by Claire Frost
It wasn’t long before they’d both been forced to recount last night’s events numerous times as word spread round the office, and Bell noticed that many of the junior staff seemed to look at her with new-found respect. As the day wore on, Suze’s likes and followers continued to grow and the Style It Out office was a buzz of chatter and glances over to their desks. Marian even came out of her office to find out what all the hubbub was about.
‘Good work, ladies,’ she nodded at Bell and Suze with the glimmer of a smile. ‘Now, where are we with spring/summer first drop? Charlie, I need to see something this afternoon.’
The office continued to have an excited air about it all day and no one seemed much in the mood for work. Bell tried valiantly to complete her spreadsheet despite everyone chatting around her, but Suze was determined to draw her into the conversation.
‘Bell, you’ve seen those superhero movies, haven’t you? Charlie won’t believe me that Superman is in the Avengers films. I swear he was in the one I saw.’
‘No, he’s DC and the Avengers are Marvel. They’re different franchises,’ Bell replied without thinking.
‘Hold on, you’re saying Superman isn’t in any of the Avengers films, not just the one I saw with Els the other week? How come you know so much about it, Ms geekface?’
‘Comic-book films were Col’s thing, so I guess they became my thing too,’ Bell said, looking up from her computer. ‘God, that sounds a bit sad when I put it like that.’
‘Well, it’s not surprising. Don’t forget you spent ten years with him, so it’s only natural you’re going to find it hard when you do “Bell and Col” things without him. And that’s okay. But now you have to see these things as “Bell and Suze” things, or “Bell and Cosette” things, or even just “Bell” things, because it is okay to do things on your own, too. In fact, the more you do these things on your own and not with Colin, the more you’ll make your own stories and create your own narrative.’
Bell stared at her. ‘Er, Suze, have you been reading that life-coaching book again?’
Suze shrugged.
‘Ha, I knew it!’ Bell laughed. ‘You and your make-your-own-narrative rubbish.’
‘It’s not rubbish! I know it sounds a bit mumbo jumbo, but there is something in it, Bellster. You need to find out who you really are and what you enjoy, after being part of Bell and Col for so long. And while we’re on the subject, I think what you need is some inspiration. I know you’ve come off social media, but it’s not all evil, I promise. Stop rolling your eyes at me! Instagram is great if you follow the right people.’
‘Ha, like you, you mean!’
‘Well, I am well on my way to becoming an influencer dontchaknow,’ she laughed. ‘I mean it, though, there are loads of people on Insta who are just normal people doing normal things, but posting really interesting thoughts and ideas.’
‘#NoFilter, of course,’ Bell said scathingly. ‘Look, I’m really pleased you’re now bezzie mates with MaryAnna and co.—’
‘I’m not!’ Suze protested. ‘This is nothing to do with her. Though she does mention some really inspirational people in her posts sometimes, when she’s not plugging fitness gear or whatever.’
‘I’ll take your word for it, Suze, but I just think it’s a slippery slope for me. I’m better off without social media at all.’
Chapter Seven
Bell
Bell tapped her fingers on her desk, trying to come up with a password she wouldn’t forget three seconds after she’d entered it. Finally, she typed ‘SuzeMadeMeDoIt1’ and hit ‘Enter’.
‘Welcome to Instagram,’ pinged her email. ‘Here are our suggestions for who to follow.’
‘What, you’ve actually done it? Yay, well done, Bellster,’ cried Suze. ‘I thought I’d at least have to use the thumbscrews.’
‘I decided it was the only thing that was going to shut you up, to be honest.’ Bell cast a rueful gaze at her friend who was pulling her chair over to Bell’s computer. Her comment completely went over Suze’s head as she happily commandeered Bell’s mouse and started clicking.
‘Ooh, @With_Bells_on, I’m loving your work with that new username! Right, I’ll follow a load of people I really rate to get you started. But remember this is all about positivity and inspiration. No moaning Marys and whinging Wendys for you!’
