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PART 1
THE PLAN
ONE
‘And so, cheers, everyone! Here’s to Christmas and the New Year and the next quarter and…YAY!’ I raise my cocktail in the air and hold my phone at arm’s length for a group selfie. As we are all squidged in together in this cosy Mexican restaurant booth, the idea of a photo to mark the occasion hasn’t gone down well. Frank looks out from under his sombrero, scrunching his nose to move his glasses up his face, while the other two shuffle closer, awkwardly.
‘Where am I looking?’ asks Jasper, frowning. ‘I’m rubbish at selfies, I’m always looking in the wrong place…’
‘The black dot…There…’ points Leo. ‘Crap, was I pointing in that picture? You’ll have to take it again, Maggie. Otherwise, it’ll be me with my finger looking like I’m phoning home.’
Jasper laughs – that laugh where I don’t know whether he’s having an asthma attack or genuinely finding life funny. I tap on my phone and take a glance at the picture. Leo is pointing, Jasper has his eyes closed and Frank’s sombrero blocks out the light. I also need to learn how to convey excitement more appropriately in photos. My eyes are bulging and I’m grinning so widely you can see my wisdom teeth. With my long brown hairhanging in a ponytail over my shoulder, I look like some sort of comedy horse. We will definitely be taking that again.
‘Just look in the general direction, lads, and we’ll try again. Everyone say “Wifi for life!”’ I squeal. Jasper raises an eyebrow; he rarely gets my jokes.
‘But it’s the twenty-seventh of November, Maggie,’ Frank replies with a heavy hint of sarcasm. ‘There is not a hint of Christmas in this place.’
I look around, listening to the November rain thunder down, almost drowning out the mariachi music. Some Halloween décor is still hanging near the kitchens. ‘Imagine the cactus in the corner is a Christmas tree.’
They all look confused, like teenagers who’ve been dragged out against their will.
‘How does Darth Vader like this turkey?’ I say, trying to lighten the mood, and holding my phone up again ready. Their faces are blank. Nothing. And you call yourself geeks? ‘On the dark side?’
And finally I get a laugh. I take the picture, then turn my phone around to have a look. Frank throws up a touristy peace sign, Jasper is pulling some sort of Elvis lip curl, we’ve caught Leo mid-laugh, I look less horsey. It’ll do. I’ll print it out and put it on our office noticeboard as a reminder of the time when we attempted to have a life beyond our office walls.
You see, I had thought this would be a good idea. Given that our office smells a lot like Doritos Cool Original chips for most of the year, I thought, where better to host our Christmas dinner than in a Mexican restaurant? This place has hats you can wear and all-you-can-eat fajitas and free Mexican-style Day of the Dead tattoos. It’s fun, and I suspect what is lacking in all our lives is a bit of fun. And daylight, to be fair.
Unfortunately, this is the reality when you’re the IT department of a mid-sized corporate financial assets company; you get put down in the basement. This place is everythingour office isn’t. I look around the restaurant on this quiet Wednesday evening in November. There’s no shortage of light and colour here. It’s a vision in teal and bright pink, with large murals of dancing jalapenos holding maracas.
‘Anyone know what Queso Fundido is?’ Frank asks, scanning the menu.
‘According to this, it’s like Mexican fondue,’ Leo says, consulting his phone. This is very Leo, he’s meticulous and will check every detail on that menu. In fact, they all have their phones out and I feel I know them all so well that I can say with some certainty that Frank is most likely texting his mother to check in and Jasper is looking up reviews for this place.
‘Maggie, someone once had a fajita here and found a human fingernail in their salsa,’ Jasper whispers, looking distressed, his head down low so the serving staff don’t hear him. ‘One star and reported to the Food Standards Agency.’
I hate it when I’m right. I glance over at his phone and scroll down. ‘The restaurant replied, Jas. It was a bit of onion.’ I smile at him. Jasper is wound so incredibly tight. He needs the tequila the most.
‘Is there a Christmas menu?’ Frank asks.
I shake my head. However much I don’t want to admit it, Frank may be right. They’ve not really ramped up the festive in this joint yet. Not a turkey fajita in sight. But then I also don’t know how to tell my lads that I only discovered last week that HR had forgotten to send out the memo to us in IT about the Christmas lunch planned in town. Some grand party in a fancy hotel; there was a dress code, a fun raffle and ice skating. I only found out because I was fixing someone’s hard drive and saw a printout of the set menu on their desk.I’m sorry, Maggie. We always forget IT. They don’t seem to forget us when their computers are filled with viruses because they’ve tried to download porn again, but I said nothing. For ‘health and safety reasons’ there was no capacity to add us to the guest list, so Itook matters into my own hands. As the team’s line manager, it was down to me to ensure they weren’t forgotten.
‘Would you like some tortilla chips to share?’ a waitress says, approaching the table. She’s young and blonde and has a fitted T-shirt on that says ‘Ask Me About My Nachos’.
I see Frank snigger but then blush immediately. It’s a member of the opposite sex; if he had to ask her about her nachos he’d implode and die. Leo looks down at the table not even taking notice of her. Jasper studies the prices of said tortilla chips.
‘That would be great. Could we also get a selection of the dips?’ I say on the table’s behalf. She nods. She looks at our table with bemusement, trying to work out what this is. I can understand the confusion. It’s not quite a work party, not quite a social gathering, none of us quite match. I can’t even explain it myself. We all joined the company within a year of each other four years ago and have stayed in our IT basement ever since.
As the waitress leaves, Frank waves at her. Yeah, Frank. Don’t do that.
‘So…’ I say, trying to prompt a conversation. These guys may be geeks but they have excellent manners and put away their phones. ‘Tell me what you’re all doing for Christmas when the office shuts down.’
They all sit around that table and stare into space. We are a tight-knit little unit in IT but we rarely delve into the personal. Our conversations mainly take place in our WhatsApp group, where we send coffee orders to the last person in, and in quiet moments where we’re playing online games and trading insults to each other online though we’re sitting across the room from each other.
‘I’m going home. To Kendal,’ Leo says in his soft Northern accent. If there’s someone in our team I know least about it’s probably Leo. He’s quiet. He comes in and does his work, gets his haircut every two weeks, owns a healthy line in hoodies thathe wears over obscure album cover T-shirts, and the only time he makes a fuss is when someone re-stocks the teabags with anything other than Yorkshire Tea. ‘Traditional Christmas at home, country walks, family and turkey.’
I nod, smiling at how wholesome it sounds.
‘My sister is getting married on the twenty-first,’ Frank says, looking pained. ‘Big event in town. I’m an usher.’
