‘Do you want me to cook you some pasta?’ I say. ‘I could do some nice shapes with bolognese?’ I can’t bear to watch Marjorie eat long length pasta. The sucking noise she makes and the mess that ends up all over her face when she eats spaghetti is gross. I mean, I’m sure I do exactly the same but I don’t have to look at myself while I’m eating.
‘I’ll get the girl to cook it tomorrow, if she can boil water without burning it: a half-wit of the highest order this new one, even worse than the last. She can’t understand basic English. She just looks at me with these big eyes like she hasn’t a single thought in her head.’
I bet she does have plenty of thoughts, Marjorie: all of them about throttling you. I head back into the kitchen and make her tea, which she drinks whiter than milk. I don’t know why she wastes money on teabags – I’m only allowed to introduce the bag into the cup for a millisecond. It’s like that quote about how to make the perfect Martini – hold the gin bottle next to the vermouth and let a beam of sunlight pass through. That’s all well and good but there’s no sunlight in Marjorie’s flat to pass through this teabag anyway.
Those poor carers the agency sends round here: I have nothing but gargantuan respect for them. None of them have a hope in hell of ever hearing those immortal words ‘thank you’. Quite frankly it’s a good job most of them don’t have English as their first language or they’d walk out a lot sooner, the amount of verbal she gives them. I know you’re not supposed to say things like this about vulnerable old ladies with osteoporosis and gout, but more often than not Marjorie is a complete cow.
Now where’s she hidden the kitchen bin today, I wonder … Marjorie’s living room is like a junk shop but for some reason she can’t abide the sight of a bin anywhere in her flat. Well probably those two things are connected, I suppose. She doesn’t like throwing things away so she pretends bins don’t exist. (Good grief, what’s it doing in there? I know I’m a bit of a hoarder but at least I don’t hide my kitchen bin in a shoe cupboard.)
Right. I’m done in this kitchen, it’s too depressing. I take her tea through and set it down on the Duchess of Cambridge coaster on Marjorie’s side table. She nods.
‘Cake’s still going strong?’ I say, walking over to a Perspex case in the corner to examine my handiwork. For Marjorie’s eightieth birthday last year, I’d baked a large cake in the shape of Fitzgerald’s head. It had taken me ages to match the perfect shades of green and yellow for the buttercream icing, and two hours to pipe them precisely in short little strokes, like feathers. I suspect it would have tasted more of food colouring than of vanilla but no one ever managed to find out. Marjorie was so smitten with this replica of her beloved that she refused to let anyone cut into it, let alone eat his face. She’s gone full Havisham and had it under Perspex ever since. God knows what they put in that food colouring – formaldehyde by the looks of it – but it’s held up pretty well.
‘OK,’ she says, taking a deck of cards from her side table. ‘Gin rummy, I’ll deal.’
We play three rounds of increasingly frustrating rummy. I would probably let Marjorie win just to cheer her up but there’s no need for that. She thrashes me every time. In each hand we play I’m just holding out for a couple of cards before I lay mine down, but she nips in and declares ‘Gin’, leaving me with a handful of deadwood. I swear she’d clean up in Vegas, she’s a total card-sharp. Defeated, I head to the kitchen to make us more tea. She’s still chuckling away to herself when I return.
‘So what’s going on with you?’ she says. ‘Still in that terrible office?’
I nod. ‘I’m working on this one last project, and if that goes well I’ll be promoted to the board. And then I’m going to leave.’
‘What I don’t understand,’ she says, pulling herself forward in her chair with her elbows, ‘is why you don’t leave now, if you’re so damn miserable. Makes no sense wasting time when you should be getting on, you’re not young any more.’ Marjorie loves to attack. It’s her favourite pasttime and the main thing keeping her alive, along with bile and re-runs of
Columbo
.
‘Well Marjorie,’ I say, trying to be patient; we’ve discussed this before. ‘There are three reasons, aren’t there? I can’t leave because I need my bonus.’
‘Money’s never a good enough reason!’ she snaps. ‘How much is this bonus?’
‘Several thousand pounds,’ I say.
‘That’s neither here nor there. You’ll have to support yourself once you’ve left.’
‘Well yes …’
‘Your grandmother was never good with money either. I told her you can never go wrong with shares in ICI.’
Lay off the dead grandmother please, Marjorie. ‘Of course I’ll need an income,’ I say. ‘But that bonus money will give me a cushion, pay off my debt, that’s all.’
