Two girls walk into a bar. There is no punchline.
I’m the girl on the left in the wildly inappropriate black and white spotty summer dress. It is the snowiest February in thirty-eight years but I flew back from a month in Buenos Aires three days ago and this tan ain’t going to waste.
A month in Buenos Aires: sounds glamorous? Ok: a month in a £6 a night hostel in the Boedo barrio – think Kilburn with 98% humidity. No air con, no overhead lighting, shared showers. I’m thirty-three. I earn okay money. I don’t like sharing showers, not least with 18-year-old Austrians proclaiming Wiener Blut the greatest Falco album ever released. Wieners aside, Laura and I have the time of our lives.
Laura is the girl on the right in the bar. Best friend, tough crowd, northerner. She’s wearing a polo neck and a woolly hat. Together we look ridiculous; we don’t care.
It is one of those evenings. Whether it’s the outfits, the tans or the sociability that a snowy Friday night in London brings, we end up being the epicentre of it all. One guy, Rob, has been trying to impress me for the last twenty minutes. He’s too pretty for my taste and he’s spouting off about knowing Martin Scorsese’s casting director.
‘I can see you playing a gangster’s moll in that dress,’ he says. ‘Those big green eyes. Real curves.’
I laugh. I’m a size 10, with tits and an arse, and the girl he’s abandoned at the bar talking to his mate is one of those girls you can count the vertebrae of through her silk shirt.
‘Are your eyes real?’ he says.
‘No, they’re mint imperials, I paint the irises on every morning to match my shoes,’ I say.
‘I like your brushwork,’ he says, smirking.
‘Your girlfriend’s getting pissed off,’ says Laura.
‘She’s with my mate,’ says Rob, fiddling with his watch. ‘Actually, do you girls want a drink? Two more margaritas?’ He heads to the bar. Before he’s even back there, his mate, who is less pretty and far more my type, heads towards us.
‘He doesn’t waste his time …’ says Laura.
I say nothing. I look at Rob’s friend and a rare but familiar feeling grabs me: something big is about to happen.
‘Why are you talking to Rob?’ he says to me, grinning. ‘You don’t fancy him.’
‘What business is it of yours?’ I say. ‘Do you fancy me?’
He looks at me for a heartbeat. ‘Yeah.’
‘Well, then you talk to me instead. What’s your name?’
‘James.’
‘James what?’
‘James Stephens.’
‘Like the poet.’
‘Ooh, a clever girl.’
‘I’m not,’ I say. ‘My granny has a poem of his she likes to quote.’
‘A love poem?’
‘Yeah, it’s about a man who throttles his over-attentive wife to death.’ He laughs.
‘I can tell you’re smart,’ he says. ‘And warm. It’s in your eyes. Don’t waste your time with Rob, waste it with me.’
So I did. I talked to him, danced a tango round the bar with him, sank three margaritas with him and at the end of the night gave him my number.
He calls when he says he will – the next day. Why do I feel so grateful for this? Because the world of dating has deigned this sort of behaviour too keen. ‘I want to see you again,’ he says.
‘Good.’
‘But I’m going away for a fortnight tomorrow.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s work. I travel quite a bit.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘China.’
‘What do you actually do?’ I’d imagined he was a high-end builder or something to do with running a warehouse. He’s very masculine, hefty, a bit rough round the edges, and his shirt last night didn’t quite fit.
‘You’ll laugh,’ he says.
‘Are you an international clown?’
‘No. I sell socks.’
‘What, like in a shop?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Everybody needs socks,’ I say.
‘At least two pairs,’ he says. ‘I’m back in a fortnight, I’d like to take you for dinner.’
‘Great. I like dinner.’
‘But do you like to eat?’
‘Are you joking? It’s what I do.’
‘You’re not one of those girls who orders salad and just pushes it round the plate? You’re pretty skinny.’
