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to his files. He turns twenty-six next month. There’s not much to him, not to look at, but I think about having sex with Graeme, some day, just because he’s here. Maybe in the stationery cupboard, when the office is empty. I won’t. His desk is across the way from mine, and if he’s on the phone, concentrating, I look at his crotch sometimes, trying to see what’s outlined under the folds of Topman smarts. I rub myself, guilty, frantically, in the toilets, under cheap hard lighting. I wash all trace of it off my fingers with the rose-smelling liquid soap Moira buys in bulk and stores in the cupboard in the kitchen. Sometimes I look at him and think, surely we are too young, we are both too young to have given up like this, to settle our bones in this halogen-lit tower. On Mondays he grins and sits on the edge of my desk, tells me about nights out he’s had ‘with the boys’, always ‘with the boys’.
    â€˜Not got a girlfriend yet, eh?’ Moira says, listening in, playing matchmaker.
    I don’t think of Graeme at all when I’m not there. Graeme, going out for drinks with the boys, playing computer games with the boys, wouldn’t really understand my world. The spaces, the silences, the waiting. The child care.
    I’m not sure why I’m angry at him now, though.
    â€˜Where are they going to go, Graeme? The, eh. The prostitutes? If we knock down their sanctuary?’
    He’s doing that thing with his face again. He looks like he’s laughing, but it’s actually nerves. Or wind.
    â€˜Eh, well. Not really our thing, eh, problem. It’s the councilsold the place. They should be taking it up with them , those women outside. We’re just doing our job. Eh. And it’s not just like we’re knocking them down. It’s the whole block. Leisure complex. Possibilities for multiplex, eight bars or restaurants, bowling, casino —’
    â€˜And you’re okay with that?’
    This is further than we’ve gone in conversation before, and he’s reddening, shifting to the door, glancing back over his shoulder.
    â€˜Do you not need to take the bag out. Moira’s cup.’
    Then he turns around properly, in the door frame.
    â€˜I’ve seen the blueprints. It’s going to be an exciting project for us, you know? For, ehm, for me. Good opportunity. Big one. We’ll make a really beautiful building out of it.’
    Glass, crap techno, cut-price cocktails on Thursdays, I’m thinking to myself. He’s running off. Moira’s teabag is bleeding scorches of tannin into the cup. I’ll need to start over.
    XXX
    â€˜They’ve got stamina, I’ll say that for them. Well, they’d have to, eh, in their line of work.’
    Norman has kept up a muttered commentary all day. There’s a judgemental wind shaking the building, and even the diehard smokers like Elaine and big George from Maintenance haven’t made it all the way down to the car park today. The protesters are still going, though, hours on, their faces whipped scarlet under cagoules, and we can still hear the chanting over the weather and the air con and the wheeze of Moira’s old computer.
    â€˜SHAME ON THE COUNCIL!’
    â€˜SAVE OUR SANCTUARY!’
    I had a look at them earlier, peeking through the blinds like a spy in an old movie. They must have been waiting for any sort of motion at all from our floor, because they all pivoted on the spot to face me, turned their heads up to the window, synchronised,eerie. Five women and a man, earnest looking middle class types for the most part. Tomorrow’s paper will tell me that they aren’t all prostitutes, that one of them was a well-known independent local councillor whose outspoken views on women’s issues had made her a target for that paper for a while, that the man was a noted Socialist Worker agitator, that one of them was Suzanne Phillips, the former ‘masseuse’