“Lalala,” I sang in a high-pitched, panic-attacked attempt to sound relaxed.
“Lara.”
Oh God. I wanted to collapse on the counter with my head in my hands and howl with shame.
“Yes?” I didn’t turn around. I didn’t want to see his face.
“Don’t you have any cups?”
I was going to have to face him. “Cups?” I trilled, leaning back on the cupboards, smiling weakly.
He smiled back, not so weakly. “Yes. Cups. China receptacles for the consumption of hot beverages. You’ve heard of them, I take it?”
Oh, ha, ha. Mind you, I’d never heard Dexter trying to be funny before, so perhaps it wasn’t such a bad sign.
“Yeah. You, um. You want a cup?”
“Ideally. Glass gets quite hot, you know. When it’s got boiling water in it. Don’t want to burn my fingers or drop it.”
“No. Right.” I chewed my lip.
“I’m sensing a problem.” Dexter swivelled towards me, averting his eyes from the computer scr
een, his face pleasantly expectant. He knows.
“It’s just…I don’t have any.”
“Don’t have any? You had them last time I was here. What happened?”
Visit from the cup monster? Theft? Mass breakage? Not a single convincing explanation sprang to my deceitful mind.
“I do have some,” I muttered sheepishly. “They’re just…I haven’t got round to washing them up yet.”
“Oh.” Dexter watched me, rather hawkishly, for a moment or two, then he swung back round to the computer and tapped at the spreadsheet. “Yes. Washing up. As and when necessary. Did you not consider it necessary to wash up when you found you had no clean cups?”
“Didn’t have time. Been busy. I’ve done everything else,” I wailed in a sudden outpouring of guilty defensiveness.
“Have you, Lara? Everything?” He smiled sadly. “Tell you what. Why don’t you wash up a cup and I’ll pour this brew into it. Then you can sit down here and we’ll go through the list together.”
He hadn’t mentioned a punishment. Perhaps he would let me off. Perhaps he was quite a generous-spirited kind of automaton after all. I smiled gratefully and pulled open the cupboard door. An ear-splitting crash of falling crockery and aluminium rent the air.
“Oh. Dear.”
* * * *
“You’ve done extraordinarily well,” he told me, closing the spreadsheet and turning to me with a melancholy smile. “So much better than I would have expected at this stage. I think our little motivational scheme might be working.”
I glowed in the sunshine of his praise, then the inevitable shadow chilled the air.
“Of course, I don’t expect perfection, and I’m almost inclined to be lenient with regard to what happened earlier.”
“The Teacup Incident,” I said, having already christened it in my mind so that its notoriety would live forever.
“The Teacup Incident.” He smiled.
He really was so much more human and…approachable…since I gave him the green light to redden my bottom.
“After all, you will have to replace all that broken china from your own pocket, and, judging by the finances we’ve just trawled through, that won’t be easy. A punishment that truly fits the crime.”