Snowflake Read online

  Most people I know would smile when I told them that, but Rex just stared at me as if I was mad.

  “And why exactly did you do that?” he asked.

  “It was…” my mind raced. I realised that I had stepped straight into the trap that Cookie had warned about. Explaining a flash mob would be up there with explaining a blog. “You know what you said about tomfoolery? Well that’s what it was. Voluntary tomfoolery.”

  He sighed and shook his head. “The position that we’re interviewing for is a zero-hours contract where you will actually be employed by a third-party contract company which provides staff for many such facilities services jobs throughout the city. Is that clear?”

  I hadn’t really heard the bits that came after ‘zero-hours’. How did a job work when it had zero hours? It sounded pretty good to me. I grinned at him. “Yep, cool.”

  “Obviously, given the nasty business with the retendering process and, following the legal challenge by the original contractors, the subsequent un-retendering programme, there has been some confusion, some umbrage taken and some natural wastage. This is where you come in.”

  I wasn’t overly sure what he was talking about and whether I was being accused of being confused, of having taken umbrage or of being a natural waste.

  The metal cupboard on the wall crackled and spat, electric light flashed in the gaps.

  “Do tell,” said Rex, “what you noticed about the museum as you walked through to this office.”

  I thought for a moment. “Lots of old-fashioned decor.”

  “Well done!” He seemed pleased by this, as if everyone else got here without noticing where they were. “How would you tackle it?”

  Ah. I already had thoughts on this. They must know from my parents’ application that I had an art degree. They clearly needed someone with an appreciation of style and function.

  “I’d probably get rid of a lot of it and replace it with a minimalist decor. Emulsioned walls and a painted concrete floor, that sort of thing. Maybe in white or some simple primary colours.”

  He looked as if I’d slapped him. His mouth actually dropped open and he stared at me for a long moment.

  “You know, like the Dutch De Stijl movement,” I suggested. “Or, you know, IKEA.”

  Finally, it was as if he realised he was catching flies and he closed his mouth again.

  “Was that a joke?” he said.

  “Would you like it to have been a joke?” I asked timidly.

  “Well, fortunately for us all, Miss Belkin, you will not be required to redecorate this historic building, merely to clean it.”

  “Oh.”

  “One hopes that your keen eye will enable you to spot where your efforts are needed. Do tell though, do you consider a cleaning job to be beneath you?”

  I thought about that. It certainly sounded dull. Should I lie to please him? Cookie had urged me to be straightforward, but did she really mean this straightforward? People say honesty is the best policy but people are frequently dumb. Let’s see. “Yes. Actually, I’m not all that keen,” I said.

  He gave me a really stern look. It was like Santa telling you he’d put you on his naughty list. “And yet you are here. Interesting.”

  “Interesting good or interesting bad?”

  “That remains to be seen.” He consulted his interview questions. “Conflict in the workplace.”

  “I’m against it,” I said promptly.

  “How would you tackle a disagreement between you and a colleague?”

  “What sort of disagreement?” I asked.

  “Anything you like,” said Rex. “Let’s say, for example, you overheard them saying something mean about you.”

  “Mean? Like what?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Not that mean then if it doesn’t matter.”

  “Perhaps they said you’re lazy,” said Rex.

  “I’d be fine with that,” I said. “They’d probably be right. I am a bit lazy. My brother thinks it’s because I’m a snowflake.”

  Rex frowned at me again.

  “A snowflake?”

  “You know, a unique and special snowflake.”

  Rex shook his head, clearly not understanding. “Conflict. Think about something that would cause conflict. Pretend that they said you’d got an ugly nose.”

  My hand flew to my face. “What’s the matter with my nose? You’ve been looking at me since I came in. Is it my nose?”

  “What? No. Your nose was mentioned as an example. There’s nothing wrong with your nose.”

  “But the rest of me…?”

  Could you fail an interview for having an ugly nose? Or being ugly everywhere apart from your nose?

