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“What’s this?”
I had been idly flipping through the cable channels while Jonathan acted busy in his office. I had already shouted to him several times to quit it and come entertain me, to no avail. Of course the thing that actually does get him to take a break is Gollum squawking at him. He follows the little scrapper (who finally seems to be on my side again) into the living room and takes the spot next to me, though he leaves a modest twelve inches between us. Gollum hops up on Jonathan’s lap, purring and kneading in delight—and we’re back to betrayal.
I ignore his initial question. “You’ll listen to him but not me? I’ve been shouting at you for twenty minutes to quit working.”
“He has a more compelling argument than you do.”
I harrumph. “8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown,” I finally answer.
He fixes me with an exhausted, put-upon look, as if this is my worst offense yet. “What in God’s name is that?”
“You’ve never seen this? It’s a mashup of Countdown and the comedy quiz show 8 Out of 10 Cats.”
The consternation in his face doesn’t clear up. I gesture tiredly at the telly. “Just watch it like a normal person.”
He frowns but obeys, turning his attention to the show. They’re on the ‘letters’ round: U O A E T N D P R. The guests are telling Jimmy the longest word they were able to make from the letters after 30 seconds.
“Jon, what was your seven?” Jimmy Carr is asking.
“Tarpedo,” Jon Richardson says with unwarranted confidence and a semi-repressed smirk, to laughs in the studio.
“A tarpedo?”Jimmy asks incredulously. “Ah, well I can guess what it means but why don’t you tell us.”
“Here’s the clean one…”
“I much prefer the original Countdown. This is…asinine.”
“You’re asinine,” I shoot back.
“You don’t even know what that means.”
I shrug mysteriously and continue working through the bowl of popcorn on the coffee table.
His face collapses into an agonized expression, but he scratches Gollum under the chin which seems to calm him down.
“Is it in the dictionary? Is ‘tarpedo’ in there?” Jimmy asks Susie Dent in Dictionary Corner.
“I’m not gonna enjoy this…but it’s not,” Susie says with mock sincerity, as if she actually feels bad about shooting down Jon’s word.
“Sam, Susie, could they have done any better?”
Sam Simmons, the guest comedian who’s doing the intermission bits for this episode, pipes up. “Yeah, there’s an eight. Pronated. And pronated means, like, you were gonna think about donating something, but then you didn’t.” He looks earnestly over at Jimmy as the audience laughs again. Turning back to Susie, he asks, “am I right?”
At the same time that Jonathan exclaims, “no, that’s not right,” Susie flatly says “no.”
“Oh.”
“It means when your foot turns inward that way.” She holds her hands flat in front of her and angles them downwards towards each other, almost forming a V.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.
Jonathan settles down a bit, seemingly placated that Susie has corrected this flagrantly heinous and false definition.
The show moves on to the maths portion.
“Miles, your turn to pick the numbers.”
“I will have two big and four small, please.”
“Two from the top and four little ones.” Rachel Riley pulls the cards and begins putting them up on the board. “The numbers are 4, 8, 5, and 3. And the big ones are 50 and 25. The target is…” She presses the button on the backboard and the numbers spin until they land on… “808.”
While the guests get to work, heads bent as they scribble figures out furiously, Jonathan leans forward, careful not to squash Gollum. His eyes have lit up. “Oh, now this is interesting.”
I choke on a handful of popcorn. “That's what does it for yez? Maths?”
He ignores me, his forehead furrowing with concentration, lips moving as he silently does the arithmetic. I watch his eyebrows cinch down, then shift upwards, then he clearly did something wrong because they tighten again. He makes for a fascinating character study, and I’m relieved he’s so distracted he doesn’t notice my blatant staring.
“25 times four, 100,” he says suddenly. I blink, jolted out of my trance, feeling a flush gently pull at my cheeks. “Then times that by eight, 800. Add three and 5, that’s eight. Add it to 800, that’s 808.” He’s looking proper smug, nodding and squinting at the telly.
“Huh?” is all I can think to say.
He repeats the steps to me, as if that will clear anything up. The Countdown Theme ends—the 30 seconds is up, and the guests hem and haw when Jimmy asks, “have you got it?”
They’ve gotten 805 and 804, which is close, but no one has gotten 808 exactly.
“Could it be done, Rachel?”
“Yes! If you say…” And she walks them through, step by step, identical to what Jonathan just said. Everyone claps for Rachel in amazement, and Jonathan just looks over at me, smug like, and says, “got it.”
“So you like the show now?”
“It’s fine. There’s a lot of…” He waves a hand in the air as if he could swipe the word he’s looking for out of it. “Superfluous material.”
“Oh, you mean the jokes? The actual entertaining bits?”
