Pear Shaped (4 page)

Hmm, time to make myself feel more insecure and jealous. Excellent idea.

I google image search for ‘Celine’ ‘Wolford’ ‘model’ ‘French’ ‘leg’ and immediately come up with over 700 photos of her. In none of them does she remotely resemble a monkfish.

I know I should stop myself right now. She’s married. What difference if she’s beautiful or not anyway? He is dating me.

Okay, I click on the first image. Relief. Dark blond hair, brown eyes, generic Disney features, looks like she eats a lot of yoghurt and apples. Swiss looking. Maybe she’s from the Alps. Second photo, a close up. Even though she’s smiling, she looks fearful, like she’s just found out her currency’s in free fall. Third photo, taken last year at the Cannes Film Festival. That must be the Argie husband. He’s corpulent. Mid-fifties. Oligarch-y. She is Botoxed to the hilt, skeletal, clutching his arm with a jewelled hand.

It’s not until the fourth photo that I see her in suspenders and a thong and start to feel in any way envious.

Her legs are perfect, long, shapely, amazing. Of course they are. She owns two Wolford legs. That’s her job. I decide it’s high time I get back to
my
job.

I go to the C-drive and click on the kitchen sample report for my latest trifles.

Besides. She’s married now. And not to James.

Ah, good: thicker, more even deposit of custards with 38% stabilised whipping cream …

And just because her legs are amazing doesn’t mean she’s smart or kind or funny.

Let’s see … uneven almond spread rectified, shelf life now at seven days … Devron will like that …

Just because her legs are amazing doesn’t mean she isn’t
also
smart and kind and funny.

Get a grip – he’ll call. And if he doesn’t? So be it. They are not together; she is irrelevant. He is dating you. Or is he …?

I’m going to call him because if he likes me it won’t matter, and if he doesn’t, it’ll expedite the ending of the relationship. I don’t want this loop of crap in my head; I have a big Phase 4 meeting in two days that I need to prepare for. Call him: then it’s done, either way.

I dial his number before the sensible voice can stop me. It’s a foreign ring tone. I hang up immediately.

He hadn’t mentioned he’d be going away. Why not? He’s flown to Paris! The Alps!

Enough. I delete James’s number from my phone and from my dialled list. I am not going to do this to myself. Nick called me at least once a day from the first day we met. He loved me and he could show it. He never made
me feel insecure, not once. Bored, enraged, despairing, sure. But insecure? Never.

If James Stephens wants me, he’s going to have to make a lot more effort.

The average human touches their nose dozens of times a day. In this sole regard, Devron is a well-above-average human. He touches his nose at least three times a minute. Sometimes he gives it little tugs and pinches. Sometimes he fiddles with the end and you can tell he’s trying to fish something out surreptitiously. Sometimes he holds, squeezes, sniffs loudly and wipes his hands on his trousers. Eddie and I always play ‘Devron Nose Bingo’ – whoever is the first to observe twenty nose manoeuvres in any given meeting and whisper ‘wanker’, wins a luxury hot chocolate from the canteen.

The worst ever time that Devron touches his nose though, is in a Phase 4 meeting.

A Phase 4 meeting is the final stage in taking a new range to market. Phases 1 to 3 involve briefing suppliers, tasting initial product ideas, doing shelf life, transport and safety tests, and evolving the products accordingly.

Phase 4 meetings are the reason why I will never leave
this job voluntarily – you’ll have to cart me away in a straitjacket.

At a Phase 4, you basically sit around like a bunch of Roman emperors dressed in Next suits instead of togas, and eat the entire range – whether that’s 12 fools and 8 trifles, like my meeting today, or Eddie’s meeting last week where I sampled 23 different curries in an hour. Of course, you  don’t eat the whole dish – you just take a bite, and the majority of people ‘spit in the cup’. Yup, they gob out their food in a paper cup, like a Bulimics Anonymous Christmas party.

I never ever ‘spit in the cup’. It’s not about etiquette. Many women, and even some men, manage to spit quite discreetly, so you barely notice the person next to you opening their mouth to eject a half-chewed lump of naan bread. No, I refuse to ‘spit in the cup’ because I think it’s cheating. Any food that goes in my mouth goes in my stomach. Admittedly, I also see it as a badge of honour – there were six men and four women at Eddie’s Phase 4, and I was the only one to make it through all 23 curries without spitting. It’s just as well I only go to the Phase 4s that are mine, Lisa’s or Eddie’s, and that I walk in to work every day.

