Josh looked up at me from an article he was reading in Homes & Gardens. I’d suggested Loaded as a slightly more useful manual for pulling, but it didn’t quite suit him, somehow.
‘And?’
‘And?? AND?? Excuse me, but as landlord of this establishment, I do believe it is your duty to let me know when you’re hoarding Johnny Depp in geek form on your property!’
‘You never asked.’
‘Why did I never think to ask?’ I asked, slapping myself on the forehead. ‘So many gorgeous computer geeks in the world, so little time. Josh! If it hadn’t been for my extreme bravery last night I might never have met my future life partner! Ooh –’ a thought occurred to me – ‘and our kids get to be brainy, too!’
‘He is very pretty, I suppose,’ said Josh, a tad dreamily. I narrowed my eyes at him.
‘Only in an objectively aesthetic way! Not in a romantic way! Not that there would be anything wrong with that! But I don’t! Not that it’s bad!’
‘Stop, stop! You’ve got caught in the Richard Gere “I’m not gay/but it’s OK” cycle of eternal justification. The only way to break free is to remove that plate of pork chops from my vicinity before I vomit on it.’
‘Thank goodness for your magic spell-breaking powers,’ said Josh, picking up his plate and moving over to the sink.
‘You know, I must have him,’ I went on. ‘He will be mine.’
‘But he doesn’t talk.’
‘That’s OK. I can talk to you, or my mother. Addison is for kissing and worshipping.’
‘So, like, there’s no difference between me and your mother?’ asked Josh gloomily, rinsing his plate off.
‘Well, you haven’t ordered me to help with the washing-up yet, so, perhaps there is.’
‘Don’t you have work to go to?’ he asked, a tad crossly.
‘Ah, that’s more like it.’
‘Fine. See you later. I’ll just continue here on my lifelong mission of female identification.’
I popped my head back round the door.
‘You know, if you meant that sarcastically, you should really take that pinny off.’
He gave me the V’s.
‘Bye, Addison!’ I called out cheerily as I passed his door. There was a small break in tapping in response. I took it as a good sign.
It was getting dark when I hopped on the bike and headed up to the market. Going out in the chilly nights was the worst; I knew I had several hours of rushing about with my hands wet to come, and all around me the nine-to-fivers were heading for home, fresh pasta and The Bill. And they all made twice as much as me. It didn’t seem fair. Working in the market wasn’t anything like working in a shop. Then, you got to choose things yourself and put them together, and if someone had been rude to you on the phone you could put a bug in their gladioli. Here, I had to check ten thousand tulips and try to work out which ones were the best.
I worked for Johnny, who was wizened and had been on the flower markets for four hundred and seventy years, as he never stopped reminding me.
‘Aye, you never saw colours like that in my day,’ he’d snort derisively at one of the more over-the-top hybrids.
‘That’s because everything was in black and white, then,’ I’d point out to him. ‘It was the olden days.’
‘People used to eat flowers during the war, you know.’ He was quite one for reminiscing. In fact, he was absolutely, bar none, the best person I’d ever met at making up things about the war.
‘Hey, Johnny,’ I waved to him as I whizzed round the corner. The lorries hadn’t started to unload yet, so people were standing around, smoking roll-ups and gossiping about magnolias. The flower people despised the fruit people in the next set of bays, and they in turn thought the flower people were a bunch of big pansies who couldn’t lift a box of melons if their lives depended on it.
‘Hey there, lass.’ He regarded me critically. ‘You know, when I was your age, I was selling out the back of my own van.’
‘Johnny, you have no idea how old I am. In fact, I’m nine years old. And I have my own van. I do this for fun.’
‘I never met a lassie who knew when to shut up,’ he observed mournfully, and threw me over a pair of heavy gloves.
I’d only been there a couple of weeks, and already I hated it. It was exactly like school. The girls all wore inappropriate clothing, smoked behind the sheds and picked on me. Either that or they were so stupid they had to be reminded every day how to pick up a box of flowers without drooling on it.
So I tended to slog away on my own, pausing only to hurl abuse at Johnny or to point out things to the drooling girls along the lines of ‘Box – there! … You see box? Pick up box?’
The smoking girls teased me because I’d been to college, particularly Tash, their queen, this scrawny girl with thick black eyeliner who had a real mother-smoked-in-pregnancy look about her. Tonight she sidled up alongside me, observed my work closely for several minutes, and then said:
‘Hmm, yes, I see now why that needed a degree – getting all those tulip heads in a line can’t be easy.’
The rough boys all guffawed and I tried to laugh but couldn’t. I hated her, and I hated being bullied, and however rude I could be to Johnny it wouldn’t translate to this lot. They were rough as badgers’ arses.
‘Could you pass the sign-in sheet?’ I hated it but sometimes I just had to talk to her.
‘Sorry, love, I’ve only got a GCSE in general studies.’
All the boys laughed again, and one of them shouted, ‘Oi, watch out, Tash, she’ll trip on the chip falling off your shoulder.’
I grimaced and pretended to join in, boiling inside, but really I felt like when I was taken by some older girls to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show when I was eleven – it was all too trashy and I just didn’t get it, but I was laughing along anyway. They were mean, mean kids. Because I didn’t blow cigarette smoke out of my nose they called me TinBits.
‘Please,’ begged one of the lads, bending on one knee before me, ‘your exquisite virginal majesty, might I just for one second peek up your skirt?’
‘She’s got her knickers welded to her bottom,’ yelled Tash.
I very nearly flashed my tits at him just to piss him off, but instead made a hasty vow to myself to apply for every florist’s job in a five thousand-mile radius.
For the rest of the night, Tash contrived to make fourteen derogatory remarks, upset my flowers four times and spend at least an hour talking about me (I suspected) on prolonged fag breaks with the lads. I was being bullied! I couldn’t believe it! This wasn’t fair.
My shift finished at 4 a.m. and I freewheeled home as usual, down the hill back to the big house. I crept in and saw the light on under Addison’s door. The urge to see him again was overwhelmingly strong so I wandered into the kitchen and made two cups of tea. I didn’t know how he liked it, so I put three sugars in for luck as I’d never seen him eat – he probably needed the nutrition. Then I ferreted around for a couple of biscuits to add to it, but the only thing going was a very lonely Penguin – Kate allowed herself one every fortnight. I took it anyway, planning to replace it, pronto.
I knocked on the door softly.