The Drop

the rest celebrating on their own while I got the fuck out of it.
    When I finally got back that evening, Laura had, as usual, opened a bottle of white wine. Before I met her, I only ever used to drink beer, now it was a nightly ritual to lose our stresses in the bottom of a bottle of Pinot Grigio. I chose one of our big wine glasses and poured it almost to the top, sitting down heavily on the couch.
    ‘Bobby still giving you a hard time?’ she said breezily, as if Newcastle had just lost again; another thing she didn’t seem to understand the seriousness of.
    ‘That’s one way of describing it.’
    Laura leaned forward in her chair, tilted her head to one side and gave me her wide-eyed empathising look.
    ‘What’s happened?’
    I wasn’t sure how to put it into words but then I figured I should try. There was something about her pitying, supportive look that spurred me into making an effort, ‘suppose you had an idea, a good idea but your boss rejected it as… too risky… in the context of an overall business plan?’
    ‘Right.’
    ‘Then, because things changed, he suddenly decided that your idea was worth the risk after all, so he went ahead with it and it worked.’
    ‘Right,’ she said, frowning, ‘but that’s good isn’t it? If it worked I mean.’
    ‘But… ’
    ‘There’s a but?’
    ‘There’s a but. He didn’t tell me about it, implementing my idea that is. Until he had actually gone ahead with it.’
    ‘Right,’ she kept saying ‘right’ but this time she said it doubtfully, ‘I’m not sure I… ’
    ‘Which means he still doesn’t fully trust me, don’t you see?’
    ‘Well,’ she thought for a moment, ‘not really. I mean could he not just have forgotten to tell you?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘It’s not all bad surely? I mean, you’ll get credit for this idea won’t you?’
    ‘Yes but that’s not what I care about right now. It’s the trust thing that’s worrying me.’
    ‘I know, I do know what you mean,’ she said enthusiastically, ‘it’s like with the Watson case, when Thomas wouldn’t hand it over to me without continuing to be involved. It was like he just didn’t trust me to do a good job.’
    ‘No,’ I said, ‘no, with respect to you Laura, it’s not like that at all. The consequences could be very different.’ I actually wanted to say ‘why does it always have to be about you?’ but I managed to not go down that road.
    ‘Alright,’ she said, through gritted teeth, ‘if you think your boss doesn’t trust you any more, here’s a radical idea…’
    ‘What?’ She gave me a challenging look, ‘no, seriously I’m interested, I really am, honestly. What’s your radical idea?’
    ‘Think the unthinkable,’ she offered enigmatically.
    I creased my eyebrows together, in what I hoped was a silent way of conveying the question, ‘what the fuck are you talking about?’
    ‘Leave.’
    ‘Leave?’
    ‘Yes,’ she said, almost triumphantly, ‘why not. If you’ve had enough, just leave. Go and do something else.’
    ‘Like what?’
    ‘I don’t know. What would you like to do?’. She was acting as if I could turn up for work at an RAF base tomorrow and start flying Tornado jets instead.
    ‘In case you haven’t noticed, my Curriculum Vitae is a little unorthodox; graduated from college, worked for a notorious gangster… That’s it. Somehow I don’t think that’s going to get me into Microsoft.’
    ‘I’m only saying… ’
    ‘What?’ I interrupted her, even though she hates that, ‘what are you saying? You’ve used that big lawyerly brain to help me and you’ve come up with a whole new radical idea? Leave? Simple as that, leave?’
    ‘Why the fuck not?’ she raised her voice.
    ‘Why the fuck not? I’ll tell you why the fuck not, because I don’t work for Marks & Spencer or the local council. Get real. You don’t leave a job like mine. It doesn’t fucking happen. Bobby won’t allow it. He’s not going to give me severance pay and a bloody carriage clock.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Why?’ I almost screeched, ‘are you fucking mental? Because I know all about him and his business. He’s not going to let me go off on a gap year, is he? Don’t you know anything?!’
    ‘No!’ she was still up for a fight, ‘I don’t know anything and why is that? Because you never tell me anything! I don’t know what you do for Bobby because you keep telling me I don’t want to know. I know you’re not a gangster because you’ve told me that one