Playing Her Cards Right

by Rosa Temple

  ‘N-no,’ I stuttered, like an idiot.

  She sighed and took her elbow off the desk. ‘Do you have an appointment?’

  ‘Not exactly, no. But if you could get one of them down here I could ex –’

  Before I could finish the sentence someone called the name “Paula” from the other side of the Perspex screen. The receptionist raised a long finger with an equally long red fingernail attached.

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ she said with dark chocolate undertones. ‘I’ll be back with you in a moment.’

  I nodded. I had no choice but to wait. And so I waited. I waited a few minutes and then I waited a few more. By which time I was becoming agitated. It was well past nine and someone from Human Resources might be typing up a letter of rejection to Cassandra for all I knew.

  From the other side of the Perspex screen I could make out the elegant frame of Paula, the long-fingernailed receptionist with the chocolate-coated voice. She was not only not back with me after a moment, she was also laughing in a chocolaty way to someone behind the screen – and not about to return to the reception desk at all.

  I went up onto my toes to look over the tall counter in front of her desk. I was searching for something like a list of employee names in the hope I could find one for someone in Human Resources. If I had a name I could blag a meeting with him or her.

  The only items on an otherwise empty desk were three name badges. They were laid in a neat row. The names Tim Chambers, Adil Roopra, and Sian Banks was printed on each badge respectively and the word “Intern” was written beneath each name. Without a second thought, I grabbed Sian’s badge and headed for the lifts on the far side of the lobby. In the lift I pinned the badge to my coat. I had no idea which floor to take but reasoned that Human Resources would probably be on the top floor. If I was wrong I could work my way back down to ground floor until I found the woman I’d spoken to about Cassandra.

  On the top floor, the offices all had glass walls and doors. I had to blend in, not look suspicious and as Sian Banks as I possibly could.

  ‘You came back then,’ someone said to me as I passed the water cooler.

  ‘I. Er, yes, I did.’

  A tall, middle-aged man in a shirt and tie, with a round red face and hair that looked as if it belonged to a member of One Direction grabbed my hand and shook it.

  ‘Martin Coombes,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t here for your induction week but Trevor tells me the team you were with really put you all through the mill. But you interns haven’t met Trevor yet, I take it. You’ll love Trevor.’

  By Trevor, he meant Trevor Launchester, chief executive officer who grew the PR company from scratch. He’d started off in his parents’ shed learning how to spin turntables by day and DJ-ing by night. He became a promoter of gigs and eventually a promoter of every conceivable live event going. He bought his first penthouse flat at age twenty-five, by which time he was the owner of a PR company the others either hated or tried to emulate.

  ‘Good old Trevor.’ I grinned happily, waving a fist and giving Martin a hearty wink like a pirate.

  ‘I thought he said you guys were out visiting the Surrey office this morning,’ Martin said, looking puzzled.

  ‘Did he? Oh, um, no. I mean that’s where the other two are. I needed to see someone in HR. Could you point me in the right direction?’

  ‘I could but then I’d have to shoot you.’ He blasted a loud, toothpaste-scented laugh into my face and turned red again. ‘But seriously, I’ll take you along there later. It might be a good idea if you come along to the MIM. You’ll be ahead of the other two, then, and you’ll meet the big man himself.’ He winked and pulled me by my elbow along the corridor. I scuttled after him pointing over my shoulder and jabbering on about Human Resources and my urgent need to find them.

  ‘You can go later,’ he insisted. ‘You’ll love this. Something to get your teeth into. I think MIM is ultra important. Human Resources can wait. Trust me.’

  He was full of enthusiasm and had a strong grip. He walked me into a very large, glass-walled conference room in which an enormous oak wood table took pride of place. The chairs surrounding the table were plush and plentiful. I don’t know how many of them were tucked in underneath in a neat design at the table, like petals around the pistil of a flower. Each equidistant from each other and the same distance from the table. At regular intervals, in the centre of the table, there was a plate of cakes and biscuits with teapots and coffee jugs and mugs.

