by Jules Wake
‘Now, Olivia, darling, I need to talk to you about …’
The rest of the conversation was taken up by who was doing what at the Old Bodgers’ match. It was agreed that I would do teas – as I did every year – which involved making copious amounts of sandwiches and buttering a scone mountain while Mum would be in charge of the evening barbecue. Apparently Dad was getting very excited about the forthcoming match and thanks to some sneaky recruiting had found some brilliant Aussie bowler. He was already counting his wickets.
Chapter Six
The reception at Organic PR is manned by Piranha One and Piranha Two. I don’t bother learning their names any more as they are replaced by updated identikit models every couple of months. Whatever that job ad promises, it must be a pack of lies because they never last long. The necessary qualifications must include a rigid expression – or they’re paid in Botox treatments – a distant superior manner and the ability to wither plants at ten paces with one icy look.
Yet all of them have this unnerving ability to morph into a human being the minute they spot an important client or a board director. Forget asking them to order a courier – which I believe is part of a receptionist’s duties. From the twitch of their immaculate lips – so much Botox they don’t curl any more – you’d think that you’d asked them whether their Prada handbags came from Next.
As Emily and I crossed the hall to the lifts, carrying hot drinks we’d picked up from Starbucks next door, Piranha One lifted her head and said in clear cutting tones, ‘Emily! Could you explain to your boyfriend that we are not here to pass on personal messages to staff? And remind him that our email is working perfectly.’
‘Pardon?’
‘I think you heard,’ and with that she turned back to her wordsearch hidden below the desk.
‘She is so bloody rude,’ Emily seethed. ‘How much longer has she got?’
‘Another six weeks of that one. Time’s nearly up for Piranha Two. What was she on about? I thought Daniel always phoned your mobile?’
‘Haven’t a clue. Probably got me muddled up with Emily Parr in Accounts.’
I’d just sat down at my desk, prised the lid off my hot chocolate and fired up my computer when a grumpy-faced Emily appeared in front of me.
‘Olivia, I’ve had another bloody email.’ Scowling she stomped back to her desk.
I followed. Peering over her shoulder I read …
-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Cooper [mailto:[email protected]]
To: ‘Emily’
Subject: Tardiness
Dear Emily
I emailed you yesterday and I haven’t heard back from you. I was worried you never got my email. Your receptionist tells me, however, that this is unlikely and that your system is very reliable. (She’s rather abrupt for one in her position.)
However I wasn’t confident she knew what she was doing so I popped in to ensure that she had checked properly. A proper little madam but that’s so many women for you. Knowing you as I do, I’m sure there’s a good explanation as to why you haven’t answered my first email. That stupid female on the front desk was covering up her own incompetence …
Oo er and yikes.
‘He popped in!’ My voice went up. ‘No wonder the Piranhas were ruder than normal.’
‘Bloody cheek. How dare he?’ exploded Emily. ‘Who does he think he is? Checking up on me? He can piss off.’
‘Emily, calm down. There’s obviously been a mix-up. Poor chap. Thought Santa had done a personal delivery when he heard you’d ticked his box.’
‘I didn’t tick his sodding box! I’ve a good mind to ring your cousin. Get him to explain the cock-up to this Peter.’ She was pacing furiously up and down in front of my desk, oblivious to the curious looks she was getting.
‘As far as he’s concerned you did tick the box,’ I said gently.
‘Well, I didn’t,’ she roared at me. ‘I’m going to email him. How the hell did he find out where I worked?’
Er hello, a quick Google on the web and Facebook and he could have found Emily and where she worked in seconds. Peter didn’t need to be Einstein to work out her email address.
‘Emily, just let him down gently,’ I pleaded. ‘Imagine how he feels.’ In this mood there was no knowing what response she would fire off.
‘I was hardly going to email, “Piss off you loony and don’t darken my inbox again”, was I?’
Actually, I wouldn’t put it past her. She wasn’t renowned for her subtlety. ‘Just do the standard-nice-girl fob-off, “you’re-far-too-good-for-me-and-I-just-want-to-be-fair-to-you.”’