The official rules of a Phase 4 are as follows:

• you change forks with every dish you taste
  
• you don’t double-dip your fork in a communal dish
  
• you pretend you’re only eating as a duty, not getting real pleasure from the food, for fear you’ll be taxed on it as a perk
  

Devron ignores all three rules and invariably digs in to the food with the hand that has just been inside his nasal cavity.

Whenever I’m arranging a Phase 4, I make sure to order two of everything – one for Devron and one for everyone else. However, this rarely stops Devron sitting in front of two identical cherry pies, flitting between the two with his sucked fingers. Fingers/nose/fingers/nose. Once Devron has touched a pudding I can’t eat that pudding, even if I try eating it from the other side. I just can’t. I’m pretty sure one day I’ll flip and pie Devron in the face, or ram a churro up his nose and kill him.

Today I pop down to the fridge to fetch the samples my supplier, Appletree, has sent in. I love working with my contact there, Will Slater, not least because he always sends me down a box of custard-filled éclairs he’s had the head chef make specially.

Zoe, our fridge manager, tells me I’m looking a bit skinny, she prefers me with curves. If I ever decide to date a woman it will be Zoe. She has Pantene hair, great Patti Smith t-shirts and a super-fast wit, and above all else, she has an even better job than I do: FRIDGE MANAGER.

This is not just any fridge. This is a fridge the size of a WHSmiths at a major railway station. If it wasn’t quite so cold I would seriously think about living in this fridge. Rows upon rows of shelves, floor to ceiling, stacked with samples of everything we sell and everything we’re thinking about selling, and everything our competitors sell. Zoe calls it ‘Paradise Frost’. I can never think of anything funny that rhymes with fridge in response.

And then there’s the freezer! While I daydream about moving in to the work fridge, I have nightmares about being locked in the work freezer. Our fifteen ice cream variants would only keep me diverted for the first hour or so, and then the thought of a slow icy death with nothing to eat but Coated Protein (that’s fish fingers to you) – death, there is thy sting.

‘Zoe, I can see the fools, but where are the trifles? Zoe?’ I walk through the fridge and back out, and find Zoe deep in the freezer, headphones on, sorting through a stack of giant frozen turkeys.

‘Huh?’

‘Didn’t Appletree send in the trifles and fools on the same courier?’

‘New system … Div-ron’s making us file by packaging colour …’

‘What?’

‘Ridiculous, worse than organising your books by colour …’

‘No, that is
really
bloody ridiculous. They’re all in different colours according to the fruit.’

‘Don’t worry, babe, I’ve got you covered. Aisle G, shelf 3 on the left – your éclairs are there too. He’s checking in on me this week, but as soon as he gets bored I’ll switch back … man, he is one giant fucking dickhead …’

I load two of every pudding into a giant orange crate and schlep it round to Tasting Room 12.

There’s only three of us attending today – Devron, Ton of Fun Tom and me. I lay sixty spoons, a stack of paper plates, and three glasses of water, then arrange the fools and trifles in the most ramshackle, non-colour co-ordinated order I can think of.

I wait for Devron and Tom to arrive. It’s quarter past, they’re late … Neither of them answers their phone. At half past, I head back up to my desk and find Devron and Janelle laughing at a website that features a selection of goats wearing jumpers.

‘Are you coming to the Phase 4, Devron?’ I say.

Janelle intercepts. ‘I had to move it to next month, I just sent you an email a minute ago.’

‘There’s twenty products that need sign off today, launch date is May,’ I say.

‘Sophie, I’m sure you can push back on suppliers, we give them enough business,’ says Devron impatiently.

‘Fine.’ I go back to the fridge and call up my friends from various departments and tell them to come to Room
12, immediately. Zoe puts the kettle on and six of us eat fruit trifles, chocolate trifles and eight types of fool and take it in turns to do impressions of Devron at the point of orgasm with a frozen turkey.

Afterwards, I return to my desk and a flashing light on my phone. A text message. From James!

‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ Ah, the relief.

I know I should be cooler – he’s left it till Thursday afternoon to ask me out for a Friday night – but I believe in momentum and if I don’t see him soon, I fear I’m going to lose it.

