Snowflake

by Heide Goody

  “Um…”

  Chorley sniffed. “Your brother’s with One Armed Bandit productions, isn’t? Doing that thing in Tierra del Fuego. And he’s gone missing, has he?”

  “What was that place you just said?” I yelped, recognising the name.

  “Tierra del Fuego?”

  “Yes! In Spain! Oh, write it down for me, will you?” I asked.

  He scribbled it on a scrap of his pad for me, but not before he’d written Spain and underlined it and added a smiley face – which was strange.

  “There you go. I hope that sorts things out for you now. Anything else you need a hand with? I might need to change me name to Chorley Danglespear, attorney at law at this rate!”

  “No,” I said, “just get the word out there about my blog and help me leave my stupid cleaning job, will you?”

  “Cleaning job? What? Actual cleaning?”

  “Yes. Mopping, dusting. That sort of thing.”

  “Huh,” he said. “I thought they only let immigrants do that kind of work these days, not English roses such as yourself.”

  “No, I had to do an interview and everything. I mean, my parents filled out the application form and sent it off to the university.”

  “Oh, the university. Even more surprising. Centres of lefty leaning liberalism. They have those affirmative action quotas for all their jobs. If you’re not a black lesbian then you might as well throw your application in the bin.” He caught sight of my perplexed expression. “You’re not, are you?”

  I stared. “What? Black?”

  He gave me an amused look and spread his hands. “These days, you can be whatever you want to be. That’s what they tell us. If you want to call yourself black, say the sky is pink and that up is down then you can. And you can go crying to the bloody Equality Commission if anyone dares to tell you otherwise. No, I’ve got nothing against the blacks. Or the homosexuals and the lesbians either. What they get up to in their own homes is none of my business.”

  I was quite concerned and confused about what Chorley Danglespear thought black people were getting up to in their own homes but I was also worried that there might have been an important journalistic question in there somewhere.

  “You were asking me about my work?” I said.

  “Indeedy-do. You’ve fought against the odds to get a cleaning job at the university but you don’t like it. What’s the worst part about it?”

  I considered the question. The work was fine, actually, it was the other nonsense that came with it. “My boss Rex is this strange man with a great big bushy beard. He’s an idiot too, but I know everyone says that. One thing that was completely crazy was that they made me work this thing called a week in hand. It means that they don’t even pay you until you’ve done loads of work. What are you supposed to do if you’ve got no money? I couldn’t even eat!”

  “Tricky that. What did you do?” he asked.

  “The only thing I could do. I ate the leftover meals in the cafe. The food there’s pretty good, so I had to work quite hard to get people to leave the things I wanted.”

  “Nice one, Lori!” he said. “You stuck it to the man!”

  I had no idea what he was talking about so I smiled at him. After he’d finished his sandwich, he wiped his mouth and struggled to his feet. “Just gonna dig out the camera. Get a couple of shots. You know what would be fun?”

  I shook my head.

  “It would be fun if we got you to do some of the things in your blog, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, maybe it would,” I said thinking about it. Florrie was a cartoon version of me, so it felt perfectly natural to slip back into that role myself.

  “Got a box of eggs back there, love?” he asked the woman at the counter.

  She produced a box of eggs from just below the counter, as if they’d been waiting there. He passed them to me.

  “Right now, do the proud face. You’ve just learned the price of eggs, and it’s like you’ve won a Nobel prize or summat. Yeah, like that!”

  He snapped away for a few seconds.

  “Now, let’s do the one that went viral where you’re looking really confused because you don’t know how big a cup is. Yeah, that cup will do.”

  I picked up a tea cup and contemplated it. It was a mystery that I’d never really got to the bottom of, the cup thing, so it was an easy matter to give it a look of despair and anguish, at the thought of the delicious cake that would elude me.

  “Lori, you’re a star,” he said when he’d finished taking pictures. “So, what’s next? Does Florrie discover that milk comes from cows?”

  “I think Florrie knows that milk comes from cows,” I told him, “although how they turn milk into more milk is a mystery.”

  Chorley frowned. “How they…? Who?”

  “Cows. They drink the milk and then make more milk from it. Round and round it goes.”

  “Cows drink water, love,” said Chorley.

  That didn’t seem right. Cows always appeared on milk bottles. I’d even seen cartoon cows holding glasses of milk and they looked like they were enjoying it.

  “They make milk from water?” I said.

  “And grass,” said Chorley.

  “Oh.” I thought about it. I’d always thought they drank milk and ate cheese – an all dairy diet which was why they looked so big and fat. I decided not to tell Chorley this; I didn’t want to come across as an idiot.

  Chorley was scribbling in his notebook.

  “Can’t wait to see you in print, my love,” he was saying.

  He sounded excited so that was good.

  I wasted no time at all heading over to the police station after the interview. Sergeant Fenton would be eager to hear my news about Adam’s whereabouts. As it turned out, she wasn’t all that eager. I waited for forty minutes for her to come out and see me.

  “Hi Sergeant, I’ve got some good news,” I said. She raised a cynical eyebrow, as if she didn’t believe I was capable of bringing good news. “I know where Adam is. He’s in Tierra del Fuego, with the One Armed Bandit production company.”

