“Well … you were dripping in pond water and covered in algae, so we tried to suggest you take a shower at my place, but … you wouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Apparently you don’t take your clothes off on a first date.”
I closed my eyes.
Ben chuckled. “We all say stupid stuff if we’ve had a drink, Alex.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So we walked you home instead—”
“What am I saying at this point?” I asked. “Am I talking?”
“You are.”
I waited for the details. “Just tell me,” I said, after a long pause.
“You told a policeman you liked his ‘big manly helmet’. You let two women from a hen party lick your cheek and when they had, you shouted, ‘Yay! I’m not a virgin any more!’ You stood on the wall by the fountains and shouted, ‘I love chicken dippers! I love Lemon Boy!’ and when we got you back home you needed to pee so badly you just did it in one of those nice box tree shrubs by your front door. That’s when your mum came out and you were like, ‘Look out everyone! It’s the Borg Queen!’”
I stared straight ahead, through the Perspex wall behind him, to the next section and a mirror that reflected back the biggest knob currently residing on the planet.
“From Star Trek, right?” Ben added.
I nodded. “Yeeeeah.”
“Then you started giggling and running through a list of other female villains, kind of aimed at her.”
“Great. That’s … what did she do?”
“Um … she turned and went inside, just after you’d called her ‘Bride of Chucky’, I think, although it might have been after ‘Cruella de Vil’.”
I felt a bit sick.
“No harm done,” Ben said. “I mean, OK, maybe calling your mum ‘The Borg Queen’ isn’t the biggest compliment in the world, but she seems cool enough, I’m sure she’ll laugh about it.”
I took an unsteady breath. If only he knew. “She’s not my mum, she’s my dad’s girlfriend. This came,” I said, handing him the all-in-caps note: TIMES UP WONDERLAND.
Ben looked down at it, then slowly back up at me. “Kids being stupid?”
“Maybe it’s kids being stupid.”
“They missed the apostrophe in the ‘time’s’ of ‘time’s up’ – that suggests to me it’s kids.”
“Or ninety per cent of the population who can’t correctly use an apostrophe – including me.”
Ben laughed.
“What?”
“I like your sense of humour,” he said.
I smiled and looked down at my trainers.
He folded the note and put it in the pocket of his chino shorts. “Let’s go and show Maggie.”
“OK,” I said. “Um … you know the way out, right?”
Ben tapped his head. “Got the route memorized.” And then he produced another piece of paper from his back pocket. “But, we’ve also got a map!” He unfolded it and showed me a plan of the maze with a red line indicating the route towards the exit. “For if there’s a fire or medical emergency or something,” he explained, handing it to me, then confidently pushing his way out through the indicated doors.
We were back out on the main floor in next to no time, which was still pretty much deserted, all the games and machines flashing away, glittering, but to no avail. Maybe it was still too early for many people to be out.
Maggie glanced very briefly up from behind her desk as Ben knocked, and we walked into her small office towards the rear. The entire room was a chaotic mess: random boxes piled on top of each other, a huge (dead) pot plant on the floor in the corner, an old arcade game with a smashed screen, and a battered filing cabinet with papers and files bulging out of it. On the wall behind Maggie’s desk was a long piece of wood with hooks screwed into it, from which hung the keys to the various machines, so you could get in to them to take money out, or refill them with prizes. “I could have sworn you two were working separately,” she muttered.
“Alex came to find me because a thing came,” Ben explained.
Maggie gave him a withering look and Ben held out the note, which she took, scanned her eyes over, and handed back to him. “Right?” she sniffed.
“Didn’t know if it was important,” Ben said.
“How should I know?” she said. “What is it you kids say? ‘Haters gonna hate’?”
My eyes widened. “Do we have haters?”
She turned her attention to me. “Why were you late?”
“Oh, I … um, it won’t happen again, I’m really sorry.”
She nodded. “Strike one, Alex.”
“How many strikes do I have?”
“Two,” she said.
