by Alice Ross
Still reeling from my conversation with Bernie, I can’t help wishing she’d used a different phrase. Undeterred, I plough on. ‘Do you like working here?’
A deep crease appears in the centre of her forehead. ‘What do you mean “like”?’
For a couple of seconds, I stare at the slogan on the mug, trying not to think about the last time my own stem was upright and conclude that I probably shouldn’t have started this conversation. But, as it’s too late to backtrack, I add, ‘Do you enjoy your work?’
The turquoise-rimmed eyes regard me warily. ‘You’re not going to make me redundant, are you? All kinds of rumours have been flying around about job losses this week.’
At this revelation, the trail the tea made in my throat begins to burn and a bead of perspiration trickles down the back of my neck. ‘No. No, of course not. I couldn’t cope without you,’ I bluster.
And I honestly couldn’t. For all her ever-burgeoning list of mid-life symptoms, Vicky does a superb job and we make a great team. Thankfully, my retort seems to satisfy her. She leans back in the chair and folds her arms over her chest, while I release a grateful sigh of relief.
‘You wouldn’t last a day without me,’ she declares smugly. ‘Remember the team building day when I was off with my slipped disc?’
I nod, remembering it all too well. Before she’d taken to her bed, Vicky had made all the arrangements for a company multi-activity outdoor away day. All I had to do was book the coach to transport us all there. Only I cocked up big time and booked it for the day after the event. Which meant, on the actual day, me and sixty other employees were left standing outside the office for hours, before the team building people came to the rescue, squeezing us into three transit vans that smelled of mouldy Stilton. It’s a cringeworthy incident I’m doomed never to forget, as Bernie insists on bringing it up at least once a month. Usually after a few lagers. And always in front of an audience.
‘So, to go back to your question of if I “like” working here,’ she rattles on, pursing her lips and affecting a pensive air, ‘it’s all right, I suppose. No better or worse than anywhere else. And the free floral foam comes in handy.’ She bursts into a peal of laughter.
Despite finding floral foam as sexy as a monk’s habit – a fact which I have successfully managed to conceal for the last six years - I attempt to join in, but get no further than forcing up the corners of my mouth. Which slump back down again when, all at once, she stops tittering and asks: ‘Is that all?’
‘Er. Yes. Thanks,’ I sputter.
‘Good.’ She stands up and smooths down her short pink skirt. ‘I’ve got a splitting headache. And I don’t need to tell you what that’s because of.’
‘Please, please, please don’t,’ I silently chant, as she scurries off, leaving me alone with my own headache – the list of redundancies.
Chapter Two
Unable to stomach staying in the office until my usual ridiculously late finishing time, I leave at five o’clock, along with the rest of my team. The new spreadsheet I’ve created, headed up Flexit (a rather creative play, even if I say so myself, on Brexit), remains blank. It did, fleetingly, contain one name: that of Roxanne, a girl in her early twenties who’s worked at the company for eighteen months. In her role as marketing assistant, Roxanne’s time seems to be largely employed in discussing her – unfailingly drunken – activities of the weekend past; her – unfailingly drunken – activities for the weekend coming; and the assiduous updating of all past and forthcoming drunken activities on a plethora of social media websites. Given her meagre work contribution, I concluded that her removal from the department would have little impact and added her name to the blank page. But, when Vicky swept into my office with a Deepest Sympathy card for me to sign ten minutes later, informing me that Roxanne’s dog had been run over by a combine harvester, I pressed the Delete key and the empty screen glared mockingly back at me again.
Driving home, I try not to dwell on my unenviable task and attempt to summon positive thoughts instead. Other than myself and my family being in good health, that endeavour proves almost as hard as dredging up names for the dreaded list. I consequently admit defeat, turn up the radio and superglue my mind onto the phone-in, where someone is having a long rant about people who talk too much.
