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Nerp!

The email icon flashed up on the screen of Adela's phone as she hurriedly pulled her boots on. She paused, sitting on the edge of the bike rack where her Virago was parked, pulled the phone out crossly, and scanned the message's contents. Good old Luz, emailing her the last months' comps as she'd requested at their meeting, moments before. 'Gees,' Adela thought, 'coulda at least waited until I'd got out the damn carpark!' With that, she pulled the other boot on, zipped up her leather jacket right up to the neck, and started patting her pockets trying to find her elusive bike keys. The keys were eventually located zipped into her intricately-designed laptop-bike-pack. Then, the phone beeped again. NERP! 'GAH!' Adela groaned. It was a text from Kaitlyn. “Soz I no ur busy but cud u fit 1 more in 4 trainin in Ashford on Wed? Its 4 Dido. TY!”

Everything about the text, in fact, everything about Kaitlyn, made Adela want to pull her own eyeballs out backwards through her ears. When she was in a better humour, Adela liked to think of Kaitlyn as her nemesis – her opposite, put on earth for her to violently rage against, an enemy that ensured Adela remained Adela. Heaven forbid she'd ever turn out like that! Kaitlyn was a franchisee of Adela's company, one of the first to buy a franchise, and so infuriatingly good at her job that she now owned four of them. Adela longed to find fault with Kaitlyn, but aside from the godawful text speak, the woman was the model franchisee: hardworking, enthusiastic, loyal and reliable.

Adela had a long history with Kaitlyn and her family. Although she didn't realise when they had first met, Kaitlyn's elder sister, Bex, had been in Adela's class at school, and Adela's husband had once been a neighbour of the family as well.. There were five sisters in all, and to Adela's mind, all of them had irritating names with stupid spellings: Kerrie (Kezza), Rebekkah (Bex), Kaitlyn, Aimee and Liann. All of them looked and dressed alike – bleach blonde highlights, gold hoop earrings and too much make up. Best of all, their surname was Pratt. Bex Pratt had become infamous when Adele was at school, because she'd got pregnant at 14 years old, and had a daughter called Dianna (born in 1997). Dianna was now more commonly known as Dido, and was, astonishingly, 16 years old. This fact alone brought on The Fear for Adela. Now, Kaitlyn, the proud Auntie, had agreed to employ her neice at her franchise of Adela's company. Another mini-Pratt on board. Adela grimaced inside her helmet and kicked the bike into life. That message could be dealt with another time. Luz's email was more worrying.

Adela's company was in trouble. The comps – that is, the monthly takings compared with the same month the previous year, were sliding at a rate of knots. April had been down nearly 8% on the previous year, if she'd scanned that email correctly. It wasn't even the fault of any individual franchisee; all 400 of the stores were doing worse this year than last, across the country. The stores were still being visited, there were always customers. Nothing specific is going wrong, Adela repeated to herself as she rode home. It was 6pm, and the rush hour traffic was grinding to a standstill as it usually did. She usually never had much of an issue with rush hours, as she so rarely had to commute at “normal” times of day. It was a nice treat for her to be heading home so early, really. There were some advantages to being on two wheels though, and she smiled as she weaved in and out the near-stationery cars, their drivers honking their horns angrily. HAHA, Suckers!! she thought. But still she was troubled.

It wasn't that she was losing customers, she told herself. There had been no major publicity disasters, and the quality of her products and of her stores was generally very good indeed. No, the same customers still visited, but every one of them was spending less at each visit. Those that came in for lunch were now grabbing takeaway sandwiches rather than staying for full meals. The morning coffee drinkers were no longer returning in the afternoon for lattes and cakes. Espresso connoisseurs were switching to more affordable filtered coffee. It was just a sign of the times. Everyone was feeling the pinch. And so, unfortunately, was Adela. What could be done?

