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  A tragic accident was the only way out, Lisa decided. A glamorous tragic accident, she amended. Forget falling under a low-rent Irish bus, that would be even more embarrassing than topping herself. She’d have to fall out of a speedboat, at the very least. Or crash in an orange ball of flame while helicoptering to some fuck-off location.

  … She was on her way to Manoir aux Quatre Saisons, I believe.

  Actually, I heard it was Balmoral Castle. At the personal request of you-know-who.

  But what a fitting way to go. Fabulous in death as in life.

  Burnt to a crisp, I’m told, like an overdone steak. The super-bitchy tones of Lily Headly-Smythe, editor of Panache, interrupted Lisa’s sleepy reverie.

  … Rumour has it that Vivienne Westwood’s going to base her next collection on it, all the models will be done up like burn victims.

  Fantasy back on track, Lisa eventually fell asleep, comforted by thoughts of her society-pages death.

  11

  The week carried on. Lisa moved through her grey-bordered life like a sleepwalker. Albeit, a well-dressed, bossy one.

  On Friday, the rain stopped and the sun came out, which caused great excitement amongst the staff – they were like children on Christmas morning. As they arrived into work, there was a stream of comments.

  ‘Glorious day.’

  ‘Aren’t we blessed with the weather?’

  ‘Fabulous morning.’

  Just because it had stopped flaming raining, Lisa thought, with contempt.

  ‘Remember last summer?’ Kelvin shouted across the office to Ashling, his eyes sparkling gleefully behind his black-framed fake glasses.

  ‘Indeed I do,’ Ashling replied. ‘It was on a Wednesday, wasn’t it?’

  Everyone roared laughing. Everyone except Lisa.

  Mid-morning, Mai tripped gracefully into the office, flashed a sly, sweet smile around and asked, ‘Is Jack in?’

  Lisa experienced a small thrill. This was obviously Jack’s girl and what a surprise. Lisa had expected some pale, freckly Irish girl, not this coffee-coloured little piece of exotica.

  Ashling, standing at the photocopier, copying several million press releases for distribution to every clothes designer and cosmetic manufacturer in the universe, paid attention also. It was the finger-biter, looking as though butter wouldn’t melt in her cherry-plump mouth.

  ‘Have you an appointment?’ Mrs Morley drew herself up to her full four foot eleven, intimidatingly extending her enormous bosom.

  ‘Tell him it’s Mai.’

  After a long, hard glare, Mrs Morley trundled away. While she waited, Mai absently twirled a slender finger in her heavy hair, looking every inch a wet dream. Then Mrs Morley was back. ‘You can go in,’ she said, her disappointment obvious.

  Mai passed through the office in lemon-scented silence, and the second Jack’s door closed behind her there was a collective release of breath and a clamour of talk.

  ‘That’s Jack’s girlfriend,’ Kelvin informed Ashling, Lisa and Mercedes.

  ‘More trouble than she’s worth, if you ask me,’ Mrs Morley said grimly.

  ‘I’m not so sure about that, Mrs Morley,’ Kelvin said lasciviously. Mrs Morley turned away with a disgusted sniff.

  ‘She’s half-Irish, half-Vietnamese,’ Silent Gerry piped up.

  ‘They fight like cats and dogs,’ Trix thrilled. ‘She’s really violent.’

  ‘Well, that’s not her Vietnamese side,’ Dervla O’Donnell said firmly, delighted to abandon Hibernian Bride for a moment. ‘The Vietnamese are a very gentle hospitable people. When I was travelling there –’

  ‘Ah, here,’ Trix moaned. ‘The ex-hippy’s having another ‘Nam flashback. I feel rigor mortis kicking in.’

  Ashling continued with her press releases, but the photocopier groaned slowly, made a few clicks that it shouldn’t have, then ground into unwelcome silence. The display panel flashed a yellow message. ‘PQ03?’ Ashling questioned. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘PQo3?’ The older office members looked at each other. ‘Haven’t a clue!’

  ‘That’s a new one.’

  ‘But be grateful for small mercies. It usually breaks down after two copies.’

  ‘What should I do?’ Ashling asked. ‘These press releases have to go out in the post tonight.’

