‘Does anyone have a spare cardboard box?’
There was a chorus of distressed tones.
‘Just joking, but nice to know you care,’ I smiled and they relaxed but were a little annoyed. But then something Edna had said hit me and I suddenly tensed up. I knocked on the door, went back inside. ‘Edna,’ I said rather urgently.
She looked up from her paperwork.
‘Augusto, he’s from …’
‘Head office, in Germany. Don’t tell the others, I don’t want them to worry any more than they already are.’
Relief. ‘Of course. It’s just not a typical German name,’ I smiled. I went to close the door.
‘Sorry, Lucy, I understand what you mean now,’ she called out to me. ‘He’s Spanish.’
I smiled but inside I wept. I was worried, I was very worried, because apart from having only just enough Spanish to order a round of Slippery Nipples and to ask for a limbo bar, I had very little other vocabulary in my head, and though they didn’t know it yet the team were relying on my schmoozing to get them through the next elimination process. It was only then when I sat down and saw the letters still lying on my desk that the conversation made sense.
Him and his analogies; Life had thrown me a curveball.
CHAPTER NINE
‘He did the Inca Trail last week, did you see that?’ my friend Jamie said to the table.
We were in The Wine Bistro in the city, our usual haunt for catching up, and being served by the usual gay waiter with the fake French accent. There were seven of the usual suspects gathered around for Lisa’s birthday. There used to be eight before Blake had started all his travelling but he might as well have been sitting at the head of the table that night, exactly opposite from me, from the way they were all going on. They’d been talking about Blake for the past twenty minutes, ever since main course had arrived, and I sensed it could go on for another twenty so I had stuffed my mouth with as much salad as I could. Silchesters didn’t talk while eating so apart from the occasional nod of interest and raised eyebrow I didn’t need to take part. They talked about last night’s episode where he’d travelled around India; I’d watched it and hoped Jenna had gotten Delhi belly. They talked about things he’d said, things he’d seen, things he’d worn and then they lovingly ripped him apart about his smarmy final comments and that cheesy look down the camera lens followed by the wink – that was personally my favourite part, but I didn’t tell them that.
‘What did you think of it, Lucy?’ Adam asked, killing their discussion and directing it all at me.
I took a while to chew then swallowed some lettuce leaves. ‘I didn’t see it.’ I shoved more into my mouth.
‘Oooh,’ Chantelle joked, ‘she’s so cold.’
I shrugged.
‘Have you ever seen it?’ Lisa asked.
I shook my head. ‘I’m not sure if I have the station. I haven’t checked.’
‘Everyone has the station,’ Adam said.
‘Oh. Whoops.’ I smiled.
‘You were supposed to go on that trip together, weren’t you?’ Adam asked again, leaning on the table, pushing all his energy towards me.
Adam pretended to joke but even if it was almost three years ago, his best friend being dumped still seriously aggrieved him. If I hadn’t been the target of his aggression my admiration for his loyalty would have been far greater. I’m not quite sure how Blake had managed to create such steadfast devotion in Adam but whatever he said, or whatever crocodile tears he’d spilled with him, it had worked and I was public enemy number one. I knew it and Adam secretly wanted me to know it, but it seemed that nobody else knew it. Again paranoia was taking over but I followed it like it was my guide.
I nodded at Adam. ‘Yeah, we planned to go for his thirtieth.’
‘And you made him go on his own, you cruel bitch,’ Lisa said, and they laughed.
‘With a film crew,’ Melanie added, kind of in my defence.
‘And a spray tanner, by the looks of it,’ Jamie added and they laughed.
And Jenna. The bitch. From Australia.
I just shrugged again. ‘That’s what you get when you give me fried eggs instead of poached. A girl can’t be dealing with shoddy breakfast in bed.’
They laughed, but Adam didn’t. He glared at me in defence of his friend. I shovelled more salad into my mouth and looked at Melanie’s plate to see what I could steal. As usual it was full of food. I speared a baby tomato, that’d give me at least twenty seconds of chewing. The tomato burst in my mouth and the seeds fired down my throat and made me choke. Not a cool reaction. Melanie handed me a glass of water.