We agree to meet at the Dean Street Townhouse at 9pm. It occurs to me that I have no idea what country he’s texting from.

I wonder if he’d have contacted me if I hadn’t called him.

What does that matter now?

On Friday, I run out of the door at 5.54pm. I’m sure I see Janelle make a note of this in her Book of Snitch. I consider waiting for the bus. I have only three hours’ turnaround time before I’m due back in Soho and an über-emergency-face-and-body-makeover to perform. On Tottenham Court Road I hail a cab, even though I really can’t afford it.

Last night I did as much of the home makeover as I could bear to. I washed my sheets, hoovered for the first
time in a fortnight, dried the sheets, and attempted to tidy the piles of recipes, post-it notes and newspapers that adorn any horizontal space in my flat.

I then tried to re-arrange my bathroom products to convey the fact that I am a natural beauty who doesn’t sweat or have body hair: hide all make-up, my razor and deodorant, bring out the cheapest, simplest £3 Superdrug moisturiser (it’s very good, actually).

I am not a total sloven, just messy. My bathroom is always clean, and my kitchen is spotless. I love to cook, and this kitchen brings me more joy than any other room in the flat. Although it’s only Ikea, it’s fairly gorgeous. White units, a grey worktop, a pale yellow glass splashback. The only thing I did in the kitchen last night was pop the bottle of beautiful white wine that Maggie Bainbridge gave me for Christmas into the fridge, just in case.

It’s 6.24pm. Two hours and twenty before I have to leave the house to meet him. I perform all ablutions as carefully as possible but I’m in such a panic that I cut my leg shaving. This happens to me about once every three shaves. I’m clumsy and impatient, but I have the added bonus of having Factor XI deficiency, a harmless but irritating disorder I inherited from my dad that means when I bleed, I take a while to stop bleeding. I once cut myself shaving before I had to get on the Eurostar to Paris for a choux pastry seminar and by the time I got to the Champs Elysees, I had a shoe full of blood. Pas très chic.

It will bleed for at least twenty minutes now, but I don’t have time to sit with my leg up and wait for it to stop, so I end up Sellotaping a wodge of toilet paper to my ankle while I go about drying my hair, flossing, and moisturising.

7.59pm, I remove my makeshift tourniquet and my ankle proceeds to drip blood like a slow-leaking tap. I was planning on wearing tights anyway – it’s freezing out – but I can’t just put them over the wound. I settle for two giant plasters and take a spare pair of tights in my handbag – I’ll have to pop to the loo in the restaurant as soon as I get there and change these, and clean up the blood stains from my foot … sexy stuff.

I put on my soft, slinky Topshop black dress and notice with a hiccup of delight that it has never been this loose on me. Final touches of make-up, perfume, a spritz of fig room spray in the hall, and I’m off.

James is sitting nursing a gin and tonic, chatting to the barman, when I walk in. He grins when he sees me and the barman gives me the once-over too. I have made an effort – high heels, earrings, the hair is behaving well. Or maybe the barman checks me out because there aren’t that many younger women in here – the clientele seems to be 60% gay men, and the rest are middle-aged fashion and media types sporting faux spectacles, frowns and unseasonal tans.

‘Have a drink,’ says James, handing me the cocktail list.

‘I don’t need that, I’ll have an Old Fashioned please, Maker’s Mark,’ I say to the barman, who winks his approval.

James immediately rests his hand on my knee. ‘A girl who knows what she wants.’

‘Well, it took me years of research in the field, but I finally found a drink that I love.’

‘And you never drink other cocktails?’

‘Sometimes. But an Old Fashioned has all the qualities I look for in my booze. Not too sweet, the right size, pretty hard for a barman to mess up….’

‘And what about men, what qualities do you look for in a man?’

I stop myself saying ‘not too sweet, the right size, pretty hard …’ -it’ll sound cheap. Instead I run through the essential criteria that twenty years of dating has reduced me to:

Kind

Funny

Clean

Not mentally ill

Tall, big nosed, and a thick head of hair is a bonus. James appears to tick most of these boxes so far (you can’t judge mentally ill after just two dates). If I say anything on this list, I’ll look too keen.

‘I’m looking for a grown-up,’ I say.

He makes to get up from the bar and leave.

‘And someone thoughtful. What about you?’ I say.

‘I’m looking for someone warm and smart. Feisty. Reasonably attractive …’ he grins.