“Olenka.”
“That’s right.”
I love that Flora instantly knew I was talking about the supermodel.
“So Alex is his son and our boss. Well, one of them. He’s, like, Adrian’s level.”
I pick up my bottle of water and take a swig, trying to stay calm. But inside I feel like squealing, Whooooo! Has this actually happened? Am I really going out to lunch with a cool, good-looking guy who’s also the boss? I feel surreal. It’s as if Life has come along and looked at my boxes of surveys and said, Oh, my mistake. Didn’t mean to land you with all that shit: Here’s a consolation prize.
“But he’s so young.” I blurt out the words before I can stop them.
“Oh, that.” Flora nods, almost disparagingly. “Well, you know. He’s some genius type. Never even bothered with university. He worked for Demeter years ago at JPH, when he was, like, twenty. But after about five minutes he went and set up on his own. You know he created Whenty? The logo, everything.”
“Really?” My jaw sags slightly. Whenty is that credit card that came out of nowhere and dominated the market. It’s renowned as one of the most successful brand launches ever. It gets used in marketing lectures and everything.
“Then Adrian got him to join Cooper Clemmow. But he goes off abroad a lot. He’s quite…you know.” She wrinkles her nose derisively. “One of those.”
“One of what?”
“Thinks he’s cleverer than everyone else, so, you know, why bother about other people?”
“Oh,” I say in surprise. That doesn’t sound like the Alex I met.
“He came to a drinks party at my parents’ house once,” Flora says in the same tone. “He hardly even talked to me.”
“Oh.” I try to look outraged on her behalf. “That’s…dreadful!”
“He ended up talking to some old man all night. About astrophysics or something.” She wrinkles her nose again.
“Awful!” I say hastily.
“Why do you want to know about him, anyway?” Flora’s eyes focus on me with more interest.
“No reason!” I say hastily. “Didn’t know who he was. That’s all.”
Nothing can crush my mood as I head home that evening. Not even the rain, which began halfway through the afternoon and has got steadily heavier. Not even a bus driving through a puddle and drenching me. Not even a gang of boys sniggering at me as I wring out my skirt.
As I open the door to my flat, I’m practically singing to myself. I’m going on a date! I’m going to the group meeting! It’s all good—
“Ow!” I come to as my shin barks against something. There’s a row of brown cardboard boxes lining one side of our hall. I can barely squeeze past them. It looks like an Amazon warehouse. What is all this? I lean down, read a label addressed to Alan Rossiter, and heave a sigh. Typical.
Alan is one of my flatmates. He’s a website designer/fitness vlogger, and he’s always telling me “fascinating” facts I don’t want to know about muscle definition and bone density and once even bowel function. I mean, urkk.
“Alan!” I rap on his door. “What’s all this in the hall?”
A moment later Alan’s door swings open and he gazes down at me. (He’s quite tall, Alan. But he also has a very big head, so somehow he doesn’t look very tall. He actually looks weird.) He’s wearing a black singlet and shorts and has an earpiece in, which will be some inspirational app like Master Your Body, Master the World, which he once tried to get me into.
“What?” he says blankly.
“These boxes!” I gesture at the crammed hall. “Are they yours? This is a fire hazard!”
“It’s my way,” he says, and I peer back, confused. His way? His way is to fill our flat with boxes?
“What do you mean, your way?”
“My way.” He reaches into an open box and thrusts a plastic pouch at me, which has ORGANIC WHEY: VANILLA printed on it.
“Oh, whey. Right.” I squint at the cardboard boxes. “But why do you need so much of it?”
“Business model. Gotta buy in bulk. Profit margins. It’s a fierce business.” He pounds a fist into his hand, and I flinch. Alan has this aggressive way of talking which I think he reckons is “motivational.” I sometimes hear him exclaiming to himself while he’s doing weights, saying, “Fucking do it, Alan. Fucking do it, you knobhead.”
I mean, really? Knobhead? Is that motivational?
“What business?” I inquire. “You’re a web designer.”
“And whey distributor. It’s my sideline right now, but it’s going to be big.”
It’s going to be big. How many times have I heard my dad say that? His cider business was going to be big, for about six months. Then there were the hand-carved walking sticks—but they took so long to make, he was never going to turn a profit. Then he was going to make a fortune from selling a job lot of some new kind of mousetrap, which he’d got cheap off his friend Dave Yarnett. (They were gross. I’ll take cider over mousetraps anytime.)
By now I have an instinct about these things. And my instinct about Alan’s whey is not good.
“So, are you moving these boxes somewhere else?” I press Alan. “Like, soon?”
Maybe I shouldn’t be so cynical, I tell myself. Maybe he has lots of buyers lined up and all this will be gone by tomorrow.
“I’ll be selling them.” He gives me a shifty look. “Making contacts.”