by Mina Ford
Watching him plonk down his caramel macchiato and his double chocolate muffin, I heave a gigantic sigh. Despite David’s gorgeousness, I can’t help feeling downright miserable at being back at work.
‘Hi, David,’ trills Melanie the Mouth.
‘Hi.’
‘Hello, David,’ purrs Serena Bumlick, rewinding the tape in her dictaphone for some serious transcription.
‘Hi,’ he says politely, before turning his attention to me. I blush with pleasure, noticing that everyone else in the office, especially Serena and Mel, have turned the colour of mange-tout with envy.
‘Good Christmas?’ he asks me.
There’s a collective intake of breath as I give everyone that smug ‘Yes, he’s asked Me a question’ sort of look.
‘The usual,’ I reply. ‘Crap weather, crap presents and crappier telly. If I hear the theme tune to Only Fools And Horses one more time I’ll scream. What about you?’
‘What’s Only Fools And Horses?’
‘Never mind. What about you?’
‘The usual.’ He grins, showing a neat row of sparkling white teeth. ‘Gorgeous weather, great presents and no telly at all.’
‘You haven’t got a telly?’ I’m incredulous.
‘I was too busy sunbathing.’
‘It was back to the land of barbies, beaches and brilliant sunshine, was it?’ I treat him to my flirtiest smile, secure in the knowledge that everyone else in the office is watching, jealous as hell. ‘Thought you were looking sickeningly brown.’
‘Just for a week.’
‘Well, there’s no need to get cocky,’ I warn him. ‘You might get all the nice weather over there, but just remember, you guys are responsible for giving us Prisoner Cell Block H and Rolf Harris. It can’t be all good.’
We chat on about holidays for a few minutes then David’s phone rings. Now, when this happens, I take it as my personal responsibility to ear-bog as much as I can. None of us have, as yet, managed to find out whether or not David has a girlfriend. But this time, disappointingly, he seems to be talking about work. And he’s taking ages about it, so I bang off a couple of personal emails and resign myself to writing the article I was supposed to have handed in before Christmas. A piece on crème brûlée. It’s my job to invent and test recipes for the Posh Nosh section at the back of the magazine. It’s the least prestigious section, of course, next to all the celebrity interviews and the reportage. It’s even lower down the ranks than the pages and pages of photos of spilt nail varnish and chopped-up lipstick, which pass for the Best Beauty Buys of the month. Actually, it’s not what I thought I’d end up doing at all. I wanted to be a chef when I was at school. But when I left catering college, I didn’t realise that if you wanted something badly you were supposed to go out and grab it, instead of waiting for it to land in your lap. So I drifted. And after months of temping, I ended up here.
Writing about food instead of cooking it.
‘Concocting the perfect crème brûlée is rather like building the perfect relationship,’ I type gloomily. ‘If the luscious vanilla custard goo on the bottom is not strong enough to support the brittle, golden caramel crust, the whole structure will cave in on itself like a floppy, flaccid…’
God, now that makes me think of penises. Must concentrate.
On second thoughts— I look longingly at David—who cares?
I spent so long over the holidays testing recipes, I’ve got caramel oozing out of my ears. But I think I’ve got the ingredients and the timing right now. Unfortunately, relationships are a tad more complicated. If I had a foolproof recipe regarding that side of life, I’d be laughing all the way to Snatch West. But how could I? I can’t even follow in the footsteps of parental example. My own father buggered off when I was fourteen. I wasn’t surprised. The alarm bells of mid-life crisis had been ringing for months. It was 1984. He’d given up mowing the lawn at weekends and started wearing stretch jeans and leg-warmers instead. Howard Jones and Nik Kershaw records started to appear in our front room with alarming regularity. One Saturday, I arrived home from the cinema (Ghostbusters, if you’re interested), to discover he’d disappeared while he and Mum were out looking at chest freezers. He’d vanished into the ether just north of Finsbury Park with a mail order Filipino. Mum was devastated. She prided herself on never having bought anything from a catalogue in her life.
I finish writing the introduction to my article then ring Janice.
