Fork & Chance

Chapter One: A Man With a Binder

Rupert Stockbridge woke at 6:04, which was four minutes later than usual, and lay in the dark for eleven seconds trying to work out what had gone wrong.

The answer was the wind. His phone had run its usual pre-dawn check of the meteorological data for Bath and selected Route C — the towpath loop — because Route A involved a hill that became statistically miserable in a north-easterly above nine miles per hour. Route C was longer. Route C required a later alarm. He had built the system himself, three years ago, on a wet Sunday, and it had never once let him down.

He got up. He drank 400ml of water. He ate half a banana, ran seven kilometres along the river past the sleeping swans, came home, showered, and ate the other half of the banana with porridge weighed to the gram.

At 8:12 he sat down at his kitchen table and opened, as he did every morning, a spreadsheet called INTERACTION_LOG.

INTERACTION_LOG had forty-one rows. Each row was a person. Each person had columns: Last Contact, Mode of Contact, Emotional Weather (a five-point scale), Reciprocity Balance, and — Rupert's proudest achievement — Diminishing Returns Coefficient, which accounted for the fact that seeing someone four times in a week did not make them four times fonder of you. It made them tired of you. Rupert had learned this the hard way in 2016, with a man named Gavin from his cycling club, and he had never made the mistake again.

This morning the sheet told him three things. First, that he was due to text his mother (7.2 days elapsed; recommended interval 7). Second, that his friend Deepak Kulkarni was flagged amber for something called Banter Debt, which meant Deepak had made him laugh more times than Rupert had made Deepak laugh, and the balance wanted correcting. Third, that his sister Monika would ring on Sunday at 10:15, because Monika always rang on Sunday at 10:15, because Rupert had once told her that was his allocated family-communications window and she had decided the funniest possible response was total compliance.

He texted his mother: *Morning. Hope the hydrangeas are behaving.*

Beryl Stockbridge replied within ninety seconds, which he found suspicious in a woman who claimed not to understand predictive text. *The hydrangeas are thriving. Unlike some. B.*

Rupert logged it. Emotional Weather: 3.

He put on his coat, checked that the coat was appropriate for the day's precipitation probability (31%, umbrella unnecessary but carried anyway as a hedge), and walked to work.

—

Rupert worked at Marrowfield Logistics, in an office above a shop that sold candles shaped like other things. He was a data analyst, which meant that when a lorry full of ceramic tiles went to Swindon instead of Southampton, Rupert was the man who could tell you why, whose fault it was, and how much it had cost, all before the driver had finished his sandwich.

He liked his job. He liked the way messy human failure resolved, under enough scrutiny, into a number.

Deepak was already at his desk, eating a croissant over his keyboard in a manner that made Rupert physically uncomfortable.

"There are crumbs going into the F key," said Rupert.

"There are crumbs going into all the keys," said Deepak. "It's a crumb ecosystem. I've named some of them." He wiped his fingers on his trousers, which was worse. "Your favourite person wants you."

"Which favourite person?"

"Pamela Cottam left a note on your desk."

"Pamela Cottam is my neighbour. She doesn't work here."

"And yet." Deepak held up a folded piece of paper. "She dropped it at reception. Reception are frightened of her now."

The note said, in handwriting like barbed wire: *Rupert — your recycling bin was out on Tuesday. Tuesday is glass. You had cardboard. I put it right. No need to thank me but a thank you is nice. P. Cottam. P.S. You look thin.*

"She walked into town," said Rupert, "to tell me about a bin."

"She loves you," said Deepak. "It's terrifying but it's love."

At 9:40, Rupert's boss appeared in the doorway of the open-plan office and said his name in the specific tone she used when she was about to give someone work they hadn't asked for. Her name was Sandhya Pethick, she had run the Bristol office for eleven years before this one, and she had the demeanour of a woman who had once fired a man in a lift and enjoyed it.

"Stockbridge. Gala dinner."

"There's a gala dinner?"

"There is now. Two hundred clients, the Assembly Rooms, seven weeks. Regional director's idea. He said the word 'relationships' eleven times." She dropped a folder on his desk. "I need someone to liaise with the caterer."

Rupert felt a small, private thrill, which he immediately concealed. "Why me?"

"Because you're the only person in this building who would genuinely enjoy negotiating the ratio of canapés to seated courses."

"That's—" He stopped. It was true. It was so true that arguing would have been dishonest. "Which caterer?"

"Small outfit in town. Fork and Chance. Meeting's at eleven. Don't be weird."

"I'm never weird."

"Stockbridge, last Christmas you made a graph of the party."

"People found it useful."

"People found it *chilling*."

—

Rupert prepared. Of course he prepared. He arrived at Meeting Room 2 at 10:47 with a binder.

It was a good binder. It was, he would have said if pressed, an *excellent* binder: colour-coded tabs, a dietary-requirements matrix cross-referenced against the client list, a room plan with service routes drawn in, three menu structures priced to two decimal places, and a Gantt chart folded out like a road map across two A3 pages. He laid out a jug of water, four glasses, and a pen for the caterer in case she had forgotten one.

At 11:00 the room was empty except for Rupert.

At 11:04 it was still empty.

At 11:09 Rupert opened a fresh document and titled it *Punctuality Observations*, then closed it, because that was — Sandhya's word — weird.

At 11:17 the door opened with a bang, because it was opened with a hip, because the person opening it had no hands available.

