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“It looks pretty bad from where I’m standing.”
Tiff does the disappointed look again. “Sometimes bad isn’t bad.”
“That sounds a lot like shite.”
She gives a long-suffering sigh, which is a cheek because she’s far too young to be long anything. “It’s the nineteenth-century equivalent of those guys who spend hours mussing their hair up just right so that it looks good but also like they’re too cool to care if it looks good. If you’re in the business, you can spot it a mile off.”
“You think he worked at looking like that?”
Tiff nods. “I think he was consciously aiming for Big Das Kapital Energy.”
Realising that I’ve let myself get distracted, I slip my phone away. “Right. Well, that’s been enlightening as always, but ifyou’ll excuse me, I need to go and find out what’s happening with our Christmas displays because if we don’t get them up by tomorrow—”
“We’ll get them up on Monday?” Tiff suggests.
“We’ll miss the first-weekend-in-December sales and that will make His Royal Dickishness even more pissed off than he already is. And since Claire managed to call him His Royal Dickishness to his face, that’s a pretty high level of pissed off.”
Amjad, who is sometimes useful when he isn’t being a gigantic pedant, looks thoughtful for a moment. “I think we’ve got some stuff from last year kicking around in the back. We could use that in a pinch.”
“And it’ll be all right after a year in a cold back room?” I ask.
He’s thinking again. “Some of it should still be usable.”
“Can we at least hold out for new lights?” Tiff picks idly at the collar of her black work-issue shirt. “Last year I had to go through over five hundred of them trying to find which bulb was broken.”
“Tree might be an issue too,” Amjad points out. “We had a real one last year, which I thought was odd because wesellartificial ones.”
I cling to the theory that this is all still doable. “Right. Well, I’m going to go check with the supplier. Absolute worst-case-scenario we use last year’s decorations until everything gets here.”
“And for the tree?” asks Tiff, who I think is enjoying the chaos more than she really should be.
“We’re on a retail park in December. There’ll be at least three places we can buy one within a twenty minutes’ drive.” I’m doing my optimistic voice, because in an absolutely ideal world Iwouldn’tbe having to drive around looking for a last-minute Christmas tree that I’d probably have to buy with my own fucking money, just so I could tell my prize dick of a boss that I at leastgot the Christmas display up on time. But in an ideal world Karl Marx would have better hair and Christmas wouldn’t be a soulless spectacle of conspicuous consumption. Sometimes you just play the hand you’re dealt.
I head back inside and call the distributor. One of the sort-of-advantages of Jonathan Forest’s habit of being a massive control freak is that there is only one distributor to talk to. Of course the disadvantage of his habit of being a massive control freak is that the distributor isn’t really in the habit of talking to individual branch managers even though that would be much easier for everybody. Every year he has his team in London design the Christmas displays, select our fairly limited range of Christmas stock, and then ship the same combination of fairy lights and Santa pillowcases to all three branches from one central location. And since there are only three stores, you’d think that’d be pretty simple, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past few years managing a bed and bath showroom it’s that pretty simple things can be surprisingly easy to fuck up.
“How,” I ask the man on the end of the phone, “did you wind up sending everything to the Isle of Sheppey?”
To give the lad his due, he seems embarrassed about it. “I don’t know what to say. We do a lot of distribution for homewares. We were sending a load of shipments out to the B&M in Queensborough, and Kev in dispatching has terrible handwriting and so—”
“Hang on hang on hang on.” I’m not letting this one slide. “I don’t care how bad somebody’s handwriting is,Sheffielddoesn’t look anything likethe Isle of Sheppeyon account of howthe Isle of Sheppeyhas the wordsthe Isle ofat the start.”
The man at the end of the phone makes a noise that sounds like a shrug. “We just call it Sheppey. Anyway, that’s where your stuff went.”
“Can we have it back like?”
“It’s in Sheppey.”
“I know it’s in Sheppey. I need it to be here. I need it to be here as soon as possible.”
He goes quiet for a moment. It’s not a moment I think he’s using to decide how best to satisfy my needs as a customer. “We can do Wednesday?”
“That’s in a week.” I’m really trying not to get angry. I wasn’t brought up to be angry. “How is in a week as soon as possible?”
“Well, there’s scheduling—”
I wasn’t brought up to be angry, but Iwasbrought up to stand up for myself. “I don’t care about your scheduling. You were meant to get a delivery to us yesterday, and now you’re telling me I have to wait until”—I did a quick count in my head, maths was never my best subject—“the eighth. That’s a third of the Christmas run-up gone and you must know how important that is for retail.”
“Out of my han—”