The journey home takes twenty-three minutes. On a good day I can do it in eighteen. Plainly, from whichever angle it is viewed, today is not a good day. Nevertheless, swapping the dreary grey industrial estate for the green and leafy estate where I and my family reside, does provide something of a psychological boost. My wife Louise – the “first-class Sheila” to whom Bernie alluded earlier – always tells me off when I say we live on an estate. She prefers to call it a development. Admittedly, it isn’t your standard collection of abodes, with rows of identical boxes squatting in regimented lines. For one thing, Louise would rather forego her weekly manicure, than dwell in anything so run-of-the-mill. Our development consists of – in estate agent speak - “exclusive mock-Georgian residences on their own gated plots”. A smattering of expensive cars on weed-free gravelled drives completes the picture of haughty affluence, Louise’s never-less-than-gleaming black Porsche 911 Carrera T, being a perfect example, crouching on ours like a complacent, well-fed cockroach.
I hate that car with a passion. It cost significantly more than – in my opinion – it is morally acceptable to spend on any set of wheels, let alone one that rarely clocks up more than ten miles a day, plus it’s completely impractical, meaning we have to provide the au pair with her own little runaround. When I made all those perfectly valid points in the showroom, having requested the sleazy salesman allow us a few minutes’ reprieve from his nauseating sales pitch in which every sentence ended with ‘And that’s a guarantee’, Louise promptly fired back her defence: that as her inheritance from her recently deceased grandfather was funding the purchase, she’d have whatever she [swear word] wanted. Now, as a ray of bright September evening sunshine glints off the bonnet, the vehicle seems to be winking at me; telling me that for all it knows I hate it, it’s staying well and truly put. Resisting the urge to ram my far less ostentatious Audi into its LouLou21 number plate, I park next to it, climb out and crunch across the gravel to the house. I enter via the front door, framed with a pretentious portico. The first time we saw it, Louise cooed that it was very Jane Austen. In my opinion it’s more Coleen Rooney but, as it had taken an inordinate amount of persuasion, a week in New York, two designer handbags and a promise that the choice of our new home would be hers alone, before my wife would so much as consider leaving London for “the sticks”, I’d kept my mouth shut.
In the hall I slide my laptop case onto the art deco Venetian mirrored console table – specially imported from Venice because no other Venetian mirrored console tables were deemed Venetian enough for our house. A matching chest of drawers for the opposite wall is currently on order. I await its arrival with apprehension, still not at all sure why Louise settled on a continental theme for our dwelling. Given its eighteenth-century pretentions, I’d envisaged spending hours trawling around antique shops. But as her selected theme has saved me from hours trawling around said establishments, I’ve refrained from vocalising that observation.
In the kitchen I find my wife attempting to slice a lemon. Despite her having very little else to do with her days, Louise attempting to slice anything is a rare sight indeed.
‘Hi,’ she says, briefly raising her head and flashing me a smile. As usual, she’s dressed in lycra. I rarely see my wife out of lycra. She is, she readily admits, addicted to the gym. And it shows. Add in her long – naturally blonde – hair and her killer cheekbones, and the whole package is nothing less than gorgeous. Indeed, I am very proud - in a lads’ way - to call her my wife. Or I would be, if I ever saw her to call her anything.
‘Good day at work?’ she asks, going back to her lemon.
‘Crap,’ I huff, pulling out a stool at the marble-topped island and slumping down on it. ‘Tha
nks to the wonders of the internet, Head Office have decided they can cut costs by doing most of the marketing from Sydney now. My department is therefore being annihilated. And as only two people have applied for voluntary redundancy, I have to select another ten. Bernie wants the list of names by Friday.’
‘Shit!’ she exclaims.
‘I know,’ I agree, grateful for her solidarity. Until I realise she’s referring to the fact that she’s missed the lemon and nicked her finger with the knife.
‘I’ll get you a plaster,’ I say, as she rives off a sheet of kitchen towel and wraps it around the affected digit, and I scoot over to the relevant drawer.
