‘I have your husband’s shirts,’ he said and handed me seven of them, freshly laundered on hangers.
When I got back to the flat I went to put them away on his side of our closet and as I hung them up the way he liked them – stripes, checks and plains all in separate blocks – I noticed something strange. They were all duplicates of shirts he already had. It must have been some kind of new grooming system he was introducing, I thought, making a note to ask him about it later.
He got back just after 3 p.m. and judging by the surprise on his face when he opened the door, he hadn’t been expecting me to be home.
‘Em!’ he said. ‘I thought you were at the office.’
‘Surprise!’ I said. ‘I came home early to make you a special dinner.’
‘Oh, that’s great, but damn,’ he said, clicking his fingers. ‘I’m such an idiot, I’ve just remembered I left something important at Paddington, in the left luggage. I’d better go back and get it.’
And he disappeared again, apparently taking his luggage with him. It was most peculiar. He came back about twenty minutes later with his bags and seeming a little more normal.
‘Are you here now?’ I said, handing him a glass of chilled white wine.
‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘I just needed to collect another bag and put some stuff in the car to take straight to the office tomorrow. I picked up a load of reference material over there and I didn’t need to clutter up the house with it.’
I didn’t think any more of it. Ollie was always shunting stuff about. It was one of the inconveniences of being a consumer on his level. We always had bags of crap going out of the house to make room for all the new crap coming in.
Dinner was fun. We rarely ate in, sitting at the table, just the two of us, and it made a nice change. He was very excited about his trip and the amazing response he’d had to the Slap stand and all the great connections he had made for promoting cosmetics to a whole new market. He listened attentively when I told him about my strange first week at Surface and was very reassuring.
‘New offices are hell, Emily. It’s always like that. I’m sure you’ll get a proper assistant once you actually start pumping out issues. Start-ups are scary and hard in any kind of business, but very exciting as well. Wait until you have that first issue in your hands and the fashion world is swooning, desperate to be in your pages.’
The only sour note in an otherwise lovely evening was when I opened the present he’d brought me. Usually, Ollie was a first-class present giver. I’d been quite stoked up about what he would buy me in Milan and had dropped a few hints, but even without any help I knew he always managed to find me the perfect thing and was generous too. But not this time. It was a toothbrush.
I just looked at him when I got it out of the bag. He was beaming at me.
‘It’s – a toothbrush,’ I said. Wondering if it was a joke and the real present, in a large Prada carrier bag, was about to appear. Maybe that was what he had been collecting from Paddington.
‘Yes,’ said Ollie, in his most enthusiastic mode. ‘Isn’t it great? It’s by Marnie Stallinger. It’s her first venture into mass-produced universal consumer objects. It’s brilliant isn’t it? It’s going to be an iconic piece and you have one of the first hundred to come off the production line. I’ve got the next one in the series. They’re numbered. They’ll be worth a fortune in twenty years’ time, as long as we don’t take them out of the packaging, of course.’
I looked down at it again. It was an over-designed purple plastic toothbrush. I didn’t even like it. I only used clear plastic GUM toothbrushes I bought in bulk in New York. This was an ugly toothbrush I couldn’t even use.
‘Thanks, Ollie,’ I said flatly. ‘That’s great. An historic toothbrush. I’ll put it away for posterity.’
I got up to clear the table, so disappointed I forgot to ask him about the duplicate shirts.
The following week I made huge strides forward at Surface. Ollie gave me a spare laptop to take in and I got an email address and a telephone, of my very own. Rosie seemed to have given up working on her book and was keeping her office door open. Making it look even more like a real office, the first fashion student had arrived to assist her, which seemed like progress. It was just unfortunate she had the phone manner of a serial killer.
It took her two days to master the system for putting calls through to Rosie’s extension and even once she could do it without cutting the caller off, she had no discrimination about which people to put through and which to take messages from. I sat in my office trying not to listen to the telephonic PR catastrophe that was going on out there, until in the end I couldn’t stand it any longer.
‘Shona,’ I said brightly, going to sit on the edge of her desk. ‘Shall I give you some hints how to deal with the phones?’
The girl just looked back at me from under her bright green fringe and carried on popping her bubble gum.
‘OK,’ I said, determined not to give up. ‘When the phone rings, you pick it up and say: “Hello, Surface magazine, how can I help you?” Sound friendly. OK?’
Shona said nothing. She certainly didn’t look friendly.
‘Then you ask who’s calling. If you don’t recognize the name as someone important – like Giorgio Armani, or Alexander McQueen, ha ha ha – or someone you have heard Rosie talking about, ask them: “Will she know what the call’s about?” If they then go into a long explanation, or they are clearly a PR, take a message, including their name, phone number and what they are calling about. Obviously do the same if Rosie is out.’
I handed her an exercise book.
‘Write the messages in this book with the date and time, the person’s name and a reply number, and give it to Rosie to look at twice a day, OK?’
Shona carried on looking at me like I was asking her to walk around Hoxton in a Laura Ashley dress.
‘OK?’ I asked again. She popped her gum at me and went back to reading the manga comic she had brought in with her.
