Monday morning began the way all Monday mornings began, with me rushing around like a maniac, trying to dry my hair without waking Alex and still finding time to eat a very greasy egg and cheese sandwich. The only difference was that this Monday morning Alex had been AWOL when my alarm went off at seven in our new house. I would have called the police to report a kidnapping – he was incapable of getting out of bed before noon unless someone held a gun to his head – but it was my first official day on the job, the first Monday morning sans Mary, and I was determined to make a go of it. I found a note on the kitchen counter telling me he was going to be out all day and he’d be home for dinner. I frowned, read it again and set it back on the counter. He was just out. He almost certainly hadn’t left me a note in the kitchen and nicked off to another country on Christmas Eve. No one did things like that. Except me. And Louisa. But really, how likely was he to make it a triple? Ignoring the little voice that was doing a dance in the back of my mind and shouting ‘TOTALLY LIKELY’, I grabbed my satchel and ran out the door before I had time to overthink things. If I could turn around the Jenny/Louisa fiasco, surely I could manage to send one little weekly magazine to print without too much bother?
At eight a.m. I was the first in the office, which, as far as I was concerned, gave me carte blanche to start playing Mariah Carey very loudly as soon as I walked through the door. It was Christmas Eve and that meant that the season had officially begun and no one could bitch me out for it. The night before, Alex had agreed that my flashing reindeer nose jumper might be ‘a bit much’ for a busy day and that maybe I could save that for Christmas Day, possibly at home, but I wasn’t letting go of my festive spirit that easily. I was decked out in a gorgeous red and green striped cashmere sweater that I’d purchased for an obscene amount of money last time I stopped by J.Crew and a pair of high-waisted black shorts that Jenny had insisted I would never wear, and I was happy to have proved her wrong. Even if this was the first time they’d been out of the wardrobe since I bought them six months ago. Combined with black tights, little black Rag & Bone ankle boots and far too much mascara, I was really quite pleased with myself. Which immediately scared me to death. Because if that wasn’t a sure sign that things were about to go spectacularly badly, I didn’t know what was.
We always started early on Mondays, and because everyone wanted as much time off as possible over the holidays and possibly because they were a little bit worried about me being in charge (but not nearly as worried as I was), everyone had worked like a demon the week before to make sure press day ran as smoothly as possible. By nine, every desk in the office was occupied. Every desk except for one.
Jesse’s.
I’d had my eye on it ever since people started to wander in half an hour or so ago. He was usually one of the earliest around on Mondays – it was his time to shine after all. Without a managing editor, nothing got signed off. This time last week, he was on his third coffee and walking around the office looking over people’s shoulders with his red pen.
‘Hey, Megan,’ I shouted, as his desk neighbour wandered past my office. She spun round to look at me with a biscuit in her hand and fear in her eyes. ‘Have you seen Jesse?’
‘Oh, thank God,’ she breathed out, holding up the gingerbread man. ‘I thought these were a test and I was going to get fired.’
‘Really?’ I tried to forget that I had already eaten three.
‘I used to work at Vogue,’ she explained. ‘Jesse isn’t in yet. Do you think something happened?’
‘It’s not like him,’ I admitted, not wanting her to worry but worrying myself sick. ‘I’ll give him a call.’
‘Great. I’ll get started on the first pages anyway.’ She bit off the head of her gingerbread man. ‘Beauty should be with you in, like, half an hour.’
‘Brillbags,’ I said, picking up the phone and then doing absolutely nothing else. What was I going to say to him? Hi, Jesse, just wondering when you were planning on getting your arse into the office, and, by the way, I still can’t believe you tried to lay one on me in the taxi the other night, you massive bell-end. If only I had someone who could do awkward things for me that I did not wish to do for myself …
With the receiver still in my hand, I pressed the intercom button on my phone and waited.
‘Yes, boss?’
‘Cici.’ Every time I said her name a fairy died. Somewhere out there a fairy died. ‘Can you call Jesse Benson and find out where he is?’
‘Absolutely, boss,’ she replied.
I waited for her to call, watching from inside my office, eyes trained on my new assistant while I nibbled on a fingernail. It wasn’t nearly as tasty as a gingerbread man. Since I was shuffled away in a corner, or to be more accurate half a corner, as long as I kept my door open, I could see almost everyone. Of course, I wasn’t often allowed to keep my door open because my design sensibilities offended Mary. That and my singing voice.
‘Hello, Jesse?’ Cici said into the handset. ‘It’s Cici, Angela’s assistant? At Gloss? The magazine you’re supposed to work at?’
Ouch.