She’s depressed. Poor old Janice. She does work really, really hard. She lived in a shithole, went to school in a shithole and gritted her teeth through A levels so she could claw her way up and out to university. Where she met me. We got through our first year in halls together then shared an old Victorian house near Southsea seafront, where she really opened up to me about her past. Every week we’d have those silly girlie occasions, when we’d sit for hours, putting the world to rights with mudpacks on our faces, henna slathered over our hair and huge glasses of wine in our hands. Now, she’s so glossy and polished, you’d never know she grew up on a council estate rougher than a badger’s bum. And that’s just the way she wants it to stay.
‘If that wasp-bottomed sow whispers “you need some serum, sweetie” in my ear just one more time, I’m going to ram her precious Rolodex down her throat, the fucking flat-chested bitch.’
‘We’re not all lucky enough to have tits so versatile we can sling one over each shoulder and tie them together like a halterneck, you know.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Just try and be a bit more sensitive to those of us who ended up in the fried egg queue when they were giving out bosoms.’ Hopefully a bit of flattery will cheer her up a bit.
‘Well, I never asked to get any,’ she snaps. ‘You’re welcome to mine.’
Oh dear. Wasp Bum, Janice’s boss, has a terrible self-confidence problem. She has far too much of it. As do most of the other girls who work in her office. Janice won’t admit it, but I think she constantly feels she has to prove herself because she thinks she isn’t good enough.
‘I thought you were doing fantastically at work.’ I light a cigarette and deliberately waft the smoke in Fat Claire’s face. ‘You’re always being promoted and getting cars and pay rises and stuff. Look at me. Still on ten pee a word. Compared to me, you’re practically executive.’
‘That’s just the problem,’ she grumbles. ‘Being solely responsible for the anti-cellulite bum cream account isn’t as glam as it’s cracked up to be. Actually, it’s really starting to get me down.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, it seems the more I’m paid, the more work I’m expected to do.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ I exclaim, shocked. ‘Everyone knows that when you’ve climbed your way to the top, all you have to do is boss other people about. Why don’t you just tell her to stick her serum where the sun don’t shine and get the hell out?’
‘I can’t,’ she says glumly. ‘I’ve made certain lifestyle choices. Unlike you, I’m a homeowner. I’ve got a mortgage to pay. There’s no way I can even think about giving it all up until I’ve found Filthy Rich. Then I’ll tell her exactly where she can stick her precious job. Right up her wee hole.’
‘Ouch.’
‘Oh, Katie,’ she groans. ‘What am I going to do? My job gets right on my tits, and to top it all my mother wants me to go over for “tea” on Sunday. And she doesn’t mean afternoon tea either. She means dinner. Which means I’ll be expected to sit at the top of that rancid tower block and eat something overcooked that comes with damp cabbage. And you know that makes me depressed.’
‘Do you want me to come with you?’
‘Nope. I’m going to try and get out of it if I can. Just looking at that cupboard I slept in for the first eighteen years of my life makes me want to slit my own throat.’
‘Hmmm.’
Janice’s mother—bless her—recently redecorated Janice’s old bedroom. She found copies of Elle Deco and Living Etc. at a jumble sale, then splashed out on bright pain
t and touchy-feely cushions in an attempt to lure Janice home a bit more often. But now that Janice has escaped, it’s going to take a bit more than a potful of Exotic Pink and a couple of sequin-sprinkled throws to drag her back to her roots. She’s got her own place now; a little oasis of clean lines and calm and she ain’t going back for no one. It’s a bit sad, really.
‘And that marriage agency I joined was a total disaster,’ she goes on.
‘Oh no.’
‘Oh yes.’ She sighs miserably. ‘So far, I’ve done breakfast with Too Short, lunch with Too Sleazy—honestly, after the way he kept grabbing his crotch I couldn’t even think of ordering the sausages—and dinner with Too Spotty.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘Then there was Cats with Too Poor—he made me go Dutch—and Les Mis with Too Married. Which just goes to show how thorough they are with their checking. I’ve wasted enough time and money on buying new outfits for that shower of losers. I’m thinking of moving on.’
‘Good.’
