The Gift

‘Lou— Loub— what are they?’

‘Identifiable by their lacquered red sole. These particular ones had one-hundred-and-twenty-millimetre heels.’

‘Millimetres?’ Lou questioned, then, ‘Red sole, okay,’ he nodded, absorbing it all.

‘You could always just ask your friend-slash-acquaintance-slash-colleague who he was meeting,’ Gabe suggested with a glint in his eye.

Lou didn’t respond directly to that. ‘Right, I’d better run. Things to see, people to do, and both at the same time, would you believe,’ he winked. ‘Thanks for your help, Gabe.’ He slipped a ten-euro note into Gabe’s cup.

‘Cheers, man,’ Gabe beamed, immediately grabbing it from the cup and tucking it into his pocket. He tapped his finger. ‘Can’t let them know, remember?’

‘Right,’ Lou agreed.

But, at the exact same time, didn’t agree at all.

5.

The Thirteenth Floor

‘Going up?’

There was a universal grunt and nodding of heads from inside the crammed elevator as the enquiring gentleman on the second floor looked at sleepy faces with hope. All but Lou responded, that was, for Lou was too preoccupied with studying the gentleman’s shoes, which stepped over the narrow gap that led to the cold black drop below, and into the confined space. Brown brogues shuffled around one hundred and eighty degrees, in order to face the front. Lou was looking for red soles and black shoes. Alfred had arrived early and had lunch with black shoes. Black shoes left the office with red soles. If he could find out who owned the red soles, then he’d know who she worked with, and then he’d know who Alfred was secretly meeting. This process made more sense to Lou than simply asking Alfred, which said a lot about the nature of Alfred’s honesty. This, he thought about at the exact same time as sharing the uncomfortable silence that only an elevator of strangers could bring.

‘What floor do you want?’ a muffled voice came from the corner of the elevator, where a man was well-hidden – possibly squashed – and, as the only person with access to the buttons, was forced to deal with the responsibility of commandeering the elevator stops.

‘Thirteen, please,’ the new arrival said.

There were a few sighs and one person tutted.

‘There is no thirteenth floor,’ the body-less man replied.

The elevator doors closed and it ascended quickly.

‘You’d better be quick,’ the body-less man urged.

‘Em …’ The man fumbled in his briefcase for his schedule.

‘You either want the twelfth floor or the fourteenth floor,’ the muffled voice offered. ‘There’s no thirteen.’

‘Surely he needs to get off on the fourteenth floor,’ somebody else offered. ‘The fourteenth floor is technically the thirteenth floor.’

‘Do you want me to press fourteen?’ the voice asked a little more tetchily.

‘Em …’ The man continued to fumble with papers.

Lou couldn’t concentrate on the unusual conversation in the usually quiet elevator, as he was preoccupied with studying the shoes around him. Lots of black shoes. Some with detail, some scuffed, some polished, some slip-ons, some untied. No obvious red soles. He noticed the feet around him beginning to twitch and shift from foot to foot. One pair moved away from him ever so slightly. His head shot up immediately as the elevator pinged.

‘Going up?’ the young woman asked.

There was a more helpful chorus of male yeses this time.

She stepped in front of Lou and he checked out her shoes while the men around him checked out other areas of her body in that heavy silence that only women feel in an elevator of men. The elevator moved up again. Six … seven … eight …

Finally, the man with the brown brogues emerged from his briefcase empty-handed, and with an air of defeat announced, ‘Patterson Developments.’

Lou pondered the confusion with irritation. It had been his suggestion that there be no number thirteen on the elevator panel, but of course there was a thirteenth floor. There wasn’t a gap with nothing before getting to the fourteenth floor; the fourteenth didn’t hover on some invisible bricks. The fourteenth was the thirteenth, and his offices were on the thirteenth. But it was known as the fourteenth. Why it confused everybody, he had no idea: it was as clear as day to him. He exited on the fourteenth and stepped out, his feet sinking into the spongy plush carpet.

‘Good morning, Mr Suffern.’ His secretary greeted him without looking up from her papers.

He stopped at her desk and looked at her with a puzzled expression. ‘Alison, call me Lou, like you always do, please.’

