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I’m still not letting it go. “Okay, but level with me, lad to lad, is itactuallyout of your hands, or is it one of those things where youcouldget it sorted but it’ll be a lot of aggro at your end?”
“It’ll be a lot of aggro at my end,” he admits, “and I don’twanta lot of aggro at my end.”
I’m pretty sure I’ve got him. Apart from the Jonathan Forests of the world, most people won’t just tell you to your face that they’re making your life harder to make their life easier. “And I understand that, mate,” I tell him. “I do. But this was kind of your mistake, and it’s going to cost me and my team a lot, so it’d be great if yez could find some way to help me out here.”
He’s quiet again, but I think this time he’s really trying to think of a way to help. “I can probably get something tonight,” he tells me at last, “but it’ll be late.”
“How late?” I ask. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know the answer.
“It’ll take at least six hours which’ll make it—what, half eight, nine?”
I have to take it. It’d be ungrateful not to.
Although it’s not my fault, putting all this crap back togetherisgoing to be my responsibility. Redecorating the entire store by myself is almost entirely outside both my skill set and my having-to-be-on-a-train-to-fucking-Croydon-at-the-crack-of-dawn-set.
I slope out to the front of the store to have a think, and find Tiff outside taking an unscheduled break. It’s something she does sometimes, and the one time I confronted her about it she pointed out that if she smoked, then going outside to have a quick ciggy would be completely socially acceptable so by normalising that and not allowing non-smokers equivalent mental health space, I was reinforcing destructive habits.
“You alright?” she asks.
“Oh, yeah.” I’m leaning on a glass-fronted door staring at a grey sky on one of the coldest days we’ve had this year so I’m not really. I’m glad of my scarf, which is a slightly unfashionable powder blue and used to be my mam’s. “Fine. Except I’ve just got off the phone with the dispatcher and the decorations won’t be here until nine and—”
Tiff’s already grinning at me. “We’re doing decorations?”
“Not really we,” I explain, “I can’t do overtime and so I’ll—”
“Ilovedecorations.”
“Okay but.”
She’s already backing through the doors, doing a little dance. “Leave it to me, boss. I’ll get everybody in, it’ll be great, just, like, order us a pizza or something.”
“But,” I try again. Only she’s already heading into the floor, singingDe-cor-a-tion par-taaayto a tune I don’t really recognise.
And I hope, then pray, then go back to hoping on account of being an atheist, that this doesn’t go disastrously wrong.
In the end, it’s Tiff, Claire, Amjad, Brian, and this new feller called Chris who’s always the first to volunteer for everything and keeps telling me he’ll be doing my job in three years. I do get pizza in to say thanks for sticking around so late, and we sit in the returns kiosk eating garlic bread and planning how the display is going to look. Well, in theory we plan how the display is going to look. Mostly we just argue over toppings.
“There’s nothing wrong,” Brian is saying, “with pineapple on pizza.”
“Yes there is.” Tiff is holding fast on this one—she’s shifted her focus from the inequities of global capitalism to the more relatable question of whether Hawaiian pizza is shit or not. “It’s the avocado bathroom of pizzas.”
Amjad gives her a nerdy smirk. “You mean it’s fashionable to hate on it but it’s actually fine?”
“No, I mean it’s objectively the worst.”
You should never use the word “objectively” around Amjad. I once heard him argue that the sky wasn’t objectively blue because of wavelengths. “It’s not objectively the worst,” he replies, “it’s subjectively the worst. Taste is subjectiveby definition. And in fact, if you want to go byobjectivemetrics, then both avocado bathrooms and Hawaiian pizzas are objectively amongst the best because they’re consistently popular and popularity is something you can actually measure.”
“My nan’s got an avocado bathroom,” offers New Enthusiastic Chris. “It’s fine.”
New Enthusiastic Chris hasn’t fully settled in yet which makes him a bit lacking on the banter front, so whenever he chimes in it’s always in a way that kills the conversation. I’m about to launch boldly into a whole new topic when we hear the truck rollingup outside. New Enthusiastic Chris is first on his feet, with Tiff shortly after. The rest of us follow them at a more sensible pace, except for Brian who’s spilled pizza on his shirt and is trying to dab it off with a different bit of the shirt.
Outside we meet a lorry driver who seems surprisingly okay with having been sent on a six-hour drive at short notice perhaps he needs the overtime—and the team pile in to help him unload all of the tastefully selected and corporate approved tinsel. New Enthusiastic Chris and Amjad double-team the Christmas tree, while Brian and Claire start a distractingly in-depth conversation about a range of candy-cane duvet covers that we’re already selling but which’ll now get their own proper display.
“All I’m saying,” Brian is saying, “is that I don’t hold with them.”
“Much as I appreciate the cynicism,” Claire is saying back, “why exactly?”
“They just feel very American.”
