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in irritation. “Piss off!” she said, spinning around.
    “Sorry,” said Ah-Lam, with a look on her face that said, “I’m going to start flat hunting as soon as I leave this room.”
    “Oh no, not you, Ah-Lam,” said Amy, reaching out to apologise. “My mother! My mother!” Whereupon Amy, some 5ft 7in, stood towering above Ah-Lam and mimed taking a gun from an imaginary holster and blowing her head off, adding, “Mother!” by means of clarification.
    Ah-Lam looked back, somewhat terrified, and attempted a smile. “Your post,” she said as she returned to her room, slamming the door with some gusto.
    “Brilliant,” said Amy as she looked down, only to see that the standard bearer for her day’s post was a credit-card bill. “Just brilliant!” She slumped onto her bed and shivered.

SEVEN
     
     
     
     
     
    Tom sidled into Derek’s office and lingered by the doorframe, half in, half out. He stared at Derek, who was behind his desk, transfixed on his computer screen. His boss looked fairly calm and collected, so Tom ruled out that he was looking at porn. He was sure he was safe from being “invited” to view yet more depravity.
    “What do you want?” Derek asked without looking up.
    Tom was momentarily caught off-guard. He’d stood in the doorway contemplating whether to go in and speak to Derek. As he hadn’t made his mind up, he’d assumed that he was undetectable. He’d stood in position, running through what he was going to say, so he hadn’t expected to be spotted. “Hmm?” he managed, as if woken from a sleep.
    Derek didn’t look up from his screen. Instead, he repetitively tapped keys on the keyboard, as if he were entering the same letter or number over an d over again. “You’ve been hovering around for ten minutes and it’s beginning to piss me off. What do you want?”
    Tom wandered in as casually as he could manage, unaware that it had been ten minutes. With no windows open, the stench of “man musk” in the room was fairly overwhelming, if not distressingly familiar. If Derek was right and this masculine aroma was an elixir to attract others, Tom was sure that he’d be feeling some stirrings at the very least. Instead, he felt queasy and suffocated.
    “Oh, nothing,” he said nonchalantly. “Just mulling over some features and articles – you know, the usual.”
    Derek continued his monotonous activity without once glancing up. “OK,” he mumbled. “Close the door on your way out, there’s a good lad.”
    Tom duly obliged and backed out, closing the door behind him. He stood against it and sighed. There’d surely be many other opportunities, but each one spurned gained a momentous significance. Tom spun around to face his desk and stared at his screen. Pictures of enlarged chemical compounds greeted his return. The company designers had tried to make an article on chemical compositions interesting but, put simply, they’d failed. Tom’s job was to write about the compound in a way that would make the man in the street understand. It wasn’t a job he relished.
    “You alright, mate?” Carl had spun his chair around and was staring at Tom over his screen. “You seem a bit distracted.”
    Tom looked up without any conviction. “Sorry, mate,” he replied wistfully. “Just can’t be arsed today, you know? I keep thinking about this leaving do.”
    They both sat in unhappy contemplation. “Well, that would depress anyone,” Carl offered.
    “You bringing your wife?” asked Tom. Carl’s wife had only been seen once. She’d shocked everyone by being Carl’s polar opposite. Whereas he was flash and always into the latest fashions, she was a stay-at-home, down-to-earth character. Fugly, everyone had agreed.
    “Probably,” Carl replied without irony. He liked to perpetuate the myth that he had a bevy of women at his disposal. The guys were never sure just how much of this was guff and what was truth. He’d been a “playa” before he got married, so it was