Blessed Are the Cheesemakers

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

Genres: Humor & Satire; Small Town & Rural; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Set on a small Irish dairy farm, this tender and funny debut novel follows two lost souls as they try to carve out new lives amid a colorful cast of characters reminiscent of those in the hit film Waking Ned Divine. Abby has been estranged from the family farm since her rebellious mother ran off with her when she was a small child. Kit is a burned out New York stockbroker who's down on his luck. But that's all about to change, now that he and Abby have converged on the farm just in time to help Corrie and Fee, two old cheesemakers in a time of need. Full of delightful and quirky characters--from dairy cows who only give their best product to pregnant, vegetarian teens to an odd collection of whiskey-soaked men and broken-hearted women who find refuge under Corrie and Fee's roof -- Blessed are the Cheesemakers is an irresistible tale about taking life's spilled milk and turning it into the best cheese in the world.

Release date: October 1, 2004

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 336

Sample

CHAPTER ONE

“You can’t hurry cheese. It happens in its own time and if that bothers you, you can just feck off.”

Joseph Feehan, from The Cheese Diaries, Radio Telefis Eireann (RTE) Radio Archives

The Princess Grace Memorial Blue sat on the table in front of Abbey, screaming to be eaten.

Abbey, as always, was smiling her dreamy smile, her eyes half closed and her head slightly thrown back, as though she were preparing to blow out a candle and make a wish. Well, it was her twenty-ninth birthday, after all, and there would have been candles, too, had not the Princess Grace been a particularly fussy cheese, inclined to expel a pungent foul-smelling aroma if fiddled with in any fashion. Actually, this pernicketiness was what made her so special. She was made with fresh Coolarney milk hand-expressed at daybreak every April 19 and she was treated like royalty from the first tweak of the first teat to the last crumb on the last tongue. She insisted on it. She was that sort of a cheese.

Her creators, Joseph Corrigan and Joseph Feehan, better known as Corrie and Fee, could not take their eyes off her. They’d been making the Memorial Blues just one day a year ever since Grace Kelly (with whom they were both in love at the time) broke their hearts by marrying Prince Rainier of Monaco on April 19 in 1956. The resulting cheeses were wildly sought after and cherished throughout the world, but nowhere as much as at home.

“She’s a fine feckin’ thing,” Fee said, licking his lips in a mildly lascivious manner, his cheeks rosy with anticipation as his fat round bottom bounced in its seat.

“She’s all right,” agreed Corrie, raising his eyebrows in a show of appreciation. Abbey looked on, smiling.

Princess Grace stood taller than the average Coolarney Blue. Her flesh was palest blond, the exact shade of her namesake’s hair in her heyday, and her veins were a perfect mixture of sky blue and sea green, silvery in some lights, black in others, depending on her mood.

Her fans had been sitting in the smoking room for nearly two hours, just watching and waiting for her to reach the perfect temperature. The room was their favorite and, unlike almost every other in the rambling, gracious home, was out of bounds to the many Coolarney House comers and goers. It needed little sun, which was just as well because little sun was what it got. Two whole walls were devoted to shelves, overflowing with magazines and books, some of them over one hundred years old. The other walls were painted a rich dark green and the woodwork, too, was varnished extra dark, giving a somber, hunting lodge sort of appeal.

Corrie was in his brown leather La-Z-Boy rocker recliner, Fee in his overstuffed patched brocade armchair. Between them, on a little round table with unmistakable altar overtones, as befitted this and every cheese-eating occasion, sat the glorious Grace and, of course, Abbey.

At seventy-three Corrie bore the same uncanny resemblance to Jimmy Stewart that he had as a younger man (although the girls commented on this less now that Jimmy was mostly a memory, long since replaced by Mels and Harrisons and Brads). His eyes were sparkling blue, his gray hair thick and slicked back with some ancient odor-free hair cream. He’d been six feet two once upon a time, but admitted now to a stoop that he blamed on the years spent bending over the cheese vat, which had shortened him by a couple of inches. Always impeccably dressed, he was wearing a pale blue woolen sweater over a crisp white cotton shirt and a dark brown pair of ’50s-style high-waisted trousers.

Fee, on the other hand, was wearing a desperate pair of pond-scum green corduroy pants, belted around his not insubstantial middle with an old piece of twine. His checked brown shirt and gray cardigan matched only in the number of holes that happened in the same spot, giving the impression that at some stage, many years earlier, he had perhaps been poked all over with a giant sharpened pencil.