“Please. This is low-brow humor at best.”
“Sorry us simple folks like to have a laugh once in a while.”
“There are plenty of forms of intelligent humor in the media.”
“And what exactly do you consider intelligent humor?”
His mouth bobs for an adorably long time as he tries to wrack his brain. He’s coming up empty and this is very vindicating for me.
“When was the last time you even watched a show? Just sat down, had a quiet night to unwind. Not with me,” I add as I can see the thought already forming in his head.
“Er,” he says eloquently. His eyes are casting about looking for either an answer or a way out of this conversation. “I suppose…watching Coronation Street with my mum. Before I went to university.”
I turn so I’m facing him now. “Before me, you haven’t watched anything on telly since 1998?”
“It was 2012,” he says gruffly, sounding a little put out. “And besides, my job—” he begins in his tired, practiced speech.
“Oh don’t start with that again. How many times’ve I had to hear that!”
“Well,” he starts lamely, then seems to have nothing else to add.
I sigh, a man with the weight of the world (or at least one very large lie that’s spun wildly out of control) on his shoulders. “Seems like I’ve got a bit of work to do, teaching you how to relax and such.”
“Relax!” he sputters. Gollum chirps at him from his lap, as if telling him to keep it down. “You’ve been the one causing me stress. I think my gray spot is getting bigger.” He touches the white lock of hair above his forehead, looking bereft over it.
I have to snap my jaw shut so I don’t say something about how endearing I find that streak, and how it makes my stomach flutter when it flops out of place. The strangled sound that comes out of my mouth could possibly, loosely be interpreted as a frustrated groan instead of the yearning whine it truly is.
To mask the particularly affectionate feeling that’s come over me, I put on the dramatics and flop bonelessly against the back of the couch. “You’re stressed! Meanwhile I’m trapped in your house, concussed. You’ve stolen my cat and slagged off my shows, and now you’re trying to pin responsibility for your graying hair on me. It's too much for one man to handle.”
Naturally, he picks out one single point from all of them and fixates on it. “I haven’t stolen Gollum. I can’t help that he likes me so much. Don’t you?” Gollum, traitorous whelp that he is, blinks up at Jonathan adoringly, his purr sounding like a rusty chainsaw that’s about to run out of petrol.
He leans down and whispers conspiratorially in the cat’s ear, “do you like me better than your father?” Gollum closes his eyes and lets out a happy little chirp and Jonathan gently boops him on the nose, which is almost too cute to handle. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell him.” And then he fucking looks at me all coy like, out of the corner of his eye, and smirks at me.
I huff in annoyance, more at how unbearably attractive it is when he’s so sweet to my cat than anything else (and that I’ve never seen him smirk like that before—and that it’s doing things to me that a look from my boss should not be doing). “Oh shut it, y'bastard.”
We both go dead silent and wide-eyed at the same time. Me, because I'm realizing that I've called my boss a bastard to his face (which is subjectively worse than a dick) as if he needs even a single additional reason to completely cut me from the company. And him, I’m sure, because he’s extremely offended and wondering how immoral it would be to fire someone with amnesia and a concussion. Several emotions are at war on his face, each fighting for purchase, but none can grab a firm hold.
There’s a strange juxtaposition as, in the background noise on the telly, Sam Simmons, during the comedy interlude, is doing a song about how his friends are pinecones and he dresses them up in little costumes.
“Sorry—” I start to say, exactly as Jonathan says, “do you—”
And we both stop abruptly again and stare at each other some more.
“Didn't mean that,” I say quickly, before he can get a word in edgewise.
And then, to my absolute consternation, he almost looks…hurt? And now I'm right confused because he just looks so goddamned sad and I have no idea what’s going on.
His eyes drop and he looks cowed. Vulnerable, even. I say nothing in hopes that he will instead.
There’s a drawn out moment of silence before he finally glances up at me again, but his eyes dart away quickly to focus on Gollum as he speaks. “You don't remember, but before you…” He waves a hand vaguely around his own head. “You told me that up north, people call their mates bastard.” He overpronounces it, the consonants harsh.
I stare at him. Turns out, I had forgotten that. Maybe I did have a touch of amnesia, which at this point would be a relief so I didn't feel so shitty for lying to him for over two weeks.
“Oh. I—yeah, they do. Or I mean, they say y’bastard. Not bastard.” I mimic his accent and the enunciation.
“Do you—” His jaw clenches very, very tightly. “No, never mind.” He moves to get up and flee, but I can't be having that. I grab his forearm, so he lurches up and then back down, and Gollum yowls in indignation at all the jostling.
“What?”
“It’s nothing.”
