Sophie Kinsella - I've Got Your Number

I’ll give myself twelve more hours, I abruptly decide, pressing the pedestrian button again. Just in case. Just in case.

And then I’ll tell them.

I always thought I might be a dentist. Several of my family are dentists, and it always seemed like a pretty decent career. But then, when I was fifteen, my school sent me on a weeklong work experience placement at the physio unit at our local hospital. All the therapists were so enthusiastic about what they did that focusing only on teeth suddenly felt a bit narrow for me. And I’ve never regretted my decision for a moment. It just suits me, being a physio.

First Fit Physio Studio is exactly eighteen minutes’ walk from my flat in Balham, past Costa, and next to Greggs, the baker. It’s not the grandest practice in the world—I’d probably earn more if I went to some smart sports center or a big hospital. But I’ve been working there ever since I qualified and can’t imagine working anywhere else. Plus, I work with friends. You wouldn’t give that up in a hurry, would you?

I arrive at nine o’clock, expecting to have the usual staff meeting. We have one every Thursday morning, where we discuss patients and targets, new therapies, the latest research, stuff like that. 24There’s one particular patient I want to talk about, actually: Mrs. Randall, my sweet sixty-five-year-old with the ligament problem. She’s pretty much recovered—but last week she came in twice, and this week she’s booked three appointments. I’ve told her she just needs to exercise at home with her Dyna-Bands, but she insists she needs my help. I think she’s become totally dependent on us—which might be good for the cash register but is not good for her.

So I’m quite looking forward to the meeting. But, to my surprise, the meeting room is set up differently from usual. The table has been pulled to one end of the room, with two chairs behind it—and there’s a sole chair facing it in the middle of the room. It looks like an interview setup.

The reception door pings to signal that someone’s entered, and I turn to see Annalise coming in with a Costa coffee tray. She’s got some complicated braided arrangement in her long blond hair, and she looks like a Greek goddess.

“Hi, Annalise! What’s up?”

“You’d better talk to Ruby.” She gives me a sidelong look, without smiling.

“What?”

“I don’t think I should say.” She takes a sip of cappuccino, eyeing me secretively over the top.

What’s up now? Annalise’s quite prickly—in fact, she’s a bit of a child. She goes all quiet and sulky, and then it comes out that yesterday you asked her for that file too impatiently and hurt her feelings.

Ruby is the opposite. She’s got smooth latte-colored skin, a huge, motherly bust, and is packed so full of common sense it’s practically wafting out of her ears. The minute you’re in her company, you feel saner, calmer, jollier, and stronger. No wonder this physio practice has been a success. I mean, Annalise and I are OK at what we do, but Ruby is the star turn. Everyone loves her. Men, women, grannies, kids. She also put up the money for the business, 25so she’s officially my boss.

“Morning, babe.” Ruby comes breezing out from her treatment room, beaming her usual wide smile. Her hair has been back-combed and pinned in a bun, with intricate twisted sections on either side. Both Annalise and Ruby are totally into their hairdos—it’s almost a competition between them. “Now, look, it’s a real pain, but I have to give you a disciplinary hearing.”

“What?” I gape at her.

“Not my fault!” She lifts her hands. “I want to get accreditation from this new body, the PFFA. I’ve just been reading the material, and it says if your staff chat up the patients you have to discipline them. We should have done it anyway, you know that, but now I need to have the notes ready for the inspector. We’ll get it done really quickly.”

“I didn’t chat him up,” I say defensively. “He chatted me up!”

“I think the panel will decide that, don’t you?” chimes in Annalise forbiddingly. She looks so grave, I feel a tickle of worry. “I told you you’d been unethical,” she adds. “You should be prosecuted.”

“Prosecuted?” I appeal to Ruby. I can’t believe this is happening. Back when Magnus proposed, Ruby said it was such a romantic story she wanted to cry, and that, OK, strictly it was against the rules, but in her opinion love conquered all, and please could she be a bridesmaid?

“Annalise, you don’t mean ‘prosecuted.’ ” Ruby rolls her eyes. “Come on. Let’s convene the panel.”

“Who’s on the panel?”

“Us,” says Ruby blithely. “Annalise and me. I know we should have an external person, but I didn’t know who to get. I’ll tell the inspector I had someone lined up and they were ill.” She glances at her watch. “OK, we’ve got twenty minutes. Morning, Angela!” she adds cheerily as our receptionist pushes the front door open. “Don’t let any calls through, OK?”

Angela just nods and sniffs and dumps her rucksack on the floor. She has a boyfriend in a band, so she’s never very communicative in the mornings.

“Oh, Poppy,” Ruby says over her shoulder as she leads the way into the meeting room. “I was supposed to give you two weeks’ notice to prepare. You don’t need that, do you? Can we say you had it? Because there’s only a week and a bit till the wedding, so it would mean dragging you away from your honeymoon or leaving it till you’re back, and I really want to get the paperwork done… .”

She’s ushering me to the sole chair, marooned in the middle of the floor, while she and Annalise take their seats behind the table. Any minute I expect a bright light to shine in my eyes. This is horrible. Everything’s suddenly turned. It’s them against me.

“Are you going to fire me?” I feel ridiculously panicked.

“No! Of course not!” Ruby is unscrewing her pen. “Don’t be silly!”

“We might,” says Annalise, shooting me an ominous look.

She’s obviously loving her role as chief henchwoman. I know what this is all about. It’s because I got Magnus and she didn’t.

Here’s the thing. Annalise’s the beautiful one. Even I want to stare at her all day, and I’m a girl. If you’d said to anyone last year, “Which of these three will land a guy and be engaged by next summer?” they’d have said immediately, “Annalise.”

So I can understand her point of view. She must look in the mirror and see herself (Greek goddess) and then see me (lanky legs, dark hair; best feature—long eyelashes) and think: WTF?

Plus, as I said, Magnus was originally booked with her. And at the last minute we switched appointments. Which is not my fault.

“So.” Ruby looks up from her foolscap pad. “Let’s run over the facts, Miss Wyatt. On December fifteenth last year, you treated a Mr. Magnus Tavish here at the clinic.”

“Yes.”

For what form of injury?”

“A sprained wrist sustained while skiing.”

“And during this appointment, did he show any … inappropriate interest in you? Or you in him?”

I cast my mind back to that first instant Magnus walked into my room. He was wearing a long gray tweed coat, and his tawny hair was glistening with rain and his face was flushed from walking. He was ten minutes late, and he immediately rushed over, clasped both my hands, and said, “I’m most terribly sorry,” in this lovely, well-educated voice.

“I … er … no,” I say defensively. “It was just a standard appointment.”

Even as I say this, I know it’s not true. In standard appointments, your heart doesn’t start to pound as you take the patient’s arm. The hairs on the back of your neck don’t rise. You don’t hold on to his hand very slightly longer than you need to.