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He was sympathetic.It actually is Claire this time.Just not so sympathetic he could see a case for keeping Brian around.
To be fair,I text back,I’m beginning to think he has a point.Then I text Jonathan,Give me a minute.
I’ve been saying Brian’s a liability for monthsandNo hurrycome back, so I send anI know sorryand aWhere were you thinking of going?
Which means the last two texts I get that evening areIt’s silly but there’s somewhere I usually goandIf I lose my job because you made me fight for the worse salesman in England…
I think about texting Claire back. SayingI’ll sort it, I promise.But I don’t know how, or what I can do, short of murder-by-toilet-bowl. Trying not to imagine the many ways I could assassinate Jonathan Forest over chicken and chips in a Sheffield restaurant, I head down to reception to meet up with him. He’s…he’s not changed, I don’t think he’s even done his hair, but he looks different somehow. More familiar. The cold your-job’s-on-the-line Jonathan who Claire was talking to twenty minutes ago has completely gone, and I’m standing by the front desk of a Premier Inn with watching-Auf-Wiedersehen-Pet-with-his-dad Jonathan.
“Silly how?” I ask him.
“What?” he looks confused.
“In your text you said you wanted to go somewhere silly.”
He looks at the floor, then back at me. “I meant more that it was silly to go there, not that it’s—we’re not going to a clown restaurant.”
“Oh ey,” I exclaim in disappointment. “I was looking forward to a clown restaurant. We could have custard pies for dessert and everything.”
He’s makinglet’s gomotions with his head, perhaps because he doesn’t want follow me down the rabbit hole of clown-themed dining, and maybe because he does but not in front of a bored receptionist in a no-frills chain hotel. As we set off, one of his hands comes to rest very naturally on the small of my back, then pulls away sharpish. And, while we’re walking together up the road, with a carefully calculated ten-inch gap between us, it occurs to me that Jonathan’s efforts to stop things feeling intimate are not really having the desired effect. Though if an afternoon in a bed and bath superstore followed by check-in at a Premier Inn can’t kill the mood, we might be in quite serious trouble.
I’ve got, if I’m honest, ambivalent feelings about Sheffield. On the plus side, it’s not London, but that’s an advantage it shareswith literally every other city in the world. And, actually, Croydon might have snuck up on me. In a funny way, I’ve made some good memories there, which given I made them while pretending to have amnesia probably counts as irony. I do like, though, that Sheffield feels like the north, with its red brick buildings and everything a bit more spaced out instead of crammed together like eels in a bucket. But when you get right down to it, it’s just a place, isn’t it?
We make our way up Ecclesall Road, past a Kwik Fit and an express car wash until we hit the bit with all the restaurants. I have to say I’m increasingly curious about where specifically he’s taking me because we’ve been past two gastropubs and an Indian already. Then we reach the corner and Jonathan stops outside Uncle Sams Diner: a tiny little place with a white-painted facade and—always the sign of a quality eatery—its menu in a glass box on the wall outside.
I’m opening my mouth to make an amusing observation when Jonathan holds up a finger to cut me off.
“Don’t start,” he says, in an embarrassed monotone. “I used to come here as a child with my family as a treat. And I like their burgers.”
Oh fuck. I don’t know what’s worse. Him being sentimental or him trying to pretend he isn’t. And by worse I mean…you know. Adorable like.
“Do they do milkshakes?” I ask.
“Of course they fucking do milkshakes. It’s an American diner.”
He storms inside, still not at ease revisiting his childhood with a Scouse amnesiac he should have fired three weeks ago. Turns out he’s got a reservation—being Jonathan, he’d never leave to luck anything he could book in advance—and we’re shown to our seats by a lass in a branded T-shirt. It feels like the sort of place that should have booths, but it doesn’t. Just wooden chairs at wooden tables with a menu in the middle on a little metal stand.
“It’s been here since the seventies,” Jonathan explains.
I can’t be having him like this all evening, so I reach halfway across the table as if I’m expecting him to take my hand, though he obviously doesn’t. “It’s okay,” I tell him. “You don’t have to keep apologising. It’s nice that you wanted to come here.”
“It’s silly,” he repeats. “There’s a restaurant in the hotel. We could have gone there.”
“Aye, we could. But then we’d have missed out on”—I scan the menu for something that sounds nice—“the special burger with white cheese sauce, bacon, and salad.”
“You joke but it’s really good.”
“I’m not joking. It’s probably what I’ll get unless you’ve got a recommendation.”
He shakes his head. “No, no, it’s a fine choice. Do you want a starter?”
“Do you want to split something?”
He gets that conflicted crease as he tries to work out if this will lead us down a dark path. Like we’ll start with a combo platter of wings and mozzarella sticks and end the night fucking in an alleyway behind the Londis. Then he relents. “How do you feel about nachos?”
“Works for me.”
“You don’t have a problem with foreign food?”