‘Of course, Mr Suffern,’ she said perkily, refusing to look him in the eye.

While Alison moved about, Lou tried to get a glimpse of the soles of her shoes. He was still standing at her desk when she returned and once again refused to meet his eye as she sat down and began typing. As inconspicuously as possible, he bent down to tie his shoelaces and peeked through the gap in her desk.

She frowned and crossed her long legs. ‘Is everything okay, Mr Suffern?’

‘Call me Lou,’ he repeated, still puzzled.

‘No,’ she said rather moodily and looked away. She grabbed the diary from her desk. ‘Shall we go through today’s appointments?’ She stood and made her way around the desk.

Tight silk blouse, tight skirt, his eyes scanned her body before getting to her shoes.

‘How high are they?’

‘Why?’

‘Are they one hundred and twenty millimetres?’

‘I’ve no idea. Who measures heels in millimetres?’

‘I don’t know. Some people. Gabe,’ he smiled, following her as they made their way into his office, trying to get a glimpse of her soles.

‘Who the hell is Gabe?’ she muttered.

‘Gabe is a homeless man,’ he laughed.

As she turned around to question him, she caught him with his head tilted, studying her. ‘You’re looking at me the same way you look at the art on these walls,’ she said smartly.

Modern impressionism. He’d never been a fan of it. Regularly throughout the days he’d find himself stopping to stare at the blobs of nothing that covered the walls of the corridors of these offices. Splashes and lines scraped into the canvas that somebody considered something, and which could easily be hung upside down or back to front with nobody being any the wiser. He’d contemplate the money that had been spent on them too – and then he’d compare them to the pictures lining his refrigerator door at home; home art by his daughter Lucy. And as he’d tilt his head from side to side, as he was doing with Alison now, he knew there was a playschool teacher out there somewhere with millions of euro lining her pockets, while four-year-olds with paint on their hands, their tongues dangling from their mouths in concentration, received gummy bears instead of a percentage of the takings.

‘Do you have red soles?’ he asked Alison, making his way to his gigantic leather chair that a family of four could live in.

‘Why, did I step in something?’ She stood on one foot and hopped around lightly, trying to keep her balance while checking her soles, appearing to Lou like a dog trying to chase its tail.

‘It doesn’t matter.’ He sat down at his desk wearily.

She viewed him with suspicion before returning her attention to her schedule. ‘At eight thirty you have a phone call with Aonghus O’Sullibháin about needing to become a fluent Irish speaker in order to buy that plot in Connemara. However, I have arranged for your benefit for the conversation to be as Béarla …’ She smirked and threw back her head, like a horse would, pushing her mane of highlighted hair off her face. ‘At eight forty-five you have a meeting with Barry Brennan about the slugs they found on the Cork site –’

‘Cross your fingers they’re not rare,’ he groaned.

‘Well, you never know, sir, they could be relatives of yours. You have some family in Cork, don’t you?’ She still wouldn’t look at him. ‘At nine thirty –’

‘Hold on a minute.’ Despite knowing he was alone with her in the room, Lou looked around hoping for back-up. ‘Why are you calling me sir? What’s gotten into you today?’

She looked away, mumbling what Lou thought sounded like, ‘Not you, that’s for sure.’

‘What did you say?’ But he didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I’ve a busy day, I could do without the sarcasm, thank you. And since when did the day’s schedule become a morning announcement?’

‘I thought that if you heard how packed your day is, aloud, then you might decide to give me the go-ahead to make less appointments in future.’

‘Do you want less work to do, Alison, is that what this is all about?’

‘No,’ she blushed. ‘Not at all. I just thought that you could change your work routine a little. Instead of these manic days spent darting around, you could spend more time with fewer clients. Happier clients.’

‘Yes, then me and Jerry Maguire will live together happily ever after. Alison, you’re new to the company so I’ll let this go by, but this is how I like to do business, okay? I like to be busy, I don’t need two-hour lunchbreaks and schoolwork at the kitchen table with the kids.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘You mentioned happier clients; have you had any complaints?’

‘Your mother. Your wife,’ she said through gritted teeth. ‘Your brother. Your sister. Your daughter.’

