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We take a tour of the rest of the setup—one room for the buffet, the room where the DJ is for dancing, with overspill rooms nearby wired for sound and other rooms wired forlesssound so’s you’ve got somewhere to have a talk if you want to. It’s big enough and complex enough that by the time we’re done taking it all in, the Leeds branch have started showing up and Jonathan has to switch into his highly specific “boss trying to be relaxed” mode, which is painful for everyone involved. So painful, in fact, I leave him to it.
I must have done something right because the party begins to fill out quickly. The Leeds crowd are soon joined by the first of the Croydon lot—the ones who were either afraid of being late or were determined to impress the boss, so their local equivalents of New Enthusiastic Chris. Then we get Sheffield, en masse, then the rest of Croydon trickling in fashionably late like the people who live closest always do at this kind of thing.
For a while I just circulate, trying to take some satisfaction in a job eventually well done. I say hello to a few folks but there’s an odd sort of in-betweeny feeling, knowing that I won’t be here next year or, if I am, it’ll be as Jonathan’s plus one. Which is a thought I don’t quite know what to do with. Across the room, I catch a glimpse of him making visibly excruciating small talkwith someone from another branch. That should not be the sort of thing that makes you want to go and stand next to someone, or hold their hand, or anything like that, but it does. Unfortunately being half-fired, full-quit, and less far from fake amnesia than I’d like to be, I don’t quite have the balls.
In the next room, I find Tall Earnest Pam, the manager of Leeds, congratulating Claire on finally replacing me, which doesn’t seem like a conversation I’d be an asset to. Over in the corner, Amjad’s having a very, very lengthy debate with some feller I don’t recognise. And that doesn’t seem like a conversation that’d be an asset to me, but I get sucked into it anyway.
“—so fucking basic,” concludes a lad with a slight Leeds accent.
“I’m not being basic,” Amjad is insisting. “Just because everybody worth listening to agrees with me doesn’t make mebasic,it makes meright—here, Sam, back me up on this will you?”
I approach reluctantly. “I’m not going to know what I’m backing you up on, am I?”
“Just repeat after me,” he says with a deadly serious look on his face. “Malekith turning out to be the true Phoenix King was fucking bullshit.”
Having understood zero of those words, I do my best. “Why are you arguing about the villain from thatThormovie?”
Amjad and the feller from Leeds he’s been arguing with glare at me like I’ve spat in their faces and called their mums slappers.
“Not what you’re arguing about?” I ask.
“No,” they both say at once.
“See what I put up with,” Amjad says.
“It’s awful.” The Feller From Leeds sighs. “I was talking to Pam aboutLord of the Ringsthe other day, and you know what she said?”
Amjad gives him a look of deep shared suffering. “They should have just got the eagles to fly them to Mordor?”
While they’re commiserating over that, I back away and go back to circulating. It’s nice and all to see everybody, and they do seem to be having a genuinely good time—or at least a better time than they had the last couple of years—but my in-betweeny feeling has settled into knowing I don’t belong here. Of course, it’s too soon to say I belong with Jonathan either, only I’d rather be there than here. And by there I mean on his uncomfortable sofa, watching him trying to pretend he’s not spent the last hour making Gollum chase after a mouse on a string.
It’s a comforting thought, and I let myself be comforted. I let myself so much that I manage to spend about twenty minutes just swiping through my mental photo album of warm-making Jonathan images. And it turns out I’ve got a lot, even if he’s scowling in most of them. Except, as I run to the end of the folder, I sort of become aware that a lot of people are…looking at me, and not just in a “why is that berk standing in the corner with a soupy expression on his face” way. And probably it’s nothing, probably they’re just saying, “oh, that’s the feller what organised this, he seems like a good bloke”. And then the lass from Croydon gives me an actual fucking thumbs-up, which feels far worse than any thumbs-up has a right to feel because you don’t thumbs-up someone to say “well done putting together this slightly above average office Christmas party.”
Oh fuck me. I hope this isn’t what I think it is.
“Sorry,” I say. “But can I ask what you’re thumbs upping me for?”
“Just, y’know,” she unexplains, “good on you.”
Her conspiratorial tone reinforces my suspicion that she’s not congratulating me on my expert choice of decorations. “Good on me for what?”
She nudges me with her elbow. “For getting one over on the Prince of Pricksylvania.”
Bollocks. Very probable bollocks. “Getting one overhow?”
“Well, what I heard,” she tells me, though at this stage she’s very much explaining it for the cheap seats, “is that Jonathan was threatening to fire your whole team, so you pretended to have amnesia and—”
Confirmed bollocks. “Who told you?”
“It’s fine.” She’s smiling in a way that I really wish she wasn’t smiling. “None of us’ll tellhim.”
This is not reassuring. Reassurance is not occurring. I am distinctly unreassured. “Who’sus?”
She thinks about this for far, far too long. “Well, I got it from Agnes, who got it from Jim, who got it from Mickey, who got it from Liam—”
I don’t let her finish. I just take off and start running around like a whippet. I’m not sure what I’m trying to achieve really, but I think if I stand still I’ll have a complete fucking breakdown. Because there is no way this is not getting back to Jonathan and when it does—
I can’t even think about that.
