by James Birk
Chapter 13
It was one of those rare occasions that I really regretted the fact that I always did the five thirty finishes. Normally I enjoyed passing the last hour or so of my working day in a largely empty office, ignoring the phone that I should have been answering and paying no heed to the large pile of unprocessed applications on my desk. My short walk home meant I would still be at my flat hours before the majority of my colleagues, who had all exited the office at four in order to sit on an over-packed train for an hour, and that was if the train was even running on time, which, if the daily moans of my co-workers were to be believed, it wasn’t. And I derived even more pleasure in knowing that I had started work a full two hours later than most of those poor commuters.
Alas, on this particular day, my daily lie in afforded me no pleasure whatsoever, for though I had indeed started work at an embarrassingly late quarter to eleven (forewarned that Grant would be leading a training session in a different building for most of the morning) I did not find myself alone for the last hour of the day. Firstly, as if to make up for his absence that morning, Grant was sitting menacingly at his desk, looking ominously as if he was planning on staying there all evening. This effectively meant that there was no chance of me sloping off even five minutes early, and it also meant that if the phone rang I would actually have to answer it. Even if the phone didn’t ring then I would need to be fully focussed on pretending to ‘input’ the huge pile of applications on my desk. On any other day I could have borne this inconvenience, but it was the last Friday before Christmas, and the unofficial FFS Christmas party was in full swing.
The ‘official’ Christmas party had, of course, taken place at the end of November for cost saving reasons, but as that usually only entailed a few cheap sandwiches and a racist DJ in a shabby hotel function room, hardly anyone ever bothered going. The ‘unofficial’ party always had a huge attendance, and was one of the few occasions when everyone in the company could be found in the same spot in Cardiff. Every year someone much cooler and more popular than me would contact a nightclub and arrange some sort of discount and free drink for anyone carrying an FFS identity card, and they would subsequently email the whole company from an external email address, (to do it from their work email would probably result in disciplinary procedures) with all the details. Generally people would start making it to the club from about nine o’clock onwards but that didn’t stop everyone from going straight into town with their friends and getting ludicrously drunk beforehand. As I sat there miserably typing, Tim, Ian and Dean were propping up the bar in the Earnest Willows, drinking cheap pint after cheap pint, and they would all be seriously inebriated by the time I got out to join them.
As if to make matters worse, a lot of my female colleagues were using the office as a kind of staging area prior to going out, so, although I was the only person in the office working, I was surrounded by hordes of scantily clad women loudly screeching at each other and at anonymous third parties on the other end of their mobile phones. Such a scene in a bar or nightclub might have pleased me, but in the office space of FFS New Business it was oddly terrifying. It was particularly unsettling as one group of girls would seemingly leave the office as if heading out into town, to be replaced by another group of young ladies, who had hitherto been in another part of the office unseen by me. They would then screech and wail at each other, while applying makeup and assessing each other’s outfits, before leaving, only to be replaced by the original group of girls who I was sure had already left the building some thirty minutes earlier. To my untrained eye, they all seemed to be ready to go out, but clearly I was missing something, for they all carried an air of purpose, as though the ‘getting ready’ had really only just entered its initial stages and still had some way to go.
My only male company throughout this was Grant, who seemed largely oblivious to the whole proceedings, except for the odd occasion when one of the girls would screech particularly loudly, and he would look up in mild irritation, before returning to whatever it was that was keeping him working late. Fortunately he also seemed oblivious to me, but I didn’t dare relax too much, because Grant could always be counted on to catch you out if you let your guard down.
Among the giggling girls surrounding me, was Cheryl, although she wasn’t paying me much heed. We had been out a few times since that first date, and in general terms it was going well, which is to say I was having a lot more sex than I was used to, but it was hard to ignore the very real feeling that we didn’t actually have that much to say to each other when we were both sober, which admittedly we rarely were. I was delighted to be sexually active again, but when I thought about the people I knew that were in relationships, there generally didn’t seem to be an overwhelming need for them to get drunk in order for them to get on. I wasn’t even sure that I particularly liked Cheryl that much, and I couldn’t honestly see what she saw in me either; I was far from being the ugliest bloke in the world, some nice people had even gone so far as to describe me as being handsome, albeit in a slightly chubby way, but two peas in a pod we were not, unless genetic modification had resulted in a new kind of agriculture, which allowed farmers to cultivate very different varieties of peas within a single pod. A little optimistic voice suggested to me that it might be because I was good in bed, but the realist in me knew that that couldn’t possibly be true, because, well, it never had been true. Still I was not one to look a gift horse in the mouth and having lots of sex with someone I didn’t really like was better than having no sex at all.
Unfortunately due to the alcohol-fuelled nature of our relationship, my drive to get fit had taken a serious knock and with the marathon now only around four months away, I was seriously behind in my training schedule. It was a problem that was genuinely causing me some concern but my libido had rendered me incapable of taking any positive action to remedy the situation.
The gathering of girls began to disperse and soon I was alone in the office with Grant. Cheryl had given me a quick peck on the cheek before being whisked off by her friends, and I was reassured that I would be ‘getting lucky’ later, which helped ease the pain of being the last guy to leave the office. Grant was not known for his philanthropic nature, so any hopes of him being overcome by a seasonal bout of goodwill and letting me slope off early were fairly ill-founded. The minutes ticked by gradually and five thirty crept ever closer. Even an awkward phone conversation with an irate financial advisor, who seemingly had no Christmas spirit, did not distract me too much from my clockwatching. At twenty-five past five I could taste my freedom, and though the clock on the wall seemed to tick ever more slowly, the magical moment arrived and I was free.
I logged off and awkwardly wished Grant a good evening, which he either didn’t hear or chose to ignore, and I was on my way to enjoy the revelries of Black Friday.
Five minutes later and I was at the bar ordering my first pint before I located my comrades.
‘What kept you mate?’ asked Dean, as I slid into the booth they were occupying.
‘Grant was on patrol,’ I muttered and even Tim looked sympathetic.
‘Well it’s great you could finally join us,’ slurred Ian, struggling to raise his head from the pint of extremely blue liquid he was nursing.
‘Ian’s been on the electric turbos again,’ explained Dean.
‘Bloody hell, that’s a bit early isn’t it?’ I laughed, ‘I was a proper mess the last time I had one of those.’
‘That’s cos you’re a pussy,’ mumbled Ian, lifting his head to look at me.
The effort of this action was obviously too much as he promptly threw up all over my trousers.