Chapter 2: Summer Job

Imogen and I were up early the next morning. Since it was the first day of our summer placement at Will’s law firm, we wanted to have a good breakfast at Jak’s, and then arrive at the office right on time to make a good impression. We were due there at nine-thirty, and I figured it was a half-hour drive at most from our house to the business park on the edge of Westmouth where the offices were. So at eight, we walked through the door of Jak’s looking for our usual table.

Well, I say our usual table. That really should be my usual table. This was the first time Imogen, or anyone else, had joined me for breakfast since the end of term a few weeks ago. I, on the other hand, had been in pretty much every morning.

And every morning I’d been greeted by the smiling face of a very lovely nineteen-year-old.

“Hi, Paul!” Marie said as I walked in ahead of Imogen. This was followed by a disappointed sounding, “Oh,” when she saw Imogen walk in behind me.

I offered what I hoped was a reassuring smile and a cheeky wink and was rewarded with a smile back as bright as the morning sun. “The usual?” she said.

“Usual?” I replied. “I have no idea what you mean, this is the first time I’ve patronised this establishment.” This had become a running joke between us.

“XL Full English coming right up.” She shifted her glance towards Imogen. “What can I get for you?”

“Oh, I’ll just have what he’s having.”

Marie frowned. “You sure? That’s a hell of a lot of food.” She grinned. “He eats like a pig.”

“I know!” said Imogen. “I keep telling him he’ll get fat one day, but he doesn’t listen. Okay, better just make mine regular size.”

“Okay. Take a seat and I’ll bring your coffee over. The food will be five or ten minutes, okay? You have yours ... er ... black? One sugar?”

Imogen nodded. “That’ll do. Thanks.”

We sat on opposite sides of my favourite table—me with my back to the door, Imogen with her back to the kitchen—and Imogen immediately leaned forward and said, “What’s up with her?”

“Huh?” I really could be a terrific conversationalist at times.

“Marie! She’s all like ... I don’t know! Has she been kidnapped by aliens and replaced with a clone or something?”

I shook my head. “No, she’s just—”

“Usually such a miserable cow. So what flipped her one-eighty?”

Marie put the coffee down in front of us both. I’d seen her coming, which is why I’d tried to stall giving Imogen an answer, but with her back to the kitchen, Imogen obviously hadn’t. She suddenly looked up at Marie and said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay,” said Marie with a smile. “You’re right. I was a miserable cow. For a long time, actually. Although with good reason. But now I ... I don’t know. Things are different. Looking up.” She looked at me. “Partly down to Paul, of course.”

“Paul? Really? How?”

Marie’s smile widened just a little more if that was possible. She really did have a lovely smile. “He spoke to his friend, the lawyer—that’s who you’re working for this summer isn’t it? —and he’s put me in touch with this firm of accountants he knows and they’ve offered me a part-time job. It’s just admin for now, but if I sit my A-Levels again in January, then they’ll consider offering me a training contract. I’ll still have to go and get all my accounting exams and stuff, but it’s a damn sight better than what I had a couple of months ago. I didn’t even think I was going to bother doing my A-Levels again.”

“You did that for her?” Imogen said. “When?”

I shrugged. “It was nothing.”

“Don’t you dare say that,” Marie said. “It may have been nothing to you, but it is everything to me.”

I smiled at her. “I know. I’m just glad I could help.”

“I know. Thanks. Sorry, I didn’t mean to ... I’m just so ... I wish I could—”

“Hey,” I said. “We’ve been over this, okay? You don’t owe me anything and you don’t have to pay me back, okay? I was just helping a friend.”

Damn! That smile! I swear, it could light up a darkened forest at night.

She nodded, then walked off to serve someone else, dabbing at her eye as she did.

Imogen stared at me.

“What?”

She shook her head. “You are ... You’re amazing, you know that?”

I shrugged again.

“Oh, don’t give me that false modesty shit. You’re amazing and you know you are.” She furtively looked around the room to see where Marie was. Then leaned forward and whispered, “She fancies you. You know that, right?”

I shook my head. “Don’t be silly.”

“I’m not. She fancies you. You should ask her out on a date or something.”

“I don’t know. I mean—”

“Hey, remember what Chloë said? If you don’t put yourself out there, you’ll never know if you’ve found your happy ending.”

“And you think...?”

“I don’t know. But do you want to risk missing out?”

“I don’t know, Gen.”

