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I take a bite out of my Fino Pitta with Smoky Churrasco sauce. “Well, I don’t want to cause any panic, but he might have implied he’d close us down if we didn’t step our game up.”
“He what?” asks Claire, audibly panicked. “That…that makes no sense.”
“I think he’s just playing hardball but—”
“I’m pretty sure that manonlyhas hard balls.”
“Would you not talk about Jonathan Forest’s balls when I’m trying to eat?”
Claire slips into denial right on cue. “He’s bluffing. He has to be bluffing.”
“What, the man you’ve just pointed out suffers from a rare ball-hardening medical condition?”
“Fuck,” she swears down the phone at me. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. You have to do something.”
She’s doing well. That was anger straight into bargaining. “Iamdoing something. I’m going to shadow him today and then when I get back I’ll—”
“No, I mean, do something big. Something now. Because if our only hope is to get better at doing our jobs, we are mega, mega shafted.”
“So what do you want me to do? Ask him to show me the warehouse and then bash him on the head with a Soft Close Tongue & Groove Wood Effect Toilet Seat?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Okay, probably no.” I hear the air go out of her. “Shit. Shit fuck shit fuck shit.”
Welcome to depression. “I know. It sucks but we’ll work through it.”
“We really need to revisit firing Brian.”
“Brian has his nan to look after. Besides, when we were talking, Jonathan made it pretty clear that just firing Brian wouldn’t cut it.” I explain the details of the point-by-point screw-your-staff-for-a-few-extra-quid plan.
“Right.” Claire’s quiet for quite a long time. “Just out of interest, whoisour second-worst employee, by Jonathan’s numbers?”
“Tiff.”
She’s quiet again. “To be fair, shedoeshave a pretty shitty work ethic.”
Some weird, probably mildly sexist, instinct makes me want to defend her, like she’s my sister or something. “She’s not that bad.”
From down the line, I hear Claire moving across the office to the window. “She’s in the car park right now kicking leaves.”
“Better for the staff to be giving one hundred percent eighty percent of the time than seventy percent one hundred percent of the time,” I say, not quite sure if the maths checks out.
Even if it does, though, Claire’s not having it. “Tiff gives forty percent forty percent of the time and about one percent of the timeshe gives ten million percent. Which is sweet but not necessarily what we need.”
“Claire.” I’m not sharp exactly, but I do let my exasperation come through in my voice. “We’re meant to be a team. Whose side are you on?”
“Ours, obviously.” She sounds resigned. “Guess you’d better grab that toilet seat and smack him one.”
“Not helpful.”
“Okay, but we need a plan. And if you won’t let Brian go, it might have to be drastic.”
“Drastic like what?” I ask.
And she’s quiet again. “Fake a heart attack? He can’t ask you to fire people if you’re in hospital.”
