Apocalipstick (2 page)

Jess spent ages doing her sympathetic but sensible agony aunt bit, reminding her that a relationship did not guarantee happiness. “I mean Liz Hurley had to put up with Hugh’s antics. Mick constantly cheated on Jerry.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Rebecca said, scraping around the inside of the Marshmallow Fluff jar with her finger and starting to cheer up, “and some poor woman somewhere must have been Mrs. Pol Pot.”

Rebecca charged out of the lift and into the office, rubbing at the remainder of the mascara gash with a tissue. By her calculations she had about three minutes before the meeting was due to start.

“It’s all right, don’t panic.” It was Snow, the fashion, beauty and lifestyle assistant—painted-on freckles, pigtails, spiky dog collar choker. “Lucretia’s just rung in to say she’s going to be ten or fifteen minutes late. She’s only just left Sorrento.”

A fully functioning person who hadn’t stayed up until past one, watching back-to-back episodes of
Seinfeld,
might have suggested to Snow that it was highly unlikely that Lucretia Coffin Mott, the magazine’s haughty, razor-cheeked fashion, beauty and lifestyle editor, would make it from the Bay of Naples to Farringdon in ten or fifteen minutes, but since Rebecca wasn’t fully functioning, she didn’t.

“Thank the Lord for that,” she said, slapping her hand to her chest with relief. Snow smiled and began heading back to her desk.

“So,” Rebecca called out after her, “you told Justin how you feel about this name thing yet?” Justin was Snow’s fiancé. He was the old-fashioned traditional type who insisted she take his surname once they were married.

Snow shook her head. “I don’t want to upset him. I mean maybe I could learn to live with being Mrs. Snow Ball.”

Rebecca shook her head. Snow was a kind, sweet girl, but she allowed people to walk all over her—especially Lucretia.

As she reached her desk, Rebecca did a cartoon double take. All her stuff had gone. Her computer, her notebook, her ceramic arse full of Biros and emery boards, the mass of freebie cosmetic samples sent in by publicists desperate for publicity, not to mention three pairs of windup walking sushi, had all vanished.

But the desk wasn’t empty. A sleek, brushed aluminum laptop now sat dead center. A matching PalmPilot lay to one side, a brand-new yellow legal pad to the other. Lying across this, bisecting it diagonally into two precisely equal halves, was a painfully fashionable Plume de Ma Tante fountain pen. Sitting at a safe distance was a Starbucks cappuccino.

“What the . . . ?” She stood frowning and looking for Snow to ask what was going on. But she’d disappeared.

“I don’t suppose anybody’s seen my stuff, have they?” she asked nobody in particular. The three or four people sitting close by staring into their screens looked up briefly to smile and shake their heads.

Her eyes shot round the huge open-plan office. Nothing. For one dreadful moment it occurred to her that after only a fortnight on the
Vanguard,
she’d been sacked. But why? She’d done two beauty columns so far and there hadn’t been even a sniff of a complaint from Lucretia. In fact only yesterday she’d made a point of coming over to her and saying how much she’d enjoyed the one on nasal waxing.

Finally she located her possessions piled up on the floor beside the fire escape. Next to the pile was a desk. On it was her computer. She knew it was hers because the screen was covered in Post-it Notes.

Suddenly everything became clear. Rebecca’s original workstation was directly next to the
Vanguard’
s news desk and the office of its editor, Charlie Holland. Obviously, he had just taken on some new hotshot hack (and an anally retentive one at that) whose worth he considered to be far greater than hers. As a result she’d been banished to the far side of the office, to fire-escape purdah.

She trudged toward her new desk. By rights she had no cause to feel so put out. As a freelancer whose only contribution to the
Vanguard
mag was a weekly column that took her no more than a day and a half to write and that she could quite easily knock out at home, she had no real claim to a desk at all, let alone one in a prime location. But Lucretia, in a rare moment of generosity, had insisted she have one. And positionwise—being right on top of the proper hacks as opposed to being with the girlies on the magazine—it couldn’t have fitted Rebecca’s needs more perfectly.

The truth was that from a journalistic point of view, her interest in cosmetics was limited. Not that she didn’t adore buying them—at the last count she owned nine lipsticks, all in the same shade of neutral—and not that she wouldn’t happily have supported any move to make Bobbi Brown a dame of the British Empire. It was just that in her opinion, there was only so much a person could write about a tube of concealer.