‘My daughter is five years old.’

‘Well, she called when you forgot to pick her up from Irish dancing lessons last Thursday.’

‘That doesn’t count,’ he rolled his eyes, ‘because my five-year-old daughter isn’t going to lose the company hundreds of millions of euro, is she?’ Once again he didn’t wait for a response. ‘Have you received any complaints from people who do not share my surname?’

Alison thought hard. ‘Did your sister change her name back after the separation?’

He glared at her.

‘Well then, no, sir.’

‘What’s with the sir thing?’

‘I just thought,’ her face flushed, ‘that if you’re going to treat me like a stranger, then that’s what I’ll do too.’

‘How am I treating you like a stranger?’

She looked away. ‘Not something He lowered his voice. ‘Alison, we’re at the office, what do you want me to do? Tell you how much I enjoyed screwing your brains out in the middle of discussing our appointments?’

‘You didn’t screw my brains out, we just kissed.’

‘Whatever.’ He waved his hand dismissively. ‘What’s this about?’

She had no answer to that but her cheeks were on fire. ‘Perhaps Alfred mentioned something to me.’

Lou’s heart did an unusual thing then, that he hadn’t experienced before. A fluttering of some sort. ‘What did he mention?’

She looked away, began fidgeting with the corner of the page. ‘Well, he mentioned something about you missing that meeting last week –’

‘Not something, I want specifics here, please.’

She bristled. ‘Okay, em, well, after the meeting last week with Mr O’Sullivan, he – as in Alfred –’ she swallowed, ‘suggested that I try to stay on top of you a bit more. He knew that I was new to the job and his advice to me was not to allow you to miss an important meeting again.’

Lou’s blood boiled and his mind raced. He’d never felt such confusion. Lou spent his life running from one thing to another, missing half of the first in order just to make it to the end of the other. He did this all day every day, always feeling like he was catching up in order to get ahead. It was long and hard and tiring work. He had made huge sacrifices to get where he was. He loved his work, was totally and utterly professional and dedicated to every aspect of it. To be pulled up on missing one meeting that had not yet been scheduled when he had taken the morning off, angered him. It also angered him that it was family that had caused this. If it was another meeting he had sacrificed it for, he would feel better about it, but he felt a sudden anger at his mother. It was her that he had collected from hospital after a hip replacement, the morning of the meeting. He felt angry at his wife for talking him into doing it when his suggestion to arrange a car to collect his mother had sent her into a rage. He felt anger at his sister Marcia and his older brother Quentin for not doing it instead. He was a busy man, and the one time he chose family over work, he had to pay the price. He stood up and paced by the window, biting down hard on his lip and feeling such anger he wanted to pick up the phone and call his entire family and tell them, ‘See? See, this is why I can’t always be there. See? Now look what you’ve done!’

‘Did you not tell him that I had to collect my mother from the hospital?’ He said it quietly because he hated saying it. He hated hearing those words that he despised other colleagues using. Hated the excuses, their personal lives being brought into the office. To him, it was a lack of professionalism. You either did the job, or you didn’t.

‘Well, no, because it was my first week and Mr Patterson was standing with him and I didn’t know what you would like me to say –’

‘Mr Patterson was with him?’ Lou asked, his eyes almost popping out of his head.

She nodded up and down, wide-eyed, like one of those toys with a loose neck.

‘Right.’ His heart began to slow down, now realising what was going on. His dear friend Alfred was up to his tricks. Tricks that Lou had assumed up until now that he was exempt from. Alfred could never get by a day doing things by the book. He looked at things from an awkward angle, came at conversations from an unusual perspective too; always trying to figure out the best way he could come out of any situation.

Lou’s eyes searched his desk. ‘Where’s my post?’

‘It’s on the twelfth floor. The work-experience boy got confused by the missing thirteenth floor.’

‘The thirteenth floor isn’t missing! We are on it! What is with everyone today?’

‘We are on the fourteenth floor, and having no thirteenth floor was a terrible design flaw.’

‘It’s not a design flaw,’ he said defensively. ‘Some of the greatest buildings in the world have no thirteenth floor.’

