15. Thank God for Monica

ank God for Monica

Monica and Jimmy got together over sandwiches. Literal y. eir eyes met over the big tray of them that hung from her neck, lodged beneath her bosom which she later admitted she had been shamelessly using as a visual sales pitch.

She was trying to sel Jimmy avocado, alfalfa and beetroot on walnut, a combination which, when she got to know him (later that day), she would realize was not his thing at al . Jimmy was very much a peanut butter sort of bloke, or Kraft cheese slices. And, above al , on white. Sliced white. at was how you made a sandwich. Pretty much al of the guys on the oor agreed.

Monica and her friend Tip had founded their own catering rm. It was cal ed Sand Witches and they both wore pointy black hats. eir idea had been that al those thousands of unbelievably busy people in the City would not have time to go out for lunch and were working too hard to think about it anyway. Tip’s brother was a trader and he’d told her that they al lived off Mars bars. e girls had therefore had the idea of bringing food, seriously good food, directly to the consumer. ey were unbelievably excited about their idea, convinced it was a real winner.

Which it was. Unfortunately, three or four thousand other girls had had the same idea on pretty much the same day. In terms of female career options in the mid-nineties, catering companies were the new nursing and for a while it seemed as if every female graduate in Britain was setting one up.

Unfortunately, this glut of bright sparky girls with their pesto and focaccia coincided with the arrival of Starbucks and Coffee Republic, who also sold sandwiches. It did not take long for almost al the sparky girls to go out of business and, apart from the two or three lucky ones who went on to cater for lm premières and Gwyneth Paltrow’s dinner parties or design food for Marks and Spencer, they al gave up.

Lizzie was one of those who prospered. She and Robson had ditched haircuts by that time and moved into food. Somehow, as with everything she touched, Lizzie had made it work and by the turn of the mil ennium Lizzie’s Sarnies were being sold in Sainsbury’s.

Monica and Tip, on the other hand, had lasted less than a week. ey had not even got as far as buying their third batch of bread. e work had been hard and horribly unrewarding. None of the men in shirtsleeves glancing up from their phones had wanted their sandwiches, although plenty of them had wanted Monica and Tip.

Jimmy wasn’t interested in Tip but he had wanted Monica right off the bat.

He had elevated his gaze from her artful y exposed cleavage to encounter a fresh, open face with pale, porcelain skin, a splash of rosiness at the cheeks and large, almost startled-looking chestnut eyes. e fringe which hung above them and the long tresses which tumbled from beneath her witch’s hat were of that deep, rich brunette in which hints of crimson lie hiding, waiting only for sunlight to make them sparkle.

Even as Jimmy asked Monica if she had any peanut butter and jel y ones, he knew that it was love at rst sight.

‘Jel y?’ Monica asked. ‘As in jel y-and-ice-cream jel y?’

‘No,’ Jimmy replied, ‘jel y as in the American word for jam.’

‘Oh,’ said Monica, ‘are you American then?’

‘Uhm . . . no,’ Jimmy replied, slightly thrown. He and his friends habitual y used as many American words and expressions as they could, and nobody had ever thought it strange before. ‘What I meant was peanut butter and jam.’

‘Oh,’ said Monica. ‘Wel no, I haven’t.’

en Jimmy asked her out and it was Monica’s turn to be taken aback. It was, after al , very sudden, and not merely in the sense that he had hit on her within seconds of declining a radish, rocket and chickpea wrap.

ey al did that.

‘How about you let me do the catering, babes?’ they’d drawl, with eyes icking from her face to her cleavage. ‘I nish at midnight but Annabel’s does a serious al -night breakfast.’

Monica knew their game al right. ey wanted her for breakfast and ta-ta in the morning. A line of coke and they’d be back to the future without a single thought for the immediate past and she’d be left doing the walk of shame with her dirty knickers stuffed in her handbag. Wel , no thank you, there’d been enough horny boys at col ege and at least they had the decency to hang around in the morning in the hope of cadging a piece of toast and Marmite.

But Jimmy’s offer was different. He wanted to take her out immediately.

Right there and then. He was actual y offering to leave his phone and buy her

a coffee.

Even though she’d only been wandering the trading oors for three days, Monica knew that this was highly unusual behaviour. ese guys were obsessed.

ey never left their phones while the trade was on. ey wanted sex, of course, but sex, like everything else, had to be on their terms and Monica and Tip had soon realized that if these blokes could have shagged you while continuing to shout into their phones those would be the best terms of al .