  Sergeant Fenton has an amazing poker face. She didn’t look at all excited as she made a note of what I’d said.

  “Not Spain then,” she said.

  “Yeah, like I said. Tierra del Fuego,” I said. Wasn’t she paying attention?

  She shook her head. “Don’t know why I’m surprised that your grip on geography is as poor as your grip on everything else,” she muttered. “Tierra del Fuego is in South America.”

  “But it sounds –”

  “Miss Belkin, I am not here to fill in the gaps in your knowledge. Is that everything that you had to say?” she snapped.

  I wondered if she was feeling stressed or something. Her patience seemed even more limited than normal.

  “Well, I have a question. Can I get back into the flat now that you know where Adam is?” I asked.

  She gave me a long hard look. “I won’t know where Adam is until I confirm what you’ve told me, but as for the flat, we finished processing it a couple of days ago. Of course you can return. We should have left you a phone message. Didn’t you get it?”

  I shook my head, dumbstruck. For the first time, I saw a small smile play around Sergeant Fenton’s lips, as if she was amused by the fact that I’d been homeless for no reason at all. I like to lift a person’s spirits as much as anyone, but her attitude was a little bit uncharitable, I thought.

  Chapter 33

  I caught the train over to the university to catch up with James. I walked across the lovely green campus, round past my museum and art gallery – my museum! Ha! – and found the right building. It was one of those buildings that is like a Mr Kipling Fondant Fancy built out of red bricks. Why was I thinking about food? I hadn’t had a proper meal all day. Watching Chorley Danglespear messily eat his sandwich had put me right off the thought of eating earlier, and now my stomach was growling. I told myself that I’d help James and then find something to eat afterwards.

 
I found him in the huge entrance hall. He was opening a cardboard box and was surrounded by loads more. If he’d said that he was organising an open day for cardboard boxes then I would have declared it a huge success.

  “What are all these?” I asked.

  “Promotional material for the courses on offer here,” he said. “We need to unpack the boxes and collate them into packs for the visitors.”

  I looked across the piles of boxes. The one that James had opened contained densely packed flyers. My brain isn’t wired up to do superfast mathematics, but it is wired to recognise a humungous task when it sees one. Still, I had volunteered my services so I joined James in opening boxes and making piles of the contents on a nearby table.

  The job consisted of inserting lots of pieces of paper into each folder. Some of the pieces of paper looked useful: a train timetable and a map of the campus. A good many of them looked like junk, but they all had to be included.

  James went off to do something else, so I decided to make a game out of it or I’d go mad. I set myself a series of challenges. The first one was to fill a folder to the tune of a song. I tried various McFly songs and even some of the AC/DC ones that I half-remembered from my disastrous theatre trip. Some were too slow, and others were way too fast, resulting in a blizzard of flying paper. What I settled on in the end was that old song from the Shrek film: I’m on my Way. It had the right sort of marching rhythm. Stomp, a map, stomp, a timetable, stomp a brochure about summer school.

  After I’d done that for a few minutes, I decided to try doing some with my eyes closed. Could I rely on muscle memory to get a full set into a folder? The answer turned out to be almost. I tipped a couple of piles onto the floor, but I’d sort them out later if I needed to.

  The next challenge? Double handing! Could I do two folders at once holding them in a fan formation and applying a deft flick-flick from each pile? The answer to that one turned out to be no. More of the flyers went on the floor than into the folders. I was not discouraged, because this is how we learn and grow, by experimenting. Maybe I’d do a blog where Florrie learns and grows.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  The voice cut across my latest fun experiment where I was trying to use my nose to slide each flyer into a folder. I sometimes try to imagine how I’d get by if I lost the use of my hands. It’s a skill worth practising, in my view. The question was delivered in the same critical tone frequently employed by Bernadette Brampton, head of the residents’ association. I looked up and saw a woman with a clipboard, looking at me with the exact same expression Bernadette Brampton used on me too. The one where I’m supposed to tremble and confess. I was impressed by the similarity. And then I realised it was Bernadette Brampton, head of the residents’ association.

  “Oh, hello, Bernadette.”

  “I asked you, what do you think you’re doing?” she said.

  “I think I’m filling these folders with flyers,” I said.

  “You think?”

  “I do. You asked. I think I’m filling folders with flyers. It’s also what I’m actually doing. But I’m thinking it too. It’s called multi-tasking.”

  She stalked over and picked up the folder that I’d just filled. She opened it and scrutinised the contents with a sneer. “And why is this timetable upside down?” she asked.

  “Because that’s the way it went in,” I said, slightly incredulous. “Is it any of your business?”

  “As the vice-chancellor of this university, I should think so.”

  “Vice-chancellor?” Oh, went my brain. Does that mean she’s my boss too? The museum and gallery belonged to the uni and even I knew that the vice-chancellor was definitely high up. I wasn’t sure what the difference between a vice-chancellor and just chancellor was. Maybe the vice-chancellor dealt with all the naughty sexy stuff and… no, probably not that.