  ‘Sit down, Sian,’ Martin Coombes boomed. He pulled up a chair at one end and started pulling laminated sheets from a case. I smiled at him. His head was buried in his case as he rummaged so I made for the door, hoping I could leave the room before he asked where I was going. As I backed towards the door I very quickly found that I was reversing into a flow of people walking in.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ a young man with a full beard said to me, hand on my waist. ‘Aren’t you going the wrong way?’

  I shook my head as he dodged around me, continuing the conversation he was having with another colleague. I glanced at Martin Coombes, who hadn’t noticed me trying to escape, and I tried to make a break for the door again. I soon found I was being greeted with a smile by each member of the stream of people entering the room. I was trapped, being forced back into the glass-walled room as their rhythm drove me further inside and far away from the door.

  Suddenly the door shut and the stream of people, mostly seated now, all called out, ‘Morning, Trevor.’

  Trevor, a tall, muscular man with dark brown skin and a short Afro looked at me. I hovered right next to a vacant seat. He nodded at it for me to sit down.

  ‘Sian?’ he said, looking extremely puzzled. I nodded. I could tell he was on the verge of saying, “But Sian, what big hair you have,” when Martin started the meeting.

  I wondered how long it would go on for. I could just excuse myself, raise my hand and say I needed the toilet, but I didn’t want to draw any more attention to myself. Trevor was already eyeing me suspiciously. If he hadn’t met the interns during induction week, he was bound to have seen them at the interview. Maybe he couldn’t quite remember what Sian looked like. He must have seen thousands of young hopefuls, I’d imagined. On the other hand he must be too important to have interviewed interns but he was still looking at me as if wondering how Sian could have changed so much.

  Either way I had to wait it out. I’d make it to Human Resources eventually and hopefully before they’d sent a rejection letter to Cassandra.

  Martin kept saying the word “mim” every two seconds and telling the enthralled group that they would get to the “mim” part just as soon as he’d made a few announcements. These announcements went on for ages. People were polite and listened carefully while helping themselves to tea and coffee and reaching across for a cake or biscuit.

  I sat there, boiling away in my coat with my man bag still strapped across my body, not daring to move, shaking my head every time someone offered me a drink.

  ‘Okay,’ said Martin. ‘If you don’t mind, Trevor, I’ll ask Kadeem to start us off. I have a feeling this is going to be a lively Monday Ideas Mashup, especially since MPS PR was on the news last Friday and made the headlines in the Financial Times this weekend. Kick us off, Kadeem, and we’ll go around clockwise shall we?’

  Damn it. They’d come around to me eventually. What was I going to say and why was this Monday Ideas meeting called a mashup? I had to get out of that room. I could pretend to faint but I wasn’t sure I could keep a straight face. Heart failure? What if I told them I needed to throw up? Dodgy curry on Sunday night or something?

  I reached across the table and picked up the closest cake to me, which happened to be a sugary doughnut. I needed to think fast and I thought sugar would give me a brain boost. It was just as I tore off a piece of the greasy doughnut, which was shedding sugar all over the desk in front of me, that I realized I’d mixed up my clockwise with my anti-clockwise. My turn had come
around quicker than I thought and all eyes were on me. The doughnut morsel was millimetres from my mouth, which had dropped open as I looked nervously at Martin’s expectant face.

  ‘It’s all right, Sian,’ he said. ‘If you have an idea you can just go for it. Nothing is a bad idea and it can totally be absorbed into something a bit more rounded. Hence, “Ideas Mashup”.’ He made air quotes, laughed, and nodded for me to go ahead. ‘Sian?’ he said. ‘Anything?’

  ‘Well, I er,’ I began, inadvertently licking the piece of doughnut I was holding. I was beginning to perspire in my coat as I licked sugar crumbs from my lips.

  ‘She’s not Sian,’ a voice from across the table declared. ‘I don’t know who she is.’

