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‘I know who you mean now. Are they a couple?’
‘Oh, yes, didn’t you know? You can’t hire one without the other. They go everywhere together. Anyway, this isn’t about them, it’s about you and Michael.’
‘I can’t have a relationship with someone I work with. I just can’t, OK?’
‘Why not?’
‘If you must know, my last boyfriend worked at the same company as me. It ended really badly, and I promised myself I’d never date someone I worked with again.’
‘Did the relationship end badly because you worked together?’
‘Yes, kind of.’
He sighs and leans back in the chair. ‘Go on.’
‘He took a job with a rival company without telling me, and he did some underhand stuff to get it. Because of that, we lost the contract and I got made redundant, which is how I ended up here. There’s more to it than that, but that’s the gist.’
‘So it actually has nothing to do with you working together, does it?’
‘Have you not listened to a word I just said?’
‘I did. What I heard is that he was a massive prick, not that working together was the problem.’
‘But it was. If we hadn’t worked together, he wouldn’t have lost me my job!’
‘He’d still have been a massive prick, though, and you’d probably have split up anyway when you realised. The job is incidental.’
‘I disagree.’
‘Fine. Let me put it a different way then. Do you know what I love?’
‘Apart from disrespecting me and my sex, no.’
‘Vindaloo. I bloody love a vindaloo. Every Friday, after going to the pub with the boys, I stop at our local curry house and pick up a vindaloo for me and a prawn korma for the missus. She’s not as keen on the spicy stuff as me.’
I have no idea where he’s going with this, but I sense he’s not going to be deflected.
‘A couple of years ago, me and the missus went on holiday to Blackpool, your part of the world.’
‘I’m from Leeds,’ I correct him.
‘It’s all north to me. Anyway, we went to this curry house on the last night of our break and I ordered a vindaloo, like I always do. It tasted a bit odd, but I put that down to your lot not doing it quite right, like fried Mars bars.’
‘Fried Mars bars are a Scottish thing, nothing to do with the north of England.’
‘Like I said, everything above the Watford Gap is the same to me. Anyway, we’re on the motorway the next afternoon, and I get this sudden cramp in my stomach. Straight away, I know I’m in trouble, but thankfully we’re only a couple of miles from a service station. I leave the missus in the car and run into the gents’ as fast as I can, but I only just make it. I’ll spare you the grisly details, but it wasn’t pretty. I don’t know how long I was in there before I felt safe to come out, but it felt like hours. I was all for getting back on the road to get home as quickly as we could, but thankfully the missus talked me out of that, and suggested we sit in the car park for an hour, just to make sure there weren’t going to be any repeat episodes.’
I’ve completely forgotten what the point of all this is supposed to be, but I’m interested to see how the story ends. ‘I’m guessing this was just the first round?’
‘Yup. Every twenty minutes, like clockwork. I had no idea where it was even coming from by the end. Luckily it was one of those places with a hotel attached, so we booked ourselves in there, and I had one of the worst nights of my life. I honestly wanted to die.’
‘I expect it was a while before you wanted another vindaloo.’
‘Not at all. I was down the curry house the very next Friday. And that’s my point.’
‘OK. You’re going to need to elaborate because I’m not with you.’
‘How many vindaloos do you think I’ve eaten in my life? Hundreds, definitely, maybe even a thousand, who knows? And out of all of them, I’ve had one bad one. If I’d let that put me off, I would never have had another vindaloo, and I’d have missed out on countless Friday nights of spicy pleasure. That’s what you’re doing. You had one bad relationship with some knobhead you happened to work with. Guess what? Not all the men you work with are knobheads. Make better choices, rather than spouting shit like “workplace romances are a bad idea”, or whatever it was you said. Does that make sense?’