“Fine.” She pulled her phone out of her pocket and started tapping away at it.

“What are you doing?”

“Updating Chloë.”

Oh, shit. What had I let myself in for?

We arrived at the Westmouth office of JMS Law at twenty past nine. I parked the car, and we stood outside the entrance looking at each other nervously.

“You ready?” I asked.

She shrugged—a habit she’d picked up from me no doubt. “I guess.” She took a deep breath.

“You’ll be fine. We’ll be fine.”

She smiled then said, “What does JMS stand for anyway?”

“Jenkins, McCall and Smith,” said a voice from behind us. We both turned and saw Will walking towards us. “Figured you’d get here early so I came down to wait for you. I was over there on that bench.” He pointed to three benches arranged in a U-shape a few yards away from the entrance. “You walked right past me.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it. It’s understandable. Anyway, Jenkins, McCall and Smith were The Firm’s founders. But when the last one retired last year, the partners—well, some of the partners, the London-based ones mostly—thought it was a good time for a re-brand. Hence, JMS Law.”

“I get the impression you weren’t keen on the name change,” I said.

“I’m a traditional kind of guy. I like traditional names for law firms.” He smiled. “Come on, let’s go inside and get started.”

As we followed him towards the entrance, Will said, “What do you think of our new building? It’s only been open a couple of months.”

“Really?” I said.

“Yes. First of April to be exact. It was supposed to be built about five years ago, but then the recession hit and the project was put on hold. I was finally able to push it through a partners’ meeting in the middle of twenty-ten. It took a while to get planning approval, and then about a year to build. But I’m really pleased with it.”

It looked to me like it was actually two red-brick buildings joined by a third glass structure. The one to the right of us was a three-storey rectangular box, the red brick punctuated with too many windows to count. It extended out from the entrance we were heading for by quite a long way. As did the building to the left—which created a sort of courtyard, I guess—but this part of the building was curved, kind of like a square with a semi-circle on one end.

Connecting these two was a wall of glass the full height of the building. Will led us through a double-height, double-width door in the centre.

“This is the atrium,” he said. “It’s our reception and waiting area. At the back, there are public toilets and some refreshment facilities. And if you look up, you’ll see there are walkways between the two halves of the building—three on each floor. I think it’s a great piece of design. But then I would—I approved it.” He laughed and took us to the reception desk.

“Have you got the ID badges for two new work-experience people,” he asked the older of the two women behind the desk. The second one was currently on the phone. She must have been about the same age as me and Imogen—very early twenties. If Clarissa’s voice had still been with me, she’d have been saying about now that she was just my type.

“Of course, Mr Brown. I have them right here,” said the older receptionist. She picked up two plastic cards on blue lanyards from the desk by her keyboard. “Here you go.”

“Thank you, Helen,” Will said as he took the IDs from her. “Paul, Imogen, this is Helen, who’s been here longer than I have. I keep trying to get rid of her, but she won’t go. I’ve sacked her five times, but she just turns up the next day like nothing happened.” He grinned as Helen suppressed a girlish giggle. She was probably old enough to be Will’s mother, but they obviously had a good relationship.

“Nice to meet you, Helen,” I said.

“See,” said Will, “What did I tell you? He’s a natural. Knows whose good side he needs to get on without prompting.”

“I’m sure he had a good teacher,” she replied.

The second woman finished on the phone and looked up. “And this is...” Will paused. “Paige,” he said tentatively. The girl smiled and nodded. Will looked at us and said in a stage whisper, “I think that’s the first time I’ve gotten her name right.”

Paige giggled again and said, “You’ve never gotten it wrong yet.”

“Oh, haven’t I? I must be thinking of someone else.” He grinned at her and then addressed me and Imogen again. “Paige has been with us a couple of months now and is our new ... What is it? Office Apprentice or something? Ten years ago, the role would have been called an Office Junior, but the Age Discrimination laws effectively stopped you from advertising that job because it discouraged more mature, experienced people from applying. So, it became the Office Assistant. Of course, that meant more mature, experienced people did start to apply for those types of jobs and since experience will usually be preferable to no experience, the Government suddenly found that the number of younger people out of work went up. And I mean it went up quickly. Naturally, they decided they needed to do something about it and introduced a new Apprentice scheme, where they paid employers to create jobs for the young people put out of work by the Age Discrimination laws. Things like this are the reason I don’t like employment law.”