Later that evening, Bell lay on the sofa with her laptop on her knees, scrolling through the feed Suze had curated for her. While she liked cat videos as much as the next person, she wasn’t so enamoured with images of rainbows overlaid with mindless mantras like ‘It will all be okay as long as you believe in unicorns’, or a row of gin bottles and the line: ‘It’s the weekend so beGIN as you mean to go on’. But among the cheesy affirmations and cute animals, there were a few posts that Bell ‘Liked’. Some were from fashion-industry accounts that she could never be bothered to follow in the past but now realised could be quite helpful for brainstorming in the office. She could hear Suze’s voice inside her head telling her that this account wasn’t supposed to be about work — it was about her ‘personal development’, whatever that meant. (Suze had sanctimoniously told her: ‘It means whatever you want it to mean, darling,’ when she’d asked, leading Bell to suspect that Suze had no idea either.) She continued scrolling and ended up saving a couple of posts about books she liked the sound of, an interiors pic with a gorgeous armchair in the background and a recipe for banana muffins that looked yummy. She even began following a few new accounts to add to her ‘inspo list’ (yep, Suze again), including an urban gardener and a very cool-looking potter who made the cutest pieces decorated with recycled materials.
Bell was feeling pretty pleased with herself, especially as she now had something positive to report back to Suze the next day. She was about to put her laptop down and contemplate watering the rather brown-looking plants in her living room when her attention was snagged by an account called @mi_bestlife. The name rang a bell but she couldn’t work out why, so she clicked on the profile. Oh, yes, now she remembered: it was Millie, one of the ‘influencers’ Ciara and Joe had met the other day. Well, if she was anything like MaryAnna, she was hardly going to be someone Bell would find inspiring. And her username didn’t even make sense – it would have to be pronounced ‘Mih’ (as in Millie) for it to work, and ‘Me Best Life’ would only be clever if she was from Liverpool. As she started clicking through @mi_bestlife’s images, there wasn’t a single shot of the Mersey and quite a few of the Thames, so she decided Millie/Mylie was probably a bit dim and definitely not inspirational.
But then she paused. She clicked on one of the images and zoomed in. It wasn’t just her name that was familiar, it was her face, too – and Bell never forgot a face, in fact she prided herself on the fact. Her brain whizzed through everyone she’d come across in the last few months like facial recognition software sorting through police mugshots. Ding! Finally, she had a match: Millie looked strikingly like the girl she’d seen arguing into her phone opposite the bus stop that night out with Suze’s mates. She peered again at the screen, then continued scrolling through Millie’s feed in search of a post from that night. She felt like some kind of private detective, and her Sherlock-like efforts were rewarded when she finally found what she was looking for.
‘Aha, Millie/Mylie, got you!’ Bell crowed, clicking on the image to read the full post. Beneath a bedroom selfie of Millie wearing a gorgeous dress Bell recognised as being part of that cool high-street collection that had sold out immediately were the words:
Such an amazing night with good food, good wine and of course, good mates. Felt sad leaving the little one at home, but he was as good as gold, so I’m told. #ootd #goingoutout #babysittersrule.
Glancing at the clock on the top-right of her screen, Bell was taken aback. She stretched out her hunched-up limbs and realised she’d just spent the last half an hour nosing around inside Millie’s life – or her life according to Instagram, anyway. She’d checked out various images of an angelic-looking l
ittle boy she presumed to be the ‘little one’ Millie had referred to in her post, learned that his name was Wolf (er, what kind of a name was that?!) and that he and Millie lived in a gorgeous apartment and seemed to have an idyllic life filled with organic food and wooden toys designed to help darling Wolfie’s life skills.
Bell shut her laptop with a bang. She and Colin had half-heartedly tried to have children, and when she didn’t fall pregnant after a couple of years she suggested they both go to the doctor for tests. Colin wasn’t keen and made it clear he didn’t want to discuss it anymore. It gradually became obvious the subject was off the agenda and Bell too stopped mentioning it. She knew how stubborn Col could be about these things, and she was fairly ambivalent about the whole kids thing anyway. Sure, she’d coo over a workmate’s baby when they brought them into the office, and she loved her niece and nephew with all her heart, but she’d never felt like that was what was missing from her life. In hindsight it was a bit strange that neither of them really pushed the issue. They never made a decision not to have children, but that was just how her and Col’s relationship had been. It had ticked along nicely with neither of them wanting to rock the boat, least of all Bell.