‘You’ve got the wrong number.’ I have slender arms and a small waist. You can fool most of the people most of the time with this combo.
‘Good. I know the perfect place. I’ll call you in two weeks.’
I work in a twelve-storey shiny building in Soho. Up until six months ago, I had one of the greatest jobs in the world and one of the greatest bosses. I am a Pudding Developer for Fletchers, one of the biggest supermarkets in the country. I worked for a genius called Maggie Bainbridge. She never compromised on quality and had bigger balls than any of the men here.
Six months ago she quit after management fired a bunch of our top talent and brought in a grunt of accountants, intent on putting the bottom line above everything else. Even our loo roll has been downgraded to that tracing paper crap from the 80s that you have to fish out of a cardboard slit.
Maggie’s started up a one-woman brownie business, ‘Happy Tuesday’. Even though we speak often, I miss her, and daydream about running off to work with her again.
So, I still have a great job, but I no longer have a great boss. No. I have Devron.
Devron used to work for a supermarket that was chewed up and spat out by a large American supermarket. He was regional manager for London South East, which is a Big Deal in Retail. Apparently he was very good at driving up and down motorways in his BMW.
His sole qualification for being head of my department seems to be that he is fat, ergo he ‘knows food’. Devron would be happy eating every meal from a service station on the M4. He thinks he’s an alpha male, he’s actually an aggressive little gamma.
The first thing Devron did when he joined was to make us all switch desks. Wanting to make his mark, and attempting to convey his profound creativity he decided to arrange us alphabetically. I used to sit with ‘Hot Puddings’, ‘Family Treats’ and ‘Patisserie’. Makes sense – we share the same buyers, technical advisers and packaging team. We liaise constantly about pastries, sugar prices, trends in the Treat market – all elements that are pudding specific.
But now, because I do Cold Desserts, I sit between Lisa, who does ‘Cocina’ – our fake-a Mexicana range of variety nachos, and Eddie: Curry. Devron says ‘we can learn a lot from talking to our colleagues’. True. I have learnt that Lisa, Eddie and I all agree: Devron is a nob.
The only thing more moronic than splitting us up from the people we need constant contact with, is Devron’s introduction of ‘cross-discipline platform solutions’. He has dumped a marketing wang on our bank of desks: Ton of Fun Tom.
Tom always wants to show me some great viral on YouTube featuring a gorilla or a dancing mouse. Tom’s knowledge of marketing is like my knowledge of Chechen history: he knows three random facts and feels guilty about not knowing more. However, I do not try to bullshit my livelihood as a Chechen historian.
Laura has come for lunch at the Fletchers’ canteen en route to do a voice-over for a car insurance website who want her husky Yorkshire accent to add ‘honest northern values’ to their shonky brand. Laura only has to do two voice-over sessions a month to pay her mortgage, and spends the rest of her time helping her boyfriend Dave run his eBay business selling vintage magazines.
This week’s canteen theme is ‘Pre-Valentine’s Value’ and we have the choice of heart-shaped pork bites or asparagus pasties. Sounds better than the falafel Eddie ordered last month, within which lurked a dog’s tooth.
‘James sounds keen,’ says Laura.
‘D’you think?’ If he was that keen, he wouldn’t wait two weeks to call me.
‘He wouldn’t let go of you the other night. You were dancing for ages.’
I love dancing. My ex, Nick, an introvert, danced with me once in five years: quarter-heartedly, for thirty-eight seconds, at his best friend’s wedding, and only after I’d threatened to embarrass him by dancing on my own if he didn’t.
‘Bet his friend wasn’t pleased,’ says Laura.
‘Rob’s an arse,’ I say. ‘That girl with them was Rob’s fiancée!’
‘She’s stood there while he chats you up?’ I nod. ‘You’re going to have some fun double dating …’ says Laura.
‘Early days, love. He might meet some sock model in China and never call again.’
