It's a meat and two veg sale

Monday

“You must be the Masterson boy?” trills a man so white and crisp he may as well be a glass of milk.

He sweeps open the heavy metal door and lets me into his penthouse. The glare from the designer spotlights bounces off the shiny wooden floorboards and burns my eyes.

Boy? I really detest being called that. And not because I consider myself a hulking lumberjack who snacks on rare steak in between rounds at the World Poker championship. More because its most common prefixes nearly always connote some form of servitude or humiliation. Whipping, rent and now, ‘Masterson’.

It’s entirely appropriate of course.

Ray’s sent me to a client’s apartment so he can….wait for it…. sign a letter. It’s 7am and minus 4 out. It’s raining thick shards of ice. Of course, said client couldn’t possibly have come to the office to do it. Why would you when Masterson can post you a BOY free of charge?

Wacko Jacko’s dream.

I hope this bloke isn’t a paedophile. That would be terrible, actually.

The client/glass of milk/hopefully-not-nonce is Johan Engstrom, CFO at Svensk Investment Fund. He is every bit the Scandi stereotype I imagined. A gigantic blonde in a cashmere black polo neck, dark wash Nudie jeans and Tom Ford brogues.

“Would you like a coffee?” he enquires.

Fuck, no. I’ll only spill it on something expensive.

“Yes, please”.

“The N’Espresso machine’s on the counter”.

He’s absolutely done me there.

“Oh, and I’ll have one too. Use the green pod.”

Cheeky fucking git.

He strides off down a dark corridor at the apex of his vast emporium. To be fair, it is the most stunning flat I’ve ever seen. It peeps over the top of Vauxhall bridge. Floor to ceiling windows run across the left side with a direct view of the Thames. The nice quiet bit, you know where people walk their dogs rather than try to sell you burnt, sugary nuts or blow excruciating noises out of novelty, plastic whistles.

The kitchen / living room is spliced by huge vertical beams. At one end, a pristine black marble island and whirring Smeg fridge and at the other, a 3-seater brown leather Chesterfield, red velvet ball chair and the Noguchi coffee table. The walls are dotted with Warhol prints, you know….Marilyn, Campbell Soup, Elvis with a gun…the usual suspects. It’s all exposed brickwork. I’ve always thought that’s a weird look - the ‘my builder couldn’t be arsed to finish’ look - but it does work here, I must admit.

I wander over to the N’Espresso machine.

“Masterson, hello. Masterson. Excuse me, Masterson?” warbles Johan.

Oh shit, I didn’t actually tell him my name, did I? At least, he’s dropped the ‘boy’.

I follow his meowling down the dark corridor. I feel like a widow poking around the estate looking for her cat. I push open a door with a faint light underneath it.

I find a mid-30ish man in a huge Fishermen’s jumper sitting in an armchair reading OK!. He looks like a trendy young dad in one of those DFS adverts on Boxing Day. Well, except for the fact he’s not wearing any trousers or pants. It’s a meat and two veg sale.

“Sorry, can I help you?” he enquires.

Does he think I’m a Jehovah’s Witness?

“Ssssorry” I stutter, yanking the door immediately shut.

“I’m doing coffees, if you fancy one?”.

Why did I say that?

“Yes please, orange pod for me” replies Knob (out) Monkhouse, his voice now muffled behind the door.

What the fuck? It’s freezing so I totally get the jumper. But no trousers or pants? What sort of bloke puts something warm on their top half and thinks ‘You know what, I’ll leave the rest for now’. Jesus, what if that’s, like, the rule in Johan’s gaff? All guests have to take their pants off. Keep your shit-encrusted shoes on but please, please, whatever you do, chuck those tighty whities in the guest bin provided.

I’m genuinely fascinated by who that bloke is though. I assume he’s Johan’s boyfriend. But what if it’s the previous tenant? Too nude and chilled out to leave the premises so he just sort of stays until he’s forcibly removed by the police. A sexually-free Swampy.

I eventually find Johan pressed up against a bathroom mirror, applying Clinique M-lotion to his face and admiring his own reflection at the same time.

“You have something for me to sign, I believe?”.

I pull out the letter from my bag and hand it to him, choosing to ignore the innate weirdness of being in a client’s bog with a satchel while he puts moisturiser on.

Johan glares at the page. He doesn’t understand what Ray’s drafted. No client ever does. But he pretends to read the letter and I blankly stare back at him pretending to watch him read it. When I die, I will genuinely regret not having spent this time doing LITERALLY ANYTHING else.

“I’m Vinny, by the way. Sorry, I forgot to introduce myself earlier”.

“There seems to be a stain on this? Look, here? On the top right corner”.

“Oh, yeah. I see. I think it’s just a bit of Mint Aero I had in my bag. It must have got stuck on”.

Johan flicks off the congealed smudge of chocolate with a disrespect thoroughly unbefitting of Nestle’s finest.

“I’ll have to sign another copy. I still have it on the email you sent. Can you go to my computer in the living room. Print it?”.

Yeah, no problem. And, after you’ve signed it, is it ok if I make it into a paper plane and jam it into your right eye and scream ‘Mayday, mayday…we’re going down’.

I trot off to the computer. I’m surprised by the lack of passwords. His desktop is plastered with pictures of him and the lad down the corridor. London, New York, Rome. They look great together, to be fair.

Fuck, I need a holiday.

I print out the letter and turn round to find Johan sitting on his Chesterfiled watching me. Yeah, that’s weirder than when we were in the bog, to be honest.

“Do you have a pen?”

I hand him a biro. From the Masterson client meeting rooms, none of that Bic shit.

“I don’t sign anything without a fountain pen”.

“Right” I quiver. “It’s just that I don’t have… a…fountain pen”.

Nobody has since Churchill.

“Ok, well. I don’t sign anything without one. It’s not official.”

Are you mental?

“I mean, do you have a fountain pen, Johan? Like…in…your apartment?”.

Johan scoffs. Alright mate, you’re the one who brought up bloody fountain pens.

“Well, looks like we can’t sign today then” he sighs. “Did you make that coffee? Green pod?”.

“What if I go and get a fountain pen?”

“Well, yeah fine. I like Aspinall or Montblanc”.

Johan stands and wanders to the kitchen. He pulls down a griddle from the Le Creuset set hanging over the stove and rips out a tray of eggs from his massive bastard fridge.

“Rrright, I’ll guess I’ll be off then? I’ll go and get hold of a fountain pen…. and… well, pop back?”.

“No problem. I’ll be here. Well, till 10 anyway, so better be quick”.

I’m in a huff. I’ve never been in one. But I think this is it. My face is flush, my head fogged with irritation and my walk to the tube a bit, well, stompy.

Where am I gonna get a fucking posh fountain pen? The only thing I can think to do is trawl the boutiques in the Royal Exchange by Bank Station. The ones which sell hunting jackets and leather filo faxes. They’ll have something, surely?

But that’s a 5-minute walk from the office.

I hop on the commuter-packed tube and the bleak circle of my day floods into my brain.

I got to the office at 5.45am to print a letter, tube’d it to Vauxhall to get to Johan’s for 7, met a lad with no keks, had to head back to where I started to find a FUCKING PEN and then I’ll rush back to where I had intended to go in the first place. All before 10am. And it’s pissing it down.

I sort of hate my life, in a way.