Removal Notice

The removal notice was laminated, which Aisling Doyle took as a personal insult. A regular piece of paper said *this is provisional, this is a conversation, we can still be reasonable people about it.* Lamination said *this decision has been sealed against weather and tears.* Lamination was the bureaucratic equivalent of a man folding his arms. She found it cable-tied to the upright pole of her coffee cart at 6:52 in the morning, before she'd even got the grinder warm, before the first finance analyst had stumbled blinking out of the lift in need of saving. NOTICE OF FIXTURE REMOVAL, it said. LOBBY CONCESSION UNIT 1. EFFECTIVE IN NINETY (90) DAYS. By order of Facilities Management, Brennan Tower. Aisling read it twice. Then she did what she always did when the day handed her something heavy: she made coffee. The cart was called The Daily Grind because the previous owner had possessed no shame, and Aisling had kept the name for the same reason you keep an ugly mug — because forty floors of office workers had got attached to it, and a city is mostly just the small things people get attached to. She had the grinder going and the first pull of espresso hissing into the cup when the cause of all this walked across her lobby. She knew it was him because she had never seen him before, and in eleven years she had seen everyone. Brennan Tower had a population the size of a small town and Aisling, from her three-square-metres of cart, knew all of it — knew that Pavel in Legal had a new baby, knew that the woman from the fourth floor was leaving her husband and not telling anyone yet, knew which security guard took two sugars and which one was pretending he didn't. A stranger in her lobby in a good grey coat, walking with the brisk ownership of a man with a clipboard energy even when he wasn't holding one, could only be one thing. "You're the new facilities director," she said, before he reached the cart. He stopped. He was younger than she'd pictured the author of a laminated atrocity — late thirties, dark hair, the kind of jaw that had clearly been told it was a good jaw and believed it. He had a coffee in his hand already. From a chain. Aisling clocked that the way a sommelier clocks a wine cooler full of cola. "Daniel Okafor," he said. "And you're —" "The fixture you're removing." She tapped the laminated notice without taking her eyes off him. "Unit One. Lobby concession. Ninety days. I do have a name, but I understand from your stationery that I'm furniture, so." To his credit — and she did not, at that moment, want to credit him with anything — he didn't flinch. He looked at the notice, then at the cart, then at the queue, because there was a queue now, there was always a queue by 6:55, four people deep and lengthening, every one of them watching this exchange with the frank interest of an office that had not had decent gossip since the fourth-floor divorce. "It's not personal," Daniel said. "It's *laminated*," said Aisling. "The lobby's being redesigned. There's a brand refresh. The new concept calls for an open-plan welcome experience and a partnership with a national coffee —" "A *chain*." Aisling said the word the way you'd identify a smell. "You want to put a chain in my lobby." "It's not your lobby." "Ask them." She gestured at the queue, which had grown to seven, which included Pavel from Legal, who looked personally betrayed, and the two-sugars security guard, who had stopped pretending. "Go on. Ask any of them whose lobby it is." Daniel Okafor looked at the queue. The queue looked back at him with the unified expression of people who had not yet had coffee and now feared they never would. It was, Aisling thought with some satisfaction, the single most hostile audience a man in a good grey coat had ever stood in front of voluntarily. "Ninety days," he said again, retreating to the number like it was high ground. "There's a process. There'll be a transition plan." "There'll be a *fight*," said Aisling pleasantly, and pulled the first espresso of the morning, and slid it across the cart to Pavel, who took it like a hostage being freed. "Two sugars?" she called to the security guard, already reaching, because the day did not stop being the day just because a man had laminated a threat to it. Daniel stood there a moment longer with his inferior chain coffee going cold in his hand. Then he left, across the lobby, with the brisk ownership slightly dented, and Aisling watched him go and felt something that was not quite triumph and not quite dread but was, she would admit much later, considerably more interesting than either. Ninety days. She looked at the laminated notice, cable-tied to her pole like a flag planted by an invading nation. "Right," she told it. "Game on."