  She glanced at Lisa, hoping she’d let her off the hook. But Lisa’s expression remained smooth and closed. At the end of the first week it was clear to Ashling that Lisa was a slave-driver with huge vision for the magazine. Great in many ways, but not if you’re the person landed with the responsibility of single-handedly implementing every one of Lisa’s ideas.

  ‘No point asking any of these eejits to fix it.’ Trix nodded scornfully at Gerry, Bernard and Kelvin.

  ‘They’d only make things worse. Jack’s fairly handy with machinery – though I wouldn’t disturb him at the moment,’ she added meaningfully.

  ‘I’ll do something else.’ Ashling returned to her desk, momentarily paralysed by the volume of work on it. She decided to press on with her list of the hundred most sexy, interesting, talented Irish people. Everyone from DJs to hairdressers to actors to journalists. And as quick as Ashling was coming up with names, Trix was arranging for Lisa to have breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea or dinner with them – Lisa was on a crash-course to infiltrate the movers and shakers of Irish society.

  ‘After all those meals you’ll be the size of a house,’ Trix laughed.

  Lisa smiled scornfully. Just because you ordered food didn’t mean you had to eat it.

  The office hummed with work until Jack’s office door opened and Mai exited at high speed. Instantly, everyone jerked their heads up in anticipation, and they weren’t disappointed. Mai made a violent attempt to slam the exit door behind her, but it was wedged permanently open, so she had to satisfy herself with giving it an angry kick.

  Seconds later, Jack came out, also going at high speed. His eyes were dark, his face was like thunder and his long legs were gaining fast on Mai. But halfway through the office he seemed to come to his senses and slowed down. ‘Ah, fuck it,’ he muttered, and banged his fist down on the photocopier. There was a whirring noise, then a click, then page after page began to flop out of the machine. The photocopier was working again!

  ‘We have the technology! Jack Devine saves the day,’ Ashling declared and started to clap. The others followed suit. Jack glared around at them as the entire office applauded, and then, to everyone’s surprise, he began to laugh. Instantly, he looked like a different person – younger and nicer.

  ‘This is madness,’ he muttered.

  Ashling quite agreed.

  Jack hovered uncertainly. Should he follow Mai or… Then, on Ashling’s desk, he saw a pack of Marlboro, a cigarette extended from the box. The office was technically non-smoking but, by general consensus, everyone smoked. Except for Boring Bernard who surrounded himself with Thank You For Not Smoking signs. He’d even got himself a little fan.

  With a raise of his eyebrows, Jack indicated a silent ‘Can I?’ and extracted the cigarette with his lips. Striking a match, he lit up, extinguished the match with a firm flick of his hand, then inhaled deeply.

  Ashling followed all of his movements, repulsed yet unable to look away.

  ‘Looks like I picked the wrong girl to quit smoking.’ Jack trailed back to his office.

  ‘I need your help, girls,’ Dervla O’Donnell boomed, distracting everyone. She leapt up from Hibernian Bride’s Autumn fashion spread, her large-is-lovely silk-knit three-piece swishing, as she began pacing. ‘What will the well-dressed wedding guest be wearing in Autumn 2000? What’s hot, what’s happening, what’s now?’

  ‘Well, I see chins are definitely in, dear,’ Lisa twinkled, and with a tilt of her head, indicated Dervla’s plenitude of chinnage.

  A gasp of shock from the office segued seamlessly into laughter, uplifting Lisa. She was proud of her clever, bitchy tongue and the power it gave her.

  Dervla stood
stock-still in astonishment, as all around her, colleagues laughed, then she too attempted a good-sport’s smile.

  ‘Isn’t this what it’s all about?’ With fake heartiness, Jack raised his pint to Kelvin and Gerry. ‘No women here to annoy us?’

  Kelvin flicked a glance around the pub. The Friday night clientele included a fair few women.

  ‘But none of them are sitting here with us, wrecking our heads,’ Jack elaborated.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind if that Lisa was sitting here,’ Kelvin said. ‘Jayzus, she’s beautiful.’

  ‘Gorgeous,’ Gerry agreed, moved to speaking.

  ‘And have you noticed the way that though her eyes stay still, her nipples follow you around the room?’ Kelvin remarked.

  Both Gerry and Jack looked slightly taken aback by this.

  ‘Mercedes is pretty tasty too,’ Kelvin enthused.

  ‘She hasn’t got much to say for herself, though,’ Gerry said, in an open-and-shut case of the kettle calling the pot black.

