“See you around.”
“?‘See you around’?”
“Jones, don’t keep repeating everything I say like a parrot.”
“?‘Like a parrot’?”
“Jones.”
“I’m so confused. We just went to a scan together and now you’re saying, ‘Great to catch up,’ and ‘See you around,’ as if we’ve just slept together.”
“Right, right,” said Daniel. “It’s all the same with you girls, isn’t it? Just because we go to a scan together it doesn’t mean we’re going out together. It doesn’t mean we have to get all serious and start having babies.”
“But we’re already having a baby. That’s why we went to the scan.”
“No, Jones,” he said. “You’re having a baby.”
I froze.
“Sorry, sorry,” he said. “Look. I just don’t think I can do this. I don’t think I have the skill set.”
“What if it’s yours?”
“I suppose I could try.”
“And if it isn’t?”
“Well, that would change everything. Sorry, sorry, oh, come on, don’t look at me like that, Jones. The point is, if we’d done it up the arse like I wanted to, none of this would have happened.”
“Daniel,” I said, getting out of the car. “You can shove your mouth up your own bum. And if it was a choice of bringing up the baby with you or Peri Campos, I would choose Peri Campos.”
—
Beyond late, mind reeling from Daniel, I rushed up to the seventh floor, grabbed a sheaf of papers and held them in front of my stomach—to give a pleasing air of just having popped out to the scanner and not being late or pregnant at all—then walked casually into the office: to find Peri Campos conducting a meeting for the entire Sit Up Britain staff.
“It’s wet, it’s see-through and without it we’d DIE! Water!” she was yelling, strutting in front of a smart board while the youths in their man-buns sat up attentively at the front and the old guard sat sulkily at the back.
“Bridget, you’re thirty-five minutes late, dated and boring. Sit Up Britain is dated and boring. The title is dated and boring. The staff is dated and boring. The content is dated and boring. We need tension, we need action, we need suspense. ‘They’re small, they’re fiercely powerful, they’re potential killers and they’re ALL OVER YOUR HOUSE!’ Well?” She looked around expectantly.
“Ants!” said Jordan.
“Vacuums!” said Richard Finch.
“Vibrators?” said Miranda, as I spurted out laughing.
“It’s batteries,” said Peri Campos, drily, “for those of us who have any sort of tenuous handle on today’s news. Bridget, see me in my office nine o’clock on Monday morning. That’s nine o’clock—not three in the afternoon: not late.”
“It won’t happen again, I promise.”
“Promise! I love that word because it raises so many talking points.”
“Please don’t sack her,” said Richard Finch, looking at me and miming, “Are you mad?”
FRIDAY 17 NOVEMBER
8.30 p.m. My flat. Have sense of impending doom. Am about to be sacked, both the fathers hate me, everything is a mess, is Friday night and am all alone. Aloooooone!
AT LEAST