That’s why, when she happened to spot Jamie Beaton in his off-duty gear on the other side of the high street, she hadn’t momentarily felt compelled to yell his name and run straight up to him to say hello.
When she twigged he was walking with a beautiful, dark-haired woman – who had her arm looped through his – laughing and chatting, Ally had instead concealed herself behind the old phone box, staring after them, something within her deflating like a stray party balloon caught in a hedge.
She didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to her before that he’d have a girlfriend and that, of course, she’d visit him on his days off. He had to be working out those muscles for someone’s benefit, right? Of course it was a stunning Edinburgh woman, probably with a glamorous girl-about-town kind of job, judging by the seriously cool way she was dressed. She must be a regular visitor to the Harvey Nicks cosmetics department, if her perfectly arched brows and that sheeny red lip were anything to go by.
Ally had skulked away, ending her torture, her cheeks burning redder than the phone box she’d hid behind at the realisation of how close she’d been to nursing a silly crush on Jamie Beaton.
That evening, sitting out on her waterwheel window ledge, the feat of contortionism she put herself through would have impressed even the most experienced Cirque-de-Soleil gymnast. She convinced herself it was lovely that he had someone special. A man like him, with a soft, secretive side needed company. They really had looked happy together. She was pleased for him and she was delighted for his girlfriend, scoring an upstanding, ambitious, handsome man like Jamie Beaton. Good. For. Her.
And that’s how she’d stayed, knotted up in delusion until early the next morning when her brother’s phone call made her jump awake.
‘Good news, sis,’ he’d told her. ‘They’re going to interview you for the Zurich job!’
9
Please wait for Future Proof Planet to join the video call.
Future Proof Planet knows you are waiting
Murray had let his sister know that his colleagues would join her the next day at 8.45 a.m. on the dot. ‘They do everything with the precision of a Swiss engineered watch,’ he’d told her before their crackling call cut out. Had he called from Mali? There’d been no time to ask. She’d been unable to reach him again, and he’d left her with absolutely zero nuggets of helpful insider advice and only twenty-four hours to prepare herself for this interview.
Ally’s mouth was dry as she sat in front of her laptop now, her hair scraped back and in a knot. She wore one of her mum’s suit jackets from the late nineties, olive green, with some red, glossy lip oil she hadn’t worn since, well, you know what.
She worried it was all possibly a bit too much paired with her favourite green charity-shop dress with the little white flower sprigs. It was too late now, though. She couldn’t shuck the jacket off or dive for a blotting tissue in case they joined the call right that second and caught her flustering and regretful.
There simply hadn’t been enough time to prepare. Didn’t they know she was more of a novelty cuckoo clock type of person than a precision timepiece?
She flicked through the pages of notes she’d made about the charity, finding she couldn’t make much sense of them now the time had come.
It had been a bewildering, and depressing, twenty-four hour crash course (minus her work shift yesterday) in the entire environmental crisis. All her carefully researched stats about fossil fuels and the rate of deforestation merged into facts about carbon neutral communities, fines for greenhouse gas emissions, the names of nature conservancy projects – too many to count – the hazards of forever chemicals, and the cost to local authorities of anaerobic digestion waste treatment.
Her heart raced and her vision blurred.
She rubbed her thumbs over the lids of gritty eyes. She should have got some more sleep, instead of cramming like she was about to address the UN Climate Change Conference. Who did she think they were expecting? Greta Thunberg?
They’d take one look at her and see she was an imposter. Why had she told her brother she was up for this?
The screen changed from blue to a red countdown on a white background. Three, two, one. Ally fought the impulse to slam the laptop shut and run flat out until she summited Ben Macdui itself. Too late. Three figures appeared on-screen.
‘Good morning,’ said a model-esque Black woman in a clipped and efficient German accent. She wore heavy beige linen over something cream and simple that made Ally instantly regret her thrifted and borrowed choices even more. ‘I’m Barbara Huber, Future Proof Planet Co-CEO for Strategy Development.’
‘Nice to meet you,’ said Ally automatically, not sure what Barbara’s job title meant, other than she was Very Important.
‘And this is Andreas Favre,’ Barbara said, indicating the extremely well put together man beside her, also in beige linen and an open-neck white shirt.
Was this some kind of uniform policy? To work there, did you have to dress as though you were fresh from a fashion shoot for some achingly chic, utilitarian eco-brand?
The barely-in-shot, slumped person to Andreas’s other side told her it wasn’t policy for everyone, at least. This person looked about fifteen and was shrouded in a huge black and white graffiti-print hoodie with extremely large clear plastic glasses and a set of chunky headphones round their neck.
‘And that’s V,’ said Barbara.
‘V?’ Ally confirmed.
‘Summer intern.’
‘I mostly fix the printer,’ V drawled in a Canadian accent, chewing gum, and looking weirdly spaced out and achingly cool in ways Ally had never been for one second of her life.
‘Thank you all for seeing me.’ Ally couldn’t help but worry that if they had V fixing the printers, why would she even be needed? She tried to concentrate on wowing them. But just how easy was that going to be?