  Kelvin grinned at Gerry. ‘It’s not her conversational skills I’m interested in.’

  They sniggered and nudged in dirty approval.

  ‘Pass us the ashtray, Kelvin,’ Jack interrupted. As Kelvin obliged, Jack chortled miserably, ‘The last time I said that to someone they turned around and said, “You’ve ruined my life, you bastard.” ’

  Gerry and Kelvin shifted uncomfortably. Jack was destroying the Friday-night feel-good factor.

  ‘Leave it alone,’ Kelvin advised, then made a valiant attempt to steer things in the right direction. ‘Isn’t Ashling a dote?’

  ‘Lovely. Like a nice kid sister,’ Gerry agreed.

  ‘And a good-looking girl, too,’ Kelvin added generously. ‘Just not a stunner like Lisa or Mercedes.’

  A small eel of discomfort squirmed in Jack – Ashling made him feel funny. Something like shame, or perhaps it was irritation.

  ‘I’m only saying,’ Jack returned to more pleasant things, ‘isn’t it nice not having any women here? So if I remark that it’s a lovely sunny evening, no one will turn around and say “Get out you loser, I’m sorry I ever met you.” ’

  With an exaggerated sigh, Kelvin gave in. ‘So it’s all off with Mai again?’

  Jack nodded.

  ‘Would you not just give up on it?’

  ‘You’re always fighting,’ Gerry threw in his tuppenny’s worth.

  ‘She drives me wild,’ Jack insisted, in frustration. ‘You don’t know what it’s like!’

  ‘’Course I do, I’m married,’ Gerry said.

  ‘No! I don’t mean like that –’

  ‘Love ‘em and leave ‘em,’ Kelvin interrupted with a laddish leer. ‘That’s my motto. Or rather, Not love ‘em and leave ‘em.’

  And that was quite enough about emotions, Kelvin decided.

  To think how glad they’d all been when Jack had first started squiring Mai! It had been over a year since Dee, his long-term girlfriend, had abruptly left him, and it was good to see him back in the game. Or so they’d thought. But after the honeymoon period had worn off – which took about four days – Jack seemed almost as unhappy with Mai as he had been in the aftermath of Dee’s departure.

  To keep Jack off the subject of women, Kelvin asked, ‘How’s the latest ruckus with the unions at the television station?’

  ‘Sorted,’ Jack growled. ‘Until the next time.’

  ‘Jayzus, rather you than me.’ Kelvin knew that Jack was constantly walking a tightrope between the demands of management, the demands of the unions and the demands of the advertisers. No wonder he was always stressed.

  ‘And viewing figures are up,’ Gerry said.

  ‘Are they?’ Kelvin exclaimed, not terribly interested. ‘Fair fucks to you, Jack.’ He turned to Gerry. ‘It’s your round. Buy our glorious leader a drink.’

  Cars, Kelvin decided. That’s what they’d talk about next.

  Lisa was the last one out of the office on Friday evening. The streets were thronged and the setting sun was dazzling. Picking her way through the good-humoured revellers spilling out of pubs on to the streets of Temple Bar, she headed determinedly for Christchurch. But memories tugged faintly at her. Of other sunny Friday evenings. Sitting with Oliver by the river in Hammersmith, sipping cider, peaceful and free after a hard week.

  Had that really been her?

  She pushed Oliver away and tried to think of something else, then sticking out from under a pub table she saw a pair of white shins, criss-crossed with red lines. Trix!

  At lunchtime, in honour of the blue sky and above-freezing temperature, Trix had shaved her legs in the ladies’ and bared them, bloodied but unbowed, to the world. She’d nearly cleared Ashling out of plasters.

  Lisa hurried on, pretending she hadn’t seen Ashling waving to her to come and join them.

  The good weather had obviously put Ashling in mind of defoliating her legs too, because Lisa had overheard her booking a lunchtime leg-wax. Oddly enough, though, she hadn’t tried to swing a freebie. It seemed she was just going to go in as a civilian and pay the going rate. But if Ashling didn’t have the nous to use – OK abuse – her position as assistant editor of a women’s magazine, it wasn’t Lisa’s job to wise her up.

  There had never been much chance that Lisa would be friendly to someone as ordinary as Ashling. But because Ashling had caught her crying and treated her as though she needed tenderness, Lisa disliked her immensely.

