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“Okay, now you’re making me sound like a fucking serial killer.” Which I suppose, to be fair, would be one more thing me and Jonathan had in common.
“I had a bet about that. With Amjad.”
“You what?”
“Before we found out you were gay, we had a bet on how many wives you had buried under your floorboards.”
My hands tighten on the steering wheel. “Excuse me, gay people can be serial killers too.”
“Yeah, but speculating about how many boyfriends you had buried under your floorboards felt creepy.” She looks thoughtful for a second. “Strange how that works, isn’t it?”
I shake my head. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”
“I’m not saying you weren’t nice to work for, and I’m really grateful that you went all the way to London and did all this”—she waves her hands again—“objectively absurd shit to save our jobs. I’m just also saying that if youhadturned out to have sixteen corpses stashed in your crawlspace, we’d have got over the shock pretty quickly.”
“This is fucking slander.”
“You’ve been better lately, mind,” she adds.
“You’re just saying that because you want a reference.”
“No really, I think fake amnesia’s been good for you.”
Up ahead, we see the lights of a Welcome Break, and since I’m beginning to feel a lot like a break would be welcome, I steer into it. “Just so’s you know,” I tell Tiff, “Iwasgoing to buy yez a milkshake, but I don’t think I will now.”
“Good.” She grins at me. “You’d probably have poisoned it anyway.”
PART FIVE
COMING CLEAN & SAYING GOODBYE
CHAPTER 32
The rest of the trip passes as well as any long road trip with somebody you only know from work can, and I get home that evening—fuck, when did I start calling Jonathan Forest’s swanky millionaire padhome—to a house full of noise and light and chaos and it’s…yeah. It’s worth getting used to, and I think I’m getting used to it. Plus Jonathan’s as pleased to see me as he can be without setting his family off completely, and I think that’s worth getting used to as well.
Next day we have the usual fry-up in the morning and then when Jonathan heads to work, I grab Tiff from the cheap hotel I’d stuck her in and try not to feel too much like I’m having an affair with incongruously festive decor.
I drive us to the venue and, if I’m honest, I start out being—pessimistic isn’t right exactly, but being at least open to the possibility that I’ve set myself up for a massive fall. Because as we carry the boxes down to the little warren of rooms and corridors we’ve decided to have our Christmas party in, I can’t help but feel that this is just a dark basement in Shoreditch and that when people start rolling in from out of town, it’s going to carry on being just a dark basement in Shoreditch. And then this’ll be the year Jonathan decided to have the Christmas party in a dark basement in Shoreditch, which will rank just under “on a boat” on the listof places no sensible person would choose to have a Christmas party.
But as the hours—and it is hours, turning a basement into a festive wonderland is slow work—pass, I begin to see it. And to give her credit, Tiff has clearly seen it all along. With the lights up, with the decorations just incongruousenoughand little ornaments set on all the empty shelves and strange nooks I’d seen on my first go around, it begins to look magical out of sheer bloody stubbornness. Because once you’ve noticed somebody’s gone to all the trouble of hiding a tiny wicker reindeer between two bricks in a disused pigeonhole, you have to assume it means something.
By the time seven o’clock rolls around I’m pretty fucking knackered, and if the self-care fairy was to come up to me right and now and tell me, “it’s okay, Sam, you can just go to bed and it’ll be fine”, I’d saythank Godand face-plant right in front of them. But the self-care fairy isn’t real. So instead I let Tiff know she’s done a bang-up job and dash out to meet Jonathan, who’s technically meant to be hosting.
The timings just about work. Tiff nips away up the street to hook up with the Sheffield crew, and I catch Jonathan coming the other way. What with Croydon being local, he’s not had to arrange a convoy and so he can come on his own, which he has, and early, which he also has.
Since this is a work thing, I greet him in a relatively professional way, which is to say a hug but no kiss.
“I know you’re worried,” I tell him, “but it actually does look good.”
“I believe you,” he replies, and it sounds oddly sincere. Like it’s a big deal. Which I suppose from him it is, because trusting other people is one of Jonathan Forest’s twelve least favourite things.
Of course the impact of his big, sincere, I-have-faith-in-youmoment is slightly undercut when I lead him in and down to the venue and he looks around at the way Tiff has done it up—soft lighting in a variety of colours, decorations strung just dense enough that you forget you’re in a basement until you remember in a cool way—and gives the biggest sigh in the history of inhalation and says, “Oh thank fuck.”
“I thought you said you believed me.”
“I did,” he lies. “I really did. I just—you have to admit, given the budget situation, it was a bit touch and go.”
I give him a coy little nod. “Yeah, I suppose so.”