My mother phones from California. She lives in an apartment in Newport Beach, OC heartland, with her second husband Lenny, a retired orthodontist and professional doormat.
‘Have you spoken to your brother?’ she asks, saving the pleasantries for another time.
‘Why?’
‘It’s Shellii.’ Or ‘the-scrawny-tramp-who-is-bleeding-your-brother-dry-with-her-spirituality-crystals-and-Lee-Strasberg-acting-classes’.
‘What now?’
‘She’s bloody pregnant.’
‘That’s good news, isn’t it?’ It means you won’t harangue me to have children for at least another two years.
A heavy silence on the other end.
‘Mum, she’s not that bad.’ Shellii’s so much worse than ‘that bad’, but I never agree with my mother on point of principle.
‘Huh. What’s news with you? How’s the flat?’
‘The flat’s fine. I’m fine.’
‘Job going well?’
‘I’m heading up cold puddings.’
‘Good, well eat some. Your grandmother said you’re looking very thin.’ My mother speaks to her ex-mother-in-law twice a year and it seems their sole remaining common ground is my weight.
I am currently slim and mostly toned but by no means ‘thin’. I will never be ‘thin’ – the Kleins are big boned. But since I split up with Nick last summer, I have lost a stone and a half through exercise and taking proper care of myself. For the first time since I was twelve, I’m almost happy with my body, save for a few inches around my bottom.
My mother takes my weight loss as a personal slight. A rejection of body fat is a direct rejection of what unites our family and everything she stands for. Food equals love, too much food equals Jewish love. At weddings, my genetically freakish thin cousin is the subject of whispered snipes about anorexia and suspect parentage. My mother feeds Lenny three large meals and half a cake every day. She will feed that man to an early grave and then overfeed everyone at the shiva (think full on Irish wake, but with egg-mayo sandwiches instead of whiskies).
‘Lenny’s just walked in, I’ve got to start lunch.’
Two weeks later James calls from Beijing airport. ‘Remember me?’
‘Clown school’s out for summer?’
‘You should see what I can do with three chopsticks and a scorpion.’
‘Sounds painful. Anyway, how can I help you?’
‘Tell me when you’re free for some spaghetti.’
My favourite. ‘A week on Wednesday.’
‘Too far away. I want to see you before then.’
Then you should have called me before now. ‘Sorry.’
‘Seriously, what are you doing between now and then?’
‘All sorts. Wednesday week, then?’
‘Okay. I’ll call you nearer the time with a plan. Got to go, they’re calling my flight.’
Is an average brownie better than none at all?
This is not the same as asking if a taste of honey is worse than none at all. When Smokey Robinson sang that, we can assume the ‘honey’ in question was just fine.
No, this question goes to the heart of what separates people like my old boss Maggie Bainbridge from most people on the planet who simply like cake.
When I went for the interview at Fletchers two years ago, I received an email from Maggie a week in advance:
Please bring:
1) A cake you’ve baked from a recipe book
2) A supermarket pudding you rate highly
It was like being asked to cook for Michel Roux Jr. on Masterchef. After agonising for days, I decided to keep it simple and make a Claudia Roden orange and almond cake that my mother makes at Passover. The texture is fantastic -totally squidgy yet light. The flesh and zest of the orange offset the sweetness and give the cake a fragrance that makes you think you’re in a Moroccan souk, rather than a fluorescent lit office block round the corner from the most toxic kebab shop on Oxford Street.
Maggie took a bite and her brow furrowed. My first thought: Christ, I hope she doesn’t have a nut allergy. But then she went over to her immense bookshelf, picked up a volume and slowly nodded.
‘It’s based on the Roden,’ she said. ‘But the depth of flavour you’ve got is superior to the original … there’s a pinch of cinnamon in there, you’ve put in slightly less sugar than ground almonds, and you’ve used blood orange, which is quite clever.’
I realise later that ‘quite clever’, from Maggie Bainbridge is like winning a Michelin star.
