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“Oh, I remember,” I tell him. “I’m just choosing to believe you didn’t mean it, just like I’m choosing to believe you didn’t mean all the other terrible things you said.”
I’m used to Jonathan Forest being angry, but now he’s gone somewhere else entirely. Somewhere I very much don’t like. “I can’t decide if you’re giving me too much credit or too little. I meant it, Sam. I meant all of it. But Iespeciallymeant that”—he waves his hands back and forth between us—“this, whatever you thought it was, it isn’t. We are not friends. We are not…” he trips over his words. “We are not friends. You are a man who works for me, who is staying in my house until the doctor says he can leave. Then you will leave. That is the whole of our relationship.”
I want to say it’s not. I want to say I’ve seen a different side of him and that he doesn’t need to be this way. I want to say I’ve been faking the amnesia and I’m sorry and I don’t know howwe got here. Then again, right now, I also want to tell him he’s being a total piece of shit and should go fuck himself, and all those wants wind up sort of cancelling each other out. “All right,” I say instead.
And I leave him to it.
The next couple of days are rough. I’d not realised at the time but I’d kind of got used to the rhythm things had settled into between Jonathan and me. I think he’d really been trying and I think we’d really been getting somewhere. I mean, he’d completely stopped barking at me and I’d mostly stopped believing he was a prick. Or, at least, started believing he was a prick with hidden depths. The sort of prick who bought you an overpriced Santa guinea pig because he didn’t want you to feel left out of his family Christmas.
But now we’re back to how things started, him being constantly tense, and me constantly wishing I could be anywhere else. It’s been long enough since the accident that I reckon if I went to a doctor and said, oh look my memory’s come back, they’d give me a clean bill of health. It’s just then I don’t know where I’d be with my job and where that’d leave my team. So I have to see this through, no matter how much of a pisser it is.
In a lot of ways, everybody would be better off if we could just all pretend that the whole thing had never happened. That I’d never come to London, that Jonathan’d never threatened to shut the Sheffield branch, that he’d never fired me and I’d never fallen into a Nexa by MERLYN 8mm Sliding Door Shower enclosure. And some of it, we probably can get away with never mentioning again. Because the accident, for all Jonathan’s convinced I’ll sue him if I ever remember it, really was an accident. But the rest—what I was doing there in the first place, which was taking abollocking over how I run my shop—that’s coming back around, one way or another.
Which leaves me in this holding pattern. And the thing about being in a holding pattern is you eventually run out of fuel and crash. Except I already have. Maybe that’s what kissing him was. And now he’ll probably never trust me again.
At least I’ve got this Christmas party to plan. Otherwise it’d be wall-to-wallPointlessand feeling shitty. Mostly it’s come together. I’ve made an executive decision—and now come to think of it, I can’t imagine anything Jonathan Forest would like less than an executive decision made by somebody else—to go for a buffet instead of a sit-down meal. Because Claire and them are right, being stuck at a table for half the evening, trying to make polite conversation either with people you don’t know or people you see every day is flat-out rubbish. There’s a top of the middle of the range DJ who we’ve paid enough that he’s going to bring his own lighting system but not a penny more. And I’ve put aside some of the budget for travel and accommodation so people coming from Leeds and Sheffield don’t feel completely shafted by the thing that’s supposed to show the company’s appreciation. As for the venue, I did have to fork out for the fancy room because nowhere that could take the number was any fucking cheaper.
As I plug the final figures into one of Jonathan’s non-negotiable spreadsheets on the spare laptop he’s given me for the purpose, I’m pretty pleased with myself. It comes to one hundred and sixty pounds a head in the end, which is slightly more than I was given, but that’s how you’ve got to do it with budgets. You come in under, they give you less next year. You go too far over, you just look like you don’t know what you’re doing. There’s a kind of an art to stretching it just the right amount and I reckon I’ve nailed it. Plus, there’s still a little bit of me wants to make a point. Like, yes, you can spend a bit extra now and again, and it won’t bankrupt you or make the roof fall in.
Jonathan’s been in the office every hour Agnieszka’s been around to keep an eye on me, partly because he can’t stop working for ten seconds together, but also I’m pretty sure he’s avoiding me. The rest of the time he’s lurking in his study with Gollum, who’s very much chosen his side. When I first got on the train down here, I thought the worst-case scenario was that I’d lose my job. Turns out I might lose my job and my cat.
I save the spreadsheet to the shared drive and poke my head through into the study.
“Party’s as good as done,” I say. “So if you approve it, I can confirm the details with everybody.”
Jonathan doesn’t answer. He just looks at his screen and clicks his mouse a couple of times. Then, “You’re over budget.”
“Not by much.”
He’s quiet for a while, like he’s wrestling with something. And when he finally speaks, it’s in that very calm way he uses at work when he’s displeased. “And if I’d said the budget is a hundred and fifty pounds per head but it’s okay to go over as long as it’s not by much, that would be fine. What I said was, the budget is a hundred and fifty pounds a head full stop.”
This is so typical of him. He just wants to make you jump through hoops for the sake of making you jump through hoops. I’d have said he gets off on it, but he doesn’t and, in some ways, that’s worse. It means he’s just doing it because he thinks he should. “Jonathan, for fuck’s sake, it’s a grand. You’re a millionaire. Can you not do something nice for your employees for once?”
“Sam”—his eyes flick to mine, all intense and unyielding—“I know things have been…unusual. But I am your boss, and this is a work conversation. You will not swear at me.”
I sigh. He’s being a dick, but he’s annoyingly right. “Sorry, I’m just—you’re being unreasonable.”
“It’s not your place to decide what’s reasonable.”
“You see this is the f—” I manage not to sayfucking. “This is what you don’t seem to understand. Idoget to decide what’s reasonable. You don’t get to tell people how they want to be treated, they tell you. And I’m telling you right now, your employees don’t want to feel like they aren’t worth an extra ten quid to you once a year.”
He’s not backing down. He barely even blinks. “It’s a tax issue.”
“Fu—forget about the tax. Is that what this is all about? Never mind showing people you give a shit, just as long as you get your annual write-off?”
“If it costs more than a hundred and fifty pounds a head,” —Jonathan moistens his lips, like he’s about to give some major speech even though from what I can tell he’s talking about tax codes—“then it constitutes a payment in kind.”
“You what?”
“A payment in kind counts as part of your wages, and is taxed as part of your wages. If I throw my employees a party that costs the company a hundred and sixty pounds a head, then I’m effectively making them pay thirty-two pounds for the privilege.”
I stare at him blankly.
“Then again, perhaps you’re right. It’s only money, after all. I’m sure somebody working part time selling loofahs in my bathroom department will be delighted to get paid thirty-two pounds less this Christmas if it means having a buffet dinner in a nice venue.”
And it’s at this exact point that I learn the most infuriating thing about Jonathan Forest is that he seems to make a point of being right in the wrongest possible way. “Could you not have just fuckingtoldme that earlier?”
“I gave you clear instructions.”