‘So will you come with me after work?’
‘Where? To the marriage agency? But I don’t want to get married.’
‘No. Somewhere else. Tell you when we get there. Shall we say Balham tube at six thirty sharp? By Pigeon Poo cab rank.’
It’s an order, not a question.
‘Kay.’
I might as well. I don’t have anything else to do. And now that my train of thought has been interrupted, I don’t see myself getting much more work done this morning. I might as well go to the loo for a kip.
I nip into the Ladies, stealing a furtive glance right and left as I go in to make sure I haven’t been seen, then enter a cubicle, flip down the lid, park myself firmly on top and rest my head against the cool plaster of the adjoining wall. Usually, I can stay like this for up to an hour, depending on how much traffic there is on any particular day. Sometimes, if there’s an important editorial meeting, or if a celebrity chef or TV interior designer is visiting, you get a glut of people in here at once, all chatting, squirting hairspray, caking on mascara and re-doing lipliner in preparation, and it’s almost impossible to get any shut-eye at all. But sometimes, it can be a full thirty minutes before anyone comes in and, even if someone does, I can usually manage to stay hidden. As long as I’m not snoring, of course. If I’m silent, people are lulled into a false sense of security. They think they’re alone. And it can be comforting to hear board directors and such like come in, hooting out big trumps and then leaving without washing their hands.
Today, though, Melanie and Serena come clattering in before I’ve had time to nod off. Quickly, I scoot my feet up off the floor so they won’t see me. You can learn a lot about office politics from hiding away in bogs.
‘Did you see her?’ Melanie starts to gob off, almost before the main door has swung shut.
‘I did.’ Serena’s voice is slightly distorted from where she’s puckering up her mouth to paint on more lipstick. ‘She’s so pathetic. Reckons she’s well in there. As if he’d be interested in someone like her. He smiled at me in the canteen the other day.’
Canteen? What the buggery bollocks was she doing in the canteen? She doesn’t do eating.
‘He held the art room door open for me when I was carrying all those trannies,’ Melanie says smugly. ‘I think he fancies me.’
‘It’s not as though she’s even good at her job.’
‘I know. Rumour has it they’re going to get rid of her.’
‘When?’
‘Soon.’
It doesn’t take a fool to realise they’re talking about David. After all, he is the only male in the office. Idly, I wonder who the ‘she’ who is going to be sacked is. It could be anyone. Everyone flirts with him, after all. And because he’s so polite, everyone has, at one time or another, dared to hope that he fancies them back. The older women mother him and buy him cream buns, which he shares with me, and the younger ones just salivate over his arse. It might be Fat Claire. I know there’s been some animosity because she’s just had an undeserved pay rise.
But before I can glean any more info, the Flight of the Bumblebee warbles robotically from the depths of my bag at ever increasing volume. Shit. My bloody mobile. I delve in to switch off, but not before Serena and Melanie have fled, tottering on three-inch heels to the safety of their computer screens.
It’s David.
‘Thanks,’ I tell him. ‘I was just listening to some juicy office gossip then and you’ve gone and ruined it.’
‘Where are you?’
‘In the loo. I was having a bloody nap.’
He laughs. ‘Come back. I’m trying to play Hangman. It’s boring with one.’
‘Can’t,’ I say firmly. ‘I’m tired.’
‘I’ve got a cherry bakewell in my top drawer.’
I scramble to my feet and leg it back to my desk where, after three games of Hangman, David gets back to work. He’s still the New Boy, after all, so he has to at least look interested. The afternoon drags like buggery. George phones once, to ask me to go to his mother’s birthday lunch in Kent with him in a couple of weeks. Apparently, she’s asking ‘when are you going to settle down?’ type questions, which might all go away if he brings me over and nuzzles my shoulder every once in a while. I do love George’s mum, especially when she makes apple crumble and custard, but I think she deserves the truth, so I refuse.
‘Why don’t you go on your own and tell her you’re a raving homosexual?’ I ask him. ‘How hard can it be? She’s pretty cool, you know, your mum.’
‘I don’t want to upset her.’
‘You won’t.’