I went back to my office and heard her answer the phone.
‘Yeah?’ was all she said, then she put the call straight through to Rosie.
I couldn’t stand it. I went over to her desk again.
‘Shona,’ I said. ‘What did I just tell you? You have to announce the magazine. It’s really important. You are the first point of entry to Planet Surface and it is really important people get a positive impression.’
I sounded like Ollie, but I didn’t care. I was right. But Shona clearly didn’t think so. She put her comic into her army surplus bag and stood up.
‘I’m not a bloody secretary,’ she said and walked out. She didn’t come back and I got the blame for alienating her.
‘They’re only kids, Emily,’ said Rosie, quite crossly. ‘You can’t expect them to know how to be a top-flight PA. And anyway, this isn’t British Airways, we’re a cool magazine, we don’t have to do all that corporate image bullshit.’
I just looked at her. How could I answer her without being incredibly rude?
‘I just didn’t think she was giving people a very good impression of Surface,’ I said. ‘And I thought you might like a bit of call screening.’
‘Yes, well, just leave it to me in future,’ said Rosie tersely, and I saw her pick up the message book and look at it curiously.
That was when it hit me. She’d never seen one before, because she’d never actually worked on a magazine before. She’d worked on a newspaper – but mainly out of the office as a correspondent – and then as a freelancer on magazines. She didn’t have the first idea how magazine offices worked. Or any office for that matter. The seriousness of this situation hit me again when I finally had a planning meeting with her that Friday. I had now been there for two weeks and it was the first time the entire staff – all three of us – had sat down together to discuss what we were going to put in the flaming magazine.
I had my list of ideas ready and it seemed like Steve already had his reactions to them ready too, because h
e didn’t like any of them. He thought they were all ‘lame’, ‘old’, or ‘obvious’. Rosie clearly didn’t know what she thought. Because after I presented each suggestion she would say ‘great, I like it’, only to change it to ‘actually that is quite predictable’ after Steve had made his comments.
After an hour of this we were no further towards having a shoot schedule in place and Steve and I were deeply established in mutual contempt.
‘OK, Steve,’ I said to him in the end, determined to keep trying. ‘What do you think we should shoot for the first issue?’
Upon which he came out with a string of ideas which were basically on the same themes as mine, just put more wankily. Looking positively at the big picture – it was getting exhausting, but I forced myself – I decided that at least it meant I could go ahead and shoot what I had wanted to in the first place and just make him feel like they were all his ideas. For a moment I had thought he was going to start asking me to do things with papier mâché horses’ heads.
But despite my best Pollyanna efforts it went seriously downhill from there. After we had established a basic list of the fashion stories we were going to do, I brought up the subject of locations.
‘There isn’t any budget for foreign travel,’ said Rosie.
‘What?’ I said. ‘Do you want me to do the whole first issue in the studio? With a few exotic shots from Camber Sands?’
Now this was something I had made a point of asking her about before I took the job and she had promised I would be able to do exactly the kind of trips I had done at Chic. ‘As behoves a parameter-redefining international fashion magazine,’ she had said at the time with the self-satisfied smile I was starting to detest.
‘What’s changed, Rosie?’ I said. ‘This is not what we discussed. I didn’t come here to shoot catalogue pictures.’
She looked uncomfortable.
‘That’s just the way it is at the moment. When we get more advertising, we can start to do more trips. For the time being, if you can get freebies, that’s great, but there’s nothing in the budget for travel.’
That was when I went back to my office and called Bee. It was the last day of her one-month deadline and I was going to take her up on her offer to come back. It was so nice to hear Nushka’s welcoming professional voice when she answered the phone, I could have wept with relief.
‘Hello, Chic magazine, how can I help you?’ she had said, all sophisticated warmth and Chic-ness. ‘Oh, hi Em, it’s great to hear from you. We really miss you. But I’m afraid Bee’s all tied up this afternoon. Will she know what it’s about?’
That was when I knew I was buggered.
Two hours later it was all confirmed. I’d popped out to the nearest café to get a coffee that was slightly less emetic than Rosie’s herb teas and found I had a tearful message from Gemma on my mobile asking me to ring her. I did and got the news like a bucket of cold water in the face.
Natalie had my job.
22
Three weeks later, the emotional decompression chamber of the business-class compartment of a long-haul jumbo jet gave me the time and the space to look at my work situation with some detachment. In between reading my mother’s poems – which had become a bit of an inflight fetish – I considered my situation.
So far Surface was a total fuck-up and there was no going back to Chic now my least favourite person had my job. Bad. But looking on the good side – at least Rosie had given me complete freedom to shoot whatever clothes I wanted on this trip, which was quite a wild prospect. She had seemed quite surprised when I had asked her to come into my office so I could present the clothes for each of the three stories I was going to do, before I set off.
I’d arranged all the outfits on a clothes rail – which I’d had to go out and buy myself, because Rosie had said there wasn’t money in the budget for one – complete with their accessories, and a list detailing the designers, prices and UK stockists. In other words, just the way Bee had always insisted we did it at Chic.