I chewed my lip. “Isn’t it normally three?”
Maggie gave me a sarcastic smile. “There’s nothing normal about Wonderland, Alex.”
Ben waved the note again. “So who hates us then?”
“No idea. The world is full of people with a chip on their shoulder about something. Maybe someone got annoyed because they didn’t win a teddy bear. Oh!” She looked like she’d just thought of something, or realized who the culprit was. “Maybe the owner of Wonderland wanted to send a message to the staff that TIME WAS UP for finishing their cleaning duties and could they please, for the love of sweet Jesus, get on with it!”
“Shouldn’t we tell the police though?” Ben asked.
“Christ!” Maggie said, slamming her palms down on her desk.
“Maybe it’s a hate crime,” I added.
Maggie guffawed, then went deadly serious. “OK. Get out.”
“What shall I do with the note?” Ben asked, as Maggie came round the desk and started pushing us towards the door.
“You can shove it up your pert little arse for all I care, sweetheart.”
Ben opened his mouth to speak again, but Maggie stopped him. “I’m doing the lunch rota – you’re both taking the early slot together, OK?”
We both looked at each other. Well, to be accurate, I looked at his lips, which were incredibly kissable, and then up to his eyes, which were incredibly beautiful. I released an unsteady breath.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Maggie said. She gave us both a long stare then rolled her eyes. “Now, if you could possibly bear to spend the rest of the morning apart, it would be great if you could finish your jobs. OK, boys?”
We both nodded and Maggie gently closed the door in our faces.
“What did she mean by that?” Ben said. “Bear to spend the rest of the morning apart.”
I shrugged because whatever Maggie was implying, she was quite wrong. I was, at this point, fairly confident I had the Ben situation under control. He was nice, yes, but he was straight, he had a girlfriend, I’d accepted those basic facts, and I knew nothing could happen between us. I was fine with that. It didn’t matter how cute he was, I wasn’t going to fall for another one. I had this. I so had this.
I so hadn’t.
CHAPTER NINE
You know what else I hadn’t? Any lunch. In all the panic of running out of the house late, it hadn’t even occurred to me. Nor had I brought any lunch money, as such, although I did have a quid on me, so I was saved to an extent – or at least, I thought I was – until the woman at the chicken and kebab shop was less than helpful:
“How much just for fries?” I asked.
“Two pounds.”
“What about a half portion?”
“We don’t do them.”
“What about a child’s portion?”
“A quid.”
“Ah, OK—”
“But you gotta be under twelve.”
“Oh.”
“Can’t make exceptions, else everyone will be wanting favours.”
I nodded. “I understand.”
I did consider trying to find an “under twelve” and asking him/ her to buy some fries on my behalf, but I’m aware it’s not a good look, hanging around, approaching little kids and offering them money. So I plodde
d back, empty-handed, to where Ben was waiting on a bench on the promenade, legs stretched out in front of him, texting.
“No fries?” he said, slipping his phone back in the pocket of his shorts.
“They wouldn’t let me have any.”
Ben frowned. “They’re a shop!”
“Yeah, well, I wanted a child’s portion but I don’t count as a child, even though, if it comes to anything fun that children aren’t allowed to have or do, then I’m a child.”
Ben gave a knowing laugh. “I hear you.” He prised the lid off his Tupperware lunchbox and held it out towards me. “Help yourself.”
I smiled and shook my head. “That’s yours. I’m not having your lunch.”
“I’ve got plenty.”
“Thank you and everything, but I can’t.”
Ben cocked his head. “Why not? These are bacon and avocado on crusty farmhouse white,” he said, nodding towards the sandwiches. “Trust me, they’re good.”
“I’m not even really hungry,” I told him, which was a lie because my hangover had worn off and I was starving.
Ben snorted, grabbed one the sandwiches, and waggled it in front of my face. “Eat me! Eat me!” he said in a squeaky little voice.
“Is that meant to be the sandwich talking?”
