Page 1 of Just Do It
1
I stared at my boss, her words echoing around my brain. I had been so sure this time.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she repeated. ‘I was positive they’d choose you. You’re still the best candidate as far as I’m concerned.’
I opened my mouth to ask a question but instead of words, a hoarse raspy noise emerged.
‘Would you like some water?’ Inis asked, her tone soft and soothing as she poured me a plastic cupful without waiting for an answer and placed it on the desk in front of me. The only sound was the glug of bubbles from the dispenser as the level settled.
I took a few gulps of the icy cold drink, cleared my throat, then tried again with my question.
‘Do you know who they went with instead?’
She gave a shrug and busied herself topping up the cup. Something smelled fishy.
‘Inis?’
My boss returned to her seat and met my eyes for the briefest moment before looking away again and unnecessarily tidying her already highly organised desk. My desk was not tidy. Mydesk was never tidy. I liked the aesthetic of tidy, the thought of it. It was just that I could never quite manage the actual task. Or if I did, the result would last less than a day before it looked like a bunch of tomb raiders had upended everything in search of buried treasure. Not that they’d find any. At least not in my office. The London museum I worked in, however, had plenty, and those I was meticulous about cataloguing and storing carefully with the reverence the items deserved.
‘But I’ve been instrumental in acquiring some of our most popular exhibits,’ I said.
‘I know.’ Inis shook her head. ‘And we’re all incredibly grateful for the brilliant relationship and rapport we now have with the various museums and collectors in Egypt.’
‘So whodothe board think is the best person for overseeing what could be one of the most important digs for decades?’
Inis paused, then mumbled something as she turned to rummage in her Kate Spade handbag.
‘Pardon? I didn’t quite catch that.’ I asked her to repeat as I raised my cup and attempted to wet my suddenly dry throat.
She faced me and spoke again, clearer this time but with a pained look on her elfin features. ‘Friedrich Heckler.’
It was amazing how much water was actually in a sip. There was enough, certainly, to go down my throat but apparently that still left plenty to find a route down my nose. I swiped at my face with my cardigan before taking the tissue offered by a concerned Inis. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said as I took another and honked out an unladylike blow, causing my left ear to pop. ‘I don’t understand the decision at all. I mean, he’s a good archaeologist but he doesn’t have as much expertise in the subject as you, or your connections.’
‘He has the names of a few people. I know that much. Stupidly I shared them with him before I realised he was acheating…’ I snapped my mouth shut, grabbed a pencil and drew a few quick hieroglyphs on a piece of paper.
‘Inventive use of a dead language.’
‘I like to keep my hand in.’
‘Still. Even if he has those names, I can’t think he has the relationship you do with any of them.’
‘No, but he has things I don’t have.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Money and charm.’
‘Aah.’
‘Yes. Aah.’
Friedrich had grown up in a castle. A proper, honest-to-God, Disney-worthy castle. His parents still lived there amongst the gilded framed paintings of ancestors long deceased. There was a portrait of Friedrich too that I’d seen on my own visits. The painter had been rather kind I thought, and given my boyfriend-at-the-time definition in his pecs and biceps that wasn’t necessarily a true representation of the sitter. Friedrich certainly wasn’t complaining. I wasn’t into all those muscled types anyway. People’s intelligence was the most attractive thing to me. Friedrich had a nice face although I did wonder how he was going to get on in the desert with his insistence on wearing contacts.
‘Glasses are so cliché,’ he’d told me when I’d questioned him about it. ‘They are too central to the classic image of the nerd. I refuse to be objectified and turned into the public’s idea of what an archaeologist looks like.’
‘I think most people think archaeologists either look like Indiana Jones or Lara Croft.’
Friedrich had given me a glare. Hollywood’s interpretations of archaeologists over the years was one of his pet hates so I’d changed tack.