‘And what did you buy on the high street?’
Maggie Bainbridge famously invented the molten middle caramel pudding. Many chefs claim to have invented this pudding, but Maggie actually did. So, even though it is my favourite shop-bought pudding, there’s no way I could bring it in – far too creepy. Instead, I found a pudding in Marks and Spencer involving cream cheese, mascarpone, raspberries and dark chocolate that I thought was amazing, and took that in.
She gives me a strange look when I take it out of my bag. Shit. Of course, I should have brought in a Fletchers pudding, utterly stupid of me.
‘Why did you pick this?’ she says, with surprise verging on irritation.
‘You said bring something that you really like … it’s four of my favourite ingredients, the texture is amazing, the sharpness and the creaminess work perfectly together, and the chocolate they’ve used is at least 70% cocoa solids….’
‘Do you know anyone in new product development at M&S?’ she asks, looking concerned.
No, I shake my head. I wish – I’d be going for a job there if I did!
‘Have you tried it?’ I ask. I feel I have upset her but I’m not sure why.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you like it?’ I ask.
‘Yes. It’s good. One last question.’
One last question! She hasn’t asked me any proper questions, and now she’s about to get rid of me. What a bitch….
‘Do you think that an average brownie is better than none at all?’
What? What sort of a question is that for an interview? Clearly this must be a trick. Is she just finding out if I’m greedy? Or if I genuinely love pudding, or what? I don’t know what she wants me to say, but all I can tell her is the truth. Well, not quite the truth – my honest answer would be ‘if you are stoned, absolutely’. But then if you are stoned, an average brownie is transformed into a superior brownie anyway.
My truth is this: I would rather not eat a brownie than eat an average brownie.
Not because of the calories.
Not because I’m a snob.
But because for me, brownies are sacred; where they’re concerned I don’t do half measures. In the same way that I couldn’t marry a man I didn’t love, or be in a relationship with someone I didn’t respect, or sleep with a man who wasn’t funny.
‘I’d rather have nothing,’ I say.
She looks at me with the merest hint of approval in her eyes.
‘That M&S pudding you brought in,’ she says. Oh no, what is it? I knew there was something wrong. ‘I created that. Freelance. Entirely against the terms of my contract here, but M&S are the best and I couldn’t stop myself. I tried to push through a similar one here last summer and couldn’t get it signed off. The reason I’m telling you this is because I know I can trust you, because I only ever employ people I can trust.’
And that is how I got my job and came to work for Maggie Bainbridge, the best boss in the world.
Now that Maggie is no longer my boss, I only get to see her every few months. She is busy with her new brownie empire and has a wide circle of friends. She’s a 51-year-old single woman, but it’s harder to get a date in her diary than a table at Rao’s.
She has invited me for dinner the night before my planned first date with James. I would really like to stay at home, eat light and sleep properly so I can look my best for tomorrow. But he still hasn’t called, so I don’t know if we’re on or not. Besides, if I don’t see Maggie tonight I won’t get in her diary for ages, so after work I walk over to her flat in Marylebone.
She opens the door in a well-worn apron and the smell of freshly baked bread and roast chicken wafts through to me like a Bisto ad.
‘My God! You’re practically anorexic!’ she says, holding on to my shoulders and examining me up and down before squeezing me close for a hug. Her grey hair smells of fried onions – it’s wonderful.
‘As if! Look at the size of my arse,’ I say, turning around and offering her a feel.
She pinches my bottom. ‘There’s nothing of you, crazy girl. Come and let me fatten you up.’
We sit down in her kitchen and start drinking. If I don’t drink I’ll be thinking about my phone not ringing all night. Even if I do drink I’ll still be on edge, but it’ll dull the focus a bit.
