The door opens and I immediately sit up straight, brace myself to not react no matter what they throw at me.
My entire body feels like it is lifted up and then thrown down when I see who is actually there. Mr Palmer.
Mr Palmer. Great. Just great. He is one of the partners where I work. So, not only do my work know, they’ve sent me him. When I thought this couldn’t get any worse, when I thought I couldn’t be any more embarrassed, they had to send Mr Palmer to make my humiliation complete.
June, 2018
‘So, trainee, you do realise you’re on Felicia duty, yes?’
I’d been told this several times by various people I worked with tonight, at the end of the first day of the strategy and planning conference the big wigs and senior solicitors were attending in Leeds. I had been picked as the only trainee allowed to attend so I was not drinking too much and was showing them they were right to choose me.
We were all staying at a large hotel in the city centre, and as one of the newest and most junior staff members, I wasn’t in on the joke. It was centred around our ferocious office manager, Lorna, but I couldn’t quite work out why they were calling her ‘Felicia’ and what it had to do with me.
As the evening wore on, though, I began to understand. At night, neat, low-bunned, skirt-suited, tortoiseshell-glasses-wearing office manager Lorna transformed into her alter-ego ‘Felicia’ who wore sprayed-on jeans and a see-through chiffon top without a bra. ‘Felicia duty’ involved watching while she started with Prosecco, moved on to white wine, raced through port and then downed tequilas like there was something chasing her, patiently waiting for her to drink herself under the table, and then taking her up to her room. Apparently you just had to put her on her bed, preferably in the recovery position with a sick bowl beside her just in case, and then ‘Felicia duty’ was done.
Once I’d worked out what ‘Felicia duty’ involved, I’d decided to make my excuses quite early because there was no way I was putting a woman old enough to be my mother to bed. What sort of nonsense was that? Stupid me decided to go to the bar, though, and when I returned, everyone had gone. Everyone except Mr Palmer, one of the newer partners, whose department I was currently working in.
‘Yeah, that’s why they were all being so nice to you earlier,’ he said when I retook my seat, looking around incredulously at all the empty chairs. ‘Never turn your back on them because this is what they do. They’ll be partying in someone’s room.’
He’d arrived just over eighteen months ago, apparently . . . and everyone had a crush on him. Everyone. It wasn’t hard to see why. He was cool, confident, calm. Decent enough not to leave me alone with ‘Felicia’.
‘You can go to bed, if you want,’ I said.
‘No, couldn’t do that to you.’ He sipped his drink then smiled, checked his black runners’ watch – the same one that Con had been trying to convince Mum and Dad to buy him for ages – and visibly worked something out. ‘Anyway, she’s been drinking a lot faster tonight, so I reckon she’s got about two more minutes before—’ Mid-sentence, Lorna/‘Felicia’ wobbled in her seat like a spinning top finding its centre and then fell forward, her forehead landing loudly on the table. Thankfully there were no glasses in the way. ‘—the end.’
He stood up and I could not help but notice him all over again. When everyone had disappeared off to change earlier, he’d got rid of his charcoal-grey suit with yellow tie and had returned in black jeans, black shirt and black high-top trainers. Everything he wore emphasised the lithe fluidity of his body.
‘Why do they call her “Felicia”?’ I asked as he gently picked her up.
‘I don’t know. She calls herself it, from what I gather. Something to do with it being her alternate persona for when she’s away from home.’
‘But there’s the whole, “Bye, Fel—” ’
‘Yes,’ he cut in. ‘But beyond this, I tend not to get too involved with the stuff people who work for me do. It makes everything much simpler.’
I nodded. Of course it did. Of course. I felt more than a teensy bit foolish. I really thought . . . I cringed inside. I had entertained for a few minutes the idea that he wasn’t simply waiting around to help with Lorna, but that he might have been very slightly interested in spending time with me. Stupid, Verity. How very cringey of you. Zeph was going to laugh her head off when she found out that one.
‘This is the part where you say, “Bye, Felicia”,’ Lorna mumbled as she lay sprawled on her hotel bed. We’d put on the sidelights and I took off her shoes. She smirked at her joke. She clearly had nooooo idea what it really meant. She’d probably just read it on socials, on a meme, and had decided to grab it for her own purposes. Cos there was no way that lady was using those words if she properly knew where it came from and why people used it.
‘So we just leave her like this?’ I asked Mr Palmer as I watched her shift and wriggle and move herself up the bed, far more easily than someone who had drunk as much as she had should be able to.
‘Yep.’ Mr Palmer shrugged his shoulders. ‘She’ll be fine in the morning as well. It’s like she stores up all this energy to be the most efficient mother and worker and then when she’s away, she lets it all out.’ He turned to leave, an indication that I should do the same. ‘Watch her turn up at breakfast like she went to bed at eight with a good book and a face pack.’
In the corridor, Mr Palmer and I paused outside her room. I felt like we were at the end of a date and that this was the moment I should tell him my flatmates were out as a way of inviting him over . . .
As if he had come to a decision, Mr Palmer started down the corridor towards the turn at the end that led to the bank of lifts, walking slowly with his hands in his pockets and his face set in a grim expression. I walked beside him, my hands nervously fidgeting with themselves.
‘My wife was actually called Felicia,’ he said as we walked.
‘No way!’ I exclaimed. ‘You’re lying.’
‘Yes, way,’ he replied, a small smile on his lips. ‘She was surprisingly fine about it. Sanguine, you could say. She said at least it was something you only heard now and then, not like, “sure, Jan” or being called a “Karen” for every bad thing a woman did. As I’m sure you know, there are a million memes and gifs dissing the Jans and Karens of this world.’
‘Dissing’ coming out of Mr Palmer’s delicious mouth gave me all sorts of conflicted feelings. On the one hand, it was like my dad saying it – a total no-no; on the other hand it was as if he was breakfast, lunch and dinner made man, so anything he said or did was fine with me.
‘You get a hundred Karen disses for one “bye, Felicia” so she reasoned she got off lightly.’
We seemed to be walking slower the nearer we got to the lifts. When we eventually arrived, we stopped in front of the bank of large grey doors with the red display reading ‘0’ for all three lifts. They were waiting to whisk us away to our separate floors, and the words to invite him to my room were teetering dangerously on the tip of my tongue. I wanted to say them, to see what would happen, how he would react. He could only say no, or he could pretend he didn’t hear or he could report me to HR for sexual solicitation. I quickly clamped down my teeth and pressed my mouth closed. Imagine coming away with a STD – Sexually Transmitted Dismissal – without any actual sex taking place.