‘Oh really?’ she pulled a face and looked over at me with a little wave. ‘Well, that sounds awful. I can’t imagine how awful it must be to be ill at Christmas time.’
She nodded a couple of times and then rolled her eyes. It was something that had crossed my mind before, but sometimes she really did remind me of Jenny. It was quite frightening how someone you loved and someone you were terrified of could be so similar.
‘Sounds dreadful,’ she said. ‘Do you know what else is dreadful? Getting fired at Christmas time. It’s press day. You don’t call in sick on press day. In fact, you didn’t even call in sick, did you?’
‘Cici!’ I shook my head, making mad ‘cut’ motions with my hand. ‘Don’t!’
‘Yeah, really?’ She was too busy shouting down the phone while the rest of the office looked on in stunned silence. ‘Then I’ll take that as your resignation. Happy holidays.’
She was carefully replacing the handset and blithely turning back to her monitor as I screeched to a halt by her desk.
‘What just happened?’ I asked, my heart beating hard and fast. ‘What did he say?’
‘Something about food poisoning,’ she scoffed, eyes still on the screen, as though it wasn’t even important enough to bother with eye contact. ‘Clearly lying, clearly hungover. And then he was incredibly rude. I don’t think he’ll be coming back in any time soon.’
‘Cici, you can’t fire people,’ I said, breathless. ‘We need Jesse. All I asked you to do was to find out where he was.’
‘And I did,’ she said, looking up at me with big blue eyes. A complete lack of conscience combined with no concept of the real world made for a distinct lack of dark circles. There wasn’t a fine line in sight. ‘He was at home when he should have been here. He’s clearly not a team player. Dead wood.’
‘But you can’t sack people, Cici,’ I said again. ‘I can’t even sack people. There are systems and warnings and HR and lots of annoying paperwork.’
‘Technically he quit,’ she rationalised. ‘So I’ve saved you all that paperwork. See? I’m super efficient.’
I had no words. The rest of the office was staring at me but no one had said a word since Cici had picked up the phone.
‘A leader needs to make difficult choices,’ Cici said, lowering her voice slightly. ‘You can’t have people taking advantage on your first day in charge, Angela. You don’t want to look weak, do you?’
I wasn’t sure if it was advice or a threat.
‘I will call Jesse back,’ I replied as evenly as possible. ‘And explain that you had the wrong end of the stick. And you will apologise when he comes into work after the holidays.’
‘I don’t have a stick.’ She looked puzzled. ‘Is this a cute British thing?’
‘I really wish I had a stick,’ I said, trying to look vaguely menacing although I was sure it came off as more constipated.
‘Oh, you,’ she called as I stalked back into my office. ‘I’ll get you another coffee, I think you’re tired.’
‘I’m fine,’ I barked. ‘Megan, can you come in here, please?’
The little brunette jumped up from her seat and ran into my office, stuck to my side as I shut the door with slightly more force than I had intended. It wasn’t quite a slam but it definitely had a distinct air of miffed-ness about it.
‘Holy shit, Angie, did she just fire Jesse?’ Megan looked horrified.
‘She doesn’t have the authority to fire Jesse,’ I reassured her. ‘Honestly, I don’t even think I have the authority to fire Jesse. But until I talk to him, I think we’ve got to assume he’s not going to be coming in today. Can you have someone set up the system so I can start approving the pages?’
‘Yeah, about that …’ She wove her fingers together and twisted them awkwardly. ‘We’re having a little trouble with it.’
‘Trouble?’
Meep.
‘IT are coming down, like, any second now,’ she said quickly. ‘It should be fixed super soon. The pages don’t want to load or something. It’s stuck on last week’s issue.’
‘Doesn’t the whole company use the same system?’ I asked, a trickle of cold desperation running down my spine.
‘Everyone’s set up independently,’ she explained. ‘In case this happens. I could maybe call Jesse and see if he knows how to fix it?’
‘I’ll call him,’ I said with a sigh. ‘What do we do if the system doesn’t start working soon?’
‘We’ll go with hard copies,’ she said. ‘Old school. I’ll make mock-ups of each page and fix a sign-off sheet for everyone to initial once they’ve checked them.’
‘Right.’ I sat back in my chair and cursed the day Mary Stein met Bob Spencer. Bobbity Bob Bastard Bob. ‘Let’s start doing that now. No one wants to be here all night. And let me know what IT says.’
‘Angela,’ Megan said, looking at the floor and sniffing, ‘is she really going to be sticking around?’
‘Who knows?’ It didn’t take a genius to work out whom she was talking about. Thankfully. ‘Honestly, I can’t see it. But you don’t need to worry, she’s not going to fire anyone and if she even looks at you the wrong way, tell me.’
