Free Because She Loves Me by Mark Edwards Page A

turned to embrace Charlie, seeking her warmth, and my heart skittered.
    She was awake, propped up on an elbow. She was staring at me.
    ‘I had a horrible dream . . .’ I began, thinking I must have disturbed her. But as I started to speak she rolled over and appeared to drop off immediately.
    My mind skipped about wildly: sex in the park with Charlie and how I’d been sure someone was watching us; Sasha’s problems with her married lover; memories of Karen and Harriet; niggling anxiety about money. And above all this din, hearing Charlie say that she loved me.
    It was a long time before I managed to get back to sleep.

Nine
    Victor Codsall beckoned me into his office and shook my hand, gesturing for me to sit on one of the two sofas, flopping down on the other like he was unable to bend his knees. A stack of books, catalogues and magazines wobbled on the coffee table. Through the glass, I watched Victor’s staff at the design agency wander to and fro: bright, trendy young things who brought their bikes to work and wore T-shirts with ironic slogans. According to Victor, they were all sleeping with each other.
    ‘The whole fucking office is a festering Petri dish of disease,’ he once told me, gloomily. Victor said almost everything gloomily, hence his nickname: Eeyore. A sketch of the depressive donkey hung on the wall beside a framed, signed Tottenham Hotspur shirt.
    ‘How’s your . . . ?’ He pointed to his eye. Victor had found it hilarious that when I had my operation, the surgeon had drawn a black arrow above my eyebrow, indicating the eye to be operated on.
    ‘Much better. Actually, I’ve been discharged.’
    ‘Thank fuck for that,’ he said. ‘Not much call for blind designers round here. Although some of the shit this lot have been churning out recently, you’d think they’d all had detached fucking retinas.’
    I didn’t tell him that, actually, since waking up I’d been bothered by a floater in my left eye, a tiny circle that drifted across my vision whenever I blinked. I was trying not to worry about it. Mr Makkawi had told me floaters were normal, that I should only be concerned if I got a lot of them together.
    We made small talk for a few minutes before I said, ‘So I was wondering if you had any work for me? I’m available to work full time at the moment.’
    ‘As a matter of fact . . .’ He sighed, making it sound like he was about to tell me I had a terminal illness. ‘We got a new contract come in this morning from this e-commerce site. They’re planning some big new campaign – holidays, summer, beaches, young sexy people having fun and getting wasted . . . All that crap.’
    ‘Sounds great. What site is it?’
    ‘Wowcom. Big fashion site, based not far from here actually.’
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘Don’t tell me – you ordered some fucking red trousers from them and they sent you pink.’
    ‘No. It’s just that I know someone who works there. My friend Sasha.’
    Not just that, but Wowcom was the company owned by Lance. It would be strange to work for Wowcom, given what I knew about the owner and Sasha.
    ‘That’s great. You’ve got an in.’
    We spent the next hour going over the details of the brief and Victor made a call to Wowcom to arrange a meeting later in the week.
    ‘Sweet,’ he groaned, at the end of the call. I wondered if, beneath the moaning, Victor was actually happy. He clearly adored his wife and children and was running a successful business. He was a self-made man. Rumour had it that he had grown up on one of the roughest estates in North London and that many of his friends were career criminals, drug dealers and gangsters with minders, huge houses and trophy wives.
    All through the meeting, the floater in my eye danced and bothered me. But it was a relief to have some work, especially as Victor thought the project would take at least a couple of months.
    I got up to leave.
    ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I forgot to mention. I saw Karen last week. She came to a