‘She’s old. She might be shocked. She might just give up breathing or something. I can’t exactly see her marching round Tunbridge Wells in an “I love my gay son” T-shirt. She hasn’t got my dad any more either, remember?’
‘I know.’ I pick up a paperclip and start bending it into comedy shapes. ‘But she’s got People’s Friend and Rich Tea. Not to mention endless cups of PG Tips. And, to be honest, I think it’ll be a relief to her to find there’s a reason for that appalling mauve coat you wear. She’ll be fine.’
‘I dunno.’
He then has one more go at persuading me to rent out my womb for a bit. It’s only for nine months, he insists. He can’t see what the problem is. Am I being deliberately obstructive, just to spite him? It’s not even as though he’d be a sitting tenant. He’d be in and out before I knew it.
I hold firm. ‘No. No and NO.’ George can be very persuasive and I don’t want to suddenly find myself agreeing accidentally.
‘God, you’re so selfish,’ he rants. ‘I sit here all day putting up with po’ white trash who want to go on telly and all you can do is depress me. Do you know how hard this work lark is?’
‘Er, yes actually.’
‘Do you though? I have to interview raddled orange hags in slingbacks every day of my life, darling. People from chip pan families who say TOILET and LOUNGE. People who live in bungalows and think it’s perfectly OK to do so.’
‘Well…’
‘Today I’ve had Linda from Dunstable all over the studio. Arse like a three-seater sofa. And Cherise from Romford who thought spaghetti hoops were—and I quote—“dead sophisticated”.’
‘Well, I’m very sorry about that but—’
‘And Wayne from Luton who thought that baklava was something you pulled over your head to hold up your local Spar. Do you know—’
‘George.’
‘Yes?’
‘Sod off.’ I put the phone down. Work is bad enough without him ranting on about his own job all day. It’s not even as though his work is very taxing. All he has to do is troll round the studio meeting people and yattering on to them, asking them questions about themselves to see if they’re exciting enough to parade around on day-time TV. It’s not exactly hard. It’s not my fault he’s such a sodding snob.
I spend the rest of the afternoon staring at my screen, willing my thoughts to unscramble themselves and
transform themselves into clear, lucid prose. Occasionally, I pick up pieces of paper and put them back down again in an attempt to look busy. I make cups of tea. I tell myself I’ll write today off and start with a clean slate tomorrow. I hack at a scab on my hand until it falls into the keyboard and no amount of poking with a paperclip will dislodge the bastard.
At five thirty on the dot, David scrapes his chair back, flips off his monitor and picks up his bag.
‘Coming for a drink?’
He’s talking to me.
I look round the office and am satisfied to see that Melanie is slack-gobbed with astonishment.
‘OK,’ I say. ‘That’d be excellent.’
We go to the vodka bar around the corner. Lots of chrome and glass and huge pink squashy sofas. Feeling frivolous, I order a double straightaway. Jelly Baby flavour. David goes for black cherry, a choice I approve of wholeheartedly. At least he’s not going to take the sparkle out of the evening by drinking lager all night like a blokey bloke would.
‘So how are you enjoying it then?’ I ask him. ‘Work, I mean. What do you think of Imogen?’
Imogen is our editor.
‘Fat ankles,’ he says.
I’m delighted. A man who looks good and knows how to bitch his way out of a crisp packet. How refreshing.
‘What about the others?’ I ask, winding my legs round each other in what I hope is a vaguely sexy fashion. ‘Melanie?’
‘Wears too much acrylic.’
‘Serena?’
‘Face like a dog’s bum.’
‘Audrey?’
‘Bit unsavoury, the way she comes into work with puke on her shoulder.’
I giggle delightedly. We’re getting on so well. I don’t know what I’m more excited about. The prospect of a shag, or the possibility of a bitching partner at work. Who knows where it might all lead? David might be my first hump and dump of the year.
Except that of course I’ll have to be a bit nice about it. I won’t be able to cruelly toss him aside, because I have to sit opposite him all day. Which is obviously a bit disappointing, but there are other ways of making sure a one-night stand doesn’t go any further.