  “We are looking at you because you are the subject of an interview,” said Rex. He sounded annoyed. Probably not a great sign. “This is a hypothetical question about conflict, Miss Belkin. Now, let’s have one last try. Imagine you overhear a colleague saying that you’ve stolen some money from the museum. It’s a hypothetical situation and you are innocent of any wrongdoing. What do you do?”

  I sat up and concentrated. “Right.” A situation like that would need swift and decisive revenge, preferably that couldn’t be traced back to me. I would probably go for the booby-trapped toilet cubicle. A bucket of water balanced across the gap, so that it falls on their head when they open the door. No. That wasn’t the answer he was looking for. He wanted something sensible, methodical…

  “Police,” I said. “SWAT team. Forensics. Criminal psychologist.” I’d been counting them off on my fingers and so said, “And Child Line,” to round off the handful.

  “You report the problem to your line manager,” said Rex.

  “That too.”

  “No, just that.”

  “Oh. Keep it in-house. Sure. Say no more.”

  Rex shook his head.

  “Perhaps we should just stop the interview there.”

  A little part of me was thinking that we were stopping early because I’d already demonstrated my brilliance. But it was only a little part. A big part knew exactly why he had stopped. Oh, well, I could just tell Mom and Dad that I had tried.

  “We are desperate for cleaning staff,” said Rex, “and despite your level of qualification, your lack of a criminal record and, we should point out, your delightful penmanship, one suspects a cleaning role is not beneath you but utterly beyond you.”

  I was agog. “I’m not good enough to be a cleaner?”

  “Frankly, no.”

  “But… But, you haven’t finished the questions. Maybe I’ll pull it round with the last question.”

  “Rest assured, Miss Belkin –”

  “Any question. Any! The hardest one you have!”

  Rex flicked through his papers.

  “Very well. We found this one on the world wide web.” He indicated the huge dirty beige monitor on his desk with a flourish of pride before returning to his sheets. “Here. How many piano tuners are there in Seattle?”

  I looked at him. Gida the goat looked at him. He looked back at me.

  “You just made that up,” I said.

  “We certainly did not,” he replied and pointed to a line on the page.

  “But it’s ridiculous.”

  “It’s a lateral thinking question. This is not a question you will necessarily know the answer to but we are interested in how you approach it.”

  “It’s like a riddle?”

  “I suppose.”

  How many piano tuners are there in Seattle? Seattle. Seattle. I’d heard of it but I didn’t know where it was. I knew Sleepless in Seattle. Tom Hanks. Meg Ryan. There was the Seattle sound: Nirvana and all those grunge bands in the nineties. They didn’t have any pianos in their bands. Was the answer zero? Rex had got the question off the internet. Ah!

  “Got it!” I said.

  “You have?”

  I pulled out my phone. “Google is your friend.” I did a quick search. “Take a look.” I held up the map to show him the pia
no tuners highlighted. “Three pages of results. About fifty? We can count them if you want.”

  Rex’s eyebrows had shot high up his forehead, like a pair of small grey rodents blasting into orbit. “Oh. I didn’t know you could do that. No need to count. And so quick. All on that little screen.”

  “Is it right?” I asked.

  “Not an approach I’ve seen before but it, ah, seems to get results.”

  He pushed back slightly from the desk and looked at me.

  “Right, we can probably draw this interview to a close. In summary, you’ve admitted to being lazy, told me that your previous employment amounted to tomfoolery and declared that a cleaning job is not something you want to do. Have we left anything out?”

  I pointed helpfully to the wickerwork goat and he rolled his eyes.

  “In spite of all this, we are prepared to offer you a probationary role as a cleaner. You will start at oh six hundred hours and work the morning shift before the museum opens. Normally, we’d do an induction day before you start but, due to the un-retendering debacle, the induction team have a four-month backlog. So, we’ll start as we mean to go on and in a few months’ time do your introductory training.”