Fee was as short and stout as Corrie was tall and lean, and should they be standing close together, as they often were, from a distance they looked for all the world like the letters d or b—depending on which side Fee was standing.

“Twenty-nine,” Fee said, shaking his head in Abbey’s direction, his voice tinged with a peculiar sort of amazement. “You wouldn’t credit it.”

Corrie nodded in agreement, and looked from Abbey to the Princess and back again. God knew he loved his cheeses, but what he felt for Abbey at that precise moment, or any moment she occupied his thoughts, no dairy product of any kind, even an impeccably flawless gem like Princess Grace, could ever hope to match. Yet still he felt sad. He poked at the fire’s glowing embers and concentrated on the loud tick-tocking of his grandfather’s clock as they waited in companionable silence.

“It’s time, Joseph,” Fee said finally, when he knew that it was, and he sat forward in his chair and reached for his cheese knife.

“For Grace?” Corrie asked, surprised. He’d have thought it another while away yet, but Fee was the expert, there’d be no argument there.

“For a lot of things,” Fee said cryptically, sucking a wedge of the Princess off the blade of his bone-handled knife and forcing it up against the roof of his mouth. He pushed his tongue against it, soaking up its perfect texture and exquisite flavor.

“Right so,” said Corrie, gently moving in to slice a chunk out of Grace with his own stainless-steel knife. He’d known Joseph Feehan for seventy-three years and for the first sixty-five had tried to make sense of what he said. More recently he had given up, realizing that it made no difference to the outcome and anyway it was part of Fee’s charm. And Fee needed all the charm he could get.

Corrie raised his knife, sporting its perfectly balanced creamy blue wedge, in the direction of Abbey and toasted her.

“Happy birthday, Abbey,” he said. “I hope you’re enjoying it and please God you’ll be with us for the next one.”

Abbey kept smiling her dreamy smile, eyes half closed, head slightly thrown back.

Corrie tucked his melancholy away and surrendered his senses to the touch and taste of Princess Grace. How she lingered on his lips! How she sang to his saliva! How she tap-danced on his taste buds! When the last tingle of the first taste had melted away to nothing, Corrie turned to his granddaughter, reached across the table and picked her up, planting a kiss on her smile. He looked at the photo awhile, tracing with his smooth cheesemaker’s finger the lip-shaped smudge his kiss had left on the glass in the frame, then he sighed and put Abbey back on the table.

It’s time all right, Fee thought quietly to himself as he reached for another wedge.

CHAPTER TWO

“Once upon a time, before the world was run by men in fancy suits, ‘grass roots’ meant just that. Grass roots. With cheese, that’s where it all begins. You can’t make good cheese with bad grass.”

Joseph Feehan, from The Cheese Diaries, RTE Radio Archives

A month or two later, across the Atlantic in New York City, another Princess Grace was living a far less fêted existence. Sure, she was sitting in a state-of-the-art refrigerator in a $7,000-a-month loft apartment in fashionable SoHo, but her only companions were two bottles of Budweiser and half a pizza that had gnarled and twisted almost beyond recognition.

The Princess oozed annoyance. She emanated anger. She fumed. Literally. She fumed. And when a good Princess turned bad, it was an eye-watering experience. She’d been sitting there in her waxed wrapper inside a brown paper bag from Murray’s Cheese for nearly three months now, and it had taken this long to permeate all the layers. Now, her time for being tasty was over. Now she was just plain evil.

In the bedroom down the hallway Kit Stephens, oblivious to this, opened his eyes and felt the bashing of a thousand tiny hammers against his skull.

“Go away,” he growled to himself. “Leave me alone.”

The banging continued. It was still dark in his room, but then that was what three walls of mind-bogglingly expensive blinds straight out of the pages of Wallpaper bought you in Manhattan. It meant nothing. It could have been midday for all he knew (although he hoped it was not). The mere thought of moving his arm to look for his watch, however, made him heave.

Searching the bits of his brain that weren’t being hacked at by pickaxes, he tried to recall the events of the previous night. There’d been martinis, a lot of them, after work at China Grill, he could remember that. Then there had been some inedible muck at one of the ethnic restaurants that Manhattan was full of these days. He could vaguely remember crashing through a Korean place to the secret bar at the back and, Jesus, had someone been doing lines there?

