* * *
By lunchtime I’d eaten my homemade 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 halfway 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.
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. When I got to the meeting with Fiona, it just came out.’
‘Really?’ My tone was dry.
