AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Excuse me,” I sputter, “you cannot ask me that. I’m your boss.”
“No, you aren’t,” Tiff reminds me, “you quit.”
“I’m still working 'til the end of the year. Which means I can still fire you.”
“Won’t firing Tiff defeat the purpose of you quitting in the first place?” points out Amjad with his usual infuriating logic.
This is not the love-in I’ve been expecting. “Look, can we not just take a moment to appreciate my incredible heroism in saving all your jobs at the expense of my own?”
With a sigh, Claire rallies the team. “Fair enough. A big round of applause for Sam, who boldly got laid on our behalf.”
“You know what,” I say, “I fucking hate you.”
“We hate you too,” they all—and I mean genuinelyall—chorus.
After that I finalise arrangements with Tiff for Operation Secretly Move A Load of Christmas Stuff and we sort out where she’s going to spend the night, and I explain that I don’t care how fine she thinks it’d be, that I’m not letting her just crash in thevan because she’s a fucking teenager and I’m her fucking boss and there’s fucking laws.
“I do it all the time when I’m festivalling,” she complains.
I decide to pass it over. “Claire, can you explain?”
“He’s worried you’ll sue him,” she explains.
If I’d been drinking coffee, I’d have spat it out. “Excuse me, I’m not.”
“It does sort of sound like you are,” offers Amjad.
“No,” I protest. “Jonathanwould be worried she’d sue him.”
“Jonathan who you’re sleeping with?” clarifies Tiff.
“Jonathan, who although he is a complex man in whom I have learned to see many fine qualities, is still in manyotherways, a dick.”
“And you don’t think,” says Claire, “that he’s maybe rubbed off on you just a little bit?”
This is slander, this is. “Hold on, how am I suddenly the bad guy because I don’t want Tiff to have to sleep in a van?”
“It’s about respecting my agency,” Tiff tells me. “Not respecting my agency is very patriarchal of you.”
I give up. And it turns out that’s all she wants, because Tiff’s no fool and she’ll take a free night in a Travelodge if it’s offered, especially if you throw in the breakfast buffet.
Then they all go back to work and I go back to…to staring at my walls and not even having my cat for company. Catlessness aside, it’s not much different from what my life was like a year ago. But itfeelsdifferent. Emptier. In a way I almost resent.
I’m not—I hope—as extreme as Nana Pauline and Ralph in my general distaste for everything south of Coventry, but it does bother me that I’ve been down to London and it’s made being back up north feel worse. The one thing I’m clinging to—and it’s not exactly comforting, not really—is that I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with the actual city and everything to do with the people. Sure, mostly what I did when I was at Jonathan’s was plana party, watchPointless,and do the occasional bit of cooking, but I wasn’t alone. Even when it was just me and Jonathan and he was still in unbelievable bellend mode, there’d been somebody around to just…I don’t know, be there, I guess. Because when it’s just you and the silence it’s easy to feel like you don’t exist, like you might as well have never existed. Like you’re nothing at all.
I lie on my bed with my eyes closed and try to just sleep. But it doesn’t work. The heating’s on but I still feel cold deep in my chest and my arms, and sometimes I blink and I think I’ve been crying.
Then the phone rings.
“Umm.” It’s Jonathan. It’s clearly Jonathan. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Sorry, are you busy?”
I look around at my copious fuck all. “No. Not really.”
“I just, well, we got home safely.”