‘It’s so hard to believe she’s related to Delia,’ she said in a whisper. No one wanted to be on Cici’s shit list. ‘I was talking to some of the girls who worked with her on The Look and they told me all the shit she used to do up there.’
‘She’s not going to be doing it down here,’ I promised, almost sounding as though I believed it myself.
‘I don’t want to be an asshole,’ Megan smiled awkwardly, ‘but if she wants to, who’s gonna stop her? She’s a Spencer.’
‘It’ll be fine,’ I replied. ‘She’s a Spencer, she’s not Superman. I’m watching her.’
The look on Megan’s face did not convince me that the team had faith in my leadership abilities.
‘When people told you those stories, did anyone tell you about the time I kicked her arse in London?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she said, doubtfully. ‘But I wasn’t sure. You’re so nice.’
‘No, I’m English,’ I replied. ‘Americans often get the two confused.’
Unsurprisingly, Jesse’s phone went to voicemail sixteen times in between nine a.m. and midday. By lunchtime, I had given up calling and resorted to sending a short but not terribly sweet email that suggested he give me a call and that I would see him in the office the following day. When he didn’t reply to that either, I went for a brief sweep of social media but he had gone to full radio silence so he was either genuinely sick, genuinely pissed off or dead. I didn’t know which to hope for as none of them made me feel like I was going to the top of Santa’s ‘nice’ list.
On the upside, the crisis had really pulled the office together. A lot of people, me included, had never sent a magazine to print without our online approval system so Megan’s mock-up of the magazine made for a fun novelty. By one o’clock, we were already halfway through the approvals, way further than the average Monday, and whether it was because everyone was shitting themselves or because they just wanted to go home, I didn’t care. Even Cici seemed to be pulling her weight after the drama. Or at least she’d been answering the phones, taking messages and hadn’t tried to fire anyone in the last three hours. When the intercom buzzed, I answered without looking, assuming she was offering to get me my fourth coffee of the day. I was already shaking from ODing on caffeine but every minute she was in Starbucks was a minute she wasn’t in the office.
‘Angela, you have some visitors.’ Her voice was clipped and cold, making me look up through the glass wall. ‘They don’t have an appointment and I have explained that you’re very busy.’
Held at her desk, I saw a very, very annoyed-looking Jenny, accompanied by Louisa and Grace, both seeming to be struggling to keep their fists under control. And she hadn’t even been involved in last summer’s brawl, bless her tiny, cotton socks.
‘They can come in,’ I replied as quickly as I could. ‘They can always come in. You don’t need to buzz me.’
I watched her quirk an eyebrow before hanging up and waving my friends into my office.
‘I’m not sure about this, Angie,’ Jenny said, flinging the door open and not even waiting for Louisa to shut it before she let rip. ‘Once a psycho, always a psycho. I don’t care if they upped her meds, no amount of Xanax can chill a bitch like that.’
‘She hasn’t upped her meds.’ I stood to give them all a quick hug. ‘She went to India. And I know. Everything. All of it. What’s up?’
‘So, merry Christmas.’ Jenny paused and prompted Grace to give me half a chocolate chip cookie and a grin. ‘We know you’re totally super crazy busy and that it’s press day and this makes us complete and utter assholes but could you watch Gracie for an hour?’
‘Say if you can’t,’ Louisa butted in before I even had a chance to explain why it was impossible. I noticed she was in her jeans and sensible shoes again, her ponytail back in place. ‘I know today is your mad day. We can just go home and do Christmas things, it’s fine really. We could make paper chains.’
I couldn’t imagine for a second that Grace knew what paper chains were but the very thought of it was enough to make her bottom lip start to quiver.
‘It is a bit mad, yeah,’ I said, feeling horrible for taking the cookie. Which I absolutely was not giving back regardless of the lip wobble. ‘Where did you want to go that you can’t take madam?’
‘James got us last-minute tickets to the Christmas thing at Radio City Music Hall,’ she explained. ‘But Grace won’t sit through it, I know she won’t. I mean, she’s about ready for her nap but if she wakes up and screams blue murder, it’ll be a nightmare.’
‘They’re front row, centre,’ Jenny added, waving two tickets in my face. As though that would help her case. I couldn’t be more jealous. ‘And Erin is out of town at Thomas’s parents’ place or we totally would have asked her to take Gracie for a couple of hours.’
‘We did have a full cookie for you but, well, she ate it.’ Lou looked so apologetic and I felt like such a twat. ‘Don’t worry, we don’t have to go. I’m sure James can find someone else to take the tickets.’