  I looked at him and beamed. I’d got a job! Boom! A job! I didn’t actually want a job but the sense of achievement was real nonetheless.

  “Do you have any questions?” he asked.

  I pointed at the sparking electrical cupboard on the wall. “Is that thing meant to do that?”

  Rex turned slowly to regard it and then looked back again at me. “The fuse box. Like so many things round here, it is old. But it functions perfectly well as long as no one tampers with it. A salutary lesson for all there. Do you have any questions about the job?”

  I thought. “No. It all sounds great, Rex,” I said. “Can I just add a few conditions though?”

  “Conditions?”

  “I’ll want the weekends off. You’ll need to provide me with a stepladder so that I can reach the high parts and then I’m going to need some rubber gloves and dusters. If you can sort all of that then we have a deal.”

  He gave a slow nod. “I don’t think we will have an issue with any of that.”

  I picked up the goat but I was struck with an urgent thought. “Can I have some money now please?”

  “No,” said Rex, “you’ll be paid in arrears.”

  “I need to get some things,” I said. “Food mainly. Think of it as danger money.”

  “Danger money?”

  “Starting work at six in the morning? That’s got to be dangerous,” I said.

  Chapter 5

  Maybe I was riding high from getting a job. Number of job interviews attended: one. Number of jobs secured: one. That’s a one hundred percent success rate. Maybe I was intellectually abuzz from the stunning answers I gave in the interview. Maybe I was delirious with tiredness and hunger.

  Whichever, I had just had an idea.

  Adam had said something about maybe ‘popping round’ to see my parents if things went well. Popping round. That made me wonder if they weren’t so far away after all. Norman in the paper shop had refused to tell me anything, but perhaps I could find out another way. The Evening Mail was delivered by an elderly gent who took the papers round in a big tartan shopping trolley. I’d have no problem following him to see where he went. I might spot my parents’ new house!

  On tired, flip-flopped feet and with Gida the goat under my arm, I headed back across the city in time for the paper round.

  The tartan shopping trolley emerged from the corner shop as I approached, although today it was not in the hands of an elderly gent but a much more spritely dark-haired chap in a tweed jacket and cords. It didn’t matter who it was, it was the trolley that mattered. If I followed it, it might take me to Mom and Dad’s new place.

  I hung back as he started off down the road. I’d seen enough cop shows to know how best to follow someone. I practised looking casual and tied my shoelaces. This tested my acting skills to the max as I was wearing flip-flops but I think I carried it off. I looked up and saw he was already some distance off. He walked pretty quickly for a tweed wearer and I realised I had seen this old-guy-in-training before. It was the handsome secret agent wolfman I’d met outside my house – my old house. Ah, so that’s how he knew about my parents leaving and Mrs Whatever-her-name-was moving in. He was probably a good source of information. I scampered across some front gardens to catch up, hoping that nobody was looking, then realised that I was the wrong side of a low wall. I got over it, but I left a flip-flop behind and had to go back over for it.

  I saw someone twitch the curtain of the house. My cover was blown. I held up Gida to the curtain twitcher and mouthed the words, ‘Just looking for my goat’ before moving on. Getting through suburbia without being seen is harder than you’d think. There were a couple of times when the paper boy – not that he was a boy but ‘paper man’ makes it sound like he’d blow away in a stiff breeze – stopped to talk to someone, so I pretended I was studying my phone, perhaps consulting a map. He zig-zagged up and down a series of parallel streets and I was starting to get the hang of things. I’d find the tallest hedge in the street and stealthily make my way to it, so that I could stand and watch unseen while he delivered the papers. When he turned the corner to the next street I’d do it again. I was like a shadow, or maybe a ninja. I moved from street to street with nobody knowing I was there.

  I peered out from a huge laurel bush and realised that I couldn’t see him. I risked a step forward. I didn’t want to blow my cover, but perhaps he was at the end of the street already. I screamed out loud as someone tapped my shoulder.