She looked at me quizzically.
I heaved a big sigh. ‘Do you want me to do it?’ It was the only way to stop her upsetting him or so I thought.
‘Would you? You’re so much better at that sort of thing.’
I rolled my eyes. She was the one that wrote press releases about magical lipsticks staying put for forty-eight hours, when everyone knew they’d never pass the ‘one swig of a Bacardi Breezer’ test.
We went over to her desk and plonking myself in her chair, I started typing.
‘Should it be, “Hi Peter” or “Dear Peter”?’
‘Try “Oy Weirdo”. Works for me.’
‘Ever considered a career in the diplomatic corps?’ My sarcasm was wasted.
Emily looked blank. ‘I couldn’t give a toss. We just need to get rid of him.’
I blinked at the casual ‘we’ but let it go. It was easier for me to get on and compose a gentle but firm rejection email explaining that ‘I’ wasn’t ready for a relationship just at the moment.
Emily tutted and tossed her head throughout. Every time I asked her opinion she pursed her mouth. Half an hour later, after much negotiation, I had an email that we were satisfied with. Emily pressed the magic ‘send’ button.
‘Happy now?’ she asked.
God, she could be a pain. If we weren’t sharing a flat, I would have stuffed the keyboard down her throat. Instead I went back to my cold hot chocolate and a curt voicemail message. My usually mild-mannered boss, Max, was pissed off. Where was I? Thanks to Emily I was five minutes late for a client meeting.
By lunchtime I’d eaten my home-made sarnie. In fact it had gone before eleven. I needed something else; something nutritious and filling like a pack of Marks & Spencer’s Percy Pigs.
I set out down Oxford Street with good intentions, but the minute I got to Marks my stomach took charge, making outrageous demands and before I knew it my basket had mysteriously been filled with essentials like feta stuffed olives, pastrami bagel chips, and chocolate-covered peanuts.
If I hadn’t been so absorbed in my Percy Pigs I might have been paying more attention as I shouldered my way through the damp crowds, dodging umbrella spokes on the way back to the office. Someone rushing by shoved me sharply and glancing up I caught a fleeting impression of glasses mended with electrical tape. Whipping my head around, I tried to get a second look but whoever it was had vanished in the flow of people undulating around me. Bloody Emily and her emails. Now I had Peter on the brain … and a wet neck, as I barged into an umbrella knocking a torrent of water down my collar.
I planned to sneak into the office hiding the telltale bag under my coat to avoid the universal chorus of ‘I wish you’d said that you were going’. I needn’t have worried – my entrance went completely unnoticed. An excited crowd was gathered around Emily’s desk. Had some major coup in the beauty world happened while I was out?
‘What’s all the excitement?’ I asked, as Helene, a junior on Emily’s team, bustled by importantly.
‘Miranda Baker has just said she’d do it,’ she gushed. ‘It’s a real coup.’
The mind boggled. Just what was it that Miranda had agreed to do? The ex-star of one of those teen
soaps, she was one of those irritating minor celebrities who popped up everywhere and pretty much did everything.
‘Do what?’ I asked.
‘Miranda has agreed to wear our dress at the premiere of the new James Bond film,’ burbled Helene. ‘We’re so chuffed. It’s amazing.’
I glanced quickly at her. What dress? What premiere?
I hadn’t heard anything about this before. I glanced over at Emily’s blonde head, pennies dropping at speed.
‘For the Luscious Lips launch by any chance?’ I asked.
‘That’s right. It was Emily’s idea. Isn’t it amazing? We’re having an amazing dress made especially for Miranda.’ Helene’s eyes shone with enthusiasm.
I couldn’t resist saying, ‘That’s amazing.’
She didn’t bat an eyelid, instead she leaned forward confidingly and said, ‘Do you know … the dress is going to be white with big lip prints all of over it.’
‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘Each one will be in the new season’s colours.’
‘Yes!’ squealed Helene, squeezing her hands together.
