Chapter 4
Dear Adam
My girlfriend and I have been dating for two years and living together for one. She’s always been a casual kind of woman – only wearing make-up when we go out, comfortable clothes, all that stuff. Low-maintenance, you know? Not that I mind – I think she’s gorgeous and sexy just as she is. But lately, I”ve noticed that she’s getting up earlier in the mornings and blow-drying her hair and doing her face before she leaves for work. She even bought a pair of high-heeled shoes to wear to the office.
When I asked about this change, she told me she’s hoping for a promotion at work, but I”m not sure I believe her.
Give it to me straight, Adam – is she cheating on me?
Rufus, Dundee
The next week, though, two things happened. Good things – or at least things that had the promise of becoming good. I spent Monday with almost nothing to do: Adam’s inbox remained stubbornly empty, no matter how many times I checked it. When, at the weekly team meeting, Greg had asked how the agony uncle column was going, I had to stammer out an admission that, so far, it was all uncle and no agony. Greg raised an eyebrow and said something about a slow burn, but I knew full well that if the column wasn’t working, he would can it and therefore also can me.
The only work I’d done was reading through endless back issues of Max! (trying not to admire Ross’s grasp of his subject matter and elegant turn of phrase), helping Simon with some research into the apparently unstoppable rise of Grandpa-core, and proofreading an article about NBA basketball for Chiraag. Oh – and making endless rounds of tea and coffee for the team. I hated not being busy – it made me even more self-conscious than usual; I imagined Greg coming up behind my desk, seeing my screen blank and idle, and telling me that this clearly wasn’t working and I might as well pack my things and go.
So on Tuesday morning at around eleven o’clock, when I heard a voice behind me say my name, I started and felt a cold trickle of dread on the back of my neck. This was it – the axe was going to fall.
But it wasn’t Greg. It was a guy I didn’t know – a tall man with a luxuriant beard, carrying a tablet.
‘Uh… Hi,’ I said. ‘I’m Lucy.’ Not that it would have taken Sherlock Holmes to work that out, given I was the only woman on the entire floor and therefore the only potential Lucy.
‘I’m Shane, from IT upstairs.’ He smiled. ‘I understand there’s a problem with your ItemProcSearch folder.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘With your incoming email,’ he translated.
’No, it seems fine,’ I said. Just five minutes before, I’d received an invitation to the Max! Monthly five-a-side football match, which obviously I would not be attending. ‘I’ve been getting mail just— oh wait. You mean the other account?’
‘[email protected],’ he confirmed. ‘The new address. We set it up last week.’
‘Yeah, that’s right. Only I haven’t had any mail to that address.’
He nodded. ‘Thought not. Mind if I have a seat?’
I stood up and he swung into my chair and scooted over to the screen, clicking the mouse and tapping obscure commands into the keyboard. I half-watched, the way you do when an IT guy is doing stuff on your machine, clueless but curious, wanting to make helpful suggestions but also worried I’d be asked something I couldn’t answer.
I managed not to say, ‘Have you tried switching it off and on again?’ I suspected Shane might have heard that joke before, once or twice.
After a minute or two, he gave a grunt of satisfaction. ‘Yup, that’s it.’
‘What?’ I asked.
‘There was an error setting up the inbox. My bad. Messages were getting stuck in a hidden folder. I’ve cleared the cache so it should be sorted now.’
He stood up, I thanked him and returned to my chair as he hurried away to his next rescue mission. The Askadam inbox was on my screen, containing just one message, from [email protected], titled TEST. So it was working – great. But there was still no one who wanted to Askadam anything – not so great.
Then, as I watched, another unread message appeared on the screen, below Shane’s test email and therefore sent earlier. Then another appeared below it, and another and another. Then there was a pause, then four more landed on the screen. Another pause – and then a rush. Email after email, their subject lines in bold because they were unread, came flooding into the inbox.
I couldn’t help letting out a whoop of excitement.
‘What’s up?’ Neil asked. ‘Won the lottery?’
‘It’s not all about money, you know,’ said Marco. ‘Maybe Lucy’s hot date from Saturday asked her out again.’
‘Or she read my column saying that skinny jeans are over and never coming back?’ put in Simon.
‘Or she’s been offered a job somewhere where she’s not surrounded by idiots,’ suggested Chiraag.
‘What’s going on, Lucy?’ asked Ross. ‘Do we need to hit the pub after work to celebrate whatever it is?’
‘Adam’s in business,’ I told them triumphantly. ‘I’ve got a whole mailbox full of problems.’
‘First time I ever heard anyone sound so happy about having problems,’ Ross noted drily, but I just grinned at him like a loon and after a second he grinned back.
I adjusted my glasses, flexed my fingers and turned to the brimming mailbox. I needed a strategy. Perhaps I’d be able to at least frame a response to some of the emails before I needed to lean on Amelie for help. Maybe I needed some sort of a system – colour-coding them, or automatically filtering them by keyword so that anything containing the word ‘penis’ got diverted into a folder where I’d never have to look at it again. Or alternatively?—
‘Lucy?’ Neil’s voice interrupted my concentration.
