Cecelia Ahern - The Time of My Life

Melanie was a bit taken aback by being put on the spot. ‘Well, I just wanted to hear what’s going on with you but you’re halfway out the door so we don’t have time for that.’

I allowed gay waiter with fake accent to help me put my coat on, then said, ‘ Il y a eu une grande explosion. Téléphonez les pompiers et sortez du batiment, s’il vous plaît, ’ which meant there has been a big explosion, telephone the emergency services and evacuate the building immediately. He looked a bit frazzled, smiled, then hotfooted it away before I could rip off his mask Scooby Doo style. ‘Well, we don’t need much time to talk about me because there’s nothing interesting happening. Trust me. We’ll catch up on our own sometime, next week I’ll go to one of your gigs and we can have a bop in the booth?’ Melanie was a much-in-demand DJ hot on the party circuit who went by the name DJ Darkness, more after the fact that she never saw daylight as opposed to being a tribute to her stunning Armenian looks.

She smiled and gave me a hug and rubbed my back affectionately. ‘That sounds great, even though we’ll have to lip-read. Ooh,’ she squeezed me tighter, ‘I just worry about you, Lucy.’

I froze. She must have sensed it because she let go very quickly. ‘What do you mean you worry about me?’

She looked like she’d put her foot in it. ‘I didn’t mean for it to be insulting, are you insulted?’

‘Well, I don’t know yet, I don’t know what that means, when your friend tells you they’re worried about you.’ They were all listening now. I was trying to keep it light-hearted but I wanted to get to the bottom of it. She’d never said that before, why was she saying it now? What was it about me that was making people suddenly worry about me? The comment she’d made about my leaving a party of hers played on my mind; maybe there were lots of things she felt about me that I didn’t know. Suddenly I wondered if they were all in on it, if they’d all signed the same paperwork as my family had. I looked at them all. They looked worried.

‘What?’ I beamed at everyone. ‘Why are you all looking at me like that?’

‘I don’t know about them but I was hoping for a fight,’ David piped up. ‘Cat fight, pinch her, scratch her, poke out her eyes.’

‘Rip off her clothes, tweak her nipples,’ Jamie joked, and they all laughed.

‘I’m not going to rip off her clothes,’ I smiled, wrapping my arm around Melanie. ‘She’s hardly wearing any.’

They laughed.

‘I just wanted to know why she was worried about me, that’s all,’ I said playfully. ‘Is anybody else at this table worried about me?’

They took turns and I’d never felt so loved.

‘Every day you get behind the wheel of that car,’ Lisa said.

‘Only that you can drink me under the table,’ David added.

‘I’ve concerns about your mental health,’ Jamie said.

‘I’m worrying about that dress with that coat,’ Chantelle said.

‘Great, anyone else want to take a pop at me?’ I laughed.

‘No, I’m not worried about you at all,’ Adam offered.

No one heard his meaning like I heard it.

‘And so on that joyous note, I’m leaving you all. I’ve to be up early in the morning. Happy birthday, Lisa. Bye bye, bump,’ I kissed her belly.

And I was gone.

I got the bus home. Sebastian was on a drip and was heavily medicated and so was having to sleep over in the garage.

My phone beeped.

– Impressive canines. Maybe send me more photos and I can piece you together. If your boyfriend doesn’t mind?!

– Slick.

–That’s not an answer.

–It is. It’s just not the answer you were looking for.

–What are you doing tomorrow?

–Busy. Going to be fired.

–Boyfriend … job … You’re not having a good week. I’d like to help with one of them!

–You speak Spanish?

–A requirement for boyfriends?

–Again … slick. However. A requirement to keep my job. About to be revealed as a non-Spanish-speaking Spanish translator.

– Hate it when that happens. Estoy buscando a Tom. Means I’m looking for Tom. Came in handy in Spain. That’s all I’ll ever be allowed to say.

Later that night as I lay in bed listening to a Spanish language tape, I received a text.

– Am slowly but surely breaking down your alias. Certainly not toothless, not married, perhaps an eye patch and ten kids. Tomorrow, will investigate.

I turned the flash off my camera phone, raised it to my face. I took a picture of my eyes. It took me a few tries to get them right. Sent it. I waited with my phone in my hand for him to respond. There was nothing. Maybe I’d gone too far. Later that night my phone beeped and I dived on it.

– You showed me yours …

I scrolled down and I was staring at a perfectly formed, unpierced ear.

I smiled. Then closed my eyes and slept.

CHAPTER TEN

I took a forkful of my three-bean salad, in which I could only find two bean types, and which I was eating at my desk for the first time in two and a half years. Louise had stolen a large leather executive chair from somewhere – after the redundancies, random chairs were a regular feature – and they were currently re-enacting an office version of Mastermind . Twitch was in the hot seat and his specialist subject was ‘ Coronation Street : Major Events 1960–2010’. Mouse was the quizmaster, firing questions at him from the Internet, Louise was timing him and so far he was doing well with three passes and a score of fifteen. Graham had his head in his hands and was staring down at his opened baguette and occasionally moving a hand from his head to pick out a gherkin.

‘I don’t know why you just don’t tell them not to put gherkins in. You do this every day,’ Louise said, watching him.

‘Concentrate on the time,’ Mouse said, panicked, then spoke even more quickly. ‘In 1971 how did Valerie Barlow leave the show?’

And in equally rapid speech Twitch fired back, ‘Electrocuted herself with a faulty hairdryer.’

Any moment from now Mr Fernández was going to walk through the door and after two and a half years in the job, I was going to have to reveal to the office my complete inability to speak Spanish. I was cringing with the embarrassment it was causing me already and what was surprising me was the horrible feeling that I knew I was going to let them down, a concern I had never previously possessed. The smaller the numbers got in our office, the more it felt like a dysfunctional family and although I was always on the outside looking in, I realised that though we weren’t quite a tight group we were certainly a less loose one. We didn’t all particularly like one another but we were protective of our unit, and in a way, I had betrayed them all. I had thought about pretending to be sick that day and also about confronting Fish Face about my lack of Spanish which would avoid the public embarrassment in front of the team but would be privately humiliating. In the end I’d decided against both routes because a part of me said that perhaps I could play my life at his own little game and there was a chance that I could learn an entire language overnight, and so after admiring Don Lockwood’s perfectly formed ear last night I had hit the Spanish language books. I had discovered at three in the morning that it was impossible to learn a language overnight.

Graham finally finished picking out his gherkins and took a bite of his baguette. He watched the game of Mastermind unfold with a weary look. It was at times like that I found him attractive; when he wasn’t pretending to be somebody he wasn’t. He looked at me and we shared a look of fond annoyance at the game. Then he winked and I detested him again.