‘Well, he didn’t do too badly, we did end up in Vegas for his thirtieth,’ Adam said and gave me a long knowing look that just killed me. The lads looked at each other with cheeky expressions, instantly sharing a weekend of craziness that would never be revealed. My heart twisted as I pictured Blake on a bar with a stripper licking Pernod off his abs and popping olives from his belly button. It wasn’t a party trick of his, just a mind trick of my own.
My phone beeped. Don Lockwood’s name flashed up onto my screen. Since our phone conversation over a week ago I’d tried to think of some kind of comeback for the Aslan song but failed. As soon as I opened the text a photo popped up. It was a porcelain figure of a haggard old woman with an eye patch and beneath it his text read:
–Saw this and thought of you.
I zoned out of the conversation and immediately texted back.
–It’s rude to take my photo without permission. Would have given you my winning smile.
–You have no teeth, remember?
I smiled cheesily, and took a photo of my teeth. I pressed send.
Melanie gave me a curious smile.
‘Who are you texting?’
‘No one, I was just seeing if I’ve lettuce stuck in my teeth,’ I said, easily. Too easily. I was getting good at this.
‘You could have asked me. Seriously, who is it?’
‘Just a wrong number.’ It wasn’t a lie. I reached into my bag and put twenty euro on the table. ‘Guys, it was swell but I have to go now.’
Melanie groaned. ‘But we hardly got to talk.’
‘We’ve done nothing but talk,’ I laughed, standing up.
‘But not about you.’
‘What do you want to know?’ I took my coat from the gay waiter with the fake French accent who’d pointed at the coat rack and said, ‘Zees one?’
Melanie was a bit taken aback by being put on the spot. ‘Well, I just wanted to hear what’s going on with you but you’re halfway out the door so we don’t have time for that.’
I allowed gay waiter with fake accent to help me put my coat on, then said, ‘Il y a eu une grande explosion. Téléphonez les pompiers et sortez du batiment, s’il vous plaît,’ which meant there has been a big explosion, telephone the emergency services and evacuate the building immediately. He looked a bit frazzled, smiled, then hotfooted it away before I could rip off his mask Scooby Doo style. ‘Well, we don’t need much time to talk about me because there’s nothing interesting happening. Trust me. We’ll catch up on our own sometime, next week I’ll go to one of your gigs and we can have a bop in the booth?’ Melanie was a much-in-demand DJ hot on the party circuit who went by the name DJ Darkness, more after the fact that she never saw daylight as opposed to being a tribute to her stunning Armenian looks.
She smiled and gave me a hug and rubbed my back affectionately. ‘That sounds great, even though we’ll have to lip-read. Ooh,’ she squeezed me tighter, ‘I just worry about you, Lucy.’
I froze. She must have sensed it because she let go very quickly. ‘What do you mean you worry about me?’
She looked like she’d put her foot in it. ‘I didn’t mean for it to be insulting, are you insulted?’
‘Well, I don’t know yet, I don’t know what that means, when your friend tells you they’re worried about you.’ They were all listening now. I was trying to keep it light-hearted but I wan
ted to get to the bottom of it. She’d never said that before, why was she saying it now? What was it about me that was making people suddenly worry about me? The comment she’d made about my leaving a party of hers played on my mind; maybe there were lots of things she felt about me that I didn’t know. Suddenly I wondered if they were all in on it, if they’d all signed the same paperwork as my family had. I looked at them all. They looked worried.
‘What?’ I beamed at everyone. ‘Why are you all looking at me like that?’
‘I don’t know about them but I was hoping for a fight,’ David piped up. ‘Cat fight, pinch her, scratch her, poke out her eyes.’
‘Rip off her clothes, tweak her nipples,’ Jamie joked, and they all laughed.
‘I’m not going to rip off her clothes,’ I smiled, wrapping my arm around Melanie. ‘She’s hardly wearing any.’
They laughed.
