3

Con pulled the glossy brochure out of the envelope and flicked through it impatiently, his eyes taking in the images a second at a time. Blue skies, palm trees, creamy beaches. But this wasn’t a travel brochure. This was a brochure for the Right Path Flight School in Durban, South Africa. Con gazed at crop-haired men in icy white shirts and epaulettes, sitting in tiny cockpits lined with a thousand buttons and lights, knobs and levers, and felt a thrill of excitement. Then, before anyone could ask him what he was looking at, he slid the brochure back into the envelope and headed for the eighth floor.

The Vogue fashion department looked like a normal office. It had desks and computers and printers and wastepaper bins. It had a suspended ceiling and fluorescent lighting and phones ringing and fax machines chirruping. It looked like a normal office, but it absolutely wasn’t.

Con partly relished the point in the day when he was called upon to push his trolley through the Vogue fashion department and partly dreaded it. He liked looking at the girls, rail-thin, delicate as wisps of smoke with their serious clothes and their perfect skin. He liked the way they sat behind their desks, slender legs knitted together like vines, tap-tapping at their keyboards with lean fingers. He liked their flat, pointy shoes and their strange accessories, the scarves and rings and tiny cardigans, so different to the girls he knew from home. And he liked the way they talked, their husky Marlboro Light voices and the peculiar shapes they made out of ordinary words. They appeared to him like people from dreams – half-formed, semi-opaque, not quite human. They fascinated him. And they repulsed him. It annoyed him that they existed so separately to him. It wound him up that he could move through them with his trolley, invisible, even to the ugly ones. They passed him their packages and parcels; they asked him stupid questions about costs and timings; they addressed him only via pieces of paper.

In his world, outside the gilded gates of the Condé Nast building, Con was a player. He met his friends in the pub on a Friday night and girls, good-looking girls, shimmied around him, glanced against him, willed him to pay them attention. Here he was just the post boy.

One of these wraith-like girls approached him now, her hand clutching a large white Jiffy bag. She had fine blonde hair, the colour of rice paper, and pale waxy skin. She was wearing a biscuit-coloured suede waistcoat with a shaggy trim over a grey lace top. Her eyes were icy blue. Con had never seen her before.

‘Erm,’ she started, handing him the envelope, ‘this has to go recorded. Will it get there by Friday?’

Con took the package from her hand and examined it. It was addressed to someone in South London. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘should be OK.’

‘Excellent,’ she said. And then, miraculously, she smiled. Not one of the smiles that these well-brought-up girls usually served him with, not the practised coordination of facial muscles to force the mouth into an upturned crescent, but a proper burst of sunshine. ‘Thank you,’ she said, still smiling. ‘Sorry … what’s your name?’

Con felt a flush of surprise rise from his midriff towards his temples. He hesitated for a second, not entirely sure of the answer to that question. ‘Connor,’ he said eventually. ‘Con.’

‘Con,’ she repeated, cocking her head slightly to one side. ‘I’m Daisy.’

Daisy, he thought. Perfect. That’s what she looked like. A colourless, uncomplicated flower, tiny and well formed. ‘That’s nice,’ he said, feeling the heat of his embarrassment starting to fade.

‘Thank you,’ she smiled again. Her teeth were slightly crooked, but very white. ‘My sisters are called Mimosa and Camellia. I must have been a very plain baby.’

Con laughed. He noticed a girl sitting at the desk nearest to him look up at the sound of his laughter. Her face registered a situation she didn’t quite comprehend. She looked away again.

Daisy said, ‘It’s my first day today. I’m in charge of letters and things so you’ll probably find me bugging you about stuff.’

Con shook his head. ‘That’s OK,’ he said.

‘Good,’ she said. And then she went back to her desk.

Con dropped the white Jiffy bag onto his trolley and pushed it towards the doors at the far end. As he passed Daisy’s desk she looked up at him and grinned. She mouthed the word ‘Bye’ and waved at him. He waved back, his heart leaping around in his chest like a wild salmon.

As the door closed behind him and he found himself in the corridor outside, he breathed out and leaned against the wall. He tried to decipher what had just happened from the mixed messages his head and his heart were sending each other, but none of it made any sense. He had a curious feeling that something significant had just happened, that his life had reached a mini-roundabout, that suddenly he had options. And all because a beautiful girl called Daisy had smiled at him.

He pulled himself upright at the sound of the lift pinging and wheeled his trolley quickly towards the features department.