Kit moved his head ever so slightly and looked at the other side of the bed. Someone was in it. And it wasn’t Jacey. Jacey had long blond hair, a model’s body and the face of an angel. Whoever this was had short black hair, a model’s body and a face he couldn’t see because she was lying on her stomach, turned away from him. Actually, thought Kit, almost raising his head off the pillow despite its condition, her shoulder blades were exquisite and the back of her neck . . . Ouch. The back of her neck just ached to be nuzzled and kissed.

A lump rose in his throat as he thought about the back of Jacey’s neck. He closed his eyes again and stopped almost raising his head. Would he ever get used to waking up without her? Or worse, waking up with a complete stranger and wondering how the hell she got into his bed? It hadn’t happened often, but it had happened. He looked over at the beautiful back of whoever she was and felt nothing but an overwhelming sadness tinged with shame. He was feeling a lot of that lately.

Kit took a deep breath, rolled onto his side and swung his legs out of the bed, his head spinning with the movement, despite trying, as he was, to sit up in slow motion. Carefully he stood up, waiting to see how the contents of his stomach would cope. Almost immediately he felt rebellion from down below and, staggering to the bathroom, he fell to his knees on the tiled floor, clutched the toilet bowl like an old friend and horked up half of Ethiopia’s annual food supply.

Classy, Kit thought to himself as the retching started to subside. Real classy. With a groan he let himself slide down to the floor until his face hit the tiles and, comforted by their coldness and hardness, the room spinning slowly around him, he passed out.

“Hey, buddy. You. Buddy. Wake up!”

Coming to sometime later was hardly a more enjoyable experience. The girl who had been in his bed was now standing over him, nudging his shoulder with her foot. She wore metallic purple nail polish and had a silver ring on her second toe.

“Jesus, I thought you were dead,” she said, standing naked with her hands on her snakelike hips, looking down at him. “You got any cigarettes? Beer? Blow? Anything?”

Kit slowly pulled himself up to a sitting position and leaned back against the wall beside the toilet, suddenly irrationally embarrassed by being naked in front of this strange woman.

“Yeah, right.” The strange woman snorted derisively at his modesty, then turned around and sat on the toilet.

Kit rested his head on his knees and listened to the tinkling sound of her bladder being emptied.

“Don’t worry,” she said in a bored tone, her hand flailing around beside him looking for the toilet paper. “We didn’t do it or anything. Just talked about your dead wife for two hours.” She wiped herself, sniffed, stood up and flushed the toilet as what she had said sunk into Kit’s addled brain.

Jacey was dead? The little hammers had stopped banging but Kit was suddenly being deafened by another sound: his heart beating louder and louder and louder inside his chest. Jacey was dead. Jacey was dead. Jacey was dead. If he said it enough times, maybe . . . He threw on the brakes. The little men with hammers were easier to bear than memories of Jacey. He hugged his knees even closer to his body, and although he really, really didn’t want to—especially in front of this girl, whoever she was—he started to cry.

“Jesus,” said the girl, by now washing her hands. She looked at him in mild disgust, then snatched a towel from the heated rail and threw it at his feet before turning to inspect her pretty face in the mirror. “Hey, where did you get that coke anyway?” she said, zooming in on an imaginary spot on her flawless skin and inserting a casual tone to the question that was far from genuine. “It was pretty good.”

Kit picked up the soft, warm towel she’d thrown at him and buried his head in it, soaking up the comforting clean smell and rubbing the velvety fabric up and down against his cheeks, sobbing as noiselessly as he could.

“So, would it be okay if I, like, helped myself to your stash before I go?” the girl said. Kit looked up and saw she was twisting her hips at him like a little girl asking for candy. Her pubic hair was waxed into a tiny little Brazilian runway, which for some reason depressed him even further. He felt disgusting. Disgusted. With himself.

“Okay,” the girl said, after he collapsed into his towel again. “Whatever.”

She padded out of the bathroom. Sometime later, Kit had no idea whether it was five minutes or fifty-five minutes, he heard the door to his apartment open and close and he knew she was gone.

What’s happening to me? he bawled into his towel, but he couldn’t bear to answer himself. Instead he thought about his breathing, then, when he had controlled the sobbing, he crawled into the shower where he let the hot water deal with his hangover and his tears.

Half an hour later he was dressed and shaved. It was past eight o’clock and he had already missed the seven o’clock trading meeting, not for the first time in recent weeks. He would have hundreds of messages waiting from clients and e-mails mounting by the moment. George would be pissed.

