Amy Bird - Yours Is Mine

She pulled her ring off and thrust it into her pocket.

“There! That’s off! And I’m back in the game!” she laughed, hoping she hadn’t just made herself sound like a desperate divorcee. Ben smiled at her, but before he had a chance to respond the tutor called the class to order. They went round the room, and five or so moderately interesting facts were revealed, along with three very drab ones, she revealed Ben’s and then they came to him. Ben paused before the interesting fact.

“And Anna’s fact is that she has successfully got rid of a cheating husband. Sure we all wonder how anyone could cheat on her but there you have it – men are bastards!” he joked, ending with a mock self-deprecating shrug. Most of the class laughed warmly, including Kate, who was flattered at the approach he had decided to take, and impressed that he had now twice made the effort to make someone who he had only just met feel better about themselves. They shared a smile and turned back to the tutor.

“How sweet,” intoned Hilary dryly, noting the shared glance. “But a bold choice of opening fact about yourself – well done. Let’s hope you can put some of that pain into your characters and then perhaps it will all have been worthwhile.”

The class tittered nervously, eyeing Kate as they did so. The two girls who had been giggling at Kate earlier were for their part now looking disgusted. Kate felt that their disgust was directed more at her than at the tutor, and felt vaguely disquieted – perhaps they felt she had given away too much about herself in the first class. She was going to have to work them round somehow – she didn’t fancy having two girls glaring at her for the next two months. For now, she shrugged.

“I’ll do my best – but I won’t send him a thank-you card until I’m quite sure I’m about to launch a stunning acting career!” she joked, and sensed the relief of the class that she hadn’t been offended and that it was safe to laugh. She was conscious of Ben smiling to himself beside her.

This short diversion aside, they were again split up into pairs, and began a series of longer exercises. They each had to tell the other about their day so far, using as much expression in their faces as possible, but within the realms of their own usual facial expressions. The other then had to mimic it back to them, trying to use exactly the same expressions and tone of voice that the other person had used. The next exercise was to go into character and imagine something either very happy or very sad or exciting that had happened recently to their character, and describe it to the other person, and again the other person would have to mimic it back. Kate was easily able to conjure up a diverting account of her morning of proofreading and was happy that it was sufficiently true to Anna’s life to be able to pass it off as her. She enjoyed seeing Ben focusing hard on her features, and laughed to see him try to copy her afterwards.

For her ‘in character’ part, she decided to opt for herself, Kate, and related the story of her dad’s funeral. She allowed herself to shed tears. Ben watched her with avid attention, and Hilary on her rounds came to watch them and nodded approvingly at Kate’s pain. Ben didn’t quite manage to conjure up tears, but he squeezed his eyes up and made his voice crack to register the emotion. Kate for her part had to mimic Ben’s character of being a clown in costume who was in a hurry so had to run for the bus in his character shoes. She wasn’t sure she had done a very good job of it, but Ben made her laugh at both him and herself, and as she wiped tears of mirth from her eyes she was pleased that he seemed again to be trying to cheer her up. Going back into the very real pain of her dad’s death had reminded her of how recent her grief was. She saw how quickly she could be sucked back down into despondency again.

At the end of the class as they were packing away, Ben came up to her.

“That was a good session, partner!” he bantered.

Kate laughed. “You weren’t so bad yourself! Not quite BAFTA level, but give it a few more clown stories and we’ll see,” she joked.

“Well, obviously!” he countered, pretending to preen himself. “I’m practising my acceptance speech already! Seriously though, you did some good work this week – not just with the acting. See you next time, and take care of yourself, right? Remember, this Luke guy may write like a Greek god but he may not look like one,” he advised, locking her eyes in his whilst momentarily touching her elbow.

As he walked away, she reflected that this last comment would be slightly crushing if she was actually pinning her hopes for a revival of her love-life on someone she had met on the internet. It was out of synch with his earlier attempts to cheer her up. She smiled to herself. Perhaps he wanted her for himself? Oh well, he could just go on wanting, she said to herself, slipping her wedding ring back on as she left the room. Still, she allowed a slight strut to slip into her walk and the occasional toss of her hair over her shoulder as she walked to the bus stop, in case he should be looking.

- Jane-

Jane Robinson paused before sealing up the envelope addressed to Kate Dixon. It was the first packet the firm had sent to Kate since her dad’s death – Peter had dictated the letter that morning. In all the fifteen years she’d been taking dictations from him, Jane had trusted his judgment – and really, it wasn’t her place to query it as a humble secretary, she reminded herself. He’d let the human side of things slip this time, though. True, he’d sent flowers for the funeral (arranged by her, naturally, as was the message telling Kate to take as long as she needed which had – Jane hoped – been duly noted in the card by the florist). But less than two weeks had passed since then. This latest letter with the chapter for Kate to comment on could have had an opening paragraph saying that the firm hoped that she was bearing up after her sad news, or something along those lines, before getting to the business side of things, couldn’t it?

It wasn’t Jane’s job to tamper with what Peter chose to write, though, and she prided herself on the accuracy with which she translated Peter’s dictations into the written word. She’d heard one secretary in another firm had been sacked on the spot for deciding to insert a comma where none had been intended, completely altering the meaning of some highly important final-form legal document leading to red-faced explanations to the client and pleading negotiations with the other side’s legal team. Not good.

Plus Jane knew the partners had behaved pretty well to Kate over the last few months. Sitting outside Peter’s office, she had a fairly good grasp of all the office gossip. There’d been the grey-faced conversations between Peter and Kate, and Peter had very rightly said that if Kate needed to take time off to deal with things, she could do. It sounded like a good deal to Jane – sitting in a pretty bit of Northumberland on half-pay reading a book, someone even printing it out for you, making the occasional comments in red before sending it back in hard copy for Jane to run past Peter. He still liked paper, bless him. Less good for the trees, but better for his eyesight, and he seemed to think Kate would feel the same.

Mostly typos, really, Kate’s comments. If it weren’t for the risk that a stray comma or double negative might in the mystery of law change the meaning entirely, Jane was sure she could almost have done it herself, if it meant getting even half of Kate’s salary (she typed up the annual salary review letters as well, so she knew all about that). There’d been some grumblings in the kitchen from the lawyers that they wished they could just sit at home proofreading a book. Still, it couldn’t have been a fun life to nurse your dying father while taking any spare moment to wade through chapters on the apparent subtleties of commercial leases. Not fun at all.