The People on Platform 5 by Clare Pooley

Author:Clare Pooley [Pooley, Clare]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473568501
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2022-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

Emmie

08:08 Thames Ditton to Waterloo

Emmie took the pie out of the oven and placed it on the kitchen table that she’d already laid for two. This recipe always reminded her of her mum. She could feel her standing next to her as she chopped the carrots, onion and celery. Watch out for your fingers, Emmie. No one wants to find a finger in their shepherd’s pie. Unless it belongs to the shepherd. Ha ha.

Emmie was trying to eat less meat, on account of the planet, but Toby was refusing to give it up entirely. She’d interrogated the local butcher about this lamb, and he’d assured her that it had lived an incredibly happy – if short – life, feeding on lush, organic grass in a Devon field with a view of the ocean. Then he’d smirked, which rather made her wonder if he was taking the mickey.

Emmie usually didn’t have the time to cook from scratch during the week, but today she’d been working from home, as she’d started doing increasingly regularly.

Toby was a huge fan of remote working. The commute, he said, was a relic from a pre-internet era. An unnecessary waste of time, energy and money, as well as being a driver of climate change and pollution.

When he and Bill, his business partner, had started their IT consultancy business they’d agreed that an office was an unnecessary expense. They now had twenty or so tech geeks working for them, mainly young guys with bad dress sense and dubious personal hygiene, but everyone worked from home, except when they were on site with clients. Most of their meetings happened by video conference and, when they needed a ‘face-to-face’, they hired a space in one of the many communal working hubs that had sprung up in the area.

Toby was always ahead of the curve.

‘Toby! Supper’s ready!’ she called.

‘This looks amazing!’ said Toby, leaning down to kiss her on the back of the neck. ‘I love it when I don’t have to share you with the office.’

While they ate, Toby told her a story about one of his clients, which involved a mysteriously malfunctioning computer system, an ethernet cable and a cockapoo puppy.

‘So, how’s your day been?’ he said.

‘Okay,’ she replied. ‘Only I’m not really enjoying this toothpaste brief. I really want to pitch for some charity work, something more worthwhile, but I guess I’m just being ridiculously idealistic.’

‘Nonsense!’ said Toby, taking her hand. ‘Your idealism is one of the things I love most about you. I have an idea, actually. It’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about for a while.’

Emmie looked at him, simmering with an excitement which should have been contagious, but instead made her feel a little wary. Toby’s ideas could range from repainting the downstairs loo, to paragliding in the Alps, with all sorts of craziness in between.

‘Go on then,’ she said.

‘You know how much you like not having to go into the office?’ he said. This wasn’t entirely true. Toby was more enthusiastic about her working from home than she was, but she didn’t want to ruin the mood by correcting him.

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