Kit looked at himself in the hallway mirror. Apart from the dark circles under his eyes, he thought he looked okay. The square, handsome face looking back at him showed little sign of a late night binge or, worse, he cringed, a crying jag. But as he stared at the green-eyed image of himself, Kit felt the thoughts he hadn’t wanted earlier attempt another ambush on his brain, and the weird feeling he’d been having so often started to creep from his groin through his gut and up to his chest.

He was sure he saw his face grow pale in the mirror and, unless his imagination was playing tricks on him, each breath was more shallow and coming quicker than the last. Panicked, he gripped the hall table, his knuckles white with the effort. Then he saw it. Sitting in the silver tray with his keys and his wallet was a little plastic bag containing a dusting of white powder. So that’s what the girl had been talking about. The blow. But why hadn’t she taken it? Kit thought to himself as he stood, trembling, in his hallway. It wasn’t his. He didn’t do drugs. He never had and he never would. Especially not now, after . . .

A vague dreamlike image of money changing hands in a busy bar started to cloud his thoughts like an incoming storm, and panic grabbed again at his stomach. He tried to get his breathing under control but still it raced away from him, dread lurching from his heart to his guts and back again. If he was going to be able to cope with the next few moments, let alone the rest of the day, he needed to ease whatever was gnawing away at him.

Grabbing the little plastic bag from the hall table, he stumbled into the kitchen and emptied what little remained of its contents into the sink and washed it down the drain. He rinsed out the bag and threw it in the trash.

His stomach was still revolting. He needed to calm down. He needed peace and tranquility. Kit looked at the refrigerator for less than a heartbeat before opening the door. The smell hit him like a tsunami but, blind to the Princess and her fury, he had eyes only for the Grey Goose in the freezer.

He poured the contents of the bottle down his throat, his chaotic innards falling into line as they were massaged by the smooth satiny vodka. Relieved and much calmer, he easily took a deep, long breath and headed for the door, looking again in the mirror as he walked by with a confident smile. Now he could face the day.

Outside his apartment, the Peterson girls were giggling in the hallway, waiting for the elevator. Or him. Giggling and the Peterson girls went hand in hand where Kit was concerned, although he had not noticed this until Jacey pointed it out and started a relentless campaign of teasing him about it. Since then, he’d tried as hard as he could to avoid them, avoid the whole family, in fact. It had been their mother, Sasha, who had found Jacey and—Kit pulled nervously at his tie. He closed his eyes and tried not to think about it again. About her.

Inside the elevator, the two girls continued to whisper and giggle, getting louder and louder until finally the elder one, Charlotte, pushed the younger one, Jessica, so that she fell into him. She jumped away and stood up straight, blushing and glaring at her sister.

“Ask him,” dared Charlotte. “Go on. Ask him.”

Kit turned to look at Jessica, as though he had only just noticed her.

“Ask me what?” he said as coolly as he could without being unfriendly.

Jessica shook her head and hugged her schoolbag close to her chest.

“Ask him,” insisted Charlotte, eyeballing her sister ferociously.

“Ask me what?” said Kit, now directing his question at Charlotte.

“Ask you what Coco Lloyd was doing coming out of your apartment at 7:30 this morning,” said Charlotte boldly.

Kit’s confidence in his ability to handle the day vanished. He felt sick, but tried not to look it. So he’d been right. She was a model. Trust one of those Prada-conscious Peterson girls to be lurking around at just the wrong time. (He hadn’t done anything wrong but that didn’t mean he didn’t feel like he had done something wrong. He considered offering up a prayer that the girls wouldn’t tell their mother but doubted he’d get a lot of sympathy.) It was less than three months since he’d lost Jacey, and he didn’t want Sasha Peterson to think he was that sort of guy because he wasn’t.

“I’m doing some work on her stock portfolio and she was dropping off some papers, if you must know,” he said, acting far more nonchalant than he felt. Picking up strange women in bars was really not his thing, even if it had happened a couple of times lately. Not to mention that it was too soon. He thought so and everybody else would too. “She’s one beautiful woman, though, I’ll give you that,” he added.

Charlotte and Jess exploded with laughter.

“‘She’s one beautiful woman,’” Charlotte mimicked, amid snorts and guffaws.

“What’s wrong with that? What’s funny about that? She is a beautiful woman,” Kit said, vaguely annoyed, as the elevator arrived at the ground floor and the door opened.