She could see now that, although it wasn’t kids that were missing from her life, something definitely was. Even two months down the line, she still felt like a stranger in her own world without Colin. Maybe their relationship hadn’t been as exciting and passionate as Cosette and Suze had lectured her it should have been, but it had been something. Now she was untethered and set adrift without any of the skills she needed to survive on her own island. She felt her eyes fill with tears.
‘Right, come on, Bell, sort yourself out,’ she shouted into the cold air of her living room. ‘Enough moping and more doing. You are an independent woman who is well able to strike out into the world on your own.’ She jumped to her feet and whooped, ‘You show them, girl!’ Then quickly realised how ridiculous she looked (not that there was anyone to see her), felt herself blush and began plumping up the cushions before heading to the bathroom and muttering, ‘God, Suze has a lot to answer for,’ while she got ready for bed.
*
‘So, feeling inspired yet?’ Suze asked as she sat down at her computer the next morning. Bell wasn’t sure if she was being serious, but she wasn’t in the mood for either jokes or life-coaching clap-trap. She’d not been able to get to sleep and had resorted to making herself a hot chocolate liberally laced with the end of a bottle of rum she’d found at the back of the cupboard. Unfortunately, the ‘end’ of the bottle had turned out to contain more than she’d thought, and after finishing her hot drink, she’d moved on to slugging it back neat, which had definitely had a warming effect. Sadly, it had worn off by the morning, to be replaced with a burning, sloshing feeling that she worried was the start of a stomach ulcer.
‘No,’ she grunted. ‘Today is not a day for feeling inspired.’
Suze side-eyed her friend and chose neither to continue to bait Bell further with her line of questioning nor to indulge her in her apparent foul mood, so she merely raised an eyebrow and proceeded to neatly write out her to-do list for the day.
Annoyed Suze hadn’t risen to her comment, Bell made a show of huffing and puffing at her computer before taking herself off to the breakout area, where she spread pages of a report across the table and stared hard at the result in search of the answers that so far had remained irritatingly elusive.
‘Ooh, Bell, I love those trousers, you are so styling out the structured sportswear trend,’ Charlie said as he walked past the breakout area. Bell paused, unsure whether he was taking the piss out of the only-slightly-posher-than-joggers trousers she’d pulled on this morning, along with her trusty Adidas zip-up, or if he was actually being serious. But thanks to his thumbs-up and genuine smile, she decided to take it as a compliment and flashed him a grin.
‘Thanks, the structured sportswear trend was exactly the look I was going for, glad you noticed.’
Buoyed by his comments, Bell retrained her focus on to the papers in front of her and immediately spotted what it was she’d been missing for the many hours she’d been looking at it through glazed eyes. Of course she needed those extra figures or none of it made any sense!
‘Charlie, you’re a genius!’ she shouted over to him. He looked momentarily confused, but then grinned back at her and said, ‘I aim to please,’ and walked off.
‘Someone’s a bit more cheerful now,’ commented Suze later as they sat at their desks cradling huge mugs of tea. ‘Did I see you flirting with Charlie boy earlier?’
‘Hardly,’ Bell scoffed. ‘Also, I’m not sure I’m exactly his type. Wrong sex for a start.’
‘Well, whatever’s thrown that black dog off your shoulder, I’m all for it.’
‘If only everything was as easy to solve as how to make my marketing spend add up, eh?’
‘Maybe you’re overthinking things,’ Suze said gently.
‘Me? Overthinking things? What can you mean?’ Bell smiled. ‘Anyway, enough of your life-coaching, I’ve got a fashion shoot to go to.’
‘Yeah, well, enjoy, and think of me in the corner all on my own while you’re swanning off with the talent, won’t you.’
Bell didn’t often make it out of the office, but she always made sure she went along to the two big photo shoots of the year – the summer shoot in the first quarter and the autumn/winter one near the end of the summer. As she made her way to the studio nearby, she thought back to the very first photo shoot she’d gone to, back when the thought of the glitz and glamour gave her butterflies. But twenty-five-year-old Bell had quickly learned that shoots were in fact hard work, especially if you were a lowly assistant and had to be on hand to fetch everyone’s lunch, as well as console weeping models, hold pins, steam clothes and bulldog-clip material away from the camera. And yet, even now, despite knowing just how unglamorous a shoot could be, Bell still got butterflies about seeing the clothes come to life in beautiful images.
