Five Go Glamping (4 page)

‘Look, I’ll be back later,’ he said as I was getting out of the car ‘I promise.’

‘I don’t want you to come back later,’ I said and I slammed the door on the car.

Connor used to be such a big part of my plan. I knew people said relationships weren’t easy, but it felt like ours was hard work all the time. At times it was so awkward, like I didn’t know him at all, not like I’d spent five years with him. And I didn’t want it to be hard work, I wanted it to be easy and fun and to be with someone who made me laugh, and who looked after me. Someone I felt safe with. As it was, Connor had now become another one of the things that was not going right with my five year plan. That and the fact that my five year plan had so far taken six years…

*

Why do people insist on having a roast dinner whatever the weather, just because it’s Sunday? Blisteringly hot outside and my parent’s kitchen was like a sauna. All the windows were steamed up after excessive vegetable boiling in The Massive Saucepan.

I‘m not entirely sure where I developed a love of cooking from, but it probably had something to do with that saucepan.

‘Can we open the back door, at least?’ I asked.

‘No, we’ll have next door’s cat after the roast.’ Mum insisted.

‘Makes a change from rice pudding,’ said Dad, putting his Sunday paper down.

Mum didn’t get it. Me and Dad both laughed as Mum attempted to remove blackened Yorkshires from an oven tray.

‘Where’s that poser of a boyfriend, then?’

‘Working,’ I said, not wanting to think about him or get Mum started on how marvellous he was again. I was still seething with him.

‘Never done a decent day’s work in his life, I bet’ Dad muttered. Dad wasn’t in the Connor fan club like Mum was.

‘Oh what a thing to say!’ said Mum, ‘Fiona’s done herself proud managing to catch someone like Connor. I wonder when you will get married. Maybe you could do what Brendan and Katie next door did and get married abroad.’

She was spooning peas onto the plate now, rapidly.

‘Careful with those peas Maureen,’ Dad said.

She ignored him and carried on piling peas until they were reaching critical mass.

‘I don’t think he’s that keen anyway,’ I said, wondering if he was planning to ask me properly. A proper proposal.

‘Don’t be silly Fiona, I am sure he will be asking you any day now.’

‘Now they’re back from their honeymoon, Brendan and Katie are taking their whole family on a fake-cation. The whole family and all the grandchildren. Can you imagine?’ She looked wistful and said ‘A Fay Cay Tion’ again quietly, punctuating the air with her fork after each syllable.

‘And what the bloody hell is a fake-cation when it’s at home?’ Dad asked her, putting his knife and fork down.

‘Well,’ she began, taking a breath and then putting on her posh phone voice. ‘Say if you really wanted to go to the Bahamas, well, you don’t go to the Bahamas, you go to Costa Brava or to Devon to a place they make look like the Bahamas. So they go to Lloret de Mar but they stay at the Hotel Caribe and they eat Caribbean food and have themed dances and they pretend they are in the Bahamas. It’s all
themed
you see. Oh can you imagine. It’s a themed Fay Cay Tion.’ Again, with the punctuation fork. She looked so pleased with herself.

‘And what would be the bleeding point of that, now?’ said Dad, winking at me.

‘It’s for the recession!’ she said sharply.

‘What do you mean, it’s for the recession? That bloody lot could afford to go to the real thing if they wanted. They must be earning a fortune, big house like that.’ He muttered something about council tax bands.

I was enjoying Dad having a go at the neighbours.

‘But that’s the wonderful thing. They said they can afford to go to the Bahamas but they wanted to go on the fake-cation anyway. They said they wanted to give something back. Isn’t that wonderful? All the money they have and they want to give something back.’ She beamed. She was calmer now having been on holiday in her head with the Callaghans.

She turned to me. ‘Wouldn’t you like to go on a fake-cation? It would make me so proud if you did, Fiona. Maybe you could ask Connor to take you.’

I took this to mean ‘Wouldn’t you like to be like the next door neighbours and marry Connor and then go on a fake-cation?’

‘Of course I bloody well would! Who bloody well wouldn’t want to go on a fake-cation? But as it is, I am probably going to get four cats instead and be a mad cat lady and I am never going to see the end of my five year plan – and right at this very moment, I am not entirely sure that Connor is the person for me or whether I ever want to get married and would actually prefer to live out my days like Doris and have as many cats as I can fit in my house.’ I’d said that out loud. More kind of shouted it. Mum and Dad both looked concerned about my enthusiasm for a fake-cation and the four cats. I hoped she wasn’t going to say ‘It’s okay if you don’t like men in that way.’ Like she used to before I met Connor.