‘Amazing,’ I said cuttingly this time.
‘Emily is so clever.’ Helene was almost skipping with excitement.
Wasn’t she just? Although it wasn’t that long ago, on a car journey along the M4 no less, that Emily had thought the very same idea clichéd. I looked over at her, surrounded by an adoring crowd. She looked up and caught my eye.
Some people might have had the grace to look sheepish. Not Emily. She just looked at me defiantly. Shocked, more by the insolence of her expression than anything else, I turned away and went back to my desk.
I realised that it wasn’t that much of a surprise, Emily presenting the idea as hers. She did tend to cut corners, and if she could get away with something she would. I remember her once walking out of Topshop with a dress accidentally tucked under her arm, which she didn’t realise she’d done until we were half way down Oxford Street. Funny that, and I might have believed it was an oversight if she hadn’t spent ages cooing over the dress, pouting when I reminded her she still had her half of the electricity bill to pay. Funny too, I said, that the security tag hadn’t gone off, to which she’d responded that there’d been men working on the electrics at the door.
No, honesty and Emily didn’t sit that well together.
Ignoring everyone else I busied myself at my desk, pressing the send and receive button on my email several times, hoping somewhere out there in the ether there was a message that needed an urgent response or something to keep me very busy for the afternoon. Nothing appeared in my inbox.
Emily found me as I emerged from a cubicle in the ladies later that afternoon. She was leaning against one of the sinks. I nodded, letting her do all the talking.
She threw her hands above her head dramatically.
‘All right, Olivia, it’s a fair cop,’ she said defensively, the old chestnuts glibly tripping off her tongue. ‘Blow the whistle, if you want, but you do know that there’s no such thing as a new idea.’
I said nothing.
Looking into my face, she said in a low urgent voice, ‘Look, I know it was your idea but I honestly didn’t think it was a goer.’
Huh, a likely tale.
‘When I got to the meeting with Fiona, it just came out.’
‘Really?’ My tone was dry.
‘Yes and she liked it. Really liked it. I couldn’t believe it, she never likes my ideas.’
I washed my hands very thoroughly with soap, not looking at her. ‘That’s because it wasn’t your idea.’
‘Technically, yes.’ Emily was now trying to catch my eye in the mirror. ‘But at that point I could hardly say it was yours. Have you any idea what it’s like working for her? You’re lucky. Max lets you get away with anything.’
If she was expecting me to sympathise as usual, she’d misjudged things. This time I was seriously pissed off. I narrowed my eyes and turned to face her.
‘Fine, Emily,’ I said, firmly making eye contact for the first time. ‘But why didn’t you tell me? I’m hardly going to march over to Fiona and say, “Actually it was my idea”.’ Did she really think so little of me? ‘Blimey, it’s not as if you haven’t had ample opportunity. We do live together. From the sound of things you’ve been negotiating with Miranda for a few days.’
With that said, I flounced out of the loo, stomping back to my desk. After all the help I’d given her that morning with Peter’s email! Well, she could bloody well sort her own mad emails out from now on.
Unfortunately that’s just what she did.
I was so fed up with Emily that I phoned Kate for a moan, but she wasn’t particularly sympathetic, in fact she was bloody miserable which reminded me of Mum’s conversation the previous evening.
‘What are you doing tonight?’ I asked.
‘Meeting up with Caroline for a drink, except she’s just phoned. Typical, I’m already on the train to London and she’s held up. I’m going to have hours to kill. What are you doing?’
‘I’ve got an idea. Give me five minutes and I’ll call you back.’ I knew just the thing. Isabelle on the floor above was always offering me complimentary visits to one of her client’s places.
‘You have such a brilliant job,’ Kate said, letting out a long heart-felt sigh as she tucked her towel tighter around her chest, and wiped her hair off her face.
‘Mmm.’ It was all I could do to answer her. Lying full-length in the delicious heat, the warmth was penetrating my muscles unfurling the knots of tension in them. I hadn’t realised how much Emily had wound me up.