“Uh-huh.” He waggled it about again and did the voice. “I’m a sandwich!” He bundled it into my hands. “Eat up, else there’s no dessert.”
“Ahhh—”
“Eat!” he insisted.
OK, so I ate, and he was right, those sandwiches were good. More than good actually; they were particularly awesome. Even the bread, which is normally the most depressing part of any sandwich, was as sensational as bread is capable of getting. “Who made these?” I asked.
“Me.”
I swallowed a mouthful down. “No way. It was your mum.”
He shook his head. “It was me.” He split open a bag of salt and vinegar crisps and laid them flat between us on the bench. “And I hope you agree, they’re the best you ever had?”
“They’re excellent,” I said.
“Right? The freshness of the bread is paramount, but beyond that, the genius lies in the textures and flavour combinations: crisp, salty bacon against the soft mellowness of the avocado, with just a hint of tart ketchup running across it. I can’t vouch for the health credentials, but it sure tastes good.”
“Which means they’re probably really bad for you,” I said.
“My favourite type of food is definitely the lethal type,” Ben said. “If I never have to eat a lentil, I reckon I will die a happy man.”
“To pies!” I said. “And cake and doughnuts and all the bad foods!”
And as if on cue, Ben produced a tub of homemade rocky roads, chock full of all the really good stuff, like marshmallows and cherries, and my first lunch break as an economically active member of society became as perfect as it could possibly get.
Maggie called us all into the staffroom for a meeting that afternoon. I was sitting next to Ben on the small circle of chairs that had been set up; Efia was opposite, next to Drake, with Eve in between, plus a spare chair for Maggie, who was riffling through some papers by the sink.
“Did Ben forgive you about the fish?” Efia said, looking across at me, smirking.
I glanced at Ben, then back at her. “I hope so. I mean, he gave me some of his rocky roads, so I think so.” I glanced at Ben briefly again, and smiled.
“Aww,” Efia said. The way she was looking at us both, it made my stomach flutter.
“Anyway, I don’t think he wants to talk about any of that,” Ben said. “Let’s just leave it.”
Efia shrugged and popped some gum in her mouth.
I looked at Ben again, who just nodded at me, and then back to Efia, who was looking down but smiling.
Great. There was something else about last night, wasn’t there? Something they weren’t telling me. I looked down at my trainers before the awkward got dialled up any further.
“Minus eight hundred quid.”
I looked up again as Maggie walked to the edge of our little circle, waving a sheet of paper with figures on it about.
She didn’t sit. “That’s what we lost last week.”
Drake sniffed, pulled out a tobacco pouch and started making a roll-up. “Like, went missing, you mean?”
Maggie smacked him on the back of his head with the paper. “No, you great lummox. Do you understand profit and loss? Accounts? That was the difference between what we made and what our outgoings were.”
“We spent more than we made?” Drake said.
“Just like the week before, and the week before that,” Maggie said. She took a long drag on her e-cigarette. It was minty today. “I’m going to carry out an audit of all the machines and games – see which ones aren’t paying their way – and in the meantime, we need to get more punters in. Ours is a numbers game – get ’em through the door, and they’ll spend. But we gotta get ’em through the door in the first place.”
“I’m not doing it,” Drake said.
Maggie blew a plume of steam out at him.
“I know where this is going, and I’m not doing it,” he continued. “Get one of the newbies to do it.”
Maggie looked between me, Ben and Efia. “Who wants to volunteer?” she said.
Only a fool volunteers for something before they know exactly what it is. Ben clearly felt the same. “What is it exactly?”
“Thank you, Ben,” Maggie said. “I like it when people don’t hesitate to step up.”
Ben’s eyes widened a little. “Yeah, but—”
Before he could finish, Maggie had spun round, grabbed a big black bin liner from the table and emptied the contents on the floor in the middle of the circle: a large oval-shaped section, covered in bright pink fluff and feathers, a long pink neck section, attached to a head, some pink diving flippers and a pair of pink tights. It looked like cartoon flamingo roadkill. “Ta-da.” Maggie said, with very little enthusiasm.