‘How’s that odious little rat doing?’ she asks, holding out a wooden spoon with a dark golden sauce on it. ‘Honey, soy, tamari, toasted sesame …’
‘Devron’s Devron,’ I say. ‘He’s talking about 20% cuts across the board but he’s just upgraded his car to a convertible, and he’s hanging his new suit jacket the wrong way round on his chair so we can all see it’s Prada.’
‘Is he still dating that poor cow?’
‘Mands, yes. It was her nineteenth birthday last weekend, he took her to The Grove, showed us all the picture of the freestanding bath in their suite. With her in it, wearing only bubbles …’
She shakes her head in disbelief. ‘And Eddie, Lisa?’
‘Eddie’s good, Lisa’s angry. The usual.’
Over dinner we talk about her business. She’s just signed a distribution deal with a chain of luxury boutique hotels – each night at turndown guests will find a box of her mini brownies, beautifully wrapped, left on their pillow.
‘How’s the man situation?’ she asks, handing me a bowl of warm ‘blondies’ – her new vanilla brownies that she’s trialling for the hotels. ‘Macadamia on the left, Vermont maple on the right.’
‘Actually, I’m so sorry but do you mind?’ I say, popping to the hall and fishing my phone from my bag. It’s been on silent and I’m convinced that my removal of it from eyeline and earshot will have elicited a call. I vowed I wouldn’t check till I was on the bus home, but lying to yourself is fine, right?
A flashing light!
Fuck. A text from Laura asking if he’s rung yet.
‘What’s wrong?’ says Maggie.
‘Nothing,’ I say, despondently. ‘Just waiting for a call.’ I explain the scenario, and call upon her greater wisdom of life and men: ‘When is he going to call?’
I still believe James will ring. But I fully object to him not having called by now. I am someone who books up my diary weeks in advance to the time and place of meeting. I often check the menu online in advance, as I like to have something very specific to look forward to. I’m not a control freak, I can do spontaneous as well as the best free spirit (sometimes), but I am uncomfortable with uncertainty, and this man is an unknown unknown.
She refills my wine glass. ‘He said definitely this Wednesday?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he called you from China to fix the date?’
I nod.
‘He’ll call. Some men don’t like nattering on the phone. If he doesn’t call, he’s an idiot.’
‘I want him to call tonight.’
‘Out of your control,’ she says, opening a second bottle of wine.
I still believe that willing something to happen can make it happen. I also believe that particular idea is insane. Isn’t that a sign of intelligence, holding two opposing thoughts at the same time, or is that just a sign of schizophrenia?
I wake at three in the morning to a blue light on my phone. A text message. Is James out, drunk? Is he cancelling?
It’s my friend Lee, on a business trip to New York, wanting to know the name of that Vietnamese sandwich bar near Washington Square I was raving about. I text back, turn off my phone and wake again at 5.30am, dehydrated and in a bad mood.
It’s 2.15pm. I’m sitting in a meeting with Ton of Fun Tom, talking about marketing my new products for spring. My phone is on the desk in front of me and I am increasingly anxious, irritable and pissy. To be fair, every meeting I have with Tom makes me feel like this, but today is worse than usual. If James can call me from China, why can’t he call me now that he’s back in town?
‘Sophie, these raspberry and cream trifles – what are they?’
‘They’re trifles, Tom. Clue’s in the name.’
‘Right, yeah, but how does it work?’
‘How does what work?’
‘The cream and stuff?’
‘Here’s the picture. Those small pink things on top are called ‘raspberries’, that creamy coloured layer is ‘cream’, and underneath is the raspberry and cream trifle.’
‘Oh, so like a fruit trifle but with raspberries.’
My phone starts ringing. My heart pauses. It’s him. ‘Sorry, I have to get this.’
I leap up and leave the meeting – rude, but Tom always fiddles with his apps when I’m talking, so now we’re quits.
‘It’s James. Are you still free for dinner?’
‘Sure.’ I can pretend to be cool for at least one phone call.
‘Great. It’s a little Italian place at the top of Archway Road, I’ve booked a table at 8pm. Do you mind if we meet there? I’ve got something in town beforehand.’