‘You break my heart, Fiona.’ She had put her knife and fork down and was now wringing her hands.

‘Oh, leave her be, Maureen and eat your dinner,’ said Dad.

I felt my eyes filling up a little bit.

‘I tell you what, love,’ said Dad, noticing something was up, ‘if you really want to go on a fake-cation, why don’t you and Connor come to the caravan with me and your mum next weekend. I’ll paint a sign saying ‘Skegness One Mile’ and then it would be like a fake-cation because really we would be in Weston-super-Mare.’

I laughed and said I’d think about it.

Later on, Dad dropped me back at home at the flat and a fluffy black cat peeked at me from behind a bush and slowly made his way over.

‘So, what’s your story then?’ I asked him as I stroked behind his ears. ‘And is it good luck or bad you are bringing me?’ I can never remember. He was quite sweet with lovely big eyes. His fluff was deceptive though. I noticed as I stroked him, underneath he was really boney. I explained very clearly to him that if I fed him, it was in no way to become a regular thing as I was definitely not a cat person. At all.

I went back inside and grabbed a tin of tuna, emptied it into a bowl and presented it to him on the steps. He must have been starving as he ate it in a minute flat and had licked it almost clean.

I stayed up until about eleven and then went to bed, trying to sleep on the still slightly damp sheets where the washing had been earlier. My head was spinning with the weekend’s events. It hadn’t occurred to me before that I could abandon my plans of saving up, of being with Connor, of us moving in together – it was all so fixed in my head. When Steph and Sinead suggested I didn’t have to follow it, it seemed nothing less than crazy. I’d been working towards it for so long, that I felt afraid to do anything else. Maybe I’d wait until September and see if things would change, it was only another week or so and I could decide what to do about everything then.

Chapter Four

The next day I’d had five missed calls from Connor but I’d decided I wasn’t going to call him back for at least two days, or maybe not at all, and I certainly wasn’t going to contribute to our savings this month. So on Monday morning, to avoid having to stand on a boiling hot bus with my face in someone’s sticky armpit, I treated myself to the train into Moor Street. I could also nip into Selfridges before work and buy a beautiful cat-free mug / vintage style teacup so I could at least halt my descent into mad cat lady. I found a beautiful one in Cath Kidston after spending too much time looking at too many bags and purses, which left me exactly four minutes to run the length of New Street.

I muttered an apology to Doris for being seven minutes late.

‘That’s fine,’ said Doris. She barely looked up. Very strange. I was expecting a five minute lecture at least. But no, not even a ‘In my day if we were late, they tarred and feathered us and marched us up and down Corporation Street until we were dead’. I unwrapped my mug and presented it on the desk in front of Ayesha for her to admire.

‘Good weekend, Ayesha?’ I asked, wanting her to notice my mug.

Doris made a snorting noise.

Ayesha very quietly said ‘Yes, thank you.’

Ayesha was always a little bit subdued on Monday mornings, but normally responded with ‘Messy’ or ‘Totally off my face’ or ‘can’t remember’. Usually she livened up before lunch and told me everything she’d got up to and all about her complicated love life. Perhaps she really had been ill. It was certainly within the realms of possibility. Or maybe Doris and Ayesha had been bickering again and I’d missed an almighty row. Maybe one of them had brought up the missing Blueberry Activia yoghurt saga again.

Ayesha had insisted it wasn’t her who took it, Doris was convinced it could be no one else. Ayesha had suggested it could have been one of the girls from finance – because if anyone needed bifidus digestivum, it was those lot. Doris had said that you couldn’t tell by looking at anyone whether they needed beneficial bacteria or not and Ayesha said that indeed she could because she had done GCSE Food Technology. This had upset Doris a lot because they didn’t have GCSEs in her day or Food Technology or Computers. But were they really still arguing over a yoghurt? Surely not?

‘Who likes my new mug, it’s gorgeous isn’t it? I bought it in Selfridges. And… it hasn’t got any cats on it. Ta dah!’ I did my best magician’s assistant impression and used my hands to frame the mug, drawing attention to it from different angles but no one seemed to be taking any notice so I added another ‘Ta-dah.’