Georgie Birkett came into the room the way weather comes into a valley. She had three tote bags on one arm, a laptop under the other, a pencil behind her ear, another pencil in her hair which she had clearly forgotten about, and, clasped to her chest like a baby, a large glass jar of something beige and alive.

"Right," she said. "Hello. Sorry. Van's in the loading bay and a man called Wes says I've got twelve minutes before he has feelings about it." She dumped everything on the table. The jar she set down with great care, and turned it so it faced the window. "Georgie. Fork and Chance."

"Rupert Stockbridge." He half rose, sat again. "You're seventeen minutes late."

"Am I? God. That sounds right." She wasn't remotely embarrassed. That was the thing that struck him first — not the bags, not the jar, but the total, sunlit absence of shame. "There was a lorry unloading scaffolding on Walcot Street. It's still there. It will be there when we're old."

"You could have left at 10:35 instead of 10:52."

"I left at 10:20," said Georgie.

Rupert had no reply to that. It was worse information than he'd expected.

She sat down, shrugged off her jacket, and he saw a bright yellow stain on the cuff of her shirt, about the size of a fifty-pence piece. She caught him looking.

"Turmeric," she said. "It's permanent. Everything about turmeric is permanent. I've made peace with it."

"And the jar?"

"Sourdough starter."

"In a meeting."

"I couldn't leave her in the van. It's warm in the van. She's going through a phase." Georgie unscrewed the lid an inch, sniffed, made a face of maternal concern, and screwed it back on. "She's been sulking since Thursday. I changed flour brands and she has *views*."

"She," said Rupert.

"Her name's Deborah."

Rupert looked at the jar. The jar, in a very slow way, bubbled.

"Right," he said, and opened the binder.

He watched her face as the tabs came into view, and had the satisfaction — brief, but real — of seeing her genuinely delighted.

"Oh, that's beautiful," she said. "Is that laminated?"

"Only the allergen matrix. It gets handled."

"You laminated the allergen matrix." She pulled it towards her, and to Rupert's surprise she read it properly, running a finger down the columns, her lips moving slightly. "Table eleven's got a coeliac and a sesame allergy on the same table."

"Yes."

"Nobody ever tells me that until the night." She looked up. Her eyes were, he noted involuntarily, a rather good grey-green, and entirely too direct. "You're going to be a nightmare, aren't you."

"I'm going to be thorough."

"That's what I said." She grinned and pulled a notebook out of a tote bag. The notebook was held together with an elastic band and appeared to contain, as far as Rupert could see, receipts. "Go on then. What do you want?"

"The menu."

"Sure. When?"

"Now would be ideal. Six weeks in advance is acceptable."

Georgie laughed out loud. It was a big laugh, unedited, the laugh of a woman who had never once considered whether people in adjacent rooms could hear her.

"Six weeks," she said. "For food."

"For two hundred covers, yes."

"I don't know what the food is in six weeks, Rupert. Nobody does. Do you know what asparagus is doing in six weeks? Asparagus doesn't know what asparagus is doing in six weeks."

"Then we buy something with a more predictable growing cycle."

"You want me to cook the *predictable* vegetables." She said it the way you'd repeat a request to drown a kitten.

"I want to be able to tell two hundred people what they're eating."

"You can tell them what they're eating when they're eating it. That's traditionally when it comes up." She leaned back. "Here's what I do. Morning of, I go to the market. I walk round. I look. I taste things. I find out what's singing, and I build the plate round that."

"Singing."

"Singing."

"Vegetables don't sing."

"Broad beans in the second week of June sing like a church choir and I will not be argued with," said Georgie. "Look. I understand you need a shape. Give me the shape. Canapés, three courses, cheese, whatever. Give me the shape and a budget and the allergens and I'll give you food that makes three hundred grown adults shut up at the same time, which, by the way, is the only review that matters."

"Two hundred."

"There'll be plus-ones nobody told you about. There always are. Build in eight percent."

Rupert stopped. He turned to tab four and wrote, in the margin: *contingency covers +8%*.

When he looked up, Georgie was watching him with an expression he couldn't classify.

"You just took advice," she said.

"It was good advice."

"I know. I was just enjoying it."

They argued for fifty minutes, comfortably over Wes's twelve. Rupert wanted a signed menu; Georgie offered him a menu "structure" with what she called "seasonal windows," which Rupert eventually realised was a genuinely sophisticated way of describing a decision tree, and he found himself, to his own alarm, drawing one. She wanted to serve the main course family-style on sharing platters; he showed her, with a diagram, why sharing platters at a corporate dinner would result in eleven percent of tables receiving no protein because of a phenomenon he called Confident Man Adjacency.

Georgie read the diagram twice and said, "That's the truest thing I've ever seen on a graph."

By the time they finished, the jug of water was empty and Deborah had produced a smell.

Georgie began stuffing things into totes. "Right. I'll email you."

"I'd prefer email to phone," said Rupert. "For the audit trail."

"Course you would." At the door she stopped, turned. "Rupert."

"Yes."

"The binder," she said. "Genuinely. Nobody's ever handed me anything that organised. Half my clients can't tell me how many people are coming."

Rupert felt an unexpected warmth in the region of his sternum and dealt with it by saying, "You've got a pencil in your hair."

"I know," said Georgie. "That's where I keep it."

She went. The door swung. Rupert sat alone in Meeting Room 2 with his beautiful binder and the faint agricultural smell of Deborah, and noticed that his pulse was elevated by what he estimated at fourteen beats per minute, which he attributed to the argument.

He was wrong about that, but it would take him some weeks to find out.