  “Well, Mrs Vice-Chancellor,” I said deferentially, “I did put some of them in upside down but, I figure, you’re expecting these students of yours to be pretty clever? They’ll be able to turn that round. Just a hunch.”

  “It’s a question of quality,” she said. “We need to protect our brand, and ensure that all promotional material reflects the standards that we expect, Miss…?” She looked at me and then, only then, she recognised me. “You! Weren’t you arrested for murder?”

  “Ms Brampton!” called James, coming over to my aid. “Lori’s been kind enough to help out with the open day. On an entirely voluntary basis.”

  “But… but… the murder?”

  “All a misunderstanding,” James assured her. “Her brother is fine.”

  “In Tierra del Fuego,” I said.

  “Is he?” said James and Bernadette together.

  “Yes. Which is in South America, not Spain,” I said knowledgeably.

  “Well,” said Bernadette, a little put out by my expert geographical acumen. “Well, Mr Reynolds, might I suggest that you share some of our best practices with the young lady?”

  “Indeed,” he smiled.

  “And measure the standard of her work.”

  “Nothing will give me more pleasure.”

  “I’ll be back to check on some more of these later on,” she said and stomped off.

  “She’s got it in for me,” I said, watching her go.

  James shrugged. “It’s just her funny little ways.”

  “I don’t find them funny.”

  “She’s got raging OCD and is a control freak. You won’t find another university in the land where the actual vice-chancellor personally decides to co-ordinate the activities across the departments. I mean, you’ll never catch her actually helping or anything, just straightening edges and criticizing how we do things. I just smile and nod and wait for her to go away.”

  “She’s taken all the fun out of it,” I said mournfully.

  James looked at me and grinned. “I do have another couple of jobs that need doing.”

  “Sure.”

  “The museum has agreed to lend our department some artefacts. I’m very pleased and surprised. After the fuss of the missing Fuseli painting of Zeus, I didn’t think the museum would let anything out of their sight again. Anyway, I need to create an exciting display of artefacts. And then afterwards, I have a PowerPoint presentation that’s a little bit dull. Can you help enliven it?”

  I gave him a look. “Does the queen have a sparkly hat?”

  I helped James carry in and position the artefacts. There were some Roman pots, which went on special stands behind a roped-off area, and then in the centre was a large glass display case containing a Roman mosaic.

  “A team of us reassembled the mosaic from fifteen thousand pieces. They were recovered from an old midden heap. It took seven weeks,” said James.

  I peered at it, wondering various things. Like what was a midden heap? “The pieces are all the same shape,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “So how do you know you’ve done it right? It’s not like a jigsaw where it will only fit one way. If you have enough mosaic pieces you could make any picture, so how do you know you’ve made the right one?”

  “Very profound, Lori,” said James, “and possibly true, but even though fifteen thousand is a lot, it’s still a limited number of tiles, so we were able to deduce what the picture was. It was a painstaking process, but it means that we can all see this gorgeous picture for the first time in nearly two thousand years.”

  I was blown away at that thought. “So cool,” I breathed, “so very cool.”

  I can confidently say that I completely nailed the PowerPoint presentation. It was dull, but I gave it everything I had. I ran James through the changed version a couple of hours later and he was impressed. He even laughed a few times (in the places he was supposed to).

  “Great work Lori. I was hoping you’d add some of your famous speech bubbles. They’re great. I wasn’t expecting the sound effects, but they’re great too. I like that sound of distant cannon fire you have in the background.” He
clicked the off button and then looked confused. “Wait, I can still hear it,” he said, cocking a playful ear.

  “It’s my stomach rumbling. I haven’t eaten all day,” I said.

  He gave me a look. I couldn’t say what it was. Amused? Patronising? Loving? Whatever it was, I liked it.

  “How could I keep you here for so long when you’re hungry?” he said. “Tell you what, there’s a wonderful deli just down the road, I’ll pop over there and get us an office picnic.”

  I liked the sound of an office picnic so much that I even went back to the hateful folder-filling job while James was gone. The tune of the Teddy Bears’ Picnic turned out to be very suitable for the job, so I got through half an hour of it without incident.

  James came back in and had a sheepish smile on his face.

  “It turns out that I had completely lost track of time,” he said. “The deli was closed, so I had to get creative.” He started to pull things out of a bag, in the manner of a magician whose rabbit has gone on strike. “Someone in our office had a birthday today and they brought cakes in.” He plonked down a swiss roll and a box half full of doughnuts. “I raided the vending machines, so we have crisps in every flavour.” I was about to point out that he hadn’t got any prawn cocktail, but I bit down on my words, because they are revolting anyway. “And then finally, I came across a student carrying a bowl of chips. I don’t know where he’d got them from but we agreed a price and here they are.”

  I fell greedily on the chips as James led me through to a small office, so that we could sit down. He spread the rest of the food across a desk.

  “I hope Ashbert won’t resent you spending time with me,” he said. “I’m really grateful for your help, but I don’t want to –”

  “I’ve asked him to move out,” I said primly. Actually, it wasn’t all that prim, as sugar cascaded from the doughnut that I’d just bitten into.