Читать книгу Here’s Looking At You - Mhairi McFarlane, Mhairi McFarlane - Страница 18

James knew the moment of reckoning would arrive eventually, and arrive it did, at 11 a.m., after Spandau Ballet’s greatest hits had left him feeling destitute.

‘Guys, just confirming we’re still on for the big night out for the company’s fifth birthday. I’ll email the itinerary soon,’ Harris said to the room. He was in his ironic t-shirt that said BOB MARLEY under an image of Jimi Hendrix and a pair of tartan drainpipes. ‘We all good?’

James had turned the options over already. He could play for time and simply say yes, he and Eva were still coming.

But the deposit was £100. He’d need a reason for Eva’s no-show. Something gastric, or a family crisis. James would be telling the kind of fibs that tie you in knots, bind your legs together and trip you over, face down onto a hard surface.

So far, failing to tell them he and Eva had split up was a lie of omission, navigating little semantic slalom courses when someone asked what he’d been up to at the weekend.

This would require active untruths – doctor’s appointments and non-transferable flights to Stockholm and remembering who’d done what, and to whom he’d told it. And when the truth of her absence was finally revealed, they’d work backwards and work it out. He could picture Harris, in one of his Playdoh-bright tank-tops, holding a hand up and saying: ‘OMFG, dudes. That was why she didn’t come to the five bash? I always thought the cancerous nephew was a crock of plop.’

The pity would be all the greater, mixed with derision. It was bad enough they had to know; James couldn’t bear them knowing he minded them knowing.

‘Uh. Actually, change my plus one. Eva and I have split up.’

Harris goggled at him. Ramona’s jaw dropped almost as far as her Tatty Devine MONA plastic nameplate necklace. A hush fell over the room, a hush punctuated by the squeak of half a dozen people turning in their chairs at once. Lexie, the pretty new copywriter, audibly gasped. Charlie, the only other married member of staff, who still dressed like he’d wandered off a skate park, mumbled a sorry mate.

‘Seriously?’ Ramona said, always ready with the wrong word.

No, she danced off in clown shoes squirting a custard gun.

‘Seriously.’

‘Why …?’

James mustered every last scrap of nonchalance he didn’t possess.

‘Wasn’t working out. It’s pretty friendly, it’s fine.’

He sensed Ramona’s desperation to ask who-dumped-who, but even her level of crass shrank from it. For now.

‘OK … well, I’ll put you down for one place then?’ Harris said.

James wrestled with the stigma of divorcing loser. Wrestled with it for only seconds.

‘Actually I was going to bring someone else. If that’s OK?’

Ramona’s jaw clunked open again.

‘Someone …? There’s someone new already? Oh. Is that why …’

James felt totally, completely justified in having not told them the truth. This was agony.

‘It didn’t help,’ he said, in a brusque, heartbreaker manner.

James turned back to his screen and congratulated himself on a job done, if not a job well done. He’d take plenty of time getting his lunchtime sandwich so that the analysis would be done by the time he returned.

So all he needed now for the birthday party was a one-night-hire-only girlfriend. Sounded like the kind of thing Laurence could help with.