“What? No. I defecate very privately.”
Evil Father Christmas narrowed his eyes. “I never forget a face, young man, and I don’t like yours. Besides, never trusted the Irish.”
“Um.” Probably I should have stood up for my mother’s father’s people but I increasingly wanted to get the hell out of there. Unfortunately Racist Santa was blocking the exit. “Sorry about the…face. I really need to—”
“What are you doing here anyway?”
“Using the…facilities?”
“Loitering. That’s what you’re doing. Lurking in a communal lavatory like you’re waiting for Jeremy Thorpe.”
“I really just want to go back to my friends.”
I managed to sidle past him with my hands in the air like I was being arrested. His head did almost a full exorcist as his cold, dead eyes followed me out. “I’m watching you O’Toole. Never forget a face. Never forget a name.”
Back at the table, my so-called companions were enjoying my absence.
“—quarter blue for tiddlywinks in the end,” Alex was saying cheerfully. “Miffy’s the real sportsman. I mean, sportslady. Suppose we’d better be politically correct about these things. Full blue for lacrosse, don’t you know. Invited to join Team GB but turned it down, didn’t you, old girl? Wanted to focus on… Oh I say, what is it you do, Miffy?”
I sat down, trying to figure out if I was relieved or pissed off that everyone was carrying on as if I hadn’t made an enormous scene.
Miffy tapped her perfect lips with a perfect nail. “Now you come to mention it, I have no idea. I think I’ve got an office somewhere, and I might be launching some kind of line, but mostly I just get invited to parties. Not like Ally, who’s got an actual, you know, job. Which everybody thinks is terribly funny. But he goes in every day, which is so good of him, isn’t it?”
This would have been a great time for me to be mature and say sorry. “I’m not sure,” I said instead, “‘good of him’ is the right phrase. Maybe more ‘contractually obligated’ of him?”
“Are you quite certain?” Alex tilted his head like a bewildered parrot. “That doesn’t seem quite cricket. Chap makes a commitment, chap follows through on it. One doesn’t need to get all legal about things—no offence, Oliver.”
“None taken.” Of course Oliver wasn’t taking offence. Oliver was an angel. While I was a slime demon from the planet Jerkface.
“Well, I say it’s splendid. And, of course”—here Miffy bestowed a dazzling smile on me, which in the circumstances felt an awful lot like a participation trophy—“you’re splendid too, Luc. Since you do the same job.”
Great. So now not only did Oliver know that my job wasn’t something I was passionate about, the way he was about his, but he was also going to think you could do it with about three functioning brain cells.
“Oh no,” exclaimed Alex. “Luc’s much more important than I am. No clue what he does, but it seems terribly complicated and involves, oh, what do you call them? Things with the little boxes?”
Miffy wrinkled her nose thoughtfully. “Cricket teams?”
“Not quite, old girl. Spreadsheets, that’s the word. I just muck about with the photocopier, check we don’t have more than two meetings in the same room at the same time, and keep Daisy alive.”
“Who’s Daisy?” asked Oliver, still ignoring me but, let’s be honest, I probably deserved it.
“She’s the aloe vera I’m growing in the filing cabinet. Our social media chappie burns himself on the coffee machine quite a lot, and Nurse always used aloe vera on us when we were small and it’s jolly efficacious. In fact, I’m thinking we might need two because the poor dear is looking quite denuded in the leaf department.”
“On another topic,” I announced, changing the subject with all the grace and subtlety of someone sayingCan we change the subject now, “a scary old man went for me in the bathroom. I mean, yelled at me. Not, like, tried to hit on me.”
“Thank you for clarifying that.” It was Oliver’s driest tone. So far Operation Come Across as a Total Prick was running ahead of schedule.
Alex frowned. “How very rum. Did you do anything to provoke him?”
My apology window had closed an aloe vera ago. So I was basically stuck with sort of pretending I hadn’t been awful, even though I blatantly had, and trying to find the mythical middle ground between making it worse and overcompensating. “Nice to know you’re taking his side already. But, for the record, no. I was minding my own business by the sink when this mad old coot barged in and—”
“Alex, m’boy,” bellowed the mad old coot, materialising behind me like the serial killer in a horror movie. “How’s the old man?”
“Can’t complain, Randy. Can’t complain.”
“Very much enjoyed his speech in the Lords recently about, oh, what was it…”
“Badgers?”