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There’s a pause. Then Jonathan clears his throat and it dawns on me he’s trying to be tactful. “I’m increasingly concerned that nobody has checked up on you.”
Fuck, I don’t want to have to talk about any of this. “Didn’t you speak to the store since I’m on medical leave?”
“I wasn’t talking about work.”
I give him a grin that I hope is distractingly cheeky. “There’s a first time for everything, isn’t there?”
“I mean it. I’d have expected somebody to be looking for you by now. If I went missing for a fortnight, my mum would havepersonally visited every hospital, police station, and undertakers in the South East.”
“Undertakers?”
“She likes to have her bases covered.”
“Well, I suppose I just don’t have that kind of—” I don’t want to go here, I really don’t want to go here. “You know, not everybody’s close with their parents.”
That shuts Jonathan up a minute. “Sorry,” he says eventually. It’s maybe the second time I’ve heard him say it, and in a funny way it’s a much nicer time to hear it. “I suppose I—it’s like you said, when you’ve got a family like mine you take it for granted. Are you—if it’s something you wanted to talk about…”
“It’s hard to remember,” I say. It’s not a lie, exactly.
“Of course.”
It’s odd, the different textures silences can have. This one feels—it’s odd. I’m not sure I can put a name on it exactly. Caring almost. Perhaps even supportive.
Jonathan taps the touch screen of the onboard computer that I’m still thinking of as a radio. “I can pick a different station if you like?”
It’s a kind offer, and one I turn over a moment before deciding if I want to take it. “No. No it’s all right.”
Bruno gives way to Katy Perry, who’s telling us all about how she’s got the eye of the tiger and that. And Jonathan Forest, in what I can only describe as a titanic breach of character, starts singing along. Not only that but he’s quite good.
“Big fan, are yez?” I ask.
He casts a sidelong look at me, half smiling, half—and I’m not sure how I feel about this—still clearly wondering why I’ve not been looked for yet. “It gets played a lot, and the nice thing about this song is it’s basically all chorus.”
So I join in—though unlike Jonathan I’mnotquite good. I’mnot even almost good. But I like to think I make up for it with enthusiasm. And we just keep going. Through Katy, into Justin Bieber, David Guetta, Olly Murs, and The Script. I’m doing that in-the-car kind of singing along where you find out two lines in that you don’t know the words half as well as you thought you did, and just find yourself going “murmurmur manana something” then belting out the title of the song really loudly in the hope that it’ll make up for how badly you botched the rest of it.
We keep on like that for hours. Literal hours. 'Til we’re both hoarse and slightly sick of relentlessly feel-good music. And Jonathan doesn’t ask me any more questions about my family, or my dad, or why they haven’t come trying to find me or anything. He just lets me sit with him and mime along to Rita Ora while we bomb past Nottingham on the M1. And when he lip-syncs “I Will Never Let You Down” with me, I weirdly believe him.
Because I don’t think he would.
Because when we’re like this, I’m happy.
CHAPTER 26
A long but eventually pleasant road trip later we arrive at the Sheffield branch and Claire meets us at the door.
“Mr Forest”—she shakes his hand firmly-but-not-too-firmly—“and Sam.” She gives me a look that I don’t think could have been more conspiratorial if she’d done an exaggerated cartoon wink. “Do you…do you remember me?”
Right, Sam. Acting time. “Maybe,” I say. “Is it—it’s on the tip of my tongue.”
“Claire,” says Claire. “I’m extremely good at my job and you’d agreed to give me a massive raise just before you had your accident.”
It’s no different from the banter we’d usually have, but we’re in work mode now, and that means fun Jonathan has left the building. Not just left it, burned it down behind him. “I hope not,” he says. “I originally invited Sam to London because this branch has serious budgetary issues.”
The thing about Claire is that although she’s got no time for knobheads, bellends, or dickheads, she does have a good sense for when to stop pushing it. “Just a joke, Mr Forest. We’re all falling behind inflation like the rest of the country. And while it’s been a bit rough without Sam, I do think we’re on track to meet our goals for the quarter.”
“Glad to hear it.” Jonathan nods. When he’s in this mode, words likeon trackandquartercalm him down like a cup of hot cocoa. In fact, he’s so calm that he flips straight back to his visiting boss routine. “What’s going to happen now,” he explains, “is that I’m going to take a tour of the shop floor, then you and I are going to have a talk about the situation going forwards.” He stops and looks round at me. “Also somebody might need to look after Sam. He can get tired easily.”
“Oh,can he?” Claire sounds unhelpfully sceptical.