‘I just wanted to know why she was worried about me, that’s all,’ I said playfully. ‘Is anybody else at this table worried about me?’
They took turns and I’d never felt so loved.
‘Every day you get behind the wheel of that car,’ Lisa said.
‘Only that you can drink me under the table,’ David added.
‘I’ve concerns about your mental health,’ Jamie said.
‘I’m worrying about that dress with that coat,’ Chantelle said.
‘Great, anyone else want to take a pop at me?’ I laughed.
‘No, I’m not worried about you at all,’ Adam offered.
No one heard his meaning like I heard it.
‘And so on that joyous note, I’m leaving you all. I’ve to be up early in the morning. Happy birthday, Lisa. Bye bye, bump,’ I kissed her belly.
And I was gone.
I got the bus home. Sebastian was on a drip and was heavily medicated and so was having to sleep over in the garage.
My phone beeped.
–Impressive canines. Maybe send me more photos and I can piece you together. If your boyfriend doesn’t mind?!
–Slick.
–That’s not an answer.
–It is. It’s just not the answer you were looking for.
–What are you doing tomorrow?
–Busy. Going to be fired.
–Boyfriend … job … You’re not having a good week. I’d like to help with one of them!
–You speak Spanish?
–A requirement for boyfriends?
–Again … slick. However. A requirement to keep my job. About to be revealed as a non-Spanish-speaking Spanish translator.
–Hate it when that happens. Estoy buscando a Tom. Means I’m looking for Tom. Came in handy in Spain. That’s all I’ll ever be allowed to say.
Later that night as I lay in bed listening to a Spanish language tape, I received a text.
–Am slowly but surely breaking down your alias. Certainly not toothless, not married, perhaps an eye patch and ten kids. Tomorrow, will investigate.
I turned the flash off my camera phone, raised it to my face. I took a picture of my eyes. It took me a few tries to get them right. Sent it. I waited with my phone in my hand for him to respond. There was nothing. Maybe I’d gone too far. Later that night my phone beeped and I dived on it.
–You showed me yours …
I scrolled down and I was staring at a perfectly formed, unpierced ear.
I smiled. Then closed my eyes and slept.
CHAPTER TEN
I took a forkful of my three-bean salad, in which I could only find two bean types, and which I was eating at my desk for the first time in two and a half years. Louise had stolen a large leather executive chair from somewhere – after the redundancies, random chairs were a regular feature – and they were currently re-enacting an office version of Mastermind. Twitch was in the hot seat and his specialist subject was ‘Coronation Street: Major Events 1960–2010’. Mouse was the quizmaster, firing questions at him from the Internet, Louise was timing him and so far he was doing well with three passes and a score of fifteen. Graham had his head in his hands and was staring down at his opened baguette and occasionally moving a hand from his head to pick out a gherkin.
‘I don’t know why you just don’t tell them not to put gherkins in. You do this every day,’ Louise said, watching him.
‘Concentrate on the time,’ Mouse said, panicked, then spoke even more quickly. ‘In 1971 how did Valerie Barlow leave the show?’
And in equally rapid speech Twitch fired back, ‘Electrocuted herself with a faulty hairdryer.’
Any moment from now Mr Fernández was going to walk through the door and after two and a half years in the job, I was going to have to reveal to the office my complete inability to speak Spanish. I was cringing with the embarrassment it was causing me already and what was surprising me was the horrible feeling that I knew I was going to let them down, a concern I had never previously possessed. The smaller the numbers got in our office, the more it felt like a dysfunctional family and although I was always on the outside looking in, I realised that though we weren’t quite a tight group we were certainly a less loose one. We didn’t all particularly like one another but we were protective of our unit, and in a way, I had betrayed them all. I had thought about pretending to be sick that day and also about confronting Fish Face about my lack of Spanish which would avoid the public embarrassment in front of the team but would be privately humiliating. In the end I’d decided against both routes because a part of me said that perhaps I could play my life at his own little game and there was a chance that I could learn an entire language overnight, and so after admiring Don Lockwood’s perfectly formed ear last night I had hit the Spanish language books. I had discovered at three in the morning that it was impossible to learn a language overnight.
