Hell and damnation!
Here I was, stuck in London trying to do a business deal on Friday 30th November and it looked like we had reached an impasse. My colleague, Dave MacBeth, and I were negotiating with our host, Georgios Stokoptionos, the Greek shipping and transport magnate. The aim was to hammer out a contract to transport fifty thousand freight tonnes of an industrial production plant from Europe and the USA to south east Asia. By nine o'clock that evening I had missed my flight home and we had decided to take a break.
"When shall we three meet again?" I asked.
We were all keen to do the deal, but the devil is in the detail, as they say. On previous occasions we had got together and fixed win-win deals, but this one was proving more of a challenge. Saving ten dollars a tonne on the budget was my goal, which would gain the project half a million dollars in savings, but Georgios was trying get a price that would burst my balloon. Okay, everyone knows I am a cold-hearted bastard who gets his kicks out of contracts, so there was no way in hell that I was going to roll over for Georgios. The fly in the ointment was my promise to get home in time for the annual Halloween Masque Ball on Saturday night.
Up north, where we live, they burned so many witches a couple of centuries ago that every Halloween we are trying to make up for it. It's debatable whether a very expensive costume ball that raises loads of money for charity cancels out the terrible sins of the past, but it's all for a good cause. Although hellishly expensive, the tickets are always all sold out months in advance. People are happy to give their money to charity, but what really gets them going is the dressing up bit, which has become very competitive in recent years and the prizes include a little silver broom on a plinth for "Hottest Witch of the Year".
Hot witches are the main topic of conversation for weeks afterwards. Stories and rumours abound about who did what with whom at the ball. Folk say the local birth rate spikes every July as a direct consequence! I could easily believe that, because I'm a Christmas baby, born on 25th September. That's why my parents decided to name me Nicholas. "Old Nick" is one of the devil's nicknames, so I always wear a devil costume to the ball. Hazel, my lovely young wife, makes a very sexy witch in her little black dress and a black pointed hat, even though she always insists on wearing a long black wig, painting her face white and sticking on a crooked false witch's nose and some really horrible looking false warts.
Dave and I eventually left Georgios's offices in Pall Mall that Friday evening, having agreed to reconvene at ten o'clock the next morning. Contractual negotiations can be unpredictable, so we hadn't checked out of our hotel. I learned my lesson a few years ago, when I was stuck in London with no hotel room. I had a quick shower and called Hazel to give her the bad news that I wasn't on a plane, heading for home.
"OK, Nick, but what about the ball?" she immediately asked.
"Look, Hazel, I promised I would get there. Come hell or high water I will do my absolute best to keep that promise."
She seemed placated and we chatted for a while about this and that. Hazel listened while I talked about how we could get away to the Caribbean for a mid-winter holiday if I managed to pull off this deal and I listened while she told me all about the continuing woes of her younger sister, Jenny. The poor girl had just gone through a painful divorce after she caught her husband, Melvin, in bed with his personal assistant. Jenny is not the sharpest knife in the cutlery drawer when it comes to brains, but she is just as pretty as Hazel and everyone thought Melvin must have been crazy. Their four year old daughter, Emma, is Jenny's top priority nowadays, so she doesn't have much of a social life.
"What she really needs," concluded Hazel, "is a good fucking."
While I agreed that what Jenny needed was a good fuck, she's a single mother now. She has little opportunity to get out and see if she can find a nice guy for a change.
I feel sorry for Jenny, because Hazel and I have clocked up nearly five years of wedded bliss and I think we're still as much in love as when we tied the knot. When we're apart we always end our phone calls by telling each other how much we love one another, but we don't do the "No, you hang up" routine. Okay, okay, I'm a cold, heartless bastard, I know. I finished my call with Hazel and, after a light supper with Dave, I turned in for the night. I was exhausted from the day's discussions, but I tossed and turned half the night, thinking about the contract before eventually drifting off to sleep in the early hours of the morning.
It's amazing how our brains keep working overnight while we sleep and sometimes the solution to a problem pops into your head when you wake up or when you're standing under the shower. That morning I thought I might just have found the key to getting a deal done. Once I had explained my thinking to Dave over breakfast, we set off to meet Georgios.