‘Or roofs.’

‘What?’

‘The Colosseum has no roof.’

‘What?!’ he snapped again, getting confused. ‘Tell the work-experience boy to take the stairs from now on and count his way up. That way he won’t get confused by a missing number. Why is a work-experience person handling the mail anyway?’

‘Harry says they’re short-staffed.’

‘Short-staffed? It only takes one person to get in the elevator and bring my bloody post up. How can they be short-staffed?’ His voice went up a few octaves. ‘A monkey could do his job. There are people out there on the streets who’d die to work in a place like …’

‘In a place like what?’ Alison asked, but she was asking the back of Lou’s head because he’d turned around and was looking out of his floor-to-ceiling windows at the pavement below, a peculiar expression on his face reflected in the glass for her to see.

She slowly began to walk away, for the first moment in the past few weeks feeling a light relief that their fling, albeit a fumble in the dark, was going no further, for perhaps she’d misjudged him, perhaps there was something wrong with him. She was new to the company and hadn’t quite sussed him out yet. All she knew of him was that he reminded her of the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, always seeming late, late, late for a very important date but managing to get to every appointment just in the nick of time. He was a kind man to everybody he met and was successful at his job. Plus he was handsome and charming and drove a Porsche, and those things she valued more than anything else. Sure, she felt a slight twinge of guilt about what had happened last week with Lou, when she had spoken to his wife on the phone, but then it was quickly erased by, in Alison’s opinion, his wife’s absolute naiveté when it came to her husband’s infidelities. Besides, everybody had a weak spot, and any man could be forgiven if their Achilles heel just happened to be her.

‘What shoes does Alfred wear?’ Lou called out, just before she closed the door.

She stepped back inside. ‘Alfred who?’

‘Berkeley.’

‘I don’t know.’ Her face flushed. ‘Why do you want to know?’

‘For a Christmas present.’

‘Shoes? You want to get Alfred a pair of shoes? But I’ve already ordered the Brown Thomas hampers for everyone, like you asked.’

‘Just find out for me. But don’t make it obvious. Just casually enquire, I want to surprise him.’

She narrowed her eyes with suspicion. ‘Sure.’

‘Oh, and that new girl in accounts. What’s her name … Sandra, Sarah?’

‘Deirdre.’

‘Check her shoes too. Let me know if they’ve got red soles.’

‘They don’t. They’re from Top Shop. Black ankle boots, suede with water marks. I bought a pair of them last year. When they were in fashion.’

With that, she left.

Lou sighed, collapsed into his oversized chair and held his fingers to the bridge of his nose, hoping to stop the migraine that loomed. Maybe he was coming down with something. He’d already wasted fifteen minutes of his morning talking to a homeless man, which was totally out of character for him, but he’d felt compelled to stop. Something about the young man demanded he stop and offer him his coffee.

Unable to concentrate on his schedule, Lou once again turned to look out at the city below. Gigantic Christmas decorations adorned the quays and bridges; giant mistletoe and bells that swayed from one side to the other thanks to the festive magic of neon. The river Liffey was at full capacity and gushed by his window and out to Dublin Bay. The pavements were aflow with people charging to work, keeping in time with the currents, following the same direction as the tide. They pounded the pavement as they powerwalked by the gaunt copper figures dressed in rags, which had been constructed to commemorate those during the famine forced to walk these very quays to emigrate. Instead of small parcels of belongings in their hands, the Irish people of this district now carried Starbucks coffee in one hand, briefcases in the other. Women walked to the office wearing trainers with their skirts, their high heels tucked away in their bags. A whole different destiny and endless opportunities awaiting them.

The only thing that was static was Gabe, tucked away in a doorway, near the entrance, wrapped up on the ground and watching the shoes march by, the opportunities for him still not quite as equal as for those that trampled by. Though only slightly bigger than a dot on the pavement thirteen floors down, Lou could see Gabe’s arm rise and fall as he sipped on his coffee, making every mouthful last, even if by now it was surely cold. Gabe intrigued him. Not least because of his talent for recalling every pair of shoes that belonged in the building as though they were a maths timetable, but, more alarmingly, because the person behind those crystal-blue eyes was remarkably familiar. In fact, Gabe reminded Lou of himself. The two men were similar in age and, given the right grooming, Gabe could very easily have been mistaken for Lou. He seemed a personable, friendly, capable man. It could so easily be Lou sitting on the pavement outside, watching the world go by, yet how different their lives were.