“I'm sure it's not nothing,” I try, because I’m not sure what’s happening but this feels like it could be a breakthrough and I am not going to let it slip right out of my hands.
Jonathan stares at my hand on his arm, looking a little wild-eyed and panicky. He exhales a short puff of air, his attention fixed on my hand for a long time, before finally flicking his eyes up to meet mine.
“I was just…wondering if you ever thought we could be mates, but—” He gives a cartoon-like shake of his head. “Of course we couldn’t, because you’re my employee and that would be highly inappropriate and unprofessional.” And suddenly the old Jonathan is back, all rule-focused and proper, the momentary softness in his eyes gone, and I realize I miss it.
I scoff, and that takes him by surprise. “Well I don’t remember being your employee, so I bet we could be mates.”
“It doesn’t matter whether you remember, you still are.”
“I’m sure lots of bosses are mates with their employees.”
He fixes me with a look that tells me this is dead wrong, but I also don’t think he has lots of boss-mates to confer with anyway.
“Well,” I say slowly. “I reckon that maybe, whether you like it or not, we might already be mates.”
Jonathan does turn to me full-on then, twisting his shoulders, his head cricked sharply towards me, trying not to disturb Gollum.
“I know I can’t remember if I’ve got any mates, and if I do have any, they’re shit, since they haven’t come looking for me. But I bet if I did have any good ones, I’d cook for them and watch telly with them, slag off the things they like and tell them exactly what I think straight to their face. Kind of like us.” I look at him as earnestly as I can, because I do actually mean that, in a scary sort of way, and I want him be able to see that in my face.
His eyes are a bit wide and his face has gone slack, perhaps surprised by the idea that I might actually consider us to be friends, even if he is a tightly-wound prick most of the time, and we sort of yell at each other a lot, and we frequently point out each other’s flaws rather angrily.
Jonathan just stares at me for a second, then almost shudders and turns away from me, turning his attention to Gollum once again, scratching him behind the ears.
Now it feels heavy, and he’s not saying anything, and I worry if I mucked it all up somehow. Maybe he’s horrified at the idea of us being friends, which would honestly hurt a bit.
I try to lighten things a little. “Although I’m not sure that mates track each other’s locations on their phones.”
“Well, I’m sure that most people aren’t concerned that their amnesiac friend will wander off into the woods and die from exposure.”
I just say “hm” with a noncommittal shrug, but I can feel the tiniest tug of a smile on my lips—perhaps Jonathan already does consider me a friend, even if unwillingly. Perhaps Stockholm Syndrome can go both ways.
Jonathan goes quiet again and looks back at the telly, and I can’t read expression, but I can practically hear his thoughts spinning up, though I have no idea which direction they’re heading.
He clears his throat suddenly, says “tea?” a little too loudly, then displaces Gollum (gently, of course) to the sofa and jumps up without waiting for a response from me.
“I’m fine, thanks,” I call after him, though I’m not even sure he heard me. “Do you even know how to make tea?” No response, then to Gollum, I say, “you little gobshite,” because he immediately hops off the couch to follow Jonathan.
I hear Jonathan scuffling around in the kitchen for a bit, and try to focus my attention back on Cats Does Countdown, but it’s the final puzzle, the Countdown Conundrum—LADYGROIN. I have absolutely no idea what the word unscrambles to, but my head feels too scrambled itself to try and work it out, because I’m stuck in a loop of does Jonathan still want to fire me? Does he know I don't actually have amnesia? How furious is he going to be when he finds out? How fast will I be fired when he finds out? What if he doesn't find out? What if we can keep just doing...this?
He strides back into my line of sight quite aggressively and thrusts something at me—a beer. I take it and stare at it as he sits down on the sofa again.
“Give up on the tea?” I ask, somewhere between earnest and teasing, hoping he’ll make the decision for me. He just grunts, but there’s a slight tinge of pink high up on his cheeks.
Gollum returns to Jonathan’s lap with a mewl that I think is meant to be chastising for disrupting his peace.
Christ, I’m never getting my cat back when I leave here.
“You know,” I say, knowing full well I’m pressing my luck at this point. “Having a beer and watching telly is exactly the kind of things mates would do.”
I cast a look at him out of the corner of my eye, noticing that he is sitting quite a bit closer than he was before. The generous twelve inches has been reduced to about four, and his elbow brushes me as he takes a long, mortified swig.
“Go on then.” I elbow him back. “Admit it. We’re mates.”
His nose scrunches in the most un-Jonathan way and he stares straight ahead. I turn to look at him, and see his eyes twitch in my direction for a moment.
“I’m your boss,” he says slowly, and I almost think I see the twitch of his lips upward, just briefly. “...you bastard.”
I sigh. It’s a start. We’ll work on it.