It took us all morning and half the afternoon, but we eventually hammered out a deal. I won't bore you with the details, but it involved a transfer of risk in return for the savings that I had targeted. We had sandwiches delivered in for lunch and by four in the afternoon Georgios had signed on the dotted line. Now all I had to do was get home!
I reckoned my best bet was to get the 5pm train instead of going to the airport, but getting across London on a Saturday afternoon isn't easy. Thankfully, London cabbies know all sorts of short cuts and my driver was no exception. I called Hazel while the black cab wound its way through the busy streets, but her number was busy, so I left a message to let her know I was planning on getting a train and would call her later.
London's railway stations are busy places and I had to swerve and dodge as I ran through the crowds towards the platform with only minutes to spare. If Georgios's PA hadn't got me a ticket while we finished off signing the contract I'd have missed the train. I made my way to my seat, trying to catch my breath as we pulled slowly out of the station. I put my coat and bag in the overhead luggage rack and settled down to call Hazel again and let her know I was on my way.
Have you ever left your mobile phone in the back of a taxi? I felt so stupid. After calling Hazel as we sped across London I had been so distracted that I hadn't put it away in my pocket or my bag. In my rush to pay the cabbie and get out of the taxi I had left it behind. I could try and call her from a public pay phone when I got off the train, but I knew the queue for taxis would be a lengthy one on a Saturday evening and searching for a phone wasn't worth the additional delay. If we were on time, I could be back home by around nine thirty. Either she would wait for me or she would go ahead and I could catch up with her. In the meantime I could sample the bland, stale and tasteless food provided by the train operator.
Eventually we got to our destination, but there were delays due to weekend maintenance work on the line, so it was nearer ten thirty by the time I got to our house. Hazel's car wasn't there, so she had obviously gone ahead. The taxi driver waited while I ran in, emptied my bag in our bedroom and grabbed my costume and some toiletries. I checked Hazel's wardrobe and her costume was gone, so I knew where she was.
The taxi dropped me at the hotel and I checked in at reception. The clerk confirmed my wife had checked in earlier. That was obvious when I got into the room. Her empty bag was by the bed and white face paint was liberally spattered over the surface of the little make-up table, which also featured an empty miniature wine bottle, two empty cans of fizzy drinks and a couple of pieces of stale pizza sitting on a large platter. The pizza looked marginally better than the meal I had on the train, but clearly neither of us had dined well.
I had a quick shower, changed into my fiery red devil costume, complete with horns and red mask, and went in search of my wife. Hazel had our tickets, but it was very late in the evening and no one bothered to check whether I had a ticket.
But which witch was which? A thousand people were in the hotel's ballroom and half of them were witches. I got myself a glass of wine and circulated, trying not to look as if I was peering at the witches. It might take some time, but I knew I would eventually be able to find her, thanks to the green ribbon that she ties round her witch's hat.
Hazel's family is of Irish descent and green is very much favoured in her family, not just because of the link to the emerald isle. It's also a good match for redheads like Hazel, Jenny and Emma. Of course it still wouldn't be that easy to spot her, because all the women in her family are little people. They're not exactly leprechauns, but at around five foot three none of them are going to stand out in a crowd.
I was beginning to think maybe I'd missed her and she'd gone back upstairs to our room, when I briefly caught sight of the green ribbon on the dance floor. I moved in that direction, squeezing past the crowds that were watching the dancers. She was dancing up a storm in her little black dress, surrounded by a bunch of guys in skeleton costumes. "Well done, cutty sark!" was the thought that immediately came to mind. Then, just as in the famous poem by Robert Burns, the lights suddenly went out. In an instant all was dark.
I hadn't realised it was so close to midnight and the tradition at the ball is to put the lights out for five minutes at the witching hour. Folk are usually so well oiled by then that pitching the ballroom into darkness for longer than a few minutes would result in chaos, but those few minutes give everyone a chance to make ghostly noises, steal a kiss or two or maybe get a little more intimate. The hubbub of noise was deafening and the ballroom echoed with demonic laughs, banshee howls and screams of horror. Everyone was clearly having a wail of a time in the darkness.