‘Nonsense, it’s clearly fear, a classic evasion technique; you’re not fooling me for a second.’ I can only imagine what a delightful time Marjorie’s patients must have had in their therapy sessions, being torn to shreds like this. ‘I could write you a cheque for five thousand pounds right now and you wouldn’t leave.’
‘I would too!’ I say.
‘Bring me my cheque book,’ she says.
‘Marjorie …’
‘Bring it to me, it’s in my brown bag, in the hall. Bring it!’
I have no idea how much Marjorie has in the bank but I couldn’t take her money even if she was rich. Still, to humour her, I fetch her bag and she writes me a cheque, signing her name in a frenzy and handing it to me with venom.
‘That’s your first excuse gone. Put it in your pocket. Do it, right away! OK, good. What’s next?’ she says, warming up now. I can see how much she’s enjoying this, though there’s a manic glint in her eyes that’s a warning sign she’s about to get nastier.
‘Well, secondly, if I ever need to go back into working at an agency, I want to go in at board level. I couldn’t bear to have to jump through all the hoops again.’
‘Gobbledygook. What do you think, Fitzgerald? Flawed reasoning, failed before she’s even started, self-defeatist, weak, cowardly. Yes Fitzgerald, I agree with your diagnosis.’
I feel my face flush. I know this is her idea of fun but I can think of many other things I’d rather be doing than sitting here: ‘not sitting here’ would be foremost.
‘And what’s your third reason? It had better be less flimsy!’
‘Just because, Marjorie. It’s the principle of the thing. I deserve it, I have earned it, and I’m not going to walk out of there till I have been recognised.’
‘Ha, pride! And such stupidity! You must get that from your mother’s side of the family because your grandma was no beauty but neither was she a fool,’ she says.
‘Marjorie, do you mind not bringing my mother into this?’ I say. ‘I know you’re only joking but it’s really not necessary.’
‘I’m not joking at all,’ she says. ‘Though I can see I’ve offended you. You probably do get the over-sensitivity from your mother too …’
‘Marjorie. I’m quite tired so I think I’m going to head off now,’ I say, moving to stand up. I don’t care if you’re old and lonely. You are a rude old cow, plus you’re not even a blood relative. And you can stick some Paxo up Fitzgerald’s arse for all I care. I’m off.
‘You’ve only been here an hour! You can’t go yet, I’ll have no one to talk to.’
You can talk to the bird, can’t you?
‘Marjorie, I’ve got a big week at work. I’ve left the food in the fridge and I can make you another cup of tea before I go if you’d like? Why don’t I do that?’
‘Don’t bother,’ she says. ‘Fair-weather friend. And you can give me that cheque back right now, trying to steal my money.’
‘Marjorie,’ I say, putting the cheque on her side table. ‘There’s no need to be like that. I’m just tired. I’ve got an early start – Mondays are always the worst.’
She turns her head to the side and pretends I’m not even in the room.
‘I’m going to go home now, but I’ll come and see you soon,’ I say. We both know this isn’t true, and as I walk back to my flat I struggle to find some compassion towards her. No wonder she’s lonely if she behaves like that to the people who are trying to be nice to her. She’s not my responsibility and I refuse to feel bad about her. I’ve got plenty of other things to feel bad about as it is.
Oh, and something to feel good about too, I think, as I ponder tomorrow’s wardrobe choice again. A date! Sorry, a ‘meeting’ with Jeff!
Status report
I have spent the whole of this morning looking at my watch and my inbox, willing it to be Jeff o’clock and worrying that he’ll email me to cancel between now and then. It’s now mid-afternoon and our department meeting has just drawn to a long, slow close. Berenice publicly savaged me for having failed to brief the creatives yet; when I explained that Robbie’s only just allocated the team and that I’ll be briefing them first thing tomorrow, she’d pursed her lips and said, ‘It’s super high-profile. It’s not just you who’s responsible.’ (She means it’s not just me who’ll take the credit. Naturally I will be the only one who’ll get the bollocking.) ‘If you slip any further, make sure you keep me in the loop.’ Given half a chance I suspect she’ll be turning that loop into a noose.
I rush back to my desk to grab my things and when I look at my phone there’s a text from a number I don’t recognise: ‘Pizzas ready and waiting, plus I’ve got a little surprise! J’.
