The owner of the shop, a burly Italian cockney glared at her but slapped the bread onto the board.
“No butter,” she said it sharply as she saw him start to dip his knife in the tub. He threw the knife down, muttering in Italian.
People had to learn. They had to toughen up. Life wasn’t a Disney film full of helpful woodland creatures and funny animated snowmen. If you didn’t look after yourself no one else would.
She paid with the correct money, and took her sandwich in silence. She stared pointedly at the now crying woman standing with a handful of change and left the shop the doorbells chiming accusingly behind her.
Walking back onto her floor from the lift, she noticed that there were still people gossiping. She could feel her lips tightening. It was a dog eat dog world; that was what made her a great lawyer. No distractions, no diversions. What she hadn’t learned by herself, her mother or Hilary Satis had drummed into her.
These people needed to get with the programme.
“Edie?” A weedy voice said.
Sighing, Edie turned away from the screen.
“Yes, Rachel?”
Edie asked herself, yet again, why she had been assigned the most colourless and ineffectual trainee solicitor the firm had ever taken on. Didn’t they know that a divorce practice needed sharks? Go-getters? Ever since Hilary had been forced out it had gone soft. Mind you the trainee before Rachel hadn't been much good either and Hilary had been around then.
“I have to leave early tonight,” Rachel said bouncing from foot to foot.
It was the most animated Edie had ever seen her.
“Early?”
She'd already taken a long lunch. Edie would have to check her billable hours carefully.
“Yes… it’s for my wedding dress fitting!” Rachel fairly glowed.
And another one was seduced to the dark side. No wonder she wasn't good for anything. Weddings turned people's mind to porridge. And if they didn't have much of a mind before, it went even quicker.
Edie looked at Rachel, really seeing her for the first time. She shone from within, transforming her dirty dishwater coloured hair, her scrawny figure hidden in a polyester black suit and her cheap shoes into something touchingly pretty.
Weddings? Pah.
It wouldn’t last.
“And you think that takes priority over Mrs Robinson-Smythe’s settlement?” Edie asked.
“I can come in early tomorrow?” Rachel’s bottom lip wobbled.
“You should be coming in early anyway if you want to get ahead. Oh don’t cry. Just go. But this will be going on your permanent record.” Edie said and turned away from her in disgust, ignoring her until she left the office.
Edie found that firing off an email to the HR department about the lackadaisical attitude of her trainee lifted her spirits, and she carried on working with a small smile. If you didn’t watch the trainees they were apt to slack off, she knew this. She’d been taught by the best. Really, between Rachel’s sloppiness and the other solicitors spending the time gossiping about men, it was a surprise that Bailey Lang Satis and Partners was still as successful as it was. Standards were slipping.
At eight pm, she shut down her computer, removed all papers from her desk, averted her eyes from Rachel’s teetering piles of briefs and left. She strode confidently through the office, and noted she was the last to leave. Good. It gave her a sense of pride, and also relief that she didn't have to make small talk with anyone.
Exactly twenty minutes later she was outside the door to her building, a red and white mansion block just off Victoria Street. It was a quiet and elegant place and an easy bus ride from work at the edge of the City. The double doors were half glazed and led through to a tiled entrance way. Above the doors was a stained glass semicircular window showing flowers, misplaced Edwardian whimsy, Edie always thought.
The last rays of the sun on this June evening were shining directly onto the window. As Edie put her key in the lock, she glanced up.
Instead of the whimsical flowers she'd expected, a face stared down at her. The face of Jessica Marley.
It glowed in the light of the setting sun. It had Jessica’s perpetual look of superiority; her chin length bob moved slightly as if touched by a faint wind. And perched on top was a cheap silver tiara. Brown eyes stared beadily down at Edie. There was nothing whimsical about them.
Edie blinked.
No, it really was just a stained glass window.
The blood from her face was now pooled somewhere round her knees. With her hand shaking, she turned the key in the lock and stumbled through the front door.
That didn’t just happen. It couldn’t have done.
“Low blood sugar. It’s just low blood sugar,” she whispered as she took the lift not trusting her legs for the usual brisk walk up the stairs. She’d seen Jessica because she’d been on her mind earlier; that was it. It had to be. It was the only logical explanation.
Once in her second floor flat, she rapidly turned the locks and put the chain on. Back flattened against it, she lifted a hand to her forehead. It was cold and damp, but not from fear; she didn't do fear.
She could hear Ms Satis' voice telling her to pull it together.
“Get a grip Edie. It was just a trick of the light.” Maybe if she said it enough she could believe it. It was a technique she knew well.
Taking a deep breath she walked to the kitchen through her bland and colourless flat. There was not a personal touch anywhere, not a photo or a knickknack; it was more like a hotel room. She could move out at a moment’s notice and not leave an imprint of herself behind. And what was in the flat was perfectly aligned; everything was in its place.
In her spotless and almost clinical kitchen, Edie prepared dinner with automaton precision: organic chicken, no skin and grilled to reduce the calories, organic vegetables steamed and not a touch of a starchy carbohydrate because it was after six pm. The work soothed her, all the boundaries and rules giving her structure, making her feel safe. Her phone rang, and she automatically checked the caller.
Her mother.
Her lips pursed. She didn’t have time to speak to her mother, Edie lied to herself, when what she meant was that she didn't have the energy to deal with her. She sent it to voice mail.
Then, as was her routine, she sat at the small breakfast bar that divided the kitchen from the living room and carefully placed a forkful of food made up of perfect proportions and dimension in her mouth. She chewed exactly thirty times before she swallowed, and, because she'd had so much practice at ignoring anything that made her uncomfortable, she successfully dismissed the thoughts of weddings and stained glass windows as she reviewed Mrs Robinson-Smythe’s settlement.
By exactly ten thirty pm Edie was in bed, a solitary figure lying in her cool crisp white linen sheets. It was as if she was laid out, arms by her sides
