‘Ditzy Delia! What can I do you for?’ he said, after the switchboard transferred her.
‘I was wondering if I could beg a favour,’ Delia said, in her brightest, most ingratiating voice. Gah, press office work was a siege on one’s dignity sometimes.
‘A favour. Well now. Depends what you can do for me in return?’
Stephen Treadaway was definitely a little Cuthbert. He might even be what Roger called ‘a proper Frederick’.
‘Haha,’ Delia said, neutrally. ‘No, what it is, we have a problem with someone called Peshwari Naan on your message boards.’
‘Not our responsibility, you see.’
‘It is, really. You’re hosting it.’
Pause.
‘This person is posting a lot of lies about the council. We don’t have any argument with you. We’d like an email address for them so we can ask what’s what.’
‘Ah, no can do. That’s confidential.’
‘Can’t you just tell me what email he registered with? It’s probably Pilau at Hotmail, something anonymous.’
‘Sorry, darling Delia. Data Protection Act and all that jazz.’
‘Isn’t that what people are supposed to quote at you?’
‘Haha! Ten points to Gryffindor! We’ll make a journalist of you yet.’
Delia did more gritted-teeth niceties and rang off. He was right, they couldn’t give it out. She didn’t like being in the wrong when tussling with Stephen Treadaway.
She tried Googling ‘PeshwariNaan’ as one word, but she got tons of recipes. She attempted various permutations of Peshwari Naan and Newcastle City Council, but only got angry TripAdvisor reviews and a weird impenetrable blog.
She had welcomed a challenge, but this was suddenly looking like a nigh-on impossible task. She could go on the message boards and openly request him to contact her, but it wasn’t exactly invisible crisis management.
And was he a crisis? Peshwari was active but hardly that evil. Scrolling through the Chronicle’s news stories, it was clear that most people got he was joking and the replies were similarly silly.
Under a report about ‘Fury Over Bins’ Collection “encouraging rats”’, Peshwari claimed that Councillor Benton had started singing ‘Rat In Mi Kitchen’ by UB40.
Delia sniggered.
‘Something’s amusing you,’ Ann said, suspiciously.
‘It’s a troublemaker on the Chronicle site. Roger’s asked me to look into it.’
‘New frock?’ Ann added, uninterested in Delia’s response. Her eyes slid disapprovingly over Delia’s dragonfly-patterned Topshop number.
Ann clearly thought Delia’s outfits were unprofessionally upbeat. Aside from medicinal novelty slippers, she believed in simple, sober attire. Delia wore colourful swingy dresses, patterned tights and ballet shoes, and a raspberry-pink coat. Ann wore plain separates from Next. And gorilla feet.
People said Delia had a very distinctive, ladylike style. Delia was pleased and surprised at this, as it was mainly borne of necessity. Jeans and androgyny didn’t work well on her busty, hippy, womanly figure.
Years before she reached puberty, Delia realised that with her ginger hair, she didn’t have much choice about standing out. It wasn’t a tame strawberry blonde, it was blazing, rusty-nail auburn. She wore her long-ish style tied up, with a thick wedge of fringe, and offset the oyster-shell whiteness of her skin with wings of black liquid eyeliner.
With her wide eyes and girlish clothes, Delia was often mistaken for a student from the nearby university. Especially as she rode to work on her red bicycle. At thirty-three, she was rather pleased about this error.
Delia drummed her fingers on the desk. She had a strong feeling that Peshwari was male, bored, and thirty-ish.
His references were songs and TV shows she knew too. Hmmm. Where else might he be online? In her experience, message board warriors had always practised elsewhere. Twitter? She started to type. Wait. WAIT.
Yes – complete with avatar of a speckled flatbread, there was a Peshwari here. And he mentioned being a Geordie in his bio. (Snog On The Tyne.) She hit the GPS location on the tweets, praying to a benevolent God. They were sent from the web, and not only that – BAM! – a café in the city centre, Brewz and Beanz. A most distressing name for likers of proper spelling and good taste, she’d always thought. She knew the place – her boyfriend Paul called it Blow Your Beans.
She scrolled through the Naan’s timeline and noted they were usually posted at lunch hours and weekends. This was someone in an office, firewalled, annoyed, bored. She empathised. Project Naan kept her occupied for two hours, until the weekend’s start point arrived. Friday afternoon productivity in her office was never Herculean.
Well, Monday’s lunch destination was assured. A stake-out, that was much more exciting than the usual fare. She wouldn’t tell Roger just yet: no point bragging and then realising she’d happened across a different talking Naan altogether.
Delia headed into the loos to get herself ready for her evening out. She’d left the bike at home and got the bus in today. She changed into a small heel and a 50s-style rock’n’roll petticoat she’d brought with her to work, stuffed into a plastic bag. She shook it out and wriggled it on under her date-night attire dress.
The ruffled taffeta was a dusky lavender that poked out an inch below the hem and picked up on the pattern of the fabric. She was self-conscious once back among her colleagues, and bolted for her coat.
But not fast enough to evade Ann’s gimlet gaze.
‘What are you wearing?!’ she cackled.
‘It’s from Attica. The vintage shop,’ she said, cheeks heating.
‘You look like a Spanish brothel’s lampshade,’ Ann said.
Delia sighed, muttered wow thanks and grimaced. Nothing between nine and five mattered today, anyway.
Today was all about this evening: when life was going to take one of those small turns, a change of direction that led onto a wide, new road.
‘If he’s making stories about the council worth reading, they should pay him, not sue him,’ Paul said, wiping his paratha-greasy hands on a paper napkin.
‘Yeah,’ Delia said, through a thick mouthful of spicy potato. ‘But when a councillor gets upset, we have to be seen to do something. A lot of the older ones don’t understand the internet. One of them once said to us, “Go on and delete it. Rub it out!” and we had to explain it isn’t a big blackboard.’
‘I’m thirty-five and I don’t understand the internet. Griz was showing me Tinder on his phone the other day. The dating app? You swipe left or right to say yes or no to someone’s photo. That’s it. One picture, Mallett’s mallet. Yes, no, bwonk. It’s brutal out there.’
‘Thank God we did dating the old way,’ Delia said. ‘Cocktail classes.’
They smiled. Old story, happy memory. The first time they met, she’d swept into his bar on a cloud of Calvin Klein’s Eternity with a gaggle of friends and asked for a Cherry Amaretto Sour. Paul hadn’t known how to make them. She’d volunteered to hop over the bar and show him.
She still remembered his startled yet