At that very instant, as though feeling Lou’s eyes on him, Gabe looked up. Thirteen floors up and Lou felt like Gabe was staring straight at his soul, his eyes searing into him.

This confused Lou. His involvement in the development of this building entitled him to the knowledge that, beyond any reasonable doubt, from the outside the glass was reflective. Gabe couldn’t possibly have been able to see him as he stared up, his chin to the air, with a hand across his forehead to block out the light, almost in salute. He could only have been looking at a reflection of some kind, Lou reasoned, a bird perhaps had swooped and caught his eye. That’s right, a reflection was all it could be. But so intent was Gabe’s gaze, which reached up the full thirteen floors to Lou’s office window and all the way into Lou’s eyes, that it caused Lou to put aside his water-tight belief. He lifted up his hand, smiled tightly and gave a small salute. Before he could wait for a reaction from Gabe, he wheeled his chair away from the window and spun around, his pulse rate quickening, as though he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t.

The phone rang. It was Alison and she didn’t sound happy.

‘Before I tell you what I’m about to tell you, I just want to let you know that I qualified from UCD with a business degree.’

‘Congratulations,’ Lou said.

She cleared her throat. ‘Here you go. Alfred wears size eight brown loafers. Apparently he’s got ten pairs of the same shoes and he wears them every day, so I don’t think the idea of another pair as a Christmas gift would go down too well. I don’t know what make they are but the sad thing is I can find out for you.’ She took a breath. ‘As for the shoes with the red soles, Louise bought a new pair and wore them last week but they cut the ankle off her so she took them back, but the shop wouldn’t take them back because it was obvious she’d worn them because the red sole had begun to wear off.’

‘Who’s Louise?’

‘Mr Patterson’s secretary.’

‘I’ll need you to find out from her who she left work with every day last week.’

‘No way, that’s not in my job description!’

‘You can leave work early if you find out for me.’

‘Okay.’

‘Thank you for cracking under such pressure.’

‘No problem, I can get started on my Christmas shopping.’

‘Don’t forget my list.’

So, despite Lou learning very little, the same odd feeling rushed into his heart, something others would identify as panic. But Gabe had been right about the shoes and so wasn’t a lunatic, as Lou had secretly suspected. Earlier, Gabe had asked if Lou needed an observant eye around the building, and so, picking up the phone, Lou rethought his earlier decision.

‘Can you get me Harry from the mailroom on the phone, and then get one of my spare shirts, a tie and trousers from the closet and take them downstairs to the guy sitting at the door. Take him to the men’s room first, make sure he’s tidied up, and then take him down to the mailroom. His name is Gabe and Harry will be expecting him. I’m going to cure his little short-staffing problem.’

‘What?’

‘Gabe. It’s short for Gabriel. But call him Gabe.’

‘No, I meant –’

‘Just do it. Oh, and Alison?’

‘What?’

‘I really enjoyed our kiss last week and I look forward to screwing your brains out in the future.’

He heard a light laugh slip from her throat before the phone went dead.

He’d done it again. While in the process of telling the truth, he had the almost admirable quality of telling a total and utter lie. And through helping somebody else – Gabe – Lou was also helping himself; a good deed was indeed a triumph for the soul. Despite that, Lou knew that somewhere beneath his plotting and soul-saving there lay another plot, which was the beginning of a saving of a very different kind. That of his own skin. And even deeper in this onion man’s complexities, he knew that this outreach was prompted by fear. Not just by the very fear that – had all reason and luck failed him – Lou could so easily be in Gabe’s position at this very moment, but in a layer so deeply buried from the surface that it almost wasn’t felt and certainly wasn’t seen, there lay the fear of a reported crack – a blip in Lou’s engineering of his own career. As much as he wanted to ignore it, it niggled. The fear was there, it was there all the time, but it was merely disguised as something else for others to see.