‘See you there at 8pm.’
I breathe a sigh of relief. He’s just one of those guys who doesn’t like nattering. I walk back into the meeting. ‘Cup of tea, Tom?’
‘You look happy,’ says Lisa, Lady of the Nachos, when I return to my desk. I daren’t tell Lisa the smile on my face is because of some guy. Lisa’s turning forty and in a ‘bad place’ right now. She hates her husband, ever since he ran off with their two-doors-down neighbour. She hates her new boyfriend, because he’s not her husband. She hates her estate agent after he inquired if she was a teacher because she wore flat shoes and no make-up when she viewed the one-bedroom flats in her area. And she hates Devron, because he’s asked her to look at making her nachos range ‘bigger, cheaper and lower in fat’. That’s a tough order with a cuisine based on sour cream, cheap ground mince, cheese and tortilla chips.
‘I’ve been thinking about your nacho problem,’ I say. ‘Tell Devron that if he cuts out the cheese, sour cream and mince he’ll save loads of cash and the fat barometer will go from 9.7 to below a 5.’
She grunts a laugh. ‘He’s already brainstormed names with Tom and come up with Nach-Lows, Nosh-os and Skinny Bandito,’ she says, grimacing. ‘I spent a year in South America researching chillies and look at me now. I’m going to kill myself,’ she says. She looks like she means it.
‘Cheer up, Lisa,’ says Eddie, who is our desk’s resident optimist. ‘At least he hasn’t asked you to rethink your entire range based on what his girlfriend likes.’
‘No way.’
‘Apparently Mandy thinks our Chicken Korma’s not a patch on Asda’s, and says our Madras tastes a bit spicy …’
Lisa rolls her eyes, grabs her fag packet and marches off.
If I’m meeting James at 8pm, I need two hours prep time which means ducking out of work early – doable if Devron is in one of his endless meetings or on the phone to his barely-legal girlfriend, and if Janelle is walking the floors. Janelle is Devron’s rottweiler PA. Devron’s swollen self-importance comes from the fact that he is Head of Food Development at the UK’s seventh largest supermarket. La-di-da. Janelle’s comes from the fact that she is ‘PA to the Head of Food Development at the UK’s seventh largest supermarket’. If you printed that on a t-shirt, she’d wear it at the weekends.
Janelle and I have had an uncomfortable relationship since my first week here, when I saved a status report in a more logical place on the shared drive than:
S:/a4/janellestott/general/dayfiles/2010/js/Qzgg67/4/ac/dc/Y-me
By creating: S:/status reports, I have created a nemesis for life.
Janelle thinks I am disobedient. I think ‘I don’t care what you think,’ and we chafe against each other like an extra-small belt on a woman who likes custard and cream with her apple crumble. (No prizes for guessing who is who in that metaphor.)
I’m in luck – neither of them is visible and I bolt out the door and jump in a cab home.
Home is a mansion block in Little Venice: misleading. When I hear mansion, I think Krystle Carrington’s sweeping staircase, not a one-bedroom, fifth floor flat with no lift. And Little Venice is pushing it – more like Little A40, within a Tango can’s throw of the Westway. Still, Little’s accurate. And if I walk out of my flat and turn left I can be at Regent’s Canal in two minutes, and at Baker and Spice eating a blueberry muffin in three and a half.
I take the stairs two at a time – work to do! I dump my bag on top of my mail on the doormat and head straight for the bathroom, disrobing en route. I’m the lowest maintenance girlfriend on the planet after six months, but a first date is a first date and I have waited three weeks to see this man; I am going to look my absolute best.
My long brown hair is naturally curly. No one but Laura and my immediate family have seen me with curly hair since I was fourteen and no one ever will and live to write about it. When I blow-dry it carefully it takes an hour. Today: seventy minutes. Make up is light and for once I don. . .
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