  There was a rumble of commotion as lots of others began to agree that they’d never seen me before in their lives. I put the piece of doughnut in my mouth and swallowed it whole, eyes on the jam and sugar that had dropped onto the desk.

  ‘Just who the hell are you?’ Trevor said to me.

  ‘I … I …’ I reached over and put the remainder of the doughnut onto the plate in the middle of the table and started scouting around for a serviette. ‘Well, I …’

  ‘Are you even an intern?’ Martin asked.

  ‘No, I’m …’

  The glass door opened and the chocolaty receptionist stood at it with at least three burly security guards in her wake.

  ‘There she is. Trevor, Martin, sorry about this but this person doesn’t have any business here.’ She pointed a long finger at me.

  Martin looked crestfallen and wiped the hand he’d used to shake mine on his chest.

  ‘Would you mind telling us what this is about?’ he asked. The security guards, one of them female, edged their way into the room and stood behind me.

  ‘She came in asking for Human Resources,’ said the receptionist.

  ‘Whatever for?’ asked Trevor.

  ‘Well …’ I stopped short. How could I explain this to Trevor Launchester? Any mention of Cassandra’s name and her association with me would completely invalidate her job application. If I just left quietly, I might be able to make a call to Human Resources later, find the person I spoke to, and say that a madwoman broke into my office pretending to be me and gave her a made-up story about their candidate. It sounded plausible – in my head anyway. Actually it was a fantastic plan and perhaps I should have just gone with it in the first place.

  The female security guard put her hand on my shoulder. I swallowed hard and pushed out of my chair, briefly putting my hands in and out of my pockets to get the sugar off my fingers.

  ‘There is a really, really weird story behind this,’ I said, smiling and wiping more sugar onto the back of the plush chair as I pushed it under the table. ‘And I’d love to tell you all some time.’ The room was as quiet as stone and just as cold. ‘But you guys just continue with your “mashup”.’ Here I made air quotes with sugary fingers. ‘They were really, really good ideas. I’d like to have stayed but, you know, time constraints and everything.’ I was sidestepping my way to the door and once I got there the receptionist shot me a filthy look.

  ‘The lift is this way,’ she said, eyes narrowing into slits.

  I followed behind her with the security guards hot on my heels. The lift took an agonizingly long time to come up to the top floor and once the five of us were inside we all appeared like giants in a tiny space. The lift doors opened onto the ground floor and as we spilled out the receptionist turned to me.

  ‘I’ll take that name tag.’ She held five red talons under my nose.

  ‘Oh, yes of course. There you go.’

  It wasn’t easy to unpin the name tag, especially with greasy fingers.

  I was escorted to the double doors at the front of the building by the heavy-duty guards and stepped onto the street.

  The guards stayed on the other side of the glass doors, looking menacing and making sure the lunatic with sugar down her coat didn’t try to come back in.

  I waved before I left, dusted off the front of my coat, and stomped off down the street, shaking my head.

  I knew I’d have to make it up to Cassandra somehow. Maybe I could offer her a job at Shearman if all else failed, even temporarily until she could get a deposit for a flat. I was sure I’d need extra help with my rebranding operation. I planned to call Cassandra as soon as I got back to the office and proceeded to take the very scenic route back to Shearman. I wanted to put off the inevitable fury Cassandra would unleash. Having witnessed Cassandra’s wrath before, I needed to buy myself some time. Come up with a plan.

  Chapter 16

  The Surprise

  I’d tried ceaselessly to get a response from Cassandra. I’d sent text after text, left messages, and she never returned a single one. Days went by, Christmas came and went, and still Cassandra never got back to me. She seemed to have fallen off the face of the earth. I absolutely hated myself for what I’d done. I’d ruined her life and she could be destitute, alone, and starving at Christmas, for all I knew. And the whole mess could have been avoided if only I’d picked up the call that went to voicemail when I was ringing Launchester about Cassandra.

  It had been the manufacture team leader asking why the courier had just delivered exact copies of my drawings. Had it been a mistake and should they return them? The team were already working on the first lot of designs that had been delivered by hand earlier.

