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For some reason, Claire thinks this is perfectly reasonable. “Fair.”
“Hang on,” I say over an armful of festive shower curtains. “That’s not fair at all. You can’t just say somethingfeels American,and even if itisAmerican, that’s not a reason not to like it.”
“It fucking is,” replies Claire who, unlike Brian, is at least managing to continue this debate while also moving merchandise.
“I really think it’s not,” I insist. Then I turn to Amjad. “Hey Amj, youmusthave an opinion on this.”
Amjad glances at me from his end of the Christmas tree. “Kind of got my hands full here.”
He does. I’d help him but I also have my hands full, and besides, he’s working with New Enthusiastic Chris and it’s hard to help New Enthusiastic Chris with anything because he’s so keen to show he can do two people’s jobs at once. So we make our way back into the store, and Amjad manages to get halfway across thecar park before he breaks. “But they’re actually almost certainly German.”
“We’re not on Christmas origins again, are we?” asks Tiff, who has armfuls of fairy lights.
“Whether candy canes are American,” I explain.
“Super American,” Tiff agrees. “They’re super Americaneven ifthey technically come from twelfth-century Bavaria or something.”
Now fully committed to balancing tree-lugging with Christmas-explaining, Amjad shifts the weight of the fir and launches into his extemporaneous yuletide lecture. “Eighteenth century,” he says, “and they were probably white to begin with because you couldn’t do the colouring without modern machinery. And it’s not Bavaria, it’s Cologne.”
Brian is carrying exactly one quite small cardboard display stand. “What’s aftershave got to do with it?”
“I assume it’s Cologne the city,” explains Claire, dumping five identical displays onto him.
Overwhelmed by the sudden addition of a medium-sized amount of cardboard, Brian looks down in a panic. “I can’t handle this, it’ll get all unwieldy.”
Claire is very rarely in a mood for people’s shit. “No they won’t, they’re in a stack and it’s fine. Get them inside.”
It takes three more trips to get everything in. Well, it takes one more trip from most of the staff then two more trips from New Enthusiastic Chris who insists there’s “not much left” and he’s “totally on it”. Around ten thirty Amjad and Brian head home, which is fair because they’ve done more than enough. Claire fucks off a little while later because she figures I’ve got it in hand and while she’s second in command she’s also covering for me tomorrow so I can’t complain. Tiff stays until gone midnight getting the displays ready.
She’s an odd one is Tiff, because ninety-nine percent of the time she gives so few shits I feel like getting her senna pods for secret Santa, but one percent of the time something catches her imagination and she’s a fucking miracle. And honestly, I’m glad she’s here because there’s no way I could do up a showroom in festive style without her. I’d just whack a bit of crepe paper on a headboard and call it done, but she goes all out with the lights and the little stick-on snowflake things, and when we’re heading off—just me, her, and New Enthusiastic Chris who’s always last to leave on account of being new and enthusiastic—we look back for a moment and it’s kind of magic like. It’s probably just me being a sap, but in that moment, standing outside on an industrial estate on the first day of December, staring at a bathroom warehouse that a trainee hairdresser—sorry, trainee hair and beauty consultant—has done up to look like a fairytale kingdom, I’m almost proud of us. Sure, we’re a bit over on budget and a bit under on sales, but by the very specific standards of wholesale bed and bath retailers, we’ve done a good job here. We’ve got a good team.
Check that. We’ve got a great team. Even if sometimes Tiff isn’t exactly where she’s meant to be and even if Brian drops the odd toilet basin and even if New Enthusiastic Chris is currently slightly more enthusiastic than he is useful, we’re still…we’re still the Sheffield branch. And I’m not going to let Jonathan Forest take that away from me. From us.
CHAPTER 3
Have I mentioned that jonathan Forest is a dick? In case I haven’t, he’s a dick. He’s the kind of dick who tells you on a Thursday afternoon to be in London for a bollocking at eight o’clock on a Friday. And don’t get me wrong, I’m a morning person. But I’m not a four in the morning person. Which was when I’d had to get up to be on the train for five to be where I am now at seven forty-nine, which is standing outside Jonathan Forest’s office in the suit I wore to my nan’s funeral, waiting for him to let me in, which—knowing him—won’t be until exactly eight.
He lets me in at exactly eight.
His office is on the second floor of the Croydon branch of Splashes & Snuggles, which makes it look like it’s trying much too hard to be a penthouse. If I squint, I can almost imagine that I’m in some fancy skyscraper in the city instead of in a retail park between a Nando’s and a DFS. There’s a little six-seater conference table and a sofa that looks like it gets slept on more than it gets sat on. And it’s got a desk—a more cluttered desk than I’d have expected—with a picture frame facing away from me and a well-used coffee mug withwe’re Wednesday aren’t werepeated over and over again around the outside in white on blue. Behind the desk, Jonathan Forest is sitting, watching me.
I think he wants me to be intimidated like, but I’m not givinghim the satisfaction. For a while he just stares at me with those dark intense eyes of his and when it’s clear he’ll not make me mess my kecks, he finally asks me to sit down.
“I’m sorry it’s come to this, Sam,” he says. At least he doesn’t call me Samwise this time.
“You can’t be that sorry,” I tell him, “or you’d’ve just not done it.”
“I’m sorry it’s come to this,” he repeats, “but Splashes & Snuggles is a business.”
When he says it aloud, I find it quite hard not to laugh in his face. There’s something very wrong, I reckon, with a man who calls his business Splashes & Snuggles and can’t see the funny side of it. “I know it’s a business, Jonathan, but it’s a business that makes good money and so I don’t quite see why you’re making a massive drama over a couple of points on a spreadsheet.”
Jonathan Forest leans back and gives me another look. In other circumstances—like not being my boss and not having dragged me the length of the country at four a.m. on a Friday—he’d probably have had that sexy-ugly thing going on. There was just something about his craggy, angry face and the unruly white streak in his otherwise carefully groomed hair that made you want him to do things to you. Or maybe for you to do things to him to see if you could get him to chill the fuck out. “I think the fact that you consider your boss asking for a meeting to discuss your performance to be a”—he does actual fucking air quotes—“massive dramamight be exactly what’s wrong with your management style.”
We’ve been talking for less than five minutes and I already want to stick his pencil up his nose. “There’s nothing wrong with my management style. Ask anyone on my team.”
“If no one on your team has a problem with your management style, that’s a problem.”
He’s not making sense. Being unpopular is not how you getresults. He’s evidence of that. “How is that a problem? That’s my job.”