“She’s a beautiful girl, jerk-off,” said Charlotte as she pushed past him. “She’s in Jessie’s grade at school.”

Kit felt the familiar frenzy clawing at his innards again. Barely able to move, he watched Charlotte and Jessica wave at the doorman before disappearing into the street in their school uniforms. In Jessie’s grade at school? But Jess was only in eleventh grade. How old did that make her? Sixteen? Fifteen?

“Oh, Jesus,” groaned Kit.

“All right there, Mr. Stephens?” Benny the doorman called, stepping out from behind his desk with a worried look on his face as he came to Kit’s aid. “You’d better sit down. You look all done in.”

He guided the shaking Kit over to the leather sofa in the reception area and eased him down onto it. “Can I get you anything? A glass of water?”

Kit nodded his head and Benny disappeared into his office just as Kit’s cell phone started to ring. The feeling of dread doubled, then tripled, then multiplied itself by a thousand.

“Kit Stephens,” he said, without much enthusiasm, into the phone.

“Where the hell are you, Christopher?” George’s voice boomed out of the earpiece. “We’ve got the Chemocorp deal going through this morning, the AsiaBank report—as if I need to remind you—out at eleven and your assistant is starting to put your calls through to me because some of your clients are ringing back for the third time today. Did I mention we missed you at the meeting this morning? Christ, that’s the second time this week, Kit.”

There was silence.

“Kit, are you there?”

“Yes, George, I’m on my way. Something came up and I—”

“Spare me the details. Just get here.” George hung up in his ear.

“Sounds like what you might call a shit of a morning, huh, Mr. Stephens?” Benny said cheerfully, appearing at his side with a glass of water, which Kit glugged down greedily before getting to his feet and checking to see if his legs were working properly.

“You could say that, Benny. God, what’s the matter with me?” He felt his pockets just to reassure himself he was still inside his suit, then exhaled sharply and collected his wits. “Hey, thanks for the water, pal,” he said. “I was just, uh, surprised by something the Peterson girls sprung on me, that’s all.”

He offered the doorman a weak smile and patted him on the shoulder in a friendly show of appreciation.

“They’ll have a few more surprises in store for the likes of us, them two, huh?” said Benny as he watched Kit’s back retreat through the doors and out into the street in search of a cab.

For once, Kit didn’t stop to take in the breathtaking view from the twenty-seventh floor of the glass and stainless building they called the Toast Rack when he arrived at work.

His assistant, Niamh, stood up from behind her desk when she saw him and intercepted him at the door to his office. “George wants to see you,” she said, looking at him closely. “And I don’t think he wants to swap recipes.”

Kit closed his eyes and tried to straighten his head. Niamh strode back to her desk and opened her top drawer, returning with some breath-freshening mints.

“Don’t blow it now, Kit,” she said, staring at him with her earnest eyes. “You’ve come too far.”

For a moment Kit thought about asking her to hold him and let him cry for a while on her shoulder. But even through the jelly in his head he realized now was probably not the time. Now was the time to get yelled at by George, his friend and boss, a guy famous for having very little patience and a lot of sarcasm. He turned and walked past the rows of trading desks where eighty of his colleagues were shouting into headsets and bashing at their telephones and keyboards. Nobody was looking at him but he couldn’t remember if that was normal or not. He passed Eddie’s office but the door was shut. Maybe Ed hadn’t made it into work this morning either. God, thought Kit, it would be great to not be the only one in the shit.

George’s assistant, Pearl, a gorgeous Asian woman with legs that raised the temperature of water coolers the whole floor over, indicated that he should go straight in.

George was behind his desk, on the phone. “I’ll call you right back,” he said into the receiver and placed it carefully in its cradle.

“Kit,” he said, motioning for him to sit down. “So nice of you to join us.”

George’s eyes were as cold as Christmas yet his lips were smiling and the sunlight glinting off his shiny bald head cast a certain jauntiness on the scenario. Kit suddenly wondered if he was dreaming and started to smile as well. Maybe the not-really-happening-to-him feeling that had been plaguing him these past few weeks was justified. Maybe it wasn’t really happening to him.

“I’m glad to see you have retained your sense of humor, Christopher,” George said, the smile slipping off his face like mud in a landslide. “That the seriousness of the situation is not dampening your spirits in any way.”