Over the years she had also become pretty skeptical about the cosmetics industry. Whereas she could see the point of spending a fortune on velvet-edged cardigans with little pearl buttons and having her roots tended by Camp David, he of Antoni e David on Berkeley Street, she could see no reason to slap on fifty-quid-a-tube gunk every night when hand cream probably worked just as well.

Jess, on the other hand, had virtually no interest in makeup beyond a superficial coat of mascara and lip gloss. This was partly because she remained almost untouched by postfeminist thinking and still clung to the quaint notion that makeup enslaved women. But mainly it was because she didn’t need it. Jess was a natural beauty with perfect skin, a mass of gleaming shoulder-length curls the color of toffee apple and deep blue almond-shaped eyes.

Rebecca had only one professional ambition—to become a successful investigative reporter. In the eight or nine years she’d been in newspapers she’d had her fair share of decent stories, but nothing big, although she supposed the Belfast women’s group story and the one about chlamydia looked pretty impressive on her CV. The thing about doing investigations as a freelancer was that they took so much time—years, often. Occasionally she would get lucky and a story would be commissioned rather than her having to do it on spec and submit it when it was finished. Then a features editor might give her some expense money up front to keep her going, but more often than not she was forced to finance her own investigations.

She’d been working on a story about a company that seemed to be making huge amounts of money selling meat intended for pet food to butchers (her bank balance getting redder by the day) when her friend Nat, the heavily pregnant beauty columnist on the
Vanguard
mag and an old mate from their early days on the
Rotherham Advertiser,
suggested Rebecca fill in for her while she went off on maternity leave. The struggle to make up her mind—which centered on the loss-of-dignity issue versus the increase-in-cash issue—lasted no more than three seconds. She spent the next couple of days mugging up on her liposomes, ceramides, lotions, potions and glowtions as if she were studying for her finals, convinced Lucretia Coffin Mott that she was a veritable Elizabeth Arden of cosmetic knowledge, and got the job.

The next day when her dodgy meat story collapsed, due to a consignment of pet food meat that she was assiduously tracking turning up at, er, a pet food factory, Rebecca realized she needed to find another big story, preferably a genuine one this time, to avoid imminent penury. So when Lucretia phoned to offer her a desk, which turned out to be just a few feet from the news desk, she was ecstatic. It meant that when the journalists were at the editor’s daily conference or at lunchtime when they were in the pub, she could answer the phone and maybe, just maybe, a proper, grown-up story might just land in her lap.

Now she was sitting by the bloody fire escape, however, and she’d feel far too conspicuous walking past the subs and advertising people to answer the phones.

She picked up a pair of windup sushi, the ones with halved and flattened plastic prawns on top, wound the mechanism and sat watching them lumber across the desk. At the very least, she thought, somebody might have told her she was being moved. Apart from anything else she was now miles from the kitchen and the loo. There weren’t even any people from the magazine sitting nearby. Just Dennis Eccles, the local government reporter, who bleated on constantly about devolution for Lancashire, and was so boring he’d been consigned to the fire escape too.

Rebecca decided to have a hunt around for Snow. It was half past ten and she wanted to know if Lucretia had arrived yet.

The male voice came from behind her. “Love the sushi,” it said.

She spun round. It was the Hugh Grant hair she noticed first. Good God, it was him—the honker with the small penis. What was he doing here? For one mad, irrational moment it occurred to her that he had somehow heard her make the small penis remark or even lip-read it in his rearview mirror. Having followed her to work, he was now about to have the most almighty go at her in front of the entire office.

“I just wanted to come over,” he began, his manner disarmingly polite and charming, “and apologize about all this—you being forced to move.”

Hang on, Rebecca thought,
this
was the new bloke Charlie had taken on? Pretty certain now that he wasn’t about to berate her about her small penis remark, she felt safe to go into affronted mode regarding his behavior on Camden Road—not to mention the small matter of her being turfed out of her desk. She shot him a thin, tight-lipped smile. Then she bent down and began gathering up papers.

