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“You’re right, he’d make you fire them.”
“Trick him into sexually harassing you?”
I choke on my Fino Pitta with Smoky Churrasco sauce. “Firstly, how? Secondly, no. Thirdly, I think that’s disrespectful to actual victims.”
“Fair point. How about you very quickly discover evidence of his shady financial dealings and threaten to tell the shareholders?”
There’s smoky churrasco sauce on my fingers, so I switch my phone to the other side and wipe them on a napkin. “Good plan. Couple of tiny problems: he hasn’tgotany shady financial dealings, and even if he did S&S is a privately owned company so he doesn’t actually have shareholders I could tell on him to.”
“Well, if you’re going to nitpick.”
“Sorry.”
“What if we invite him to visitourstore so he can see us as people and be too sentimental to make you fire any of us?”
“Now you’re really reaching. He’s met me loads of times and I’m pretty sure he still wouldn’t piss on me if I was on fire.”
She’s silent again.
I’m silent back.
“Shit,” she says at last.
“I know. I’ve got a few months, like, but I think we’re basically fucked.”
“Well.” Claire doesn’t sound very helpful, or very hopeful. “Do what you can?”
“I will,” I tell her. Not that I have the first fucking clue what that is.
I’ve lost my appetite for my Fino Pitta with Smoky Churrasco sauce, so I slide the plate across the table, get up, and head back to face Jonathan Forest.
CHAPTER 4
I carry on shadowing jonathan as he prowls the shop floor looking for staff who aren’t being productive enough, and I’m sure if I paid attention I could learn a lot. A lot about being sort of a knobhead, mind, but a lot. Problem is it’s hard to concentrate with Claire’s voice sayingyez’ve got to do something, Samin my head all the time. We move upstairs from bedding to bathrooms, and I find my eyes straying to the merchandise as if the bash-him-on-the-head-with-a-bog-seat plan is in any way workable. It definitely isn’t.
Probably isn’t.
“I do really appreciate what you’re doing here,” I tell him. I don’t, but kissing his arse is the only strategy I’ve got that’s not illegal, immoral, or embarrassing to try in front of a pyramidal display of Croydex Flexi-Fit Grosvenor Toilet Brushes. “A lot of bosses wouldn’t have given me this chance, like.”
“Are you sucking up to me, Sam?”
“Is it working?”
He raises an eyebrow. I’m beginning to think he seriously overuses them. “Do you think I’m the kind of man who likes being sucked up to?”
I do. But I also think he’s the kind of man who likes to think he doesn’t. “Probably not, sorry. Still, I really am glad you’ve given us a chance to get things straight before we start with the firings.”
I’m hoping he’ll go along with that, but you don’t get to run a chain of bed and bathroom superstores with three whole outlets by letting stuff slip by you. “To be clear, therewillstill have to be reductions.”
So, he was calling them reductions now, was he? “I know, I’m just building my way up to it. Mentally and that.”
He gives me a look that would be almost kind if it wasn’t so fucking patronising. “I know it can be hard, but you aren’t there to be people’s friend, you’re there to be their boss.”
I want to remind him that being a boss doesn’t mean being a money-grubbing little shitebag, but for all he says he doesn’t like to be sucked up to, it’s pretty clear he doesn’t like being talked back to either. “True,” I say instead.
We’re leaving bathroom accessories and moving into showers and wet rooms when Jonathan stops, and his avaricious hawk eyes turn to a team member who seems to be closing a deal on a Nexa by MERLYN 8mm Sliding Door enclosure.
“I know it’s top of the price range,” the team member is saying—he’s a tall lad, very tall, but he handles it well. He’s got that skill of being large without looming that big fellers learn quick if they don’t want to go through life scaring the shit out of people. “But it’s worth it. It’s classy, it’s luxurious, and because of the shape”—he indicates the width and depth of the unit, mostly for distraction I’m thinking—“it fits really well even if you have a smaller bathroom.”
