"Like margarine?" I asked, pronouncing the hard g. I loathe the substance, and I loathe the word, which when pronounced properly (it derives from margaric acid, you see, so the g has always been hard) sounds nothing like anyone would be willing to eat.
"Like margarine?" she parroted, her face study for an artist confronted with the loss of his arms: blank.
"Spreading like margarine, straight from the fridge. I thought the phone hacking scandal was old news now, and we were all about people not being convicted for the murder of other people, possibly because they own a cat?"
"What are you talking about?"
"Whoa Nellie! Are you telling me you don't keep up with the news at all?"
"We're the weekend supplement," she said, shaking her head in mystery. "We're not concerned with the news at all, in fact, if you try to be too contemporary our copy-editors will wield their red pens. At you, and possibly your prose."
Our copy-editors appear to consist of a somewhat feral tribe and have hereditary positions, sharpened teeth, and views on comma-placement that you violate at your peril, so I retreated a little and helped her get the conversation back on track.
"What's with the phone hacking then? Who's been hacking whom this time?"
"Do you recall Rosemary?"
"I still have nightmares where she arrives at the office with a truck-load of lentils that have been sitting in a Georgian warehouse for ten weeks and attempts to make us all eat them all, shouting at us that they're health foods and that a little bit of ergot never did anyone any harm. There's usually a european peasant dancing around with a pitchfork as well, in front of a bonfire."
"Do you have to be so literal? Can't you just say 'yes' or 'no' once in a while?"
"No." I smiled.
"She's alleging that we hacked into her phone."
"Why?"
"To further bolster her case that we set out to destroy her livelihood by representing her as a mad harridan with personal vendettas against much of the country."
"No, I meant why would we want to hack her phone. But before you answer that, that sounds like a very accurate representation of her."
"Notwithstanding," said my editor with a smile like a twist of barbed wire. "I need you to meet her and assure her that we're not interested in her phone."
"Oh no! I met her once already, it's someone else's turn. Send the intern, he's leaving next week anyway. Or send Joe, his balls belong to his wife so he'll be safe!"
"I said you'd do it. You're meeting her here, tomorrow morning at 6am."
"What kind of place opens at 6am? Oh. A greasy spoon. I'm reviewing breakfast?"
"Yes. And meeting Rosemary. Our lawyers think she spends much of the night posting flamebait to various internet forums so she should be tired and easier to talk to."
"The plural of forum is fora," I said.
"Only in Latin," replied my editor calmly. "English pluralises everything with an s if it feels like it."
The greasy spoon was called the English Breakfast and served me a strip of rubber that I tried to send back as not being bacon. The proprietress, a buxom woman with strawberry blonde hair who I'm sure counted every baked bean that fell on my plate, told me it wasn't, it was a fried egg. I pointed helplessly as the hockey puck and said that the black pudding appeared overcooked, and she told me it was a mushroom.
I was wondering if I could stomach eating it when Rosemary marched in, slamming the door open so that the plate glass windows at the front shook, and tried to pull the seat opposite me out. It was, however, screwed to the floor in the Great British Tradition of greasy spoons. When it didn't move Rosemary pulled harder, until she snapped the back of the chair off. The proprietress was upon us immediately like some overweight avenging angel, determined to sit on the culprit until they admitted culpability with the last of their breath.
"It was like that when I got here!" is how Rosemary started, and moved on to blaming me, blaming British manufacturing standards, the shopfitters and imported Chinese plastics. None of which swayed the proprietress in the slightest. "I'll blog about it!" Rosemary finally shouted, looking triumphant.
"With broken fingers?" asked the proprietress, and Rosemary caved.
"You hacked my phone," she spat, sitting on a different chair and putting her credit card back away.
"No," I replied as calmly as I could. I tried to spear a french fry on my fork, but it bounced off.
"Oh yes you did. You're well aware that I'm the organiser of PAVINGSTONES, and you were trying to find out what our next offensive would be! I hear the clicks on the line, I timed the delays when I try to connect my calls. I know exactly what you're up to!"
"PAVINGSTONES?"
"People Against Vegetables INdustrially Grown Subject TO North European Standards."
"There's a problem with that?" I shouldn't have asked, but my blood sugar was low thanks to the inedible breakfast in front of me. Rosemary ranted for fifteen minutes while I tried to find something on my plate that wasn't congealed, too hard to chew, or remind me of things I've found in the Blonde's makeup bag. When she finally ran out of breath, I said,
"We're not hacking your phone. We don't even know your number."
"Well who is then?" she demanded.
"We don't know that either," I said. "Look, would you like some breakfast?"
"I'd rather drink the water from the mop-bucket than eat that rubbish!"
"That can be arranged," said the proprietress, who had chosen that moment to come back with the receipt for the payment for the broken seat.
I excused myself, leaving a generous tip behind, as Rosemary had her head forcibly pushed into the mop bucket and was exhorted to 'drink deep.'
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