So wrapped up in these anxieties was she, that she begun to pick up speed on the bike without even noticing. 50mph, 60, 70, 75, 80mph as she whizzed onto the quieter suburban ring road. Unbeknownst to her, a white van was waiting to turn right at a junction up ahead. Its driver used the pause at the junction to take a long swig from a large green coffee cup, with “Dela's Deli” scrawled in a white curly font around the cup. He glanced again up the road, looked straight through the solitary motorbike, and pulled out. The van flashed momentarily across Adela's field of vision, she felt a brief moment of almost elated panic, then ploughed straight into the van's cab at 80mph.

The coffee cup landed ten foot away, its contents staining the road, and steaming gently.

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Jeff stared blankly at the desk in front of him. He’d got as far as turning the computer on today, which was a small milestone. Summoning the courage to do even that simple task had taken him a week so far. As the machine warmed up and hummed into life, it took all his mental strength not to look away, or quickly turn the monitor off at the critical moment – the moment when the desktop picture loaded. There she was, in an old photograph, arms flung around his shoulders and both of them smiling triumphantly. Jeff and Adela, the day they opened the first store. Both looking considerably younger and so carefree, with everything in the deli looking so new and shiny, straight out of the box. How long ago that felt now. So much had happened, so much change, so much loss.

“It’s just a picture” he told himself. “A picture can't hurt you!”

But of course it could. She was everywhere, all the time. Her face still adorned every wall, she was in every newspaper, and such was the media furore surrounding her... passing, that old footage of his wife, Adela the burlesque star turned business woman, was still being blasted from most news channels and all over the internet. Jeff was only coping with the paparrazzi vultures because he knew something that precious few others did - that those images were just that: images. The imagined ideal, airbrushed, tweaked, photoshopped, the video footage was staged, her performance designed to delight, intrigue and tease. Only Jeff knew the real Adela – feisty, beautiful, but also beautifully flawed, impatient, competitive, the determined, stubborn control-freak that he had adored so completely. Adela, once Queen of the tantalizing outfit, had retired at the grand age of 35 and swapped sequins and corsets for a taylored business suit, to which she'd quickly adopted with the same ease and naturalness as she had her countless costumes in her modeling days. 'Time to grow up' she had told him one day, as if it was that easy. And she'd done it: shrugged off one persona and climbed into a new one, as easily as she'd donned a new outfit on stage.

Opening that first cafe, the original “'Dela's Deli” had happened so fast, and in hindsight, it had seemed so straight-forward and perfect, as if it were destiny. Adela had acted as if the idea for a cafe had just slipped into her head one day, perhaps as she peeked out seductively from one of her huge ostrich-feather fans on stage. The whole thing had ballooned from a simple idea, (and, as Jeff was beginning to realise, the nagging little voice in Adela's head that told her that she would not stay young, supple, curvy and seductive forever,) into brutal reality, all within a few months. Of course, it wasn't that easy or straight-forward, business never is. Those first few months had been hell, although they never admitted it to each other. The weeks of pulling all-nighters to get things done, followed by endless sleepless nights of worrying on the meagre times they convinced themselves they needed to rest. Putting their life savings into the venture with no means of knowing if they'd ever make it back. Having to borrow money from every available source, against their better judgments, and learning everything, absolutely everything from the bottom up with no map or guidelines. Jeff often wondered how they'd ever had the nerve.

He'd always had his doubts of course. It was his money, his life as much as hers, and yet he was never as completely absorbed by it all. He was a silent partner, supporting, sympathising, advising, but never really on the front line. That was entirely Adela. Her fame, her reputation, her face staring out of every poster: Dela's Deli... come for Afternoon Tease, you're in for a beautiful time!It was her magic that made it all work, and Jeff knew he could not contribute to that. Now, it looked as though he would have to. Somehow.