Rosie had just looked perplexed and waved me away saying I was the stylist and she trusted me to do the styling. She didn’t even want to see what I was thinking of for the cover tries. I thought she was nuts and realized I missed the creative bounce around of such discussions. Bee had often made my shoots much better by restricting me a bit in what I wanted to use and making really helpful suggestions, but Rosie didn’t want to know.
‘You don’t get mixed up in the words, Emily, and I won’t interfere with the pictures,’ she had said patronizingly and completely missing the point.
That was exactly what an editor-in-chief was supposed to do – interfere, control, change, infuriate and generally spice up the crazy brew that made a fashion magazine great. As Bee used to say, magazines are not democracies, they’re dictatorships, with one vision steering them, and that’s the only way to make them work.
But as Rosie clearly had no concept of any of that, I decided I was just going to enjoy the freedom while I had it and if the magazine turned out to be as cruddy as her management skills, I’d just leave and go freelance until something better came along. At that moment, though, I was rather excited about the adventure I was embarking on. I was on my way to Sydney, for the first time, as the guest of Australian Fashion Week.
The week after the disastrous planning meeting Rosie had received an email inviting Surface to attend, with the flights and hotel paid for. I was amazed they’d even heard of us, but Rosie’s reputation as a writer was international and they’d written about us on WGSN – the best fashion news wire service – and they seemed keen for us to go. I jumped at the opportunity to tack some shoots in great locations on to the end of the free trip.
Ollie had been really excited about me going to Sydney and had asked me to do a serious recce of the city and how Slap sat in the market there. He was so geared up about it, rushing into his study and producing a file of cuttings he’d saved about groovy things in Australia, I thought for a moment that he might come with me.
And I had seriously mixed feelings about that. Normally I would have loved to share the excitement of visiting a new city – a new continent – with Ollie, but this was different. Miles lived in Sydney. If Ollie had come there with me, it would have been as weird as when Miles had been in London. Weirder.
Which was also why I hadn’t told Miles I was coming over. I knew how I had felt when he was in my home town, so I thought I should respect how he might feel about having me in his. I didn’t know anything about Miles’s private life outside our hotel-room bubble – and I didn’t want to. Not seeing him while I was there, seemed the cleanest way to handle it.
Of course the twenty-four-hour flight potentially gave me plenty of time to think about all that and the implications of it, but I just blocked it out with the free champagne, the movies and my mum’s book. It was funny how I could use her words to push away the things I didn’t want to think about, when normally I used anything available – to stop myself thinking about her. Somehow, though, reading her clipped, economical lines enabled me to allow her into my brain, without having really to confront the situation. It was the perfect balance.
I was so brain lagged by the flight when I arrived I could hardly take in anything about Sydney at first, but I was aware of a very big blue sky and a very short distance, compared to most cities I knew, between the airport and the hotel, which was in an old converted wharf sticking out into the famous harbour.
I had the most amazing view of the water from the little balcony off my room and I sat there feeling slightly dizzy and unable to take my eyes off the sparkling view, framed by wooded headlands and an atmospheric old naval depot to the right.
I started unpacking and then, despite everything I knew about conquering jet lag, I just had to lie down. I went straight to sleep until I was abruptly woken by the phone ringing next to my head.
‘I can’t believe you didn’t tell me,’ said a familiar voice. ‘I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you were coming over.’
<
br /> ‘Miles?’ I said, faintly.
‘Who did you think it was?’
‘But how did you know I was here?’
He laughed. ‘I went in to the Fashion Week office just now to get my accreditation pass and there was one sitting there with your name on it. It wasn’t hard, Emily. But what is Surface magazine?’
I groaned. ‘Don’t ask. I’ve changed jobs.’
‘Well, you can tell me about it over lunch. I’m coming to get you.’
So there I was, just a couple of hours after landing in beautiful Australia, in the arms of a beautiful Australian. As welcomes go, I thought, as Miles lifted me up on to the balcony railing, gently biting my neck as he entered me with great tenderness, it would have been hard to beat.
*
‘So this is a panel van,’ I said to him, as I climbed into a hideous bronze-coloured thing, like an estate car, but with no side windows.
Miles grinned at me.
‘Yeah, ugly bugger, isn’t it?’
‘What’s the attraction?’
‘Room for your surfboards. And your woman… There’s room for two to sleep back there. As long as you don’t mind lying on top of each other.’ He grinned at me again and squeezed my knee, ‘I’ll take you on a little tourist tour, before we go to the restaurant,’ he said. ‘Show you my city. It’s better than yours.’
I have no idea where we went. He seemed to drive me all over the place, and the harbour and the ocean kept popping up around corners when I was least expecting them. We definitely went over the Sydney Harbour Bridge a couple of times and although I had seen it a million times in films and photos, I was blown away by the famous opera house view in real time.
My first impression was that I’d never been anywhere that made such an instant visual impact on you. The cities I knew and loved – London, Paris, New York – were more about aggregate impressions of lots of wonderful details and experiences, but Sydney just leaped out at you, the whole fabulous thing in one eyeful. It was like a city designed by John Galliano.
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