  I whirled around and there he was.

  “Is there a problem?” he said. “I couldn’t help noticing that you’re walking up and down all over the place.”

  “Yes,” I said, wracking my brain for a good alibi.

  “Are you lost?” he said. “Oh, we met, didn’t we? Still looking for your parents, yes?”

  “I might be.”

  At that moment, my phone started to ring. “This will be them now!” I said for no good reason and walked away as I answered.

  “Hello,” said the caller. “I understand you need some help finding some missing people? I have extensive experience in this field and I’m sure I can help you.”

  I knew that voice. “Cookie? Is that you?” I said.

  “Lori. What are you doing on this number?”

  “It’s my number.”

  “I was answering an ad in the shop window.”

  “It was my ad.”

  “The pieces fall into place and the universe reveals its secrets. What’s going on?”

  “I’ll explain everything to you later. I’ll meet you at the end of your shift and we’ll talk about it at Adam’s, yeah?”

  Cookie’s always looking for work. Her curriculum vitae must read like a directory of mad jobs. I think she made some of them up.

  In the time I’d been talking to Cookie, Corduroy had moved on to another street. I forced myself to be even more careful as he’d obviously spotted me before. I began to wonder if the slapping of my flip-flops on the pavement might be louder than I’d first thought. I looked at the houses and had a thought. These were the sort of houses that had a back alley running parallel to the road between the back gardens, with access from the sides and entries between the houses. I could creep along through there and pop out of one of the entries. I tried to gauge where he might have got to and went along the back alley of the next road. About two thirds of the way up there was an entry. I sidled up until I was at the front and then I peered out to the left and then the right.

  To the right, Corduroy was standing at the house’s front door, talking with a lady inside. They both turned to stare at me. For a long and awkward moment I stared back, and then I did the only thing that I could in the circumstances: I walked up the road until they were out of sight and then I stepped into a hedge. I literally inserted myself into it to hide
and to have a rethink.

  I heard a car pull up on the road next to the hedge. I peered out. Through prickly branchlets, I could see the blue and luminous yellow stripes along the side of the vehicle. A police car. Ah.

  “Come out of the hedge, ma’am,” said a no-nonsense voice.

  “Me?” I asked.

  “Well, unless you’ve got anyone else in there with you…”

  I stepped out as nonchalantly as I could. There were two of them. The nearest one gave me a stern, appraising look. It was the kind of look my part-woman part-wildebeest art teacher Mrs McGee used to give me when she caught me drawing cartoons in her lessons and there was more than a little bit of wildebeest about this woman too.

  “Evening, constable,” I said.

  The police officer pointed at the stripes on her shoulder. “Sergeant. Sergeant Fenton. “Can I ask what you’re doing?”

  “Doing?” I said.

  “We’ve had three calls about you now.”

  “About me?”

  “A woman with a wicker donkey creeping in and out of people’s gardens.”

  “It’s a goat,” I said and held up Gida as evidence.

  The sergeant’s colleague nodded. “It is indeed,” he said.

  “Thank you for the clarification, Constable Stokes,” said Sergeant Fenton.

  “I’ve been trying to find my parents,” I said.

  “In a hedge?” said Sergeant Fenton.

  “No. Not in a hedge.”

  “So how is this,” she gestured at the hedge, “helping you to find your parents?”

  “I thought the paper boy might lead me to them if they’re still having the Evening Mail,” I said.

  “So, they’re at home? You’ve not lost them. You’ve lost your house.”

  “But they moved,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out. They did it while I was in Crete.”

  “So, your parents didn’t tell you where they’d moved to?”

  “No.”

  “And you’ve tried phoning them?”

  “They’re not picking up.”

  Sergeant Fenton gave me a look. It was a complex and rich look that featured impatience, world-weariness and perhaps a desire to go home and sink into a sofa with a large glass of wine. Mrs McGee used to give me those looks too, when I’d pushed the old wildebeest too far.