Plaster located, I hand it to her and she peels off the backing and wraps it around her finger, which is topped off with a sparkly pink nail.
I go back to my stool and resume the conversation. ‘So,’ I continue, loosening my tie, ‘I really don’t know where to start with the list of names. And Bernie couldn’t give a toss who goes. It’s like he—'
Her beautiful features twist into a rueful expression. ‘I’m really sorry, Darren, but I’m meeting Chantelle at the gym. There’s a new High Cardio Intensity with Abdominals Bodypump class we want to try.’
‘Oh. Right,’ I sigh. Although I don’t know why I sigh. The only aspect of my work Louise has ever shown any interest in is the pay slip at the end of each month. When I first met her, in a trendy bar in Soho, she worked in PR, doing a job that seemed to consist of an inordinate amount of champagne-quaffing and an even larger amount of “networking”. After she fell pregnant with Annabelle sixteen months into the relationship and we subsequently married, the plan was for her to return to work part-time. But, with Bettina making an appearance a mere – and unplanned – eighteen months later, shortly followed by our move north, the part-time work plan had never left the starting block. And, despite both girls now being at school, seemed to have been deftly wiped from the agenda, replaced with more gym sessions than could possibly be healthy.
‘Concetta should be back with the girls to make dinner soon,’ she informs me, dropping a couple of slices of lemon into a water bottle.
I pull a face. Concetta, our Italian au pair, has a pitiful total of two dishes in her repertoire – the pasta with the pesto, and the pesto with the pasta.
‘Great,’ I mumble.
Louise appears not to hear. ‘See you later,’ she chirps, whisking out of the door in designer trainers, exactly the same shade of pink as her fingernails.
Alone in the cavernous space, I drag myself over to the in-built fridge, grab a bottle of beer, flip off the top and knock back several refreshing slugs. I then plop back down onto my stool and begin pondering ways to escape one of Concetta’s culinary delights. I’m considering rattling up something from my own limited repertoire of beans on toast, eggs on toast, marmite on toast, or just plain toast, when Concetta appears, all wild dark hair, flashing black eyes, and lime-green hareem pants covered in geometric shapes. My two daughters trail in behind her – Annabelle, the oldest at eight, in her tennis kit; Bettina, six, in her fencing gear.
‘Mr Ferrrrrrguson,’ Concetta exclaims, screeching to a halt on the tiled floor and looking like she’s just discovered a pack of marauding smurfs in the room. My girls, equally astonished, crash into her back.
‘Hi,’ I sing, raising my bottle in greeting.
Three stunned faces stare back at me.
‘We were not expecting you back until laters,’ Concetta announces.
‘Yes, well, I thought I’d come home early and spend some time with my family,’ I reply – attempting a jolly, nonchalant tone.
Clearly, the fact that I’m trying to pretend me being home at this early hour is really no biggie, goes down like a complete biggie. The two little ones exchange a worried look, while Concetta almost succeeds in raking a bewildered hand through her riot of hair.
‘I was thinking,’ I say, setting down my bottle with such determination that a couple of drops of alcohol splash onto the worktop, ‘that we could all go out for pizza.’
This suggestion is met with yet more consternation.
‘Oh,’ eventually mutters Concetta. ‘I was going to make the pasta with the pesto for the dinner.’
‘Lovely,’ I reply. ‘But I’m sure you’d like a night off from cooking. We could try that new place on the high street. I’ve heard they do a great calzone.’
My sales pitch makes no noticeable impression in their scepticism.
Looking as if I’d just proposed we all don our pyjamas and set off barefoot for the Himalayas, Concetta turns to my daughters and asks, ‘What you think, girls? You want to go for pizza with Mr Ferrrrrguson?’
Annabelle and Bettina shrug their slim shoulders in unison.
‘Um, OK. We go,’ concedes Concetta warily.