if you want.’
‘Snazz it is,’ I said. I was trying so hard not to stare.
‘We haven’t got long. We need to be in Milton Keynes for the opening of a Tesco Metro by half eleven,’ barked the woman with the handbag as everyone got themselves seated around the table. ‘Let’s hear the new girl’s ideas.’
‘So, I’m Ros,’ I said brightly, holding out my hand. The agent stared at it as though I were offering her a shitty stick. The man didn’t move. Slowly, I pulled my hand back in towards me and bit my lip.
‘Veronica, Ros just joined us from America,’ Ted offered. ‘We’ve brought her in especially for the project, the result of a global search for the perfect producer.’
I looked over at my boss without saying a word. What was he talking about?
‘Fan-fucking-tastic,’ Veronica replied, rattling her fingers against the table before pulling a pen out of her bag and slipping it between her fingers as though it were a cigarette. ‘Let’s hear what she has to say then.’
‘Obviously we know Snazz has a lot of fans,’ I began, watching as the panda reached across the table for a Hobnob, broke it into four pieces and carefully fed it up underneath his mask. ‘And we want to offer them something with the podcast they can’t get anywhere else.’
Veronica nodded, winding her finger in the air, signalling for me to continue.
‘Well, one idea would be …’ I looked down the table to see the panda staring back at me blankly, not moving, not breathing, just a dead-eyed panda with black, blank pits boring into me. I stared into the abyss and the abyss was a YouTuber. ‘One idea would be for Snazz to choose some vintage video games and tell the story of how the game was developed, any social significance, interesting founder stories, stuff like that?’
Veronica looked over at her young charge. He did not move.
‘He hates it,’ she declared. ‘What else?’
I took a deep breath and opened my notebook, pretending to be pleasantly surprised by what I saw when in fact the page was filled with a shopping list of things I needed to pick up from Tesco on my way home from work.
‘What if he interviewed other inspirational young people? I’m thinking Greta Thunberg, Millie Bobby Brown … Malala?’
Veronica quite rightly choked on her coffee.
‘Next,’ she barked.
‘He’s not very chatty, is he?’ I said as Snazz pulled the zip on his jacket up and down and up and down in silence. ‘All my ideas involve quite a lot of him talking.’
‘He’ll be fine,’ Veronica replied. ‘I’ll give him some Red Bull and a Mars Bar.’
Snazz snapped another Hobnob in half and tittered under the mask.
‘Red Bull and a …?’ I whispered, wondering if the number to Childline was still the same.
She fixed me with a cool, level glare. ‘Do you have any more ideas? Because these are just as bad as the ones we heard before.’
Glancing down at my notebook, pages full of suggestions and a dozen or so failed attempts at drawing a house without taking the pen off the page, a cold sense of dread gripped me in my seat. I could not lose this job, I just could not.
‘Ros?’ Ted’s voice cut through the tension like a rusty bread knife.
‘What if he just sat around and talked to his mates while they play video games and we call it Snazzlechuff Says?’ I blurted out.
Ted gasped with either joy or despair, it was far too difficult to tell.
‘CHUFF,’ Veronica barked.
The panda snapped to attention.
‘Snazzlechuff Says,’ she repeated. ‘Yay or nay?’
His narrow shoulders pinched together in what seemed to be a shrug.
‘He’ll do it,’ Veronica declared, snapping her fingers twice.
‘We could record live at WESC,’ Ted suggested, popping up and down inside his too-big hoodie like a designer meerkat. ‘Make a big noise for the first episode.’
‘Love it, two birds one cheque,’ she replied, standing up and clapping in the sad man’s face. ‘Let’s go.’
While Ted saw them all out, I loitered in the staff kitchen, admiring the big pink fridge and reading all the different kind of coffee pods. The longer I could stay upstairs, the better.
‘Good work in there,’ he said, striding back into the office, his chest puffed out like a peacock. ‘Snazzlechuff Says, it’s got a good ring to it.’
‘Why did you tell them you’d brought me in from America to do this job?’ I asked, pocketing a bag of Mini Cheddars to take back down to my lair.
‘It’s more or