‘I could get used to this.’ Kate’s voice sounded wistful
That sounded like a good cue to me. I sat up. Too quickly! I felt light-headed for a second in the hot air.
‘You missing Greg?’ I asked sympathetically.
‘What?’ asked Kate, looking confused for a moment.
‘Gorgeous Greg, the surf-stud?’ I teased. ‘He of the six-pack.’
‘Six? You mean eight. Everything’s more macho in Australia, Sheila.’
Clearly that wasn’t the problem, so what was it? Was Mum imagining things? There was only one other thing I thought it might be.
‘Poor old Bill. I bet he’s only got a six-pack,’ I said.
‘Where did that come from?’ she asked rather sharply, looking at me. ‘What about Bill?’
Bingo. As I suspected.
‘It’s not every day you get picked to play rugby for England. He’s been in every newspaper this week,’ I answered. ‘I just wondered if you might have had a change of heart.’ I used my towel to dab at the water dripping down my neck.
‘As if that impresses me,’ she snapped, looking up for a second and sticking her nose in the air.
I looked at her and opened my mouth in astonishment. ‘Gosh, it impresses the hell out of me. He’s done so well to be selected and how great would it be to say you’re going out with an England rugby player?’
‘There was never any chance of that,’ she said more gently, shaking her head, clumps of hair plastering her damp cheeks. A small part of me relished her looking dishevelled.
She sighed. ‘Much as Bill hoped, nothing was ever going to happen.’
‘Why not?’ I asked, turning my palms up to the ceiling. ‘What was wrong with him?’ I never did get it. Bill reminded me of Hugh Grant in his bumbling, gentle way. The same floppy hair and bemused expression although that’s where the similarity ended. At six foot five he was much taller and twice the width. Bill didn’t play in the back row for nothing. For some strange reason he adored Kate and never bothered to hide it, to her total embarrassment.
‘He was my boss for one thing,’ she said, tapping the wooden slat beside her with her fingernail. ‘And you know he’s not my type.’
&
nbsp; ‘You mean he doesn’t work in the City and wear pinstripes,’ I said cynically.
Her fingernail was still tapping. ‘Don’t knock it. It might not matter to you but it does to me.’
True. We were totally the wrong way round. I had the job with the smart clothes and restaurant lifestyle and while I enjoyed it, it wasn’t essential to my happiness in the same way it seemed to be to Kate.
When she’d stuck at Gainsboro’s Plumbing Supplies for more than the usual three months, Mum thought perhaps she’d found her niche. Aside from Bill’s devotion, Kate acquired a fan club among the plumbers thanks to her designer’s eye and constant suggestions for tiles, fittings and sanitaryware.
‘I want someone who’s going places. Not some family-run business where the pinnacle of success is a contract supplying gold-plated taps to footballers in Chelsea Harbour.’ Her finger tapped in time with her staccato sentences. ‘Someone with ambition. Style. Money.’ Tap, tap. ‘Someone who doesn’t buy the same pair of trousers … in three different colours … from the same shop because’ tap ‘… they’re comfy.’ Her voice rose as she finished.
‘Not Bill, then.’ I said sadly. Shame, he was lovely. Each to their own and all that. I’d be seeing him again in a couple of weeks time. Daniel had recruited him to play cricket in the forthcoming Old Bodgers match. Hang on! I remembered now.
‘I forgot to ask you,’ I said, shifting to lie on my stomach. ‘Did Bill get in touch when he was in Oz a month or so ago? He asked me for your number?’
‘Yes … er … no.’
I raised my eyebrows and twisted my head round to look up at her on the top shelf of the sauna. ‘Which?’
‘He did get in touch …’ she faltered, and lay down abruptly.
‘And?’ I pushed, intrigued. I couldn’t see her face any more. Was she deliberately avoiding looking at me?
‘We … there wasn’t time to see him.’
I couldn’t help pressing to find out more. She’d always taken Bill’s adoration for granted. ‘Of course, rugby players are gods out there. Bet there were women falling all over him.’