“What’s … this?” Ben said, weakly. I think he knew what was probably coming.
“It’s the costume that will enable you to become the living embodiment of our famous mascot,” Maggie smiled.
Drake sniggered.
“Walk around town in it this afternoon, handing out flyers for ten free games tokens and a free drink,” she continued. “Pose for some pictures, talk to the kids – everyone loves a flamingo.”
I thought that was quite a bold statement and I didn’t see why it would be true particularly.
Ben gingerly picked up the tights. “I have to wear these?”
“Flamingos have pink legs, dude,” Drake grinned.
Ben sighed. He sort of looked … crushed. I didn’t blame him.
“I can wear my boxers underneath, right?” he asked, eyes pleading.
Maggie rolled her eyes. I wasn’t sure if that was a yes or a no. I felt so sorry for him. And Ben was … such a nice guy. He’d been so sweet to me. He’d shared his lunch with me. He got me home safe. He didn’t mind that I killed his fish.
I swallowed. I didn’t want to, but I owed him. That’s what friends did. It couldn’t all be a one-way street. “I don’t mind,” I muttered.
I felt all the eyes in the room flick to me. “You want to do it, Alex?” Maggie said.
“Sure,” I said. I looked up at her, tried to smile but physically couldn’t. “I’d love to.” I think a little bit of sick came up.
“Alex, it’s fine, I don’t mind—” Ben said.
“No, it’s OK. Anyway, I owe you, so.” I looked at him and nodded. He nodded back and smiled. It was worth it, just to see that smile and the, er … accompanying dimples, of course.
“Oh, my heart!” Efia said, clasping her hands to her chest. “This is too cute.”
Ben narrowed his eyes. “Efia.”
“No, but seriously,” she said, “Alex is making the ultimate sacrifice for you. Everything he holds dear – his self-esteem, dignity, and any v
estige of cool he possibly had, he’s prepared to give it all up – for you.”
I wasn’t keen on her use of “vestige of cool” – I mean, I wasn’t massively cool, I knew that, but I think she made me sound a lot worse than I actually was.
Ben folded his arms. “He’s not my boyfriend,” he told the group.
Everyone just stared at him, because that kinda came out of nowhere.
“What?” Ben said, going red. “I’m just saying.”
Efia put her head in her hands. “Oh my god.”
I didn’t know what to do. He sounded quite adamant too. A dull ache in my stomach told me I was sad and disappointed, which meant I wasn’t doing a very good job of convincing myself not to fancy him and not to construct wild fantasies in my head about me and him doing stuff like taking bubble baths together, which… I blew my cheeks out. Oh boy.
Maggie was staring at me. “Alex?”
“Huh? What? It’s true, he’s not my boyfriend,” I told her. I looked at Ben and nodded. He was just staring back, open-mouthed. “We only just met, really,” I added.
Maggie rolled her eyes. “I meant, are you OK to be the flamingo?”
“Oh, I really don’t mind.” I shrugged. “How bad can it be anyway?” It couldn’t possibly be more horrific than this staff meeting.
I looked around the group. Everyone was looking down at the floor.
The fluffy pink middle section sat around my hips and had a pair of fake human legs attached to the front, so as to give the impression I was actually riding the flamingo – which, as far as I know, is not really a thing, but anyway. I wore my uniform polo shirt on my top half, and I had some “reins” attached to the neck section, which I held in my hands, juggling also the flyers I had to hand out. The tights were predictably horrific, leaving not much to the imagination towards the, er … upper portion, and the pink diving flippers ensured that this flamingo, far from being a graceful, nimble sort of creature, slapped along the pavement in fits and starts, like some sort of demented, injured yeti.
“You look really good,” Ben said as I flip-flopped out of the staffroom.
“It’s OK,” I said. “You don’t have to lie.”
“Aww, look at your little legs!” he said, adjusting the fake ones attached to the front of the pink middle.
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