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“Yeah,” agrees Amjad, “you want the Dreamscene luxury large waffle honeycomb. They go all the way up to two by two and a half meters.”
Tiff adopts a doubtful face. “You’ll crush the tinsel.”
“Crushing the tinsel, Tiffany,” I say, “is not currently my largest concern. My largest concern is Jonathan finding out we’ve scammed him and sacking the lot of us.”
“Well, if the tinsel gets crushed,” Tiff points out, “the Christmas party will suck, and he’ll decide you were a bad manager this whole time. So we’re sort of fucked either way.”
“And to be fair,” adds Amjad, “if the plan is to demonstrate how well run the Sheffield branch is, the fact that Jonathan’s presently dealing with somebody having shat in a display toilet probably isn’t helping matters.”
“That was beyond our control,” I say, hoping the new reasonable Jonathan will also see it that way.
Amjad gives a little grimace. “Still not a great look, though, is it?”
It’s not. But something else is nagging at me. “Wait a minute. If this is for the Christmas party, how are you going to get it to London?”
Tiff gives the kind of shrug that inspires less confidence in others than the shrugger clearly has in themselves. “Work something out.”
“What?”
“Something.”
As plans go, it’s not one I feel much like relying on. “Can you at least get a van?”
There’s something about the enthusiasm with which Tiff sayssurewhich makes me suspect I’m missing a trick. “Hold on,” I say, “how old do you have to be to rent a van these days?”
“Twenty-three,” Amjad tells me, and for once I’m glad he sat down one day and memorised literally every fact.
“I can do twenty-three,” Tiff reassures me.
Claire pats her gently on the shoulder. “Tiffany, love, be very careful who you say that to.”
“And you can’t,” I add. “I’m not letting you defraud a van rental company with work money. We’ll have to use mine.”
“Yours?” Now Claire’s giving me a suspicious look. “You never told me you had a van.”
I didn’t. And there’s reasons I didn’t, but I don’t want to go into them so I try to laugh it off. “How will you forgive me for keeping such a terrible secret? Anyway, I don’t see we’ve got another option. I’ll let Jonathan know that I’ll not be coming back with him tomorrow, and I’ll swing by here instead, drive you back to London with”—I wave a hand at the decorations—“all ofthis, and we can work out what to do from there.”
Nobody seems entirely sold on this plan, and Claire seems weirdly hung up on the Great Never-Said-You-Had-A-Van betrayal, but there’s no more ideas forthcoming.
“Right”—I clap my hands in a doomed effort to seem decisive—“I’m going to find Jonathan. Somebody should probably come with me so we don’t have to explain how I suddenly know my way around, and we’ll stop him coming in here by any means necessary.”
“Ah,” Claire brightens up, “we’re back on operation kill him with a toilet seat.”
“No,” I say very firmly. Though I like to think Claire wouldn’t really go to murder that quickly, I know her just well enough that I can’t rule it out. “But there’s still a poo situation ongoing, and the good thing about hygiene emergencies is that they sometimes take a while to sort out, so that might see us through to close of play.”
“Every poo has a silver lining,” says Tiff, ever in touch with her inner philosopher.
Amjad shakes his head. “If your poo has a silver lining, see a doctor.”
Leaving the younger staff members to discuss the finer nuances of an unplumbed lavvy full of shit that I was too old and set in my ways to consider, I took Claire to intercept Jonathan.
To his, New Enthusiastic Chris’s, and even—I have to admit—Brian’s credit, they’ve handled the situation very effectively. The soiled area has been cordoned off with yellow cleaning-in-progress signs, shoppers are being smoothly directed to other less crapped-in models they might wish to consider purchasing, and air fresheners have been strategically deployed.
Brian has taken to cleaning with the same mild obliviousness he takes to everything else. And while that limits his usefulness as a salesman it does, now I think about it, make him one hell of ateam player. There aren’t many fellers who’d take the instruction to get on their knees and scrub shit as completely in their stride as Brian does. It doesn’t quite give me a warm glow of affection, if anything it gives me a warm glow of maybe-I-could-have-used-this-feller’s-skills-better. That maybe if I’d been less willing to just let stuff slide asBrian being Brian, we wouldn’t be in the mess that we’re in.
Jonathan is still dealing with the customer whose kid did the deed in question. “All I’m saying,” she’s saying, “is that there should be a notice.”
He’s staying professional, but having lived with him I can see he’s not taking it brilliantly. “A notice sayingdon’t relieve yourself in these toilets?”