I was disappointed with their lack of enthusiasm so I took a photo of my mug and uploaded it on Facebook.

‘Drink anyone?’

Doris said nothing, her head was bowed and Ayesha didn’t answer but was motioning to something behind me with her head, making her eyes big and raising her eyebrows. I recognised the look. Last time she did it was when she’d been to Global Gathering for the weekend, but this time it looked intentional, rather than involuntary. Puzzling.

‘What are you doing with your head, you mentalist?’

Then it clicked. How could I have not recognised the international distress signal for ‘Jurassic Bleach is behind you’?

‘Oh.’ The tea would have to wait. If I didn’t acknowledge him, maybe he would go away and find someone else to talk to about velociraptors and Domestos.

But it wasn’t him. It was something much, much worse.

‘Nice of you to join us Fiona, are you taking your coat off or not staying?’

It was Juliet Jackson. Regional Manager. AKA The Wicked Witch of The West Midlands. Like Doris, she had been with the company for forty years. She was the same age as Doris, but looked twenty years younger. She wore an expensive suit and always had the shiniest tights.

‘Juliet! Hi. I didn’t know you were visiting this week.’ Then I actually gulped. This woman was pure evil. She was probably going to sack me on the spot for being late. Last time she was here, she gave Phil in IT a disciplinary because she’d caught him on the internet looking at The Jedi Federation of Rowley Regis’s website in work time. He’d left the office in tears and spent the next week actually rocking. He hasn’t really been the same since. He wears a shirt and tie to work now instead of comic book T-shirts, and he’s stopped talking like Yoda when we ask him for IT help.

‘Can I have a word, Fiona? Pop into the office for a sec?’

Ayesha looked terrified. Doris looked up at me and smiled. This was bad, very bad.

‘Popping’ into the office sounded so innocent and fun, like there might be a tea party in there or puppies. And yet every bone in my body told me I wasn’t to go in that room. It was like a horror film when you know you are not really supposed to look in the basement because something bad will happen to you, but you feel compelled to even though you know there’s mad axe murderers hiding in there waiting to kill you and eat you. From where I was standing, I would rather fancy my chances with the mad axe murderers than Juliet.

Everyone in the office was looking at me as I made the walk of doom. Part of me hoped she would be kind and sack me on the spot for being seven minutes late – I couldn’t handle having to sit there rocking for a week like poor Phil.

‘Please. Sit down,’ she said and gestured to a chair.

‘I’m sorry I was late, Juliet, I had to get something on the way.’

She leant against the desk, towering over me in her four inch heels.

She didn’t say a word for what seemed like ages. Then she folded her arms.

‘I wanted to talk to you about Doris.’ She made a face as though she was intently listening to something very important I was saying, even though I was not saying a word. I was wondering whether it was a signal I should say something about Doris.

‘Well, Doris is…’ I searched for something to say.

Juliet waved a hand in front of me. This meant I should shut up. Rude.

‘As you know, Doris is retiring shortly and we are looking to fill her role…’

‘Actually, Juliet,’ I said, feeling brave. ‘I was wondering if it was possible for me to look into a different role in food development or somewhere else, away from the distribution centre?’

She thought for a minute, looking at me with a puzzled expression, and then simply said ‘No.’ and waved me away.

No. Just like that, she wouldn’t even consider it.

Over the weekend I had felt like everything I had planned for was slipping away from me, but maybe this was the thing that got my plan back on track. Clearly, a move to another department was out of the question, which just left Doris’s job. Could I take it? With Doris’s salary, I was fairly sure I could buy a place of my own straight away. Taking Doris’s job would be the sensible option and it didn’t mean I had to be like Doris, I didn’t have to get four cats.

‘Right, okay then, well of course, I’d love to accept Doris’s position.’

‘Oh you are funny, Fiona’ Juliet said and she touched me on the arm, smiling a tight smile which looked like it was causing her pain. ‘Now, be quiet while I explain’ she snapped.

‘As you know we are legally required to advertise the role, but you stand a very good chance of getting the position. Of course, we couldn’t have any more repeats of this morning. Lateness isn’t acceptable and I will be observing you all this week. I’ll be looking out for how you operate as a team, to see how you are all getting along. Then we can touch base at the end of the week. Off you go.’