‘Order the pizza, I repeat, order the pizza,’ Ted barked into his iPhone. I could only assume he had the intern at Heathrow, ready to go.

‘Don’t want pizza,’ Max mumbled inside his mask.

‘Then what do you want?’ I asked, utterly frantic. I had not come this far to fuck up now. ‘Are you hungry? Thirsty? Do you want a new mask? The tiger mask? A real tiger? Ted, he wants a real tiger.’

‘Cancel the pizza,’ Ted screamed into his phone. ‘I repeat, cancel the pizza and find us a tiger.’

But still, nothing.

Taking a deep breath in, I dug deep. There was only one thing for it.

‘That’s it, you’re officially on my shitlist, Max,’ I said, fixing him with the glare of a woman whose fucks had all but expired. ‘Do you think I want to be doing this? No, I don’t. I’ve spent ten years working as a radio producer, I have won awards for my culture programming, I have produced interviews with world leaders, I have shown Greta Thunberg the way to the toilet. Michelle Obama once told me she liked my shoes.’

I paused to let that sink in but the robot was unmoved.

‘Yes, a real tiger,’ Ted marched up and down the room, still bellowing into his phone. ‘What other kind of tiger would I be talking about?’

‘But forget everything else I’ve ever done,’ I said, still focused on my target. ‘Because this is what we’re doing today and I have worked too hard for too long for you to cock it up now. I’m not going to get sacked because you can’t even be bothered to go out onto that stage and talk about Street Cleaner Three with your two chuckle buddies.’

‘Street Fighter Two,’ he corrected sullenly.

‘It could be Street Fighter Seventy-Eight for all I care!’ I shouted. ‘I am sick to the back teeth of putting all my energy into something when the other person could not give a flying fuck. Do you know how long women have been doing this? Forever, Max. For-Ever. So I will not eat your shit and call it ice cream, so either get out there and show me the same respect I’ve shown you or go home and stop wasting everybody’s time.’

The robot head looked up at me, shining silver, all its bright lights flashing.

‘You’re amazing,’ he gasped. ‘Will you go out with me?’

I looked around the room to make sure everyone else had heard the same thing I had. From the looks on their horrified faces, they had.

‘Absolutely not,’ I replied.

‘I’ll be sixteen next December,’ he said, a trace of teenage bravado forcing its way through the robotic effects on his voice modulator.

‘Which means you’re fourteen now,’ I said, looking him dead in the robot eye. ‘Max, you are a child, I am not going out with you.’