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“Look”—I sneak the binder out from his hand—“leave it with me and I’ll see what I can come up with.”
For a second, our fingers brush as we shift our grip on the blue plastic cover of the by now extremely overly-built-up party planning folder. And Jonathan Forest pulls his hand away like I’m a gas hob. “Very well,” he says, “I’ll leave it with you. But you need to take thisseriously.”
He’s a dick. “I am taking it seriously.”
I’m not sure what he’s going to say next, but he draws in a slow, deep breath. “You won’t remember this,” he says at last, “but part of why you were in London in the first place is thatyou’re…you’re not always the best with budgets. I’m trusting you here, but it’s important you do things properly.”
He’s a dick, he’s a dick. “I will.”
“I mean it. Your absolute maximum spend—absolute maximum—is a hundred and fifty pounds a head. You can’t go a penny over.”
He’s a dick. He’s a dick. He’s acontrollingdick. “Okay,” I tell him. “I won’t. Now give me the file and I’ll start ringing caterers.”
“Not a penny,” he repeats.
“I heard you the first time. I’ve got it. I promise.”
This, right here, is why I need to remember liking Jonathan Forest is a nonstarter. I’m trying to help him out of the goodness of my heart. Well. Out of the goodness of a desperate and poorly thought-out plan to convince him it’s okay to leave the Sheffield branch alone. But the point is, I’m trying to help him, and he’s treating me like a bellend who can’t count. Never mind his extremely unsexy Ebenezer Scrooge impression. It’s all making me strangely determined to throw the best party he’s ever fucking seen. Which, in a way, means his whole terrible management style is actually motivating. And isn’t that a kick in the balls?
It’s one of Agnieszka’s days so Jonathan gets to go into the office for the afternoon, which is probably a relief to both of us, to be honest. He’s always a bit twitchy about working from home on account of being completely unable to trust anybody to do anything, but the second I take over the party project, he gets about a hundred times worse because it means he takes all that pent-up micromanagement and dumps it on yours truly. I’ve barely started flipping through the unnecessarily long list of venue options when he’s bombarding me with suggestions that feel a lot like orders. Sit-down dinner is a must (I disagree but don’t want to push it), don’t book a river boat (I’mnot planning to), make sure there’s room for dancing (incredibly obvious), and check the DJ brings their own lighting (ditto).
It doesn’t help that what I really want to do is get onto my old team and ask for their input on things, especially about how I can use my hard-won role of Christmas party planner to stop them all getting fired. And that’s pretty hard to do while Jonathan’s breathing down my neck and I’m pretending I’ve got amnesia.
So as soon as he’s in the car and out the driveway, and Agnieszka’s somewhere I can be pretty sure I won’t bother her, I ring up the store, whack my phone on speaker, and ask Claire to get everybody in the room for a meeting. Well, by everybody I mean her, Tiff, and Amjad because Brian’s a liability and New Enthusiastic Chris is too new and enthusiastic to be totally trusted with a plan that involves lying to the boss.
“You’re what?” asks Claire.
“I’m organising the Christmas party,” I tell her again.
“Isn’t the Christmas party always shit?” This is Amjad, telling it like it is.
I gesture at my phone even though nobody can see me. “Aye, but that’s why it’s genius.”
Claire makes the sort of noise your teacher makes in school when they’re trying to be encouraging but you’ve just said something that’s total bollocks. “Is genius really the word we’re looking for here?”
“No,” I protest. “Listen. The problem with the Christmas party is that Jonathan organises it his way and, because he’s Jonathan, that makes it miserable and soulless. So if I organise it my way and it’s great, then that means I can show him that my style of management works and he won’t fire anybody.”
“That seems spurious,” says Amjad, telling it like it might well be if I’m honest.
“I agree,” chimes in Agnieszka, who’s come into the front room to dust the coffee table. “It’sextremelyspurious.”
There’s a moment’s silence from the other end, then a confused “Who’s that?” from Claire.
“It’s okay, it’s just Agnieszka, she’s the housekeeper but she’s cool. She works for Jonathan so she knows what a prick he is.”
“I know no such thing,” Agnieszka insists as she moves my blanket off the sofa, fluffs up a cushion, then sticks the blanket back much more neatly. “He’s always been perfectly nice to me. I just suspect he may carve up hitchhikers in his spare time, that’s all.”
This seems to really appeal to Tiff. “He probably does, doesn’t he?”
“Well, unless we can find enough evidence of his off-duty serial killing that we can get him locked up before he sacks us”—I’m doing my best to bring things back to the topic at hand—“our best bet is still the party plan.”
“I still think it’s spurious,” Amjad tells me.
Agnieszka glances over her shoulder on her way back upstairs. “And I still agree.”
“Tell you what,” I suggest. “I’ve got my phone here and I’ll set a timer for six minutes and if, when it goes off, nobody’s come up with a better plan, we’ll try mine.”
To give them credit, they do think about it. Not for the full six minutes, which is good because I haven’t really set a timer.
