A Hundred Pieces of Me by Lucy Dillon

Gina found the energy to chase up the most tedious final details. One day they might matter too.
    A month after she’d been made redundant by the council, Gina had taken a year’s lease on the office and set up on her own as a freelance project manager for renovations like the one she’d organised on her own house. She’d dealt with enough confused applicants drowning in paperwork (usually the wrong paperwork) to know that there were people out there willing to pay someone else to handle planning applications, as well as hunt down double-booked plumbers and translate builder-ese into something understandable.
    Her first job, via a recommendation from a colleague in the planning department, had been co-ordinating a barn conversion in Much Larton for a young family. The eco-barn had featured in a house-building magazine, and since then, a steady stream of work had come her way, mainly via the builders she’d used herself, none of whom particularly enjoyed dealing direct with inexperienced clients. The office had been Stuart’s idea. When she’d signed the unit-rental contract, Gina had immediately felt a lurch of terror and pride that she hadn’t had when she’d signed the wedding register or the mortgage agreement for her own house. This was hers. Her vision, her responsibility.
    Downstairs, there was a communal kitchen area with a microwave, a kettle and a cupboard for mugs next to a noticeboard that occasionally had a handwritten note about items for sale. As the year wore on, Gina got to know the others in the units above and below: Sara the wedding planner, Josh and Tom, the web designers, David the tax accountant. They shared a nervy camaraderie, joking as the kettle boiled about the madness of setting up on their own in a recession. Sara was a brisk networker and chair of Longhampton Women In Business; she had organised a Christmas party at the pizza place nearby, and after a few glasses of wine, Gina had gazed at her random office-mates with real affection. They were all loners like her, escapees from bigger workplaces where they had never quite fitted in. But she drew the line at joining the pub quiz team Sara set up. After the constant hum of speculation about everyone and everything that had buzzed round the planning department, she liked the sense of being almost in an office but not quite.
    If I were going back into Planning now, she thought, as she let herself into the foyer with her swipe card for the first time since she’d moved into her new flat, they’d be like lemmings peering over their cubicles trying to work out what was wrong that I’d had to have time off work. There’d be a sweepstake on how long I had to live by lunchtime.
    Gina pushed open the door to the kitchen, thankful that she didn’t have to run the gamut of what she’d called the Coffee Coven back at the council, particularly Sheila the office manager and her ‘Are you okay, hon?’ eagle eyes that never missed an absent engagement ring or blood-test plaster. Naomi had told her to ignore the murmurs in the kitchen when she’d first returned after her sick leave, but she couldn’t: once you were labelled, that was it. You weren’t you, you were the Thing That You’d Done. She was the Cancer Survivor. It could have been worse: her old colleague Roger was Mr Thai Bride, even though Ling, his wife, was actually from Wolverhampton.
    She’d come in early this morning, but from the faint sound of Radio 1 in the unit above, the web designers had beaten her. Gina opened the crockery cupboard and lifted the jute bag full of mugs onto the counter. She hadn’t told Naomi the whole truth about her mug purge: yes, she’d given a lot to the charity shops, but there had been some she couldn’t bring herself to throw away. Fifteen, in total, sitting in mug limbo under the sink.
    Gina didn’t intentionally collect mugs, just as she didn’t intentionally collect scarves, or wooden spoons, but there was something about them that she