Jill Steeples - Let's Call The Whole Thing Off

‘Anna?’

I jumped and my hand flung out involuntarily, knocking my mug of coffee and spilling the entire contents over my desk. The huge heap of papers I’d been aimlessly shuffling around were now drenched.

‘Oh, Christ! What is it? Look what you made me do! If you’ve come to make small talk about my wedding that’s very nice of you, but I really don’t have the time. I do have a job to do, you know, and if I don’t get this lot cleared by Friday, then there’s every chance I won’t have a job to come back to.’ I picked up the soggy mass of papers and held them up in the air over my bin, watching the brown water drip out. They were past saving, I knew. I slumped down into my seat and finally looked up with a scowl at the person who was frankly the cause of my current damp predicament.

‘Oh shit! Helloo!’ I said, sitting up straight again in my chair. My boss, the official holder of the title ‘Office Bitch Numero Uno’ was looking at me darkly.

‘Everything okay, Anna?’

‘Yes, yes, absolutely fine. Sorry! Just spilt my coffee.’ As if that really needed explaining.

‘Yes. I can see. Well, I’m glad to hear you’re attempting to clear your desk, but had you forgotten about our meeting?’

‘Oh shit!’ My three-month review with Nina Palmer, how the hell could I have forgotten? The meeting I’d been dreading for weeks, it had been uppermost in my mind until yesterday when it had been trumped in spectacular style by the discovery that my boyfriend was a complete shit. It was the meeting where she would tell me how I’d been getting on in the company and whether I had any future with them. Judging by her tight-lipped expression, I guessed I already knew the answer to that one.

‘I am so sorry,’ I said, apologising in my head for the over-use of the shit word, which was the only one that seemed to want to come into my head at the moment and then apologising for completely forgetting about our meeting. I glanced at my watch. It was 9.25 a.m. and from the recesses of my memory our meeting was set for 9.00 a.m. I was clearly not in the line-up for the ‘most punctual employee of the month award’.

‘Get yourself cleaned up and then come into my office, would you?’

‘Yes, yes, of course,’ I said, feeling my skin turning a bright shade of pink as Nina waltzed off.

Oh well, this is just bloody marvellous, I thought, when I returned to my desk armed with a wad of kitchen towels, making a half-hearted attempt at mopping up the mess. Somehow not only had I managed to alienate my fiancé and send him running into the arms of my best friend, it looked as though there was every chance I could lose my job as well and all in the space of a couple of days. Everything was Ed’s fault. I looked down at the warm soggy patch on my jeans and sighed again. Had I got dressed in the dark this morning? Jeans and T-shirt, what had I been thinking? I never dressed so casually for work. If I’d been looking to make a good impression, I’d clearly failed.

‘So,’ Nina said, when I stumbled in to her office and she beckoned me to sit down opposite her, ‘how do you feel your first three months at Purcells has gone?’ She sat back in her chair, and crossed one stockinged leg over the other.

‘Okay, I think.’

‘Just okay?’

What the hell did she expect me to say? I’d been stuck in the corner of the office entering invoices and manipulating spread sheets for three months. It was hardly very taxing. I could quite easily have done it standing on my head, but it was a job and I needed a job after being made redundant from my dream job only four months earlier. This was never meant as a long-term career move, just as something to pay the bills, a stop-gap until something better came along, only nothing better had come along.

‘Well, you know, good-ish, I think.’ I had lost the capacity to construct a coherent sentence. It didn’t help that I felt like a completely disorganised and inefficient slouch in my old clothes, especially when Nina was dressed in a grey silk slub suit that oozed authority and class.

She nodded and looked at me intently.

‘Is there something wrong, Anna?’

‘No, no, nothing wrong at all.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, absolutely!’ I said, trying to look and sound like someone who was perfectly employable.

‘And do you enjoy working here, Anna?’

‘Yes!’ I gave a little leap in my seat and banged my hand on her desk. ‘Sorry … I love my job,’ I said, not entirely convincingly.

Please don’t sack me. Please don’t sack me. Please don’t sack me.

‘Good. It’s just that I couldn’t help noticing you’ve been a bit short with everyone this morning. Poor Adam couldn’t get away from your desk fast enough. There was the incident with the coffee. You completely forgot our meeting and I’ve just had an email from you that I think was intended for one of our suppliers.’ She turned her computer screen around so I could see for myself the incriminating evidence. ‘Is the stress of the wedding getting to you?’

‘Oh God. I am so sorry.’ I cringed in my seat. That was definitely the email I’d sent but no way had it been meant for Nina. Of all the people I could have mistakenly sent it to, it had to be my boss and on the day she was doing my appraisal too. ‘That email …’ The words trailed away. What words were there? Apart from disorganised, inefficient and ‘what job?’

Nina widened her eyes, looking at me expectantly.

‘Right, well, let’s not worry about that for the moment, shall we?’ she said with an imperceptible sigh. ‘If I’m being honest with you, Anna, I think you’ve done a reasonable job within the department, although I’m pretty certain this wouldn’t be your ideal choice of career?’

‘No, but—’

‘I wonder if it wouldn’t be better if …’

Oh God no. Please don’t sack me . I was pleading with my power of thought, but my subliminal suggestions were clearly not reaching the other side of the desk. Obviously there was some wonky celestial alignment at work, Mercury was in retrograde or Pluto was at odds with Neptune or Uranus was having an off day. It was the only explanation for everything going wrong in my life at the moment.

‘Nina, sorry to interrupt you but if you’re going to sack me I would much rather you come straight out and say so. Don’t worry about sparing my feelings. I’m really getting quite good at dealing with bad news right now.’

Nina put down her pen and sat back in her chair, chewing on the inside of her lip.

‘Ah, so there is something wrong. I knew it.’ She gave a supercilious smile, the smug bitch. ‘Why don’t you tell me what’s been going on, Anna?’

I looked at her, feeling all the energy slump out of me. What did it matter now? People were bound to find out sooner or later and if I was about to lose my job it wasn’t as if I’d have to come back and face everyone. I could disappear into the sunset with my pride hanging precariously in place.

‘Oh, it’s nothing really. Just the wedding, my wedding, this Saturday, it’s, um, well, it’s all a bit iffy now.’

Nina’s perfectly sculptured eyebrows shot up her forehead.

‘That’s hardly nothing. I’m sorry to hear it. But if you were having second thoughts about the marriage then maybe it’s for the best.’

‘Oh, I wasn’t having second thoughts. I just found out Ed was doing a bit of last-minute sampling of other models currently available on the market, that’s all.’

‘I see.’ She put down her pen and pulled down the lid on her laptop, nodding sagely, as if she knew everything about being dropped from a great height. Which was highly unlikely. Nina was definitely the type of person to be doing all the dropping. Boyfriends. And now employees, by the look of things. ‘Look, Anna, why don’t you go home?’