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Then Tiff pipes up, “Do you know anything about organising parties?”
“Don’t you start.” I make a grumpy face at my phone. “I had enough of that from Jonathan Forest this morning.”
She makes a—and I’m dating myself by saying this—a very teenage noise. “I’m not being a Jonathan. I’m just saying…you’re not very fun either.”
Oh, now it’s on. “What do you mean I’m not fun?”
“Okay, you’re notnotfun. You’re just fun in a bit of a…bit of a…dad way?”
“Tiff, I’m twenty-seven. To be your dad, I’d have had to knock your mam up when I was ten.”
“Sam,” says Claire. “I think we’ve gone somewhere we need to come back from.”
She’s right. The phrase “knock your mam up” is never one you want to use to an employee, even if she’s making you feel old. “Look,” I try, “all I’m saying is, it can’t be that difficult.”
“That’s what my mam said,” Tiff puts in, “when she wouldn’t let me help her organise Auntie Rita’s fiftieth. And then we ran out of booze by half past six and Uncle Colin got so aggro he threw a plate of mini quiches at Mr Pettiforth from Number Forty-Two.”
“Was he all right?” asks Claire at the same time Amjad says, “That’s a waste of mini quiches.”
I rap on the table to try and call the meeting back to something that looks a little bit like order. “I see what you’re saying, Tiff, and I’m aware that there’s”—I flash back to the massive binder—“logistics and that. But the thing is, this party doesn’t have to be the Royal Wedding. It just has to be better than Jonathan could do, and that is a very, very low bar.”
Somehow, I hear Claire wince down the phone. “Do you remember that time he trapped us all on a boat?”
“Yeah,” I say, not quite wanting to defend him but, for whatever reason, doing it anyway. “He did learn from that. Not very much like, but he did.”
“The one I went to,” offers Amjad, “was at a hotel where there were six other Christmas parties happening at the same time. And I had to sit next to this bloke from the Leeds branch who kept trying to convince me that Age of Sigmar was better than Warhammer Fantasy.”
“I don’t know what any of those words mean,” says Tiff.
“So”—Amjad’s launching into an explain, you can hear it coming a mile off—“Warhammer Fantasy was a classic settingwith thirty years of lore and content attached to a really solid tactical war game with asymmetric gameplay if—I’ll admit—quite shonky faction balance. But then they blew up the world in a way that just took an enormous dump on canon, and replaced it with a skirmish game for children and casuals.”
“I don’t know what any of those words mean either.”
In some ways I don’t want to interrupt them. I know I should, but there’s something comforting about hearing Tiff and Amjad bickering like they’re brother and sister. Something that feels almost like home. But I’m the boss, and this is important, so I say, “And you don’t need to, because it’s not relevant to the party I have to plan.”
Amjad makes the huff of a man who is not appreciated in his own lifetime. “I’m just saying don’t have it in a hotel and don’t invite Leeds.”
“I have to invite Leeds.”
“He’s right about the hotel, though,” says Tiff. “Nothing saysI’ve put zero thought into thislike a hotel.”
“So where’d you want me to hold it, in a disused car park in Dagenham?”
“You’re in London.” Tiff’s sounding very slightly less respectful than I think is fair for somebody whose job I’m trying to save. “It’s basicallybuiltout of party venues.”
I grab a spare scrap of paper from the back of the binder and start scribbling notes. “Alright. No hotel. Not on a boat. Wedohave to invite Leeds—”
Amjad sighs. “Can you at least not sit us with them.”
“Yeah but,” Claire protests, “that means we have to sit with each other and that means we’re going two hundred miles on a train to have dinner with people we work with every day.”
“Better that,” Amjad fires back, “than going two hundred miles on a train to have dinner with peoplewho suck.”
I cut them off. “Okay what I’m hearing here is that you don’twant to sit with other people and you don’t want to sit with each other and, if I’m honest, that’s not the most helpful feedback.”
There’s a medium-sized pause as everyone shifts gears from carping about things they hate to actually trying to solve problems. Unfortunately, that extends the pause from medium to quite long, and I’m starting to be very aware that these people do have a real job to do that isn’t this, and the more time I keep them off the shop floor the less likely they are to meet Jonathan Forest’s precious fucking targets. On top of which there’s always the chance he’ll come back unexpectedly, because he’s forgot something or decided to check up on me. At which point he’ll discover that not only am I faking amnesia but that the whole team is in on it, which might just make him a little ill-disposed towards them. I glance at the tracking app on my phone and he’s definitely still at the shop, but I decide to wrap things up anyway.
“I think I’ve got enough to be going on with,” I tell them, only mostly not lying. “If you come up with anything, sit on it and wait for me to call you back. Because the last thing I need is to be having dinner with Jonathan and get a text that saysHey, I’ve worked out how to use this party to trick our dickhead boss into not firing us.”
