch break or something. Anyway, I closed the deal, Lou,” Alfred said, taking that first bite into Lou’s flesh. “I did it alone. So there’s no need to worry.”

  Lou, trembling with rage, looked from one man to the other. He wanted to punch Alfred. Alfred wanted him to punch him. Lou looked to the water jug filled at the center of the table and thought about flinging it at Alfred’s head. Alfred’s eyes followed Lou’s gaze. He smiled knowingly.

  “Do you need a glass of water, Lou?” Alfred asked. “You don’t look well.”

  Mr. Patterson finally spoke up, “Is something the matter, Lou? You do look—”

  “No,” Lou interrupted Mr. Patterson, cutting him off far more rudely than intended. “I’m fine. All is fine. In fact, I’m feeling better than usual.” He tried to perk himself up but felt a bead of sweat drip down his forehead. He quickly brushed it away. “I’m ready to go, ready for two important meetings this evening, both of which will be an absolute success.”

  Mr. Patterson frowned. “Lou.” He was silent for a moment. “Are you sure you’ll be able to—”

  “Absolutely,” he interrupted again. “I have never let you down before, Mr. Patterson, and I don’t intend on doing it now.” Not when so much was at stake.

  Mr. Patterson looked at him with concern, then grumbled something inaudible, gathered his papers, and stood up. Meeting adjourned.

  Lou felt like he was in the middle of a nightmare; everything was falling apart, all his good work was being sabotaged. He stormed out of the meeting room, ignoring Alfred’s faux-concerned voice calling to have a private word with him. Lou headed straight to Alison’s desk, where he threw the details of that evening’s dinner on her keyboard, stopping her acrylic nails midtap. She narrowed her eyes and scanned the brief.

  “What’s this?”

  “A dinner tonight. A very important one. At eight p.m. That
I have to be at.” He paced the area in front of her while she read it more carefully.

  “But you can’t; you have the conference call. It took us weeks to set that up. If you don’t talk to them tonight, they’ll go with Raven and Byrne, and you don’t want that.”

  “I know, Alison,” he snapped. “But I need to be at this.” He stabbed a finger on the page. “Make it happen.” Then he rushed into his office and slammed the door. He froze before he got to his desk. On it his mail was laid out neatly.

  He backtracked and opened his office door again.

  Alison snapped to it quickly and looked up at him. “Yes?” she said eagerly.

  “The mail.”

  “Yes?”

  “When did it get here?”

  “First thing this morning. Gabe delivered it the same time as always.”

  “He couldn’t have,” Lou objected. “Did you see him?”

  “Yes,” she said, looking concerned. “He brought me a coffee, too. Just before nine, I think. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” he snapped.

  “Em, Lou, just one thing before you go…Is this a bad time to go over some details for your dad’s party?”

  She’d barely finished her sentence before he’d gone back into his office and slammed the door behind him once again.

  THERE ARE MANY TYPES OF wake-up calls in the world. For Lou Suffern, a wake-up call was a duty for his devoted alarm clock to perform on a daily basis. At six a.m. every day, when he was in bed sleeping and dreaming, thinking of yesterday and planning tomorrow, his alarm would ring dutifully and loudly. It would reach out from the bedside table and prod him right in the subconscious, taking him away from his slumber and dragging him into the world of the awakened. Lou would wake up; eyes closed, then open. Body in bed, then out of bed; naked, then clothed. This, for Lou, was what waking up was about. It was the transition period from sleep to work.

  For other people wake-up calls took a different form. For Alison, it was the pregnancy scare at sixteen that had forced her to make some choices; for Mr. Patterson, it was the birth of his first child that had made him see the world in a different light. For Alfred, it was his father’s loss of their millions when Alfred was a child, forcing him to attend public school for a year before his father made it all back. It changed him forever. For Ruth, her wake-up call happened on their last summer holiday, when she walked in on her husband with their twenty-six-year-old Polish nanny. For little five-year-old Lucy, it was when she looked out into the audience during her school play to see an empty seat beside her mother.

  Today, though, Lou was experiencing a very different kind of wake-up call. Lou Suffern, you see, wasn’t aware that a person could be awakened when his eyes were already open. He didn’t realize that a person could be awakened when he was already out of his bed, dressed in a smart suit, doing deals and overseeing meetings. He didn’t realize a person could be awakened when he considered himself to be calm, composed, and collected, able to deal with life and all it had to throw at him. The alarm bells were ringing now, louder and louder in his ear, and only his subconscious could hear them. He was trying to turn the bells off, to hit the snooze button so that he could nestle back down in the lifestyle he felt cozy with, but it wasn’t working. He didn’t know that he couldn’t tell life when he was ready to learn, that life would instead teach him when it felt he was good and ready. He didn’t know that he couldn’t press buttons and suddenly know it all; that it was the buttons in him that would be pressed.

  Lou Suffern thought he already knew it all.

  But he had only scratched the surface.

