‘Wait till you see it, Ginge.’ He winks at me. ‘It’s fantastic. Loads of light. And when I’ve decked it all out, I’m going to use one of the upstairs bedrooms as an office.’
‘What for?’ George’s big brown eyes glint mischievously. ‘I’d have thought you’d be needing the extra bed. Then you can get the next old slap in before the last one’s vacated. You won’t even have to wait for the sheets to cool. Just roll her into the damp patch and move on.’
‘Like you’re so chaste.’ Janice waves her cigarette around so that a big carrot of ash drops into my wine. ‘You’ve had more men than my ruddy mother. And that’s saying something.’
I feel sorry for Janice’s mum. Just because she refuses to tell Janice who her father is, we all assume she doesn’t know. Which is, more than likely, complete bollocks. And if you actually sat Janice down and asked her, she’d probably admit that she’s never seen her mum with a man. But we all prefer the slagbag story. It’s much more fun.
‘Can we get back to me?’ Sam is laughing.
‘Me now. Me now,’ I tease him.
‘Don’t you want to know why I need an office?’
‘Not really,’ I joke, lighting myself one of Janice’s fags and jabbing him in the ribs.
‘I’m going to set up my own business,’ he announces proudly.
‘What as?’ George asks. ‘A male escort?’
‘’Cept no one would have to pay him,’ I say. ‘Would they, Sam?’
‘Depends who’s offering. Obviously I might do discounts for very good friends. But you three buggers’d have to pay full whack of course, the amount of piss-taking you do. Anyway, a couple of the clients at my place have been a bit disgruntled recently and I’m sure I could persuade them to come with me. I sometimes think they’d prefer the more personal touch.’
‘Not too personal, I hope?’ Janice laughs.
Sam rolls his eyes to heaven.
‘That’s cool,’ I tell him. ‘Even if it’s a bit scarily grown-up. C’mon, you two. A toast. To Sam’s new business.’
Janice and I clink glasses enthusiastically and then George, anxious to gossip, lights yet another fag and tells us how his job on a TV culinary dating show is going. The week before Christmas a gay couple won a holiday to Martinique on the strength of their steak and kidney pie. Understandably, they were jubilant. And, at the celebration party afterwards, George managed to separate them.
‘I had one in the stationery cupboard over the staplers and took the other into the Ladies.’ He giggles naughtily. ‘Though, looking back, I think giving out my mobile number afterwards was a bit of an error.’
‘To which one?’ Janice asks.
‘Both.’ George laughs. ‘They wrote it down on separate pink Post-its. Barry found my number in Steve’s pocket and clicked. They rang me from the airport. I ruined the holiday, apparently. I mean God only knows what it had to do with me. I got all the bloody blame, obviously. I certainly don’t remember promising to be faithful to either one of them. They should have been mad at each other.’
‘Have you heard from them since?’ Sam asks.
‘No.’ George tosses his head back and exhales smoke through his nostrils like a dragon. ‘I went home for Christmas. Drank port and lemon and played Scrabble with Mum. Chucked my mobile in her fish pond.’
‘And did you tell her?’ I ask, suddenly serious. George, though aged nearly thirty and camper than Carry On Camping, still flatly refuses to tell his mother he’s gay. It’s something to do with her being elderly and he being her only child. Stupid, I call it.
‘No.’
Sam pours more wine and we all agree George is lucky not to have been sacked. Janice says she wishes she could get the sack, because she hates everyone at work so much, and I say I probably will get the sack if I don’t make a start on the article I have to finish by tomorrow morning. Then we all clink glasses again, amidst a chorus of Happy New Years. Which sets Janice off again.
‘Resolutions. Who’s got resolutions? And I don’t mean stupid, shallow ones, like more Croissants for Breakfast.’ She takes one last drag of her fag and stubs it out in the butter dish.
Croissants for Breakfast is Janice and Katie shorthand for cunnilingus, the inference being that cunnilingus doesn’t happen very often, and is therefore a lot like having croissants for breakfast instead of toast.
‘Or getting rid of your duty friends,’ she says. ‘I don’t mean that.’
‘What’s a duty friend?’ asks Sam.