The Sandwich

“I pressed the key down. It stayed down and wouldn’t come up. Neither would any of the others. Oh God.

“You see, he’d done it again!

“Superglue squirted into my computer keyboard was one of Rob’s favourite ‘jokes’. Afterwards, whichever of us he’d played his ‘joke’ on, would have to go out of the office to the computer store nearby and buy a new keyboard at our own expense. He always had a good laugh about it, and told each new victim that in future we should ‘stay glued to our work’.”

Sally is an old friend, and she was talking to me one evening, reminiscing about how she hated people who play practical jokes. Here in her own words is the troubling incident from her past:

Rob was the kind of boss who loved playing practical jokes. Selling advertising space for a newspaper was largely a female-oriented trade, and the other girls and I resented the behaviour of the alpha male who was our boss, but what could we do? We all needed the job, and some of us were very good at it, in spite of Rob’s malevolent influence.

There was always some joke going on. For instance once he sneakily managed to pick up Jane’s keys, that she’d left on her desk inadvertently. He kept them all morning, laughing uproariously at her increasing blind panic as she phoned her husband, checked her handbag a hundred times, and all of us were searching the office and the stairwell outside in case she’d dropped them. As she was on the point of phoning a locksmith to change the locks to her flat, a smiling Rob emerged from his office, dangling the keys in front of him, saying “Lost something Jane? You really should be more careful.”

Rob was a peculiar character in other ways too. He was a health fanatic, often arriving in a track suit after his morning run, a keen foodie who never ate anything without checking the label on the container carefully, saying things like “Your body is a temple. You shouldn’t abuse it.”

Kathy, a friendly jokey blonde girl, joined us six months ago, and right from the start we got on well, and soon she became my best friend there. We’d natter away over coffee and lunch breaks, we even lived in the same part of town so often met on the underground on the way in to work and going home.

“Do you think he just hates women?” Kathy asked me one day, when Alison had just been released from the toilet in hysterics, where Rob had locked her cubicle from the outside, so that she’d had to shout to be rescued. She’d gone home, too upset to go on working, with Rob smirking and shaking his head commenting that “Some people have no sense of humour.”

“Oh no, he likes women all right,” I told her. “In fact although he’s careful not to get entangled with anyone at work, in case he’s done for sexual harassment, he’s had lots of girlfriends. When he broke up with the last one he plastered pictures of her naked all over the internet. Do they call it revenge porn?”

“It’s so sad,” Kathy went on. “All of us get on pretty well. If that bastard wasn’t here we’d all work much faster and better and there’d be no tension or fear.”

“He thinks treating us like rubbish keeps us on our toes.” I shivered with disgust. “In another age I suppose he’d have had slaves and tortured them for his own amusement. The sad thing is, the management probably know how he behaves, but the department gets results, so they don’t care.”

All of us knew that Kathy and her boyfriend Charlie had been trying for a baby ever since they’d been together, but so far it just hadn’t happened. When she was eight weeks pregnant, Kathy couldn’t resist sharing her news, swearing me to secrecy, until at least the three months period was past. Then, sadly, she miscarried a couple of weeks later.

I’ll never forget her face when she came back to work. It had been a huge effort for her to face people again, knowing they all knew what had happened. Of course none of us said anything, she just arrived to friendly smiles, quick hugs and pats on the arm, and lots of unasked for cups of coffee. On her desk later during the morning she found a large parcel wrapped up in brown paper. She unwrapped it, and there was ‘The encyclopaedia of motherhood’, a huge colourful coffee-table book, illustrated with pictures of loving mothers with their babies. She burst into tears and ran out of the office and stayed away for a couple more days.

We all knew who had been responsible for the ‘joke’.

A few weeks later At the Christmas party, Rob got blind drunk, as he usually does. The funny thing was, Kathy was being quite friendly with him, when ordinarily she avoids him like the plague, as we all do. I thought it was weird, the way the pair of them would huddle in corners, with her plying with more and more drink. At the end of the evening, he ended up in his own office, merrily drunk and barely able to speak. Everyone else apart from him, Kathy and me had gone home, and I was waiting for her.

But instead of leaving with me, Kathy came out from Rob’s office and was messing about with one of the rolls that had been left over on the drinks table.

“Rob didn’t have lunch today,” she told me. “He said he’s very hungry.”

“What do you care?” I asked her, angry now. “And why are you so matey with Rob all of a sudden?”

“Oh you know, we all have to work together.” She shrugged and disappeared into Rob’s office with the sandwich she’d made him. As we left I glimpsed him through the gap in the door eating it hungrily.

On the Tube train we didn’t chat as usual, because I felt uncomfortable, as if something was wrong. Really I was simmering with anger with Kathy because she had betrayed our pact of hatred for our boss. In the rare silence between us, when Kathy opened her handbag I noticed her fiddling with a long white plastic tube.

“What’s that?” I asked her in surprise.

“This?” she said innocently. “Oh it’s Rob’s emerade.”

“Emerade?”

“It’s an ‘adrenaline pen’. For use in an emergency. He must have dropped it and I picked it up.” She leaned closer. “He always carries it with him. You take the top off and there’s a needle you can stick in your thigh and inject adrenaline if you’re going into anaphylactic shock.”

“Anaphylactic shock?”

“Rob told me that he’s extremely allergic to peanuts. That’s why he’s always so fussy about his food, checking the labels all the time. He told me that If he eats peanuts he goes into advanced anaphylactic shock, and if he doesn’t get this antidote within seconds his lips and tongue will swell up, so that he can’t breathe. Within a minute or so, no oxygen to the heart muscle also means his blood pressure will fall dangerously and major organs fail.” She looked at me, a slow smile spreading across her face. “Apparently It’s a really nasty way to die.”

“Don’t you think you should have given it back to him?” I asked. “After all it’s Friday night, he’s alone in the office. Anything might happen.”

“Yes, he is alone, isn’t he?” she said, still grinning. “He’s all alone there. Everyone’s gone home.”

When we got off the train I saw Kathy take out the white emerade pen, the knife she’d used to make the sandwich, and a half empty jar labelled PEANUT BUTTER. She put them all into a rubbish bin and rubbed her hands together.

“Oh, he did like that sandwich, didn’t he?” Kathy began to chuckle to herself. “He really did enjoy it.”