And now one of them, a particularly cute one with his boyish face and lovely mop of sandy hair, his brand-new shirt clearly worn straight from the shop, the heavy folds of its packaged state rmly subdividing his chest, this nice-looking, eager, youthful chap had actual y hung up both the phones he had been working and offered to take her for a coffee. ere and then.

‘Don’t you have to keep working?’ Monica asked. ‘I thought that was the rule.’

Jimmy was aware that one or two of the other guys had already noted that he was engaged with a sandwich chick for more than the usual brief moment.

‘Babes,’ he said, icking his cuff to reveal the gold Rolex beneath (actual y a Hong Kong fake), ‘the Jimster makes his own rules.’

e icker of disappointment and distaste that passed across Monica’s sweet features was for Jimmy that thing which his American col eagues had started to refer to as a ‘wake-up cal ’. Something stirred deep in his memory, back before the nearly two years of phones and computer digits had numbed his personality, destroyed his good taste, ruined his sense of decorum and buried his self-awareness. He could remember what a complete wanker sounded like.

It sounded like him. Jimmy ‘the Jimster’ Corby.

‘Did I say that?’ he asked.

Monica nodded glumly. ‘Yes. You cal ed me “Babes” and you cal ed yourself

“e Jimster”.’

‘I didn’t! It’s a lie. You’re a crazy woman. I should cal Security.’

Monica couldn’t help smiling at the speed with which he was recovering, but she stood rm.

‘Also you thought I’d be impressed because you’re wearing a Rolex.’

‘It’s a fake! I swear! Two hundred Hong Kong dol ars! I may stil have the receipt to prove it!’

Monica smiled again, but that did not mean she was letting him off the hook.

‘at’s even worse. Trying to impress a girl on the cheap. But it doesn’t matter anyway because I have a rule that I never go for coffee with boys who refer to themselves in the third person. Or people who pre x their names with a de nite article.’

‘Pardon?’ Jimmy said, his head swimming a bit. People did not normal y bother with ful sentences where he hung out.

‘In plain English, babe. Bye bye, the Jimster.’

She turned and Jimmy cried out.

‘Stop!’ he said. Loudly and rmly.

He didn’t know why he did it; he’d known her less than a minute. Heads turned. Piers, who stil headed up Jimmy’s group, looked up from his computer. Tip, who’d been working the derivatives desk next door, turned round too.

Jimmy didn’t care. It was a scene from a movie. He’d cal ed out in a crowded room to a girl whose name he didn’t even know and now she was turning back towards him and giving him the cutest ‘yeah, what?’ expression he had ever seen.

‘My name’s Jimmy. I’ve been here for nearly two years,’ he said, ‘and I’ve never taken a break. I think I’ve earned one. Please, let me buy you a coffee.’

Jimmy didn’t care about the laddish ‘woohs’ that fol owed him and Monica as they left the oor together. Nor did he mind that Piers would certainly want to know what the fuck was going on when he got back. What he cared about was the beautiful, funny girl whose name he would shortly discover was Monica.

Perhaps it was an instinct for self-preservation that led him to fal hopelessly in love that day. It certainly saved him. Saved him from career burnout and saved him from turning permanently into the appal ing idiot he had been rapidly becoming. Saved him from becoming a man who cal ed women he’d never met before ‘babes’ and who referred to himself as the Jimster.

Strangely enough, it also made him a much more useful operative for Mason Jervis. A potential group leader who would rapidly overtake Piers and be given charge of a national desk.

Loving Monica gave Jimmy a sense of perspective. Reminded him of outside interests. Reintroduced him to the importance of social communication.

Brought to his attention the half-forgotten notion that you could do more

interesting things with your earnings than count them. In another American term that had recently crossed the Atlantic, she ‘grounded’ him.

ey were married just four months after they had rst met. Lizzie catered the wedding, did the owers and designed the invitations. David designed and supervised the erection of the marquees. Henry read the bit from Shakespeare about ‘the marriage of true minds’. Rupert sourced, ordered and paid for the wine (‘so I’l be sure there’s something decent to drink’) and Robson was best man.

Effortlessly, easily and so satisfyingly, Monica was absorbed into Jimmy’s little gang.

‘ank God for Mon,’ Lizzie said. ‘She saved Jimmy.’ And they al agreed that she had.

OceanofPDF.com