“Thing is,” he continued, clearing his throat, “there wasn’t a lot I could do, I’m afraid. Charlie insisted. The girl with the freckles—Snow I think her name is—was supposed to explain. She did, didn’t she?”

Rebecca straightened and put the papers down on the desk. “Actually, no. Snow hasn’t said a word,” she replied frostily.

He was tall with broad shoulders. The navy suit was Kenzo, maybe Paul Smith. Underneath, he was wearing an Italian cotton shirt in a slightly lighter blue, with a matching tie. Brand-new shoes, she noticed. Expensive black slip-ons. Unquestionably overdressed—certainly for the
Vanguard,
where all the blokes wore Dockers, open-neck shirts and sensible shoes.

Clearly fancied himself, she decided.

“Sorry,” he said. He was looking at her, his head tilted slightly to one side, “but have we met?”

“Briefly,” she said, “and I have to say it was a total blast.”

He gave her a look of total noncomprehension.

“Camden Road. Half an hour ago. I was the woman in the blue Peugeot.”

“What, the one doing her makeup?”

She reddened. “OK, I admit, it may not have been the most sensible thing I could have been doing, but you didn’t have to be quite so bloomin’ rude.”

He looked distinctly sheepish. “No, you’re quite right,” he said. “What can I say? You must think I’m a complete prat.”

“Well, I have to say my thoughts were veering in that direction.” She was
so
enjoying getting her own back.

“Look, I’m most terribly sorry. Thing is, I was in a bit of a state this morning. My car got pinched from outside my flat.”

Her enjoyment instantly turned to guilt. “God, I’m sorry,” she said.

“Yeah, not the best way to start your first day in a new job. By the time I’d sorted everything out with the police, I was running severely late. I tried calling a cab, but there weren’t any. Anyway, I was just leaving to get the tube when I bumped into the guy from downstairs who I know pretty well and he offered to lend me his car. I’m thinking great, problem solved. Then I hit the traffic on Camden Road.”

“Oh, right. So the Subaru isn’t yours?”

“Good God, no. Bit flash for my taste. Plus I always think blokes who drive cars like that are out to prove themselves in some way, don’t you?”

“Maybe,” she said, casually turning back to organizing her papers. “Never thought about it.”

“Really? I thought most women loathed blokes who drive flash cars. Anyway, look, I know I was appallingly rude, but please could we possibly start again?”

She swiveled round to face him. He was smiling at her, but it was an uneasy, slightly diffident smile, she thought. He was also fiddling with the loose change in his pocket. Maybe she had misjudged him. Perhaps what happened this morning really was nothing more than an aberration brought on by stress. She decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.

“OK,” she said. “Let’s start again.” She extended her hand and introduced herself.

“Max Stoddart,” he said, taking her hand in his. She couldn’t help noticing how big and warm it was. “I’m the new science and environment correspondent.”

Of course. The
Vanguard
had just poached him from the
Independent,
where he’d won the Listerine award for an investigation into hospital superbugs.

“Look,” he said, “let me help you pick this stuff up.”

“No, I’m fine, honestly.”

But he bent down anyway. She was now acutely aware that her hair, which always took on a life of its own whenever it was exposed to the damp and drizzle, was probably sticking out all over the place. God, she must look like she spent the night under a helicopter rotor blade.

“By the way,” he grinned, “nice bum.”

“Er, excuse me?” she shot back, thinking maybe she shouldn’t have given him the benefit of the doubt after all.

“The pot thing,” he said, pointing to the ceramic arse. He picked it up and handed it to her.

“Oh. Right. Yes.” She put it down on the desk, next to the papers.

“Before I forget,” he went on, “I found a few more bits and pieces in your desk drawer.” He put his hand into his jacket pocket and took out a box of TheraFlu and her ChapStick.

“Oh, thanks.”

“Hang on,” he said, “there’s something else.”

His hand went back into the pocket. The next second it had reemerged holding what looked like a tube of something wrapped in a paper tissue. He passed it to her. Then he said he’d better get going as the editor’s conference was due to start any minute.

Once he’d gone, she unwrapped the tube. It was her Monistat. In order to spare her blushes, he’d wrapped her thrush cream in tissue. Max Stoddart might fancy himself, she thought. He might even lose it under stress, but he wasn’t without sensitivity.