‘Sorry, I think I’m hearing things.’
Jack hadn’t been paying attention. In his defence, there was a squirrel jumping from branch to branch in the tree outside the window of the meeting room.
‘No, you aren’t hearing things.’
Jack allowed his vision to blur, the acrobatic squirrel becoming an indistinct smudge of fur, yanked this way and that like a puppet on a string. His eyes refocused, taking in the two men opposite.
The man on the left’s brow was furrowed, the man on the right’s mouth tightly pursed. I wasn’t ignoring you, Jack wanted to say. There was a squirrel.
‘Sold,’ he said, instead. He turned the word over in his mouth. It had a bad aftertaste. ‘Wait. Sold?’
Across the glass-topped table, Hugh looked at Hugo. Hugo looked at Hugh. Hugh laced his fingers before him on the tabletop. Visible through the glass, one of Hugo’s chino-clad knees began to jiggle. Jack looked from Hugh to Hugo, Hugo to Hugh. To most people, they’d be indistinguishable. But up close, Hugh’s hair was mousy brown, Hugo’s a dirty blond.
Hugh tended to smirk, while Hugo preferred a sneer. They both stared at him with inscrutable expressions, now, as if they might break character at any moment and admit it was all a joke. Jack was the first to break eye contact, looking down at his legs. His own knee was jiggling now, no matter how hard he tried to stop it.
‘Yes,’ said Hugh.
‘The company is being sold,’ said Hugo.
Not ‘We’re selling the company’, as that would suggest some agency on their behalf. And to come to a decision like that at an agency like this, they would have had to tell their third-in-command. Jack handled the money side of things. And though Hugh and Hugo had begun to take more of an interest in the company accounts of late, asking him to produce extensive financial records for mysterious third parties, Jack had been stretched so thin that he hadn’t had the time to question their motives. He’d been silently optimistic, hoping that there might be new backers on the horizon. He’d been obliging, as per usual. He rarely asked questions…
Leave a Reply