Free The Wish List by Jane Costello Page B

so I’m just chilling with my guitar.
    I hesitate over the handset, reading those words, as a thought occurs to me. But I’m ambushed before I can process it fully.
    ‘Emma! Into my office!’ instructs Perry with a manic spring in his step that indicates that what follows isn’t going to be good.
    ‘I was talking to one of the bods over at Kidsplay TV last night,’ he says, wide-eyed. ‘Nice chap. Lovely shoes.’
    I fail to come up with a response to this.
    ‘He was telling me that there’s a grant knocking about from some European disability rights doodah. He reckons there’re pots of cash to be made if you come up with a storyline
that fits their agenda.’
    ‘Right.’ My head starts spinning with dreadful possibilities about where this is going.
    He sits on the sofa and crosses his legs exuberantly. ‘So I thought,
we’re
a right-on company!
We
should be the guys taking advantage of this!’ He leaps up
again and starts pacing the room.
    ‘What did you have in mind?’
    ‘What do you think of this idea . . .’ He holds up his arms like Spielberg pitching this to his very first producer. ‘We have a cat. And a mouse. By golly, they can’t
stand the sight of each other. The cat is forever trying to catch the mouse in a variety of outlandish and totally wacky ways. Except the mouse . . . well, he’s a clever little chap. He
manages to get away, time and time again – by doing things like . . . ooh, I don’t know, smashing a frying pan over the cat’s head . . . or snapping his tail in a
mousetrap!’
    ‘This is sounding very like Tom and Jerry, Perry.’
    ‘I
knew
you were going to say that!’ He clicks his fingers in front of my face. ‘But I’m a step ahead of you. Several steps, in fact.’
    ‘Oh?’
    ‘
My
cat and mouse have a twist.’
    I raise an eyebrow.
    ‘They’re in
wheelchairs
!’ he says triumphantly. ‘Kids’ll love it! The BBC’ll love it! The European disability rights doodah will love it! I
adore
political correctness, don’t you, Emma?’
    Perry’s ‘blue sky thinking’ proceeds to turn every shade of the rainbow. I try to pitch an idea to him that I thought of a few weeks ago – about a clothes shop in which
all the garments come to life when it’s shut. But he barely hears me.
    ‘I don’t know why I bother,’ I tell Giles as I slump in the seat in front of my computer, mentally fatigued.
    ‘Let me guess: you got his idea about Tom and Jerry on Stannah Stairlifts. Honestly, this place is going to the dogs, Emma,’ he says, leaning over and pinching a Hobnob.
    I open my
World of Interiors
magazine and start flicking through it for want of a distraction. ‘To be absolutely fair, you’ve never been a glass-half-full person, have you,
Giles?’
    ‘I don’t think there
is
a glass at the moment. It’s a polystyrene cup with cracks in the side and penicillin at the bottom.’
    I take a deep breath. ‘Do you enjoy this job, Giles? I mean, really? I know you grumble a lot. But what do you think about it, deep down?’
    Giles looks slightly scared. He and I don’t do heart to hearts; the only time I’ve ever asked about his feelings was when he got his finger trapped in his desk drawer.
    ‘A few years ago, you wouldn’t have needed to ask,’ he says, serious all of a sudden. ‘We
all
loved it, didn’t we?’
    I pause and think about this. Even in those days, Giles didn’t exactly walk in every morning, throw his arms open to the world and declare himself glad to be alive. But he’s right:
he loved it, I loved it, we all loved it. Which makes the present situation all the more frustrating.
    ‘Deep down, Emma, I know there aren’t many people who get paid to dream up stuff like this every day. Deep down, I know I’m good at it . . . almost as good as you. I was born
to do this stuff and I’d hate to do anything else. But I’m not sure how long this can go on before the whole place sinks into the shithole that’s Perry’s twisted