‘Yes?’ I glanced at him.
He was holding his empty mug, and as I watched, he tipped it upside down in a meaningful manner. A dribble of cold tea landed on his desk and he wiped it up with his sleeve.
‘I’m awfully thirsty,’ he said. ‘Any chance of a brew?’
Shit. Half an hour earlier, I’d have leaped to my feet, taken a round of drinks orders and hurried to the kitchen, relieved to have something to do. But now I did have something to do – something important, something that was my actual job.
I’d made a rod for my own back, I realised. All those helpful trips to the kitchen, all that checking whether Chiraag’s lemon and ginger tea was strong enough and putting just one ice cube in Simon’s glass of water had come back to bite me in the arse.
I was the only woman in the team, and now it seemed I’d volunteered to keep all these men hydrated and caffeinated for the foreseeable future.
I wanted to say no – but at the same time I didn’t want to come across as unhelpful, lazy or bitchy.
‘Come on, mate,’ Ross said from the desk opposite mine. ‘Why’s that Lucy’s job?’
‘Do you think she switches on the kettle with her ovaries or something?’ asked Barney.
‘Are you okay, Neil?’ Chiraag asked with faux concern. ‘Couple of weeks ago, you took your turn to do a round of drinks, same as all the rest of us. Now you seem to have lost the use of your legs.”
‘Maybe Lucy gives him such a massive boner he’s scared to stand up,” suggested Marco.
‘Fine,’ Neil huffed. ‘Fine. Gotcha. I’ll?—’
‘Don’t worry.’ Now it was clear everyone was on my side, I felt guilty about causing ructions within the group. ‘I’ll do it. Just this once, mind.’
I stood up and started gathering up the empty cups. Opposite me, Ross did the same, collecting mugs from his side of the bank of desks and following me to the kitchen.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ”You didn’t have to do that.’
‘You didn”t either,’ he pointed out.
‘I didn”t mean the coffee,’ I explained. ‘I meant backing me up.’
Ross smiled. ‘Reckoned it wouldn’t do any harm. Give Neil an inch and he’ll take a mile.’
‘Well – thanks anyway. Guess you saved me from a lifetime of servitude.’
‘Somehow, I can’t quite see you in that role.’
His words brought back a flash of a memory I”d have preferred to forget – when I’d also found myself in a role at work I could never have expected.
I pushed it aside. ‘Yours is a double espresso with a drop of milk, right?’
Ross shook his head. ‘It’s after midday, so I’ll just have a tea, thanks.’
I grinned at him and quoted, ‘“No thank you. I don’t like coffee, it keeps me up.”’
‘“Coffee’s not coffee, coffee is sex.”’
To my pleased surprise, he’d got the Seinfeld reference right away. Only now he was talking about sex, and that felt awkward – almost too personal, like he was suggesting something, or I’d be giving something away if I responded in kind. But that was ridiculous. We weren’t exchanging details about our favourite positions – we were just quoting actors in a TV show.
After a second, I forgot my caution and went for it.
‘“Sex, that’s meaningless.”’ I pressed the button to send a stream of coffee into my mug.
‘“Food and sex. Those are my two passions.”’
Oh, really?I thought. Then I reminded myself, He’s just quoting a show.
‘“To men, sex is an emergency,”’ I said.
Ross laughed, then poured boiling water over a teabag, his brow furrowed. ‘Damn, you got me.’
‘Next time, I’ll do my Soup Nazi routine.’
‘I’m totally here for that.’
I arranged the drinks on the tray and Ross picked it up.
As we left the kitchen, I couldn’t resist saying, ‘“I gotta get on that internet, I’m late on everything!”’
When we got back to our desks, we were still giggling. I couldn’t help noticing that every time I looked up from my screen and met Ross’s eye, he’d smile like we now had a shared secret. I found myself storing up more Seinfeld quotes in my mind, ready to produce them at opportune moments so I could not only beat him at the game, but make him laugh.
I spent the rest of that day reading through Adam’s mail, feeling more and more bewildered by the minute. I’d known I didn’t understand men, but I hadn’t realised just how much there was to not understand. There was a guy whose girlfriend had dumped him and he didn’t know why. I didn’t know either, and therefore nor did Adam. There was a guy who didn’t know whether the woman he fancied fancied him back – both Adam and I drew a blank on that one too. And there was Rufus, who wasn’t sure if his partner upping her sartorial game meant there was another guy on the scene.
I mean, I could see where he was coming from. I remembered myself a few years back, buying a dress and tights to wear to the office when before I’d always gone in in jeans. It was a decision I’d come to regret, and now I’d reverted to hoodies and zero make-up – it was safer that way.
There was no way I was going to try and make myself took fanciable at work again, not even for Ross. Especially not for Ross.
But perhaps Rufus’s girlfriend was telling the truth, and she was just trying to dress for the job she wanted rather than the one she had. I was stumped – and so was Adam, over and over again.
With each new message came a fresh awareness that I had bitten off more than I could chew.