It's the office party.
2 Brydges Place and the assembled cast of Pedantic Books, all 27 of us crushed onto small kitchen chairs and jammed around three tables.
Mr T says there will be no placement this year and that we may all sit where we like. Damn it. I rely on the placement to ensure that someone actually sits next to me. After years of the Arab Charity Dinner circuit where the only empty place in the room was always beside mine, I have something of a complex about seating plans.
But I needn't have worried. A few sips of champagne later he looks at me, twitching with discomfort and asks anxiously: 'How do you feel about the placement, is it a good thing? It won't take a minute, it's all in my head...'
I nod vigourously in an encouraging manner and he scuttles off oozing relief at being able to control our dining fate, and simultaneously ensure he sits next to people he feels comfortable with.
I am in Scotch Corner with all the other company jocks. Mr T likes to isolate us for our own safety and comfort. You know why. It's that strange phenomenon whereby people catch the accent after five minutes in your company and start oching and ayeing and thinking it's charming. At least we are less likely to cuff one another, except in a familial, Saturday night after the pub sort of way.
Wine flows, we do the annual circular cracker pull. There are speeches. There are awards which, this year, as Head of the Pedantic Press Yearbook Committee, have been in my gift. There are some invisible guns aimed at my head by disgruntled employees and some real water-filled guns similarly employed (pray - who gave the bloody ubereditor a water pistol and then sat him behind me - this is your idea of a placement Mr T?) The Secret Santa presents are passed out, as do several employees. Love is in the air. There is hugging. There is kissing. There are claims of undying devotion.
'See you, Marion, see you - you're my mouth...' (this sounds kinkier than it was, I assure you) slurs one of the girls as she pins me to the bathroom wall and insists on putting make up on my face. Note to self: Never let a drunk woman put make up on you, not even one who likes you.
'No, it's fine, it's very discrete,' says the lovely Alice, patting my arm reassuringly and wiping off streaks of eyeshadow with spit as I emerge with red dots of blusher on each cheek and dark purple lipstick. I look like the pissed undead.
I'm supposed to go to my ex-husband's posh Arab cousin's house in Knightsbridge after this. How on earth am I going to rock up to their Levantine palace in a cheap red frock from New Look as the ajnabia (foreign) ex-wife who has had the misfortune to lose her husband in the last year, staggeringly drunk and with a make-over from an even more inebriated colleague? The women will all be admiring their reflections in their rubies and muttering haram under their breath thinking that it was a wonder he kept me this long.
'Sure, I was just giving you a wee bit of a shimmer. I might have been just a wee bit heavy handed, but it looks grand,' she says, grabbing my head in an arm lock.
The Ubereditor comes over and places his hands on my shoulders in what, for a second, I mistake for affection. 'Just remember that I'm the Uber and you're the Unter,' he says darkly. If this was a panto the audience would hiss.
Lest I forget, huh?
Yanking out sack after sack of old manuscripts from the office, laying out post tenderly on other people's desks, organising the Zac Goldsmith Award for Worst Carbon Footprint travel plans for trips that I never take myself, making coffee I don't drink, booking lunches in restaurants that I don't eat and fielding daily calls from tutting and, often rude, agents would not, of course, have alerted me to the fact that I was at the bottom of the pile on which others nestle supreme.
But if it had escaped my notice, I was glad to be so gallantly reminded.
Uber and Mr T then drift off to the bar, deep in conversation. I've never seen two men so entranced by each other's company. Mr T offers his little boy grin of delight in reponse to something Uber has said and replies with rapid fire delight. The laugh, they giggle, the slap each other jovially on the shoulder. I've hurt my shoulder carrying out the fricking garbage. Glamorous Editor and I watch them from the cold bar stool of Unterland. 'If a man spoke to me with that expression in his eyes, I would think he was in love with me,' I sigh, but they only have eyes for each other.
In fact, even my current love disinterest doesn't look at me like that. I just had an email from him excusing his long silence because he's had his mother staying with him for two weeks. I mean, come on - a wife I would understand - but his mother? Uber and Unter. Loud and clear.
I didn't make it to the posh cocktail party in Knightsbridge. I fear I will never be invited back into the ex-family fold. Never mind. The next novel is going to put paid to that in any case.
I'm spending Christmas at home cuddling up to my own nest of vipers, catching up on my own blog and will return, after 10 days in Salvador over New Year, on the 5th of January.
Happy everything and see you next year...
