Katy Regan - The One Before The One

‘Sure do,’ says Toby, raising an eyebrow.

‘Well, I kept thinking of Darryl and a camel.’

‘Oh Jesus .’

‘Yes. I know, I am sick, sick in the head. Then I kept thinking he was going to make a move on me.’

Toby’s snorting with laughter now, Shona’s got her head on the desk and one eye open.

‘Your face was like this …’ Toby says, assuming a grimace, somewhere between shocked and offended: flared nostrils, wide eyes.

‘You looked like a cross between someone who had poo smeared on their top lip,’ adds Shona, thinking hard, ‘and a hamster in rigor mortis.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You’re welcome.’

‘Hey, but I got the sale though and that is all that matters.’ I raise my hand for a high five. Toby slaps it, somewhat reluctantly. ‘Six hundred units to be in every store by next month!’

‘What?’ He wasn’t expecting that. ‘You spawny cow. If you win that award, I’ll kill you.’

I feel a guilty little thrill of competition. So it’s not just Rachel who wins awards, actually, thank you very much.

I look at Shona.

‘It will be an award tainted with dubious morality, which is unfortunate,’ she says.

‘God, people! It’s breath freshener I’m selling, not children!’

‘But well done,’ Shona adds. ‘Because I know how much it means to you. It’s just, don’t think that just because Schumacher is now officially on board, that I will ever engage in any conversation with that prick that isn’t ab-sol-utely fucking necessary, okay?’

‘Loud and clear, Shona. Loud and clear.’

‘Well done, Caroline.’ Janine has a new super-short fringe that makes her look even more like a German lesbian than she did before. ‘You officially kicked ass.’

‘Thanks,’ I say, dumbly. I always feel like a disappointment whenever I’m in Cross’s office.

But it feels great all the same. Sealing the deal. Who would think selling breath freshener could make your heart race? But I think that’s it. The simplicity of it, the lack of anything major at stake. I doubt, for example, if I’d feel this way if I worked for a charity, or as a teacher where real hearts and minds were on the table. The fact we could all quite happily survive well into our nineties without breath freshener allows me to put a hundred per cent of me in without feeling there’s going to be any emotional fall out. And that’s great, because sometimes it feels like work is the only place in my life where I feel safe to operate; like it’s the only room in the Titanic,

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