  ‘Don’t keep beating yourself up, Magenta,’ Anthony said.

  It was Christmas – the season of goodwill, peace on earth, and all that nonsense and I was as miserable as sin.

  ‘I just wish I knew what happened to her, that’s all.’

  Anthony poured me a second glass of wine. He’d cooked a ham, I’d cooked a roast chicken, and we’d spent the afternoon peeling more vegetables than we could ever eat and allowing them to roast into oblivion. The gravy was fine, though. I got Father to talk me through the special one he made to accompany roast meat. There was a knack to making gravy with the juices of the roast without having to resort to using a gravy mix. The gravy was the best thing about the meal and neither of us ate an awful lot. Maybe we could make gravy sandwiches later.

  ‘Would you have preferred to have gone to your parents’ after all?’ Anthony asked when we were all out of conversation. Anthony and I ran out of conversation a lot. We were no longer angry or moody with each other but the atmosphere between us hadn’t quite gone back to normal.

  I’d been looking forward to getting back the handbag samples. They would be finished after the holiday. I had so many ideas in the pipeline for the rebranding and it was the only thing I really spoke about with Anthony. Once that conversation had dried up then I’d ask how his painting was going.

  ‘Why don’t you come by the gallery some time?’ he asked me.

  We’d finished eating and we’d moved over to the sofa, neither of us ready for dessert.

  ‘I’d love to,’ I said. ‘You sure it’s okay with the gallery?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have said otherwise.’

  ‘Oh. Of course not. Right then, I will.’

  The conversation ran dry for another few minutes.

  ‘Shall we see what’s on television?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure. Shall I open the chocolates Riley gave me?’

  ‘Why not.’

  ‘I’m really looking forward to seeing the sample bags,’ I said as a rerun of Casino Royale popped up on the screen. Neither of us were Bond fans but we let it play anyway.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Anthony. ‘I’ll come in and see them when they’re in.’

  I very much doubted that he would and I very much doubted that I’d ask him to but such was the extent of the riveting conversations we had at the time.

  When there was nothing else to say. I stared blankly at the screen, wishing I could go back to work and that the gallery would hurry up and reopen after the Christmas break.

  A week of stilted conversation la
ter and there was still no word from Cassandra. I popped in and out of work to tidy up some loose ends and Anthony began another project in his studio at the back of the house. He gruffed and grunted if I did something as simple as ask him how the painting was going, so I stopped asking.

  ‘Why aren’t you just having time off, Magenta?’ He was wiping off a brush when I got back in from Shearman after finding no more loose ends available to me. He dumped the brush onto the rickety old table covered in newspaper. As he walked in towards the kitchen we both tried to dodge out of the way of the other, swaying and staggering in the doorway as if we didn’t want to touch.

  ‘I’m making tea,’ he said.

  ‘Yes please.’ I sat at the table and watched him prepare two cups of tea. PG Tips for him and lemon and ginger for me. I looked up at a peeling patch on the only wall of the kitchen I never got to paint. ‘I never did get this kitchen finished did I?’

  ‘And quite right,’ said Anthony over his shoulder. ‘You shouldn’t have been doing so much anyway.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Recently.’

  ‘As in when I was pregnant?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘You didn’t have to. I know you think I was overdoing it. You think it was my fault don’t you? I wish you’d just come out and say it, Anthony. It’s been sitting between us like a time bomb.’

  Anthony placed both cups of tea down with purpose on the table so that tea spilled out of each cup.

  ‘I’m not falling for this,’ he said flopping into a chair.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘You want to trap me into saying something I don’t mean. Why is it the only time we say more than two words to each other we end up fighting?’ he said squeezing his fist.

  ‘That’s not true.’

  Anthony got up. I thought he was about to storm out but instead he knelt at my side and took both my hands, resting them on my knees.

  ‘It is, Magenta. It’s true. We argue all the time and I’m tired of it.’

  ‘But do you blame me? Do you think I was responsible? I really want to know.’