Mammy Banter by Serena Terry

Author:Serena Terry [Terry, Serena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2022-01-20T12:00:00+00:00

19

Fuckssake patriarchy

Mr Handley is a sadist. There’s no other explanation for it. He is silent throughout Tuesday, and through Wednesday, except for sending the briefest of emails about new projects, forthcoming pitches and some godawful training on social media curation – no doubt to be delivered by some sixteen-year-old hipster who is ‘down with the kids’ and makes the symbol for hashtag with his fingers every three seconds.

As the last wee while has taught me, so brutally, I am not down with the kids and if I wanted a teenager to lecture me on what is so great about social media, all I’d have to do is spend an hour in Gemma’s company as she shows me at least ten of the latest dance crazes from TikTok and tells me about a video she saw where this teenage girl ‘like saw an actual ghost and no one believed her and then she died’.

As for any mention of the promotion? Handley remains tight-lipped but has taken to walking through the office and giving us little smiles, winks and on one particularly cringe-worthy occasion making that finger-gun gesture, for fuck’s sake. It is not good for my anxiety levels.

I have been trying to channel my inner Jo and remain zen at all times, which is not easy. What I really want to do is grab Handley by the lapels and shake him vigorously until he tells us who got the promotion – with the preferable answer being me.

‘No news is good news,’ Paul says as I stab a turkey dinosaur with renewed viciousness. ‘It’s a bit like the cat in the box.’

‘The cat in the box?’ I ask him, fork freezing midway to my mouth, nervous as to where this is going.

‘Aye, there’s some scientist or something who has some theory about a cat in a box. I can’t think of his name – but until the box is open you don’t know if it actually contains a cat, so there is both simultaneously a cat in the box and not.’

‘Eh, that’s a load of shite,’ I say, which immediately earns me an extreme eyebrow-raise from Nathan, but I’m tired and frankly not in the mood. ‘Yes, Nathan. I said shite. Mammies are allowed to say shite because we are grown-ups and those are the rules of the world. When you are a grown-up you too can say shite whenever you want.’

‘But … But … Miss Rose says …’ he starts.

I point my fork, the back end of the dinosaur dripping in ketchup now skewered to it, to stop him. ‘Nathan, my darling, at this exact moment in time I don’t give a flying shite what Miss Rose says or thinks or does. At this precise moment, Miss Rose can kiss my cellulite-covered ass.’

I’m sure I hear Paul choke on an oven-baked smiley face. I’m not stupid, I know I’ve gone too far.

‘Schrödinger,’ Gemma pipes up, which stops us all in our tracks.

‘What?’ I ask her.

‘The cat in the box. It’s Schrödinger’s

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