  She disliked Mercedes too, for totally different reasons. Mercedes, silent and self-possessed, rattled her.

  When Ashling had hung up from booking her leg-wax, Lisa had made the whole office laugh by saying, ‘Now your turn to book one, Mercedes. Unless, of course, gorilla legs are in this summer.’

  Mercedes shot Lisa a black look, so dark that Lisa held back what she’d been about to say next, which was that with her colouring, Mercedes was an ideal candidate for sideburns and a moustache.

  ‘Hey, it’s a joke.’ Lisa smiled bitchily at Mercedes, compounding the damage by making her seem like a bad sport as well as hairy.

  To piss off both Ashling and Mercedes, Lisa was extra-sweet to Trix. It was a power-generating technique she’d used in the past – divide and conquer. Select a pet, shower them with intimacy, then suddenly abandon them in favour of another. Rotating the position engendered love and fear. Except for Jack, she was going to be nice to him all the time. He was the only thing in her life that was giving her hope. She’d discreetly studied how he responded to her and it was different to the way he treated the other female staff. He was amused by Trix, polite to Mercedes and seemed to positively dislike Ashling. But to Lisa he was respectful and solicitous. Admiring, even. And so he should be. She’d been getting up even earlier than usual this week, taking extra care with her already pampered appearance, expertly applying gossamer-thin layer after gossamer-thin layer of fake tan to give her a golden glow.

  Lisa was clear-eyed about her looks. In her natural state – not that she’d been in that for a very long time – she was a pretty enough girl. But with huge amounts of effort she knew she’d upgraded herself from attractive to fabulous. As well as the usual attention to hair, nails, skin, make-up and clothes, she popped huge amounts of vitamins, drank sixteen glasses of water a day, only snorted cocaine on special occasions and every six months had a botulism injection in her forehead – it paralysed the muscles and gave a lovely wrinkle-free appearance. For the past ten years she’d been constantly hungry. So hungry that she barely noticed it now. Sometimes she dreamt about eating a three-course meal, but people do the oddest things in dreams!

  Despite her confidence in her looks, Lisa had to admit that Jack’s girlfriend had come as a bit of a shock. Lisa had blithely assumed that she was being pitted against an Irish girl, which would be a cake-walk. But she wasn’t too discouraged. Tearing Jack away from his passionate, exotic girlfriend was currently one of the least taxing aspects of her life.

  Finding somewhere to live was much more of a challenge. Al
l week, after work, she’d been viewing places, and nothing remotely suitable had come along yet. Tonight she was viewing an apartment in Christchurch, which didn’t look too bad. Though the rent was expensive, it was in a modern complex and it was walking distance from work. The downside was that it would mean sharing with someone, and it was a while since Lisa had shared with anyone, especially a woman. The owner of the flat was called Joanne.

  ‘It’s great living here because you can walk to work,’ Joanne enthused. ‘Which means you’ll save £1.10 each way on the bus-fare.’

  Lisa nodded.

  ‘Which is £2.20 a day.’

  Lisa nodded again.

  ‘Which is eleven pounds a week.’

  Lisa’s nod was slightly reluctant this time.

  ‘Which adds up to forty-four pounds a month. Over five hundred pounds a year. Now, the rent. I need a month’s deposit, two months paid in advance, and a two-hundred-pound deposit in case you disappear leaving a large phone bill.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘And what usually happens is that you’d give me thirty pounds a week towards groceries. Milk, bread, butter, that kind of thing.’

  ‘I don’t drink milk –’

  ‘But for your tea!’

  ‘I don’t drink tea. Or eat bread. I never touch butter.’ Lisa put a hand on her slender hip and looked at Joanne’s rather larger one. ‘Besides, how many pints of milk can you buy for thirty pounds? You must take me for an idiot.’

  Back on the street, Lisa felt wretched. She missed London so badly. She hated being here and having to go through this. She had a perfectly good flat of her own in Ladbroke Grove. She’d give anything to be there.

  Yet another shock-wave of exhaustion and displacement hit. In London she was inextricably woven into the fabric of fashionable life, but she knew nobody here. And she didn’t want to. She found them all so irritating. No one turned up on time for anything in this lousy country and one person even had the cheek to say, ‘The man who made time made plenty of it.’ As a magazine person it was her prerogative to be late.