  CHAPTER 15

  Bump in the Night

  AT SEVEN THAT EVENING, WHEN the rest of his colleagues had been spat out of the office building and then sucked in by the spreading Christmas mania outside, Lou Suffern remained inside at his desk, staring at some files, feeling less like the dapper businessman and more like Aloysius, the schoolboy in detention whom he’d fought so hard over the years to leave behind.

  Outside was black and cold. Lines of traffic filled every bridge and quay as people made their way home, counting down the days of this mad rush to Christmas. Harry in the mailroom was right: it was all moving too quickly, the buildup feeling more of an occasion than the moment itself. Lou’s head pulsated more than it had that morning, and his left eye throbbed as the migraine worsened. He lowered the intensity of the lamp on his desk, feeling sensitive to the light. He could barely think, let alone string a sentence together, and so he wrapped himself up in his cashmere coat and scarf and left his office to go to the nearest pharmacy for some headache pills. He knew he was hung over, but he was also sure he was coming down with something; the last few days he’d felt extraordinarily unlike himself. Disorganized, unsure—traits that were surely due to illness.

  Lights were out in all the offices; the hallways were dark, apart from a few emergency lights that remained on for the security guards doing their rounds. Lou pressed the elevator call button and waited for the sound of the thick wires pulling the elevator up the shaft to start up. Instead, the doors opened instantly, and he caught sight of himself in the elevator mirror: disheveled, tired. He pulled his coat around him tighter, stepped into the car, and before he had the opportunity to press a button, the doors automatically closed and the elevator immediately descended.

  He pressed the ground-floor button, but it failed to light up. He pressed it again harder. Still nothing. He thumped it a few times and, with growing concern, watched as the light moved from each number on the panel to the next. Twelve, eleven, ten…The elevator picked up speed as it descended. Nine, eight, seven…It showed no signs of slowing. The elevator was rattling now as it sped along the wires, and, with growing fear and anxiety, Lou began to press all of the buttons in front of him, alarm included, but it was to no avail. The elevator didn’t respond, and it continued to fall through the shaft on a course of its own choosing.

  Only floors away from the ground level, Lou moved away from the doors quickly and hunched down, huddling in the corner of the car. He tucked his head between his knees, crossed his fingers, and braced himself in the crash position.

  But seconds later, the elevator slowed and suddenly stopped, shuddering a little from its abrupt halt. When Lou opened his eyes, which until that moment had been scrunched shut, he saw that he’d stopped on the basement floor. Then the elevator omitted a cheery ping, and its doors slid open. He shuddered at the sight in front of him as he looked out. The basement was cold and dark, and the concrete ground dusty. Not wanting to get off in the basement, he pressed the ground-floor button again to return quickly to marble surfaces and carpets, to creamy toffee swirls and chromes, but the button still failed to light up; the elevator stayed open. He had no choice but to try to find the stairs so that he could climb up to the ground floor. As soon as he stepped out of the elevator and placed both feet on the basement floor, the doors behind him slid closed and the elevator ascended.

  The basement was dimly lit. At the end of the corridor a fluorescent strip of light flashed on and off, which didn’t help his headache and made him lose his footing a few times. There was the loud hum of machines all around, and the ceilings revealed a complicated mess of electrics and wiring. The floor was cold and hard beneath his leather shoes and dust motes bounced up to cover his polished tips. As he moved along, searching for the exit, he heard the sound of music drifting out from under the door at the end of a hallway that veered off to the right. “Driving Home for Christmas” by Chris Rea. Along the hallway on the opposite side, he saw a green sign depicting a man running illuminated above a metal door. He looked from the exit, back to the room from which music and light emanated. He glanced at his watch. He still had time to make his way to the pharmacy and—providing the elevators worked—back to his office for the conference call. Curiosity got the better of him, and so he made his way down the hall and drummed his knuckles against the closed door. The music was so loud he could barely hear his own knock,
so he slowly opened the door and stuck his head in the room.

  The sight stole words straight from his mouth.

  Inside was a small stockroom, the walls lined from floor to ceiling with metal shelves, filled with everything from lightbulbs to toilet rolls. There were two aisles, both of them no more than ten feet in length, and it was the second aisle that caught Lou’s attention. Through the shelving units, light came from the ground. Walking closer to the aisle, he could see the familiar sleeping bag laid out from the wall. On the sleeping bag was Gabe, reading a book, so engrossed that he didn’t look up as Lou approached. On the lower shelves a row of candles was lit, the same scented kind that were dotted around all the office bathrooms, and a shadeless lamp sent out a small amount of orange light in the corner of the room. Gabe was wrapped up in the same dirty blanket that Lou recognized from Gabe’s days out on the street. A kettle was on a shelf and a plastic sandwich bag was half empty beside him. Gabe’s new suit hung from a shelf, still covered in plastic.

  Gabe looked up then, and his book went flying from his hands, just missing one of the candles, as he sat up straight and alert.

  “Lou,” he said, with a fright.

  “Gabe,” Lou said, and he didn’t feel the satisfaction he thought he should. The sight before him was sad. No wonder the man had been first at the office every morning. This small storeroom piled high with shelves of miscellaneous junk had become Gabe’s home.

  “Are you going to tell?” Gabe asked, though he didn’t sound concerned, just interested.