The studio was a hum of activity when she arrived, with the definite undercurrent of a team up against it. Harassed stylists sorted through rails of clothes, a hair and make-up artist fussed over three models who stood quietly waiting to be summoned by the photographer, who was standing by the lights with his assistant. He glanced up as Bell entered the fray.
‘Bell, sweetheart, look at you!’ he cried, coming over to kiss her on both cheeks. ‘You look great and, er, quite sporty?’ he said, taking in Bell’s one-stripe trousers and Adidas jacket.
‘You know me, Ade, Sporty, Scary, Baby, Posh and Ginger all rolled into one spicy girl!’ Bell cringed and felt her cheeks colour.
Suze always teased her about what she called her ‘schoolgirl crush’ on Ade. A former model himself, he was undeniably gorgeous, with sculpted cheekbones, closely cropped fair hair and piercing blue eyes. He was also married to a beautiful, petite woman named Bethan, who three years ago had given birth to twins who were surely bound for the pages of Vogue if the photos Ade readily shared were anything to go by. It wasn’t even that Bell fancied Ade, it was more that she was a bit overcome by not only his looks, but also what a good photographer he was.
Bell always loved watching Ade at work, seeing how he got the models to give exactly the pose and expression he wanted. And since his camera was attached to a shiny Mac with a huge monitor, she found seeing the results of the shots immediately appear on the screen utterly awe-inspiring. Clicking through the hundreds of frames was like looking at a high-tech version of one of the flipbooks she and Cosette would play with when they were little; the pictures turning into a moving image to tell a story.
Bell knew Style It Out were lucky that Ade still agreed to shoot their campaigns for them, despite him being more in demand than ever and able to command large fees from bigger companies. But he always told her how much he loved going back to basics and making their shoots about the clothes, rather than focusing on a set that had cost thousands of pounds to build. There was certa
inly no danger of any such set on Style It Out’s budget.
‘Here, grab a drink,’ she said, tossing him a can of Coke during the break for lunch. ‘The shots are looking great, aren’t they?’
‘Yeah, I’m really pleased. Though it’s always weird shooting summer dresses when the weather’s so grey outside. Good job we’ve got all the yellow filters on the lights to warm everything up a bit, otherwise those poor models would look deathly pale, despite their fake tan.’
‘Do you mind if I take a few behind-the-scenes shots later, for Insta?’ Bell asked self-consciously.
‘Course not. How are things going with you, anyway? Ticked anything off that bucket list we talked about last time?’
Oh god. Bell had completely forgotten drunkenly creating a list with Ade during the last post-shoot team drinks. It was meant to be all the things she wanted to do in life but hadn’t as yet achieved, and it was quite a list; it had involved activities as diverse as building an igloo and eating at a three-Michelin-star restaurant, though she couldn’t for the life of her remember what else was on there.
‘Didn’t you mention getting more seriously into photography?’ he nudged.
Oh, yes, apparently she had confessed her love of his profession and told him how much she wanted to hone her own skills behind the camera. Nothing to do with her being even more overwhelmed by Ade than usual when they were sitting side by side in the pub, obviously.
‘That’s some memory you have! Most of what I remember from that night involves a magically refilling wine glass,’ she grinned at him, then finished lamely, ‘But, yeah, when I have more time I’ll definitely get on that photography thing.’
‘Well, if you need any help, just give me a call,’ he said, touching her shoulder lightly as he got up to fill his plate. Bell tried not to jump as his skin burned through her clothing.
She’d never told Col about her secret bucket list (or her crush on Ade, for obvious reasons), and although at the time she hadn’t really thought why this was, now she was able to recognise that it was the type of thing Col would have chuckled at then patted her shoulder – in a very different way from Ade – before telling her they should book that weekend in the Lake District they’d been talking about. He just wouldn’t have got it.