I walk over to the Fletchers Head Office – sorry, ‘The Building’ – in my flats, checking my hair and make-up in as many reflective surfaces as possible along the way, then change into my heels on the corner of Wardour Street and head in.
Jeff Nichols doesn’t make me wait twenty-three minutes down in reception! No, Jeff Nichols comes to fetch me within two minutes, which earns him brownie points in my book. And then even more brownie points when he takes me to the basement kitchens and presents me with some actual brownies.
‘I baked these off earlier,’ he says. ‘We’re doing trials on low-cal brownies and they tasted like an old sponge, so I thought I’d do a batch that weren’t soul-destroying just to keep myself sane. What do you think?’
‘Mmm, great,’ I say. ‘You’ve got salted caramel in there, haven’t you? I’m getting the sweetness and then something cutting through at the end.’
‘Good palate!’ he says. ‘I love that combo of salt and sweet. You know, for years, people thought that your tongue had different zones on it that tasted the different basic flavours.’
I nod encouragingly. We’re a minute into this so-called ‘meeting’ and he’s already talking to me about tongues. Could this be any more blatant?
‘So when you first put something in your mouth, you’d taste sweetness, right at the tip of your tongue … and then you’d pick up saltiness on the sides, and then at the back you’d pick up if something had any bitterness to it.’ He picks off a chunk of brownie and puts it in his mouth and I do the same.
‘A Harvard scientist called, believe it or not, Boring, put that theory forward … but it’s not true,’ he says. ‘Some bits of the tongue might be a tiny bit more sensitive than others, but you can taste everything, everywhere.’
‘I did not know that!’ I say. ‘I wonder if he had a wife …’
‘Who?’
‘Dr Boring. Can you imagine being Mrs Boring?’ I say.
‘I can’t imagine you ever being Mrs Boring,’ he says, laughing. ‘Right then, I suppose I’d better take you through where we are with this food.’ He goes to the fridge and takes out three uncooked pizzas.
‘Have a seat,’ he says, pulling out a stool for me. ‘Actually I’ll sit next to you, it’ll be easier to talk you through it.’ He sits down next to me and our knees touch, and he doesn’t move his away, though after a moment I feel so acutely aware of having turned tomato-red that I find myself moving my legs slightly.
‘OK,’ he says. ‘So you know how we make our standard pizzas.’ His eyes are so piercing and he has this way of looking at me that’s so intense it is all I can do to keep looking directly back at him. I nod and try to keep his gaze. ‘The bulk of calories in a normal pizza is dough and cheese. If you’re talking classic southern Italian pizza from Naples, it’s not particularly fattening – just a thin base with a drizzle of olive oil and a little mozzarella, sometimes not even cheese if you order a marinara. Have you been to Naples?’
‘No. My granny was Italian, but from the north.’
‘Your grandmother was Italian?’ he says. ‘Your colouring’s quite Celtic, that reddish brown hair with pale eyes …’
I feel myself blush under his attention. ‘I look like my dad’s side of the family more,’ I say. ‘But no, I’ve never been to Naples. I’ve always wanted to go, I hear it’s amazing.’
‘The drivers are insane but it’s just one of those cities, like New York – it has an amazing energy. You should come out next time we do a research trip. There’s this one pizza restaurant, Da Michele, they only have two pizzas on the menu, but they’re the best two pizzas in the world … anyway, where was I?’
‘Italian pizzas aren’t fattening …’
‘Right. But Fletchers pizzas aren’t in any way authentic. We have our standard two-inch greased base, and then we load it up with fatty proteins – bacon, meatballs, cheeseburger bites, sweet chilli chicken bites, all the stuff our customers love.’
‘So how are you cutting the calories?’
‘You take out the saturated fat in the base and replace it with a liquid fat substitute.’
‘Liquid fat substitute? Like the stuff you buy from the chemist if you’re obese, that makes you …’ I want to say anally incontinent, but of course I don’t want to bring our light and flirtatious conversation on to that particular subject.
‘Yes, liquid fat substitute – the stuff that means you can’t get on the tube,’ he says. ‘And then instead of cheese you have low-fat cheese substitutes.’ He picks off a handful of pale grey flaky matter from the pizza that looks more like a skin disease than cheese. ‘But unfortunately, because there are no fat proteins in the cheese substitute it won’t melt, even at two hundred degrees, so that’s one of the problems we’re looking at.’
‘What’s it made of?’