Jeff grimly began searching through the files on Adela's computer, maximising every folder to mask the desktop background, every glimpse of which stabbed him through the heart with grief. He wasn't even sure what he was looking for. He knew all the financial ins and outs of the business, and where to find the comps tables, store on store reports, and so on. Then there were all the details of their intensely complex supply chain, the way cupcakes and coffee beans and the bloody stone-baked frigging ciabatta bread and millions of those individual folded napkins embellished with a stylised version of Adela's signature on the corner all wove their way across the country, to every one of their 300 branches from Ashford to Aberdeen, day in day out.

The next folder he clicked on contained copies of the staff training manual, known amongst the staff as The Bible. The manual really was a work of art, a creation of love and the real testament of Adela's adoration and utter dedication to her business. It was that document that contained the magic, the secret coding that ensured that Dela's Delis were not just cafes, but maintained an air of the exotic, a sophisticated, luxurious place to treat yourself, and where the experience was unique despite the fact that each of their three hundred stores was identical inside. It even translated to the staff, all of whom were incredibly loyal and seemed, incredibly, to actually want to come to work for long shifts and low wages. Dela's Deli was voted “most glamourous workplace” by Vogue magazine three years in a row. In the middle of the UK's financial crisis, they had opened a new store in Nottingham, advertised for staff, and received 1700 applicants for 8 jobs. At the time, both Jeff and Adela had been utterly stunned by that response and put it down to depressing times and desperate measures – a sign of the hopelessness of the country's economic situation, which had also frightened them a great deal. Perhaps it was insensitive to push for further expansion and post their company profits at a time when so many companies – including their competitors, were going bust. Perhaps they should have slowed down. But there was never any backlash, in fact, the media had even gone so far as to tout Dela's Delis as a beacon of hope in these tough times, inadvertantly stoking the flames that fuelled Adela's reputation and personal brand. She was a gorgeous glamour model, but also a feminist icon, a business guru and now seemingly, a Messiah sent to save humanity from the evils of the Conservative government hell-bent on the destruction of the public sector.

They really had come a long way, he thought to himself, and for the first time since the accident, he smiled. Never throughout their entire business career, had either of them once had the opportunity to stop and think about what they were doing and how much they'd already achieved. After the stresses of the original opening and the company's conception, they had quickly franchised the operation, and had got up to five stores in their first three years. After that, growth had been exponential, and there was now a Deli in every major town and city up and down the country. But every time they achieved something, reached some milestone, the goalposts just shifted. Open the shop. Open 5 shops, Buy out the competition. Open shops all over the country...it never stopped. At the time of her death, Adela had been obsessing over the idea of international expansion, and had already set her sights on Canada, Russia and Japan. America was too full of the religious right, who Adela knew would condemn her soul for eternity were a female-owned, risque burlesque cafe to open, let alone one run by a former glamour model. She also secretly suspected that she could not compete with the age-old traditional glamour of Paris or Milan, even if they were closer to home. She had, with his help, created what felt like this vast, incomprehensible machine that at least superficially operated itself, cloned itself and would carry on turning over, growing and replicating itself with very little intervention required from themselves. All over a sudden, Jeff felt overwhelmingly frightened. It was all too much for him, he had only ever wanted to support his wife, make her happy, help her achieve her dreams. But now she was gone, how could he carry on without her? What was he supposed to do with this... this machine? Could it even survive without her? He wondered, and for the first time: how much of Adela was tied up in this, and what was left?

Jeff took a large swig of his tea and grimaced, it had gone cold. He breathed deeply, rubbed his eyes, and turned his attention back to the computer. What he was really looking for, he thought, was something – anything – to give him some guidance as to what to do next. The business plan, that organic, ever-changing document, should yield some clues, he hoped. They had never planned an exit strategy, he realised, and their marriage had been so happy, so solid, that the thought that either might have to cope without the other had never even occurred to them. The company had taken over their entire lives, and yet there was so much left unsaid between them: what Adela really wanted from him, why he had followed so blindly and unquestioningly, how or if they would ever retire, why they had never had children....