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Turns out their biggest room isnonsensebig. Like built-in-lighting-rigs, has an actual fucking gallery big. I pan Tiff’s phone-borne image around the room and she makes approving noises.
“Yeah,” she says, “this’ll work.”
“Is it not a bit over the top?”
“Sam, it’s a Christmas party. It’s a holiday where people hang lights off things that don’t normally have lights on them and put giant plastic reindeer on their lawns. Over the top is thepoint.”
I turn the phone around to look at her again. She’s giving me you-don’t-know-what-you’re doing face, which is pretty normal for her and I usually chalk up to her inherent teenageriness, but today it feels more directed than usual. “Is there not—does the top not exist for a reason? I mean this place has marble walls for fuck’s sake. I’m not sure I want to organise a Christmas party somewhere with marble walls. Brian’s probably going to come to this. Brian is not a marble walls kind of a lad.”
“You’re asking people to come two hundred miles to spend time they don’t have hanging out with people they don’t like from a job they don’t care about—”
“Hey”—I’m not having that, the actual work can be mindless but we’re still a team—“I care about my job. And I hopeyoucare about your job because lest we forget I’m herefaking amnesiato protect your job so that you can keep up payments on your hair and beauty course.”
“Right, but”—she bites her lip—“doesn’t the fact I’mtakingthat course show I want to do other things with my life?”
It does. And she’s probably right, I’m sure most people who work on the shop floor at an S&S aren’t doing it out of a passionate commitment to duvets and whirlpool baths. “Okay, and that means you want to be in a room with marble walls?”
“It means if my rich boss is dragging me to London so he can show how grateful he is for my hard work, he can at least book the nice room. Besides, we don’t have much choice.”
She’s right about that. Because apparently booking Christmas party venues in London is much harder, and much more annoying, than I’d thought. So I track down the manager and ask him how much for the big swanky room with the gallery and the marble on the walls, and he tells me it’s eight hundred quid, which I reckon is pretty reasonable, and then clarifies that it’s eight hundred quid anhourwhich I reckon isn’t.
I haul e-Tiff into a corner. “Is that not a bit steep?” I ask her.
For the first time that day she looks as flummoxed as I feel. “Yes. But also… I don’t know, it’s London. You probably can’t rent a toilet for less than three hundred an hour in London.”
She’s right about that too. London is—by the standards of any sensible right-thinking person—the absolute worst. “We’re on a hundred and fifty quid a head budget. How long are we going to need the room for?”
“Since it’s going to take people at least three hours to get there, probably quite a long time. Maybe seven to twelve for the party, couple of hours setup before. Eight hours maybe?”
I was never the best at maths so I minimise Tiff and stick eight times eight hundred into my calculator. Then I must pull a face, because I hear Tiff laughing at me. “That’s a lot,” I tell her.
“Jonathan can afford it. He must have money coming out of his arse.”
He does. I mean not literally, but figuratively. His house is the exact kind of place that you only live if your arse is pretty decently cashed up. “The budget’s a hundred and fifty a head.”
“And if you go over”—I’ve switched back to Tiff just in time to catch her giving a dangerously devil-may-care shrug—“what’s he going to do?”
“He’s going to saySam, I knew you were bad with budgets, you’re fired and your branch is closed.”
“And if you go under”—Tiff has that glint of confidence in her eye that I’m sure I used to have at her age as well—“then he’ll saysee, cutting corners works, now fire the chick with the wacky hair.”
He might. It’s the sort of thing he’d do. “If it helps, I’m pretty sure he wants Brian gone first.”
It didn’t help. And despite Tiff urging me to just take the damned room, I tell the manager I’m looking at some other options and head back out to the car.
I find Jonathan hammering away at his laptop doing—whatever it is he does when he’s not in the office but feels the need to keep his nose to the grindstone anyway. “Well?”
“It’s an option.”
“You’ll need to make a call quickly, they’ll book up.”
I don’tthinkhe’s deliberately needling me, but I might have lost the ability to tell. And what with just having had Tiff in one ear and now having him in the other I really want to change the subject so I say: “Do you want to grab some lunch?”
And to my surprise, he says yes.
I’m about 70/30 on whether Jonathan’s going to bring his laptop with him, but he doesn’t. He just stows it under the seat, where it’s out of sight, and we head up the road to look for somewhere to eat. What with us not being especially friends, and the boss/employee dynamic having been somewhat eroded by him giving me a concussion, me lying to him about amnesia, and us living together, the whole “what sort of restaurant do we go to” dance gets very awkward indeed. So we resolve that by just turning into the first place we hit that doesn’t scream “obvious date venue.”
As it turns out, it’s a little independent pizza joint that doestwenty-inch stone baked pizzas with a frankly very central London variety of toppings. So, short on pepperoni, long on rocket. Inside, it’s almost rustic which would be nice except it reminds me that you can’t get less rustic than Shoreditch. You’re about as far from the countryside as it’s possible to get in England. In any case, the “definitely not a date” atmosphere takes a bit of a hit when they bung us in a booth in the corner and I realise I’m going to have to spend a good hour staring into the eyes of Jonathan Forest over a tastefully decorated hardwood table.
