Page 17 of Read My Lips

“Excuse me.” Simon slapped the table, and everyone froze. “Hi. Ben,” he signed, voice off. “You do know your entire job is interpreting for me?”

Eyeballing him, I rolled my fist slowly downwards, signing back. “Yes?”

“So do you think you could possibly tell me what the hell is going on? If it wouldn’t inconvenience you too much.” Hands short and stern and close to his body but so so loud, Simon rounded right out of serenity into Definitely Not Calm.

In fact, one might go as far as to call him A Little Bit Shouty.

Oh Christ. He was going to kill me. With his bare hands. Right after I took the gold medal for worst interpreter in the world. Mandela Memorial bloke had nothing on me.

I winced. Somehow my hands stayed steady. “Telling her it wasn’t Richard – it was me?”

Simon’s nostrils flared, eyes burning molten with fury. “What?”

The line I’d crossed was a dot from here. A tiny little full stop in size six font somewhere off in the distance.

With one efficient slap, Simon flipped the department laptop closed like he was taking my head off. I flinched. The projector blue-screened, complaining about connected devices and input channels, and he rounded the table, striding towards me.

I’d be lucky if I had any input channels left to complain about after he was done. Terror rooted me to the spot. What was I supposed to do? His boss, who I had lied through my lying teeth to, was right there, watching.

“Give us a minute, will you, Mel?” Pure charm, Simon purred at her – smile twinkling in his eyes. But his grip on my collar as he yanked me to my feet was unrepentantly steely.

“Ben and I need to have a little chat.”

CHAPTER

SIX

Simon barrelled out of the meeting room, bouncing us into the harsh lights of the wood-panelled corridor. Less dark and crooked little house, more Scandi spa chic. Pinballing along the wall, I had to keep pace with his long-limbed power walk without tripping over my own feet. Hard no to falling behind. Mel Booker would eat me like a buttered kipper on toast.

The metal bar in the middle of the glass side wall clattered as Simon shouldered the fire door open, and I braced for the building going up in a wall of sound. But all I got was the white noise of distant traffic and the scrunch of my rubber-soled granddad shoes on the gritty flat roof of the tiny L-shaped terrace.

A skyline I’d never seen from this angle stretched out in front of us – a mishmash of glass and jagged scaffold tents and sleek slopes of tiles. Silhouettes of cranes mingled in with church steeples. London, perpetually under construction.

The door slammed, and Simon loomed livid, neck-crickingly tall, all but visibly rocking forward with the pace of his pulse.

“What do you think you were doing in there?”

“Saving your bacon, mate!”

Simon’s eyes boggled. He should really get that throbbing vein in the side of his neck checked out.

“That’s not part of your job.” Clawed hands balled into fists up by the side of his head. “You’re my interpreter. You’re supposed to interpret. My life is not a group project!”

“I know that.” Wincing, I held my hands up. Full on surrender gesture. “But I’m not one of those documentary photographers who’s going to watch the antelope getting mauled to death by an entire pride of lions, am I?”

Simon growled, a whole lot more Scar than Simba, and I inched a step towards the side wall, away from the parapet. In case he tried to throw me off the building.

“You’ve gone all Geordie.” His eyes narrowed murderously. “Did you just call me an antelope?”

“No! Yes. Sort of. Maybe?” Most of the time, London abraded my accent into something smoother than I was, and I’d still never get to where he wanted me to be. Flared tempers thickened everything.

Simon folded his arms across his chest. “You’re being entirely unintelligible. Stop doing the accent.”

Balling my fists, I held myself back, teeth gritted with the effort of not lamping him. “Excuse me? Doing the accent.”

When my words came out raw – nothing matching what he was used to. The shape of them on my lips didn’t pair with the sound profile he expected. But he didn’t have to make out I’d started speaking Klingon, did he?

“I’m voicing an accessibility requirement.”