Kit cleared his throat. The chances of it all being a dream, he supposed, were really quite slim but that was okay. He wasn’t naturally a dreamer, he had his feet on the ground, everyone said so.

“God, George,” he said. “I’m real sorry about this morning. It’s just that, ah, I got held up back at the apartment with the neighbors. One of their girls had taken the dog for a walk and lost it in the park and Sasha Peterson—remember her? I think you met her last Thanksgiving. Anyway, she came and asked if I could—”

George, unable to listen to another syllable of Kit’s labored excuse, suddenly thumped his fist on his desk with a rage of which Kit had heard but never dreamed he would bear the brunt.

“Don’t. Fuck. With. Me. Kit,” he said in a voice so cold and hard Kit couldn’t believe he wasn’t shouting. “I’ve had enough. I’ve heard enough. You are messing up big time, buddy, and you are not going to do it on my shift any longer.”

“Your shift?” Kit laughed, albeit nervously. “Come on, George, what is this, Hill Street Blues?”

George took a deep breath. “Kit, you don’t seem to understand. You seem to have forgotten that there are kids out there on that trading desk who would do your job for free, just to prove that they can. There are kids out on the streets who would do the jobs of the kids on the trading desk, just to prove that they can. The places left empty on the streets? They would be filled like that”—he snapped his fingers—“with other kids also willing to do anything, anything, for nothing, no money, nothing, just to prove that they can. Are you with me?”

Kit was bewildered.

“What I am saying, Christopher, is that you are no longer an indispensable part of the broking team here at Fitch, Wright and Ray. As of 8:30 this morning your clients were transferred to Ed Lipman, and your office is to be occupied by Tom Foster from the desk. We will pay you a month’s notice and your stock options can be cashed in with no penalty for choosing not to remain employed here for the required ten years, although you will have to wait until the ten years is up. I believe that will be, luckily for you, in just a couple of weeks’ time. In the meantime, good-bye.”

The sun still glinted off of George’s bald pate as Kit sat stunned in his seat.

“Jesus, George,” he said, trying to laugh and failing miserably. “You’re firing me?”

“No, Kit, you are resigning.”

George paused, then looked at his friend and shook his head, thawing slightly now that the worst part was over. “Jesus, man, look at yourself,” he said more softly. “You’ve been a mess since Jacey—”

“This is not about Jacey,” Kit broke in, his voice shaky but determined nonetheless. “Do not talk about Jacey.”

“Kit, you’ve got to accept the facts,” said George, exasperated. “Without her, you have been a disaster area. Jesus, and I thought with her you were a disaster area. You can’t do a decent day’s work anymore, Kit. You don’t sleep. You can’t concentrate. Your drinking is way out of control. I can’t trust you anymore. Your clients can’t trust you anymore. You’re a mess, my friend. You are an embarrassment.”

“But, George,” Kit said, feeling the words starting in his throat strong and sure before stumbling over his tongue, tripping on his lips to end up weak and pathetic and whining, “we’re buddies. I’m your daughter’s godfather, for chrissakes. I made a speech at your wedding. Jesus, we go back. Way back. I’m your top guy. We built this firm up together, you and Eddie and me, from almost nothing. The money I’ve made you, made us. God, doesn’t that count for something?”

George looked at him sadly. “Kit, the day you met Jacey Grey was the day you stopped being my top guy. It was bad enough when she was here but since she’s been gone you have turned into someone I don’t even know anymore. Look at you! I can smell the booze from here, Kit. When did you have your last drink? Did you even get any sleep last night? Can you even remember where you were, what you did?”

Smell the booze? What was he talking about? Kit started to feel the panic rising in his stomach again.

“Remember what I did? Sure,” he said, uncertainly. “Had a few drinks with the guys at the Grill and then, uh, hung out a bit, I guess. What does it matter?”

“It matters to me,” said George, once again cold and unfriendly. “It particularly matters to me that you downed half a dozen tequila shots in some swanky bankers’ joint then shouted for Cristal for your companions before snorting a line of coke on the bar in front of two of our biggest clients. You then tried to pay the bill with your company credit card, which, by the way, is maxed out. It’s not the nineties anymore, Kit. Nobody wants to see money being spent like that. It’s disgusting.”

Kit was speechless. George had his facts wrong. What the hell was he going on about? Snorting coke in a bar? Someone had been but it wasn’t him. The panicky feeling had reached the insides of his face by now. A drink would be great, he thought. He realized he was sweating.

“You’re not. . .