Graham finally finished picking out his gherkins and took a bite of his baguette. He watched the game of Mastermind unfold with a weary look. It was at times like that I found him attractive; when he wasn’t pretending to be somebody he wasn’t. He looked at me and we shared a look of fond annoyance at the game. Then he winked and I detested him again.
‘Okay my turn.’ Louise practically lifted Twitch from the chair to jump into it herself.
Flustered, Twitch stood up and fixed his glasses.
‘Well done, Twitch,’ I said.
‘Thank you.’ He pulled up his trousers, so that his belly showed above and below his belt-line, and looked proud.
‘What is your specialised subject?’ Mouse asked Louise.
‘“Shakespeare’s Plays”,’ Louise said very seriously.
Graham was midway into taking a bite of his baguette. He froze. We all looked at her.
‘Only joking. “The Life and Times of Kim Kardashian”.’
We laughed.
‘You have two minutes, let’s begin. For whom was Kim Kardashian’s father, Robert Kardashian, attorney during a controversial case in the nineties?’
‘O. J. Simpson,’ she said, so fast the words were barely audible.
Twitch sat beside me and we watched.
‘What are you eating?’ he asked.
‘Three-bean salad but look, I can only find two beans in it.’
Twitch leaned over to study it. ‘Kidney beans, chick peas … did you eat the other one?’
‘No, definitely not, I’d have noticed.’
‘I’d bring that back if I were you.’
‘But it’s half gone, they’ll think I’ve eaten them.’
‘It’s worth a try. How much did that cost you?’
‘Three-fifty.’
He shook his head in disbelief and sucked in air. ‘Yeah, I’d take that back.’
I stopped eating and we returned our gaze to the Mastermind game.
‘In which spin-off show did Kim Kardashian move city to set up a new clothing store with her sister?’
‘Kourtney and Kim Take New York,’ she yelped. ‘The clothing store is Dash.’
‘You don’t get extra points for extra information,’ Graham
complained.
‘Ssh,’ she silenced him, keeping an eye on the clock.
I heard Michael O’Connor’s voice in the corridor: loud, confident and informative as he pointed out the mediocre facts of the floor I lived on every day. Edna must have heard them too because she opened the door to her office and gave me the nod. I stood up and smoothed my dress down, hoping that crease-free humming-bird-patterned material would help my ability to speak Spanish. Michael O’Connor greeted Edna at the door and it was up to me to bring Augusto into the office.
I cleared my throat, held out my hand as I walked towards him.
‘Sr Fernández, bienvenido.’
We shook hands. He was extremely handsome and I became even more flustered. We looked at one another in a long silence.
‘Em. Em.’ My mind went completely blank. All the phrases I’d learned quickly flew out of my head in an obvious act of sabotage.
‘¿Hablas español?’ he asked.
‘Uh-huh.’
He smiled.
Finally I remembered something. ‘¿Cómo está usted?’ How are you?
‘¿Bien, gracias, y usted?’ The words were fast and didn’t quite sound like the voice on the tape but I recognised some of them so just went with it, trying to speak faster like him.
‘Uhhh. Me llamo … Lucy Silchester. Mucho gusto encantado.’ It’s a great pleasure to meet you.
He said something long and fast and detailed. Smiling sometimes, then looking serious, using his hands in a presidential way. I nodded in turn, smiling when he did and looking serious when he did. Then he went silent and waited for a response.
‘Okay. ¿Quisiera bailar conmigo?’ Would you like to dance with me?
His forehead wrinkled. Behind Mr Fernández’s head I could see Graham trying to stuff his baguette into a drawer in a panic as if eating at his desk at lunchtime would rob him of his job. Gherkins were flying everywhere so I went to Twitch’s desk instead. This knocked me off course; in my head I had planned to begin my spiel with Graham and now I had to move down to the second paragraph of the piece I’d learned in my head. Twitch stood up, fixed his glasses, proud as a peacock.