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“I had that idea,” I protest. “Also, it’s not even an idea. It’s an obvious thing.”
Brian tsks like he’s the one who’s disappointed. “I don’t think you ever mentioned it.”
“I’m pretty sure I did.”
“Not so it sounded important, though. Anyway,” he goes on cheerfully, “I just thought you’d like to know we were in safe hands.”
And of course I do like knowing that. Though it also makes me feel a bit superfluous. It’s not that managing a bed and bath superstore was my lifelong dream or my one true calling or anything, and…I mean…it’s not that I wanted to beessential. Like I wanted to get back and have everybody sayingOh Sam, we’re so glad you’re here, everything was falling apart without yez. But this feels like I’ve been replaced. Worse, it feels like I’ve been replaced and everybody’s better off. And that’s a spiky pill to swallow.
Because the thing is—and as I sit there sipping my tea, I’m poking at this but not really wanting to poke too hard—the thing about the team, about the branch, was that I’d been part of something. And the thing about it going on without me was that I’m not so much. That worse, maybe I never was, not how I thought. And that’s—well it’s jobs, at the end of the day. They’re bigger than you and that’s nice when you’re there. But every connectionyou make is based on cash and convenience. It’s not a substitute for—
For anything.
CHAPTER 27
After his tour, jonathan’s in with Claire for a long time, which makes me nervous. Though not as nervous as the three texts I get about forty-five minutes later which just say:
On his way back.
Still looking for cuts.
Brian especially fucked.
Since we still can’t let Jonathan see that the staff room is filled with the exact decorations that’ll be populating a basement in Shoreditch three days from now, I head out with Brian to meet him and we catch up in the middle of towels.
“Go well?” I ask.
“I think so.” Jonathan’s looking at me even more inscrutably than usual. And though I don’t want to, I start filling in blanks.
Because I know he’s just been in with Claire talking about laying people off. And he doesn’t know I know that. And healsodoesn’t know that I know he had the same conversation with me back when I first came down and that it was that which led to the whole shower-falling-head-bashing amnesia thing in the first place.
So now I’m feeling guilty and angry all at once. Guilty because it still doesn’t feel right that I’ve been faking quite a serious medical condition in order to get Jonathan to reconsider his plans.And angry because it apparently hasn’t fucking worked. I’ve been doing my best see-me-as-a-person I-know-there-is-good-in-you act and he’s still the same ruthless, bottom-dollar, grasping little shit he was three weeks ago. The worst thing is, I really thought he’d changed. But perhaps he’s just changed around me.
“Oh,” I tell him, swallowing hard on account of how I can’t let on about a single word of this, “well that’s good then. Shall we off?”
Jonathan gives a sad little nod like he’s a kid whose parents are making him leave Disney World before he’s had a second go on Space Mountain. It’s not so much that the unique charms of the Sheffield branch have swept him off his feet. It’s just that he’s, y’know, a micromanaging workaholic, and the thing about my team is that, for better or worse, they dispense an awful lot of workahol.
We hop back in the car and he takes us into the centre of Sheffield where he’s booked us into a Premier Inn, and if his reversion to full work mode hadn’t tipped me off that this wasn’t Sam and Jonathan’s Romantic Getaway For Two, the choice of venue would’ve. Partly because he’d got us separate rooms but mostly because you would never ever take someone to a Premier Inn if you were in any way trying to pull them.
I dump my bag and then sit down on the end of the bed on top of that purple stripe thing that Premier Inn HQ has apparently decreed must be laid across every bed in the chain. After a minute or two of sitting and thinking gets me precisely nowhere, I flop backwards and stare up at the ceiling trying to put my screwed-up rubber-band-ball of thoughts, emotions, and instincts into something like an order.
I’d not been imagining it, had I? Jonathan had, in fact, been de-Jonathaning, that is to say turning into less of an unbelievable piece of shit. Pulling out my phone, I stare at Claire’s texts again.
Fuck, I text back. Then,This hasn’t worked, has it?
Compartmentalisation, that was the problem. Clearly from Jonathan’s perspective the question of what to do about the Sheffield branch and the question of whether he should stop treating his family like a mildly inconvenient admin job were two completely different things.
Did he at least seem conflicted?I ask, and three little dots pop up to suggest Claire’s texting back.
What does he look like when he’s conflicted?she asks.
The funny thing is, I could probably tell her. I’ve been looking at Jonathan Forest a lot lately and though he seems all stoic like on the surface, he’s actually got a very expressive face. Conflicted is when his eyes and his lips don’t match up, when he’s got that crease on his forehead he has when he’s thinking, even though it’s something he’s pretending not to think about.
How should I know?I text back.
The next text that comes through says,I’m downstairs, do you want to get something to eat?And that one’s not from Claire it’s from Jonathan.
I’m tempted to say I’m too tired. It’s early but we’ve had a long drive and a big work thing and I do still have the after-effects of that concussion, so it’d make sense. Only it feels like copping out.
