“Dexter is very clear on the way he likes to operate. He will want to meet with you in your home. As I said before, he’s quite happy for you to have a friend or neighbour with you…”
“Oh. I don’t know. Oh. Let me think about this…” I thought I might hyperventilate. Nobody ever came into my flat. It wasn’t as if it was that bad—it just didn’t project the image I wanted people to have of me. I wanted them to see Lara, the charming, slightly distrait, friendly, but busy, city girl. I didn’t want them to see a mess. I wasn’t a mess! I really…okay. I was.
“Dexter will be booked up to the end of the month…”
“Oh. okay.” I was a mess. I knew it, deep down. I needed to be cleaned up. Put away. Tied with a neat ribbon. “You’ll want my address then.”
It was only later, in bed, that the enormity of what I’d signed up for hit me. I had agreed to pay a man to tell me what to do. Paying to be scolded and pushed around by some man! Was I mad? I didn’t know. But I was certainly just a little bit excited…
* * * *
With five minutes to go until zero hour, I decided that I’d done what I could. The unironed clothes were in a basket under the bed. The bills and tickets and whatnot were in a perilous stack on one corner of the kitchen table. All pizza boxes, empty wine bottles and ice cream tubs had been consigned to the recycling. I’d found a duster under the sink and had trailed it across a few surfaces, marvelling at the cloud of dust particles I’d disturbed in the process. Dust is so interesting to watch, isn’t it?
Dishes washed, clutter hidden. Somehow everything still looked wrong, and I wondered if Dexter would eventually come to the same conclusion I had—that my problem was congenital and, as such, untreatable. List making simply wasn’t in my DNA.
The buzzer jolted me out of reverie. It was two o’clock exactly—had he stood by the door waiting for the second hand to hit the twelve?
“Hello,” I spoke cautiously into the intercom.
“Miss Fisher? Dexter from ‘New-U’ here.”
“I’ll buzz you in.”
Was that a normal voice? It didn’t seem unusual in any way. Not too high, not too deep, no accent, no speech impediment. Why was I so nervous? I tried to shake the foreboding out of me and remember that I was paying for a service! That put me in the driver’s seat, didn’t it? If he didn’t suit me, I could fire him.
All the same, my skin prickled at the sound of his knock, and I stood a little farther back than I normally would when I opened the door and let him in.
“Hello, hello,” I chirped, talking too fast and too much, as I always did when I was anxious. “Sorry about the state of the place, do take a seat if you can find one, can I get you a drink, tea, coffee, something colder, or I’ve got hot chocolate, or even wine, though I don’t suppose you drink on duty, do you, like policemen, I suppose…”
“No, thank you,” he said, placing a laptop bag on the cleanest rectangle of the kitchen table.
“Really? The cups are clean, I can vouch for it, I washed them up just now…”
“I’m fine. Really.”
It wasn’t quite a smile, more a tightening of the facial muscles. He sat on a kitchen chair and unzipped his bag. He hadn’t shaken my hand or introduced himself, yet. I felt his manners left something to be desired, and I couldn’t help but say so.
“I’m very pleased to meet you, Dexter,” I said, holding out a hand. “I’m Lara Fisher. This is my home.”
He looked up, slightly impatiently, and nodded. “Yes. Can we move on from formalities? We have a lot to get through in a short space of time. Please take a seat.”
He was asking me to take a seat in my own kitchen! Who was this man? Was he some kind of automaton? He was certainly coming across as such. And the way he dressed made him look like a priest—that high-necked black shirt and trousers, hair swept ruthlessly back, silver-rimmed spectacles. He dressed older than he was, because if you looked a bit closer, he was probably no more than forty tops. If you really looked, really, really closely, you might notice that he was pretty good looking, behind the icy veneer. Full lips, high cheekbones, intense golden-brown eyes. If he ruffled up his hair and wore something less austere, I realised with a guilty start that I would fancy him. Possibly. Probably.
“Yes?” he said.
Oh, I was staring. I coughed, blushed a little and gestured behind me, to the barely contained chaos of my kitchen. “Sorry. Yes. Well, you can probably see why I’ve hired you.”
“Yes, I can,” he said without smiling or giving me any kind of clue that I could breathe out. “I’ll want to have a quick look around later, just to get the full measure. But first, I need you to tell me exactly what you want help with.”
He pressed some keys on his laptop and it began to bleep and whir.
“Everything,” I said with a pained laugh. I wished he’d smile, or give some indication that he was human. I was about to start looking for an off switch.
“Let me talk you through a few categories,” he said. “Financial. Professional. Social. Domestic. Health and well-being.”
“All of those.”
“All? Fine. And a few sub-headings. Timekeeping. Paperwork. Household maintenance. Bill paying.”