Alphabet Weekends - Elizabeth Noble [65]
Mike Sweet was the vainest man she had ever met. When all the jocks had had their pictures taken for some magazine a couple of months ago, he had insisted on being in the middle, and on leaping out of the elaborately arranged shot to look at the photographer’s Polaroids every five minutes, making sure his chin wasn’t too fleshy or his eyes half closed. He had the kind of highlights that make your head look like a leopard’s, and she knew, because he had upended his sports bag once by accident, that he wore thong briefs, which was, frankly, appalling.
He claimed to know the lyrics of every pop song ever written, and his favourite game was to get you to tell him one line and let him tell you the next. He was actually very bad at this, unless the song was by Huey Lewis and the News or Kajagoogoo. He knew those because he’d been at primary school with Limahl, and called him a close personal friend. History did not relate what Limahl called him. Rose used to say that Mike Sweet was the kind of man who should be banned from entering the Friends Reunited website. ‘Can you imagine him popping up on your PC?’ she said.
Of course, he popped up on Natalie’s PC all the time, having installed himself starring in a newspaper article as her screensaver. ‘Mike Sweet Brightens Up the Children’s Ward ’ was the headline. He was sitting on a hospital bed, with a few unwilling-looking children smiling weakly beside him. ‘As if chemotherapy wasn’t tough enough,’ Rose had said, when she’d first seen it.
‘Is he for real?’ Tom’s mouth was wide with incredulity. They were in the kitchen. One of the researchers had just been in and walked out again, choking on a Bourbon biscuit from laughing so hard. ‘The man is a walking cliché.’
‘Welcome to my world.’
‘And patronising! I don’t think I’ve ever been spoken to like that. Even when I was working at the biscuit factory.’
‘I know.’
‘Do you think he was suspicious? I mean, I know I’m wearing well, but a thirty-five-year-old work-experience boy?’
‘I told him you were a city analyst looking for a change in direction. And then I told him you were a massive fan. That kind of distracted him from everything else.’
‘You told him I was a fan?’
‘A massive fan.’
‘Thanks. Great.’
‘It is great, actually. He’s going to let you do his on-line research for the councillor who’s coming in this afternoon. Local-issues stuff. It was six months before he let me do that. And I had to let him “accidentally” feel my arse in the lift.’
‘Remind me to Dettol that arse before I go near it again.’
‘Again? You wish. Now, get on with the tea!’
‘All right, but later you can tell me what the hell you’re still doing in this job.’
Natalie thought about it for the next couple of hours. She thought about it so hard, she forgot to put through the irate caller wanting to complain about bins to the councillor during the interview. Mike Sweet came out during a record and told her to ‘Look lively, sweetheart.’
And she was still thinking about it at five thirty as she watched Tom through the big glass window. He was trying to say goodbye to Mike, who was waving him away, trying to shrug on his leather blouson jacket and talk into his mobile phone at the same time. She smothered a giggle when Tom stuck two fingers up at him and backed out of the door genuflecting.
‘I need a drink, badly. It’s no wonder you’re practically an alcoholic,’ he said.
As they strode towards the wine bar by the river, he said, ‘You’re quiet – although I imagine a day with him takes some unwinding from. The guy’s a tosser.’
‘I’m thinking about what you said to me.’
‘Which particularly insightful remark was that?’
‘You asked me what the hell I was still doing there.’
‘Ah, yes.’
It was only just dawning on her what she was still doing there. She was remembering a conversation she had had with her old colleague Stella, at Stella’s leaving do a couple of years ago. Stella was pregnant again: ‘See how desperate I am to leave. Desperate enough to get myself pregnant!’
‘You don’t