Page 3 of Merry & Bright

Great.

Keeping my gaze averted, I began walking quickly towards the lifts. The guard didn’t take the hint though.

“Morning,” he called cheerily as I hurried past the desk. “Aren’t you going to have one of these?”

And in that moment, I made a fatal mistake. Instead of pretending to be absorbed by whatever was coming through my headphones and ignoring him, as I usually did, I stopped and yanked my headphones down so that they circled the back of my neck.

“One of what?”

He gestured at a plate on the desk. “Mince pie,” he said cheerfully. “’S’Christmas, innit?”

“Mince pie? Um, no, thanks. I—”

“Go on,” he interrupted with a roguish wink. “You know you want to!”

“No, honestly, I’m fine.”

I began turning away, but he wasn’t having it.

“Oh, go on,” he wheedled, “it’s Christmas. Treat yourself. My missus made ’em. They’re gorgeous.”

I could see I would be quicker taking one than arguing further, so, suppressing a sigh, I paced back to the desk. “Okay, I’ll take one to have with my coffee.”

The mince pies crowding the Tupperware container on the desk weren’t in little foil cases like the ones from Waitrose we’d been serving in client meetings for the last couple of weeks. They didn’t look as tidy as those ones either. In fact they looked pretty crumbly and uneven and had been so heavily dredged with icing sugar that they were a uniform white.

I searched for the smallest one and gingerly lifted it out, grimacing when my fingertips breached the pastry walls, sinking in to the sticky, fruity interior.

“Damn.” I glanced at the guard and said, unhopefully, “I don’t suppose you have any napkins?”

He looked at me blankly. “What?”

“Napkins?” I lifted the hand holding the pie to eye level to demonstrate my predicament, only for the fragile structure to give completely under my fingers. Cursing, I cupped my other hand below to catch the crumbling pastry and sticky filling before it fell to the floor.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” I demanded.

The guard looked at me like I was nuts. “Why don’t you just eat it? It’s only a little pie. Most people have finished by the time they reach the lifts.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I muttered, more to myself than to him, then gave an impatient huff. “Have you got a bin back there?”

“A bin?”

“Yes,” I said with exaggerated patience. “A bin.”

“Um, yeah.”

“Can I see it?”

Slowly, still looking puzzled, he bent. When he stood straight again, he was holding a metal wastepaper basket in one hand.

“Thanks,” I said and dropped the remains of the mince pie into it. While he gaped at me, I pulled out a tissue out of my coat pocket, wiped my hands quickly and dropped that in too.

“Maybe next time bring some napkins.”

And with that, I turned on my heel and strode towards the lifts, the incident already forgotten, my thoughts on the day ahead.