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“Twenty-three-point-four percent,” Amjad pipes up helpfully.
This is definitely impossible. I let myself slide slowly into the Heritage Devon Double Ended Slipper Cast Iron Bath with feet. “I’m never getting that. I could suck the guy off and not get that.”
“It’d be a really expensive blowjob,” says Claire. She thinks about it a bit longer. “Even with London weighting.”
“It’s still probably your best bet.” This is Tiff again. “I mean, not the blowjob bit. The room bit.”
I try some deep breathing to steady my nerves. “Okay, but—”
“No buts, Sam.” The best thing about Tiff is that she’s young enough to still have confidence in things you should on no account have confidence in. “You can do this.”
Telling her I can’t seems petty and would make me just as bad a manager as Jonathan Forest, though from a different direction. So I saythanksinstead. And then they’re quiet for a bit and I reckon they’re probably keen to get back to doing their jobs for as long as they still have them, especially the ones as are on commission. So I let them go, and I lie there for a while in the bottom of the Heritage Devon Double Ended Slipper Cast Iron Bath with feet and tell myself that my team are depending on me, that at least some of them believe in me, and that I really am able to turn this around.
I don’t completely convince myself. But I bluff myself for long enough to ring up the venue and tell the bloke I’m hiring it from that I’m coming in to ask him some questions.
For the first time in two weeks I leave the house without Jonathan trying to stop me. And I never thought I’d miss his overbearing insistence on taking his sort of care of me, but I do. A bit of me does. Because it’s proper winter now and there’s a chill in the air that cuts deeper when you’re stressed and at the moment I’m very, very stressed indeed.
Without Jonathan to give me a lift it’s a pisser of a journey, with a bus ride at each end and a Thameslink train in the middle, and as I stand on the platform at East Croydon station waiting for my connection, I think to myself how easy it would be to just get on a train back to Sheffield, or maybe even one back to Liverpool.To forget about all of this and pretend that the last few weeks, or the last few years, never happened.
Except I can’t, because they did.
By the time I arrive at London Bridge, the cold’s settled in bone deep, and as I trudge to the bus stop, I try to think of things I’m less up for in this exact moment than going to ask a relative stranger if he’ll give me a twenty three point four percent discount on a room he could easily relet that I’ve already paid a deposit on.
The list is very, very short and notably excludes things likebeing devoured by sharks.
And I hate sharks.
To make matters worse, though my London geography isn’t great, I realise I’m only a short walk away from Fortnum & Mason and that makes me think of the guinea pig, and the box of decorations, and Jonathan.
As I make my way up the steps of the venue and tell the bloke on reception that I’m here to see the other bloke that books the rooms, I try to radiate confidence, even though right now I’m feeling about as assertive as an unusually diffident rodent.
And there’s that guinea pig again.
I’m shown through to the feller’s office and he’s very nice and everything, but I can see from the look of him that he’s got no incentive to give me an inch.
“Okay,” I begin, “so here’s the thing. It turns out we can’t afford the room we’ve booked, and while I know that’s not strictly your problem—”
“Glad you do”—he’s still looking friendly, but no-nonsense friendly—“because it definitely isn’t.”
“Even so, I was hoping that since it’s Christmas, maybe you’d be able to give me some options.”
He gives me a cheery smile that I suspect is overselling how helpful he intends to be. “Course we can. If you want to switchto a cheaper room, we can do that and we’ll happily transfer your deposit.”
“Thing is,” I tell him, “the cheaper rooms are too small.”
“Then you’re free to cancel. But honestly I don’t think you’ll find the same size for less. Not in this town.”
“Or at this time of year,” I add, which probably isn’t helping my case.
The feller nods. “Or with the weather we’ve been having.”
“And talk of a tube strike,” I finish. “Trouble is we literally cannot go ahead with the current venue unless we get some kind of discount.”
Del, it strikes me, would be loving this. He’d also be doing much better at it.
“Tell you what”—the man taps something into his computer and looks hard at the screen—“we’ll see what we can swing. How big a discount were you hoping for?”
“Fifteenhundredquid,” I say very fast in the hope that it’ll bamboozle him into not noticing how unreasonable that is.