I looked at Grace, her face covered in cookie and her eyes drooping in her pushchair. She waved at me lazily and stuck out her tongue. Behind the pushchair Jenny and Lou, wrapped up in scarves, gloves and stylish but not terribly warm-looking coats, huddled together, the light of hope still in Jenny’s eyes. Damn them, they knew I couldn’t say no to a Christmas-themed activity. After all, if she was going to sleep, what was the difference? I was going to be stuck to my desk all afternoon anyway, and it might be nice to have some sensible English company for a change, even if that company was under two years old and occasionally pooped itself.
‘She can hang out here,’ I said, immediately regretting my decision. ‘What time will you be back?’
‘Four, four thirty tops.’ Jenny clapped her leather gloves together and did a little dance. ‘We’ll bring you some shit, I promise. I’ll kidnap a Rockette for you.’
‘Just go,’ I said, rushing them out of the office before I changed my mind. ‘Have fun. I’m jealous.’
‘She’ll go right to sleep,’ Lou said, ignoring the fact that Jenny was stood by Cici’s desk making hissing noises. Cici was studiously ignoring the two of them and staring at her nails. ‘Don’t give her any sugar.’
‘No sugar, check.’ I saluted and waved them into the lifts. ‘See you later.’
Ignoring the look on my assistant’s face, I turned back towards my office to see the previously sleepy Grace leaping out of her pushchair and grabbing the remaining half-cookie from my desk and shoving it into her face.
‘Indian giver,’ I said, crossing my arms over my chest.
‘That’s offensive to native Americans,’ Cici said over my shoulder before handing me the updated mock-up magazine. ‘Fashion pages. Megan needs them back in fifteen minutes.’
I nodded and tried to pretend Grace wasn’t climbing up the bookshelf and throwing herself onto the armchair in the corner of my office as we spoke.
‘I might need twenty,’ I replied. ‘She’s nuts.’
‘Let me look after her,’ Cici offered, crouching down in front of the armchair and clapping at Grace with wide eyes. ‘I love children.’
Yeah, right.
‘Is that for lunch or dinner?’ I asked.
‘Really, I have a way with kids.’ She made goldfish faces at my goddaughter while she spoke and held out her arms for a hug. Grace immediately leapt onto her new playmate, grabbed a handful of hair extensions and pulled. Hard. I winced, waiting for her to chuck the toddler out of the eighteenth-floor window, but instead all Cici did was laugh. A genuine, sweet tinkle of a laugh, not her raucous LOL in real life guffaw but an actual, honest to God chuckle. I pinched myself and snapped back to reality.
‘She’s fine,’ I said, marching over and grabbing Gracie out of her arms and getting a slap in the face for my trouble. Someone needed to teach that girl some manners. And it wasn’t going to be me. ‘We’ll be fine.’
No matter how tempting it was to palm Grace-sitting duties off on someone else when I was busy, Louisa would end me if I gave her baby to someone who made Cruella De Vil look like an animal rights activist.
‘I’ll go get her some juice.’ Cici stood up and smoothed out the tugs and pulls in her outfit. ‘And check back in twenty.’
‘That would be great,’ I replied, just as Grace sneezed on my shoulder. The amount of crap that came out of someone so small … ‘But we’ll be fine.’
Cici nodded and shrugged, leaving us alone in the office.
‘We’ll be just fine, Gracie,’ I told her as I wiped down my sticky cashmere. ‘You would have to get up to some pretty evil shit before I asked Cici for help. And you’re not going to do that, are you?’
She sat prettily on the edge of the armchair and shook her head, smiling and swinging her pink T-bar-clad feet back and forth.
‘Of course not,’ I said, sitting back at my desk with the magazine mock-up. ‘You’re a bloody angel.’
‘Cici …’ Not even fifteen minutes later, I threw myself around my office door, panting. ‘I need your help.’
There weren’t many sentences in the English language I’d never imagined myself saying but that was one of them. My shiny new assistant jumped out of her chair and came running as fast as her Louboutins would carry her, which was actually surprisingly fast.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, closing the door behind us.
In lieu of more words, I pointed to the corner of my office that Grace was currently terrorising. Everything that had ever been on a shelf was now on the floor, pages had been torn out of magazines, she was covered, head to toe, in slashes of black ink and fluorescent yellow and was traipsing up and down the office with my Jimmy Choo black patent pumps on her feet and my grey suede Gucci Mary-Janes on her hands. This was entirely my fault for keeping such an extensive shoe library under my desk. Of course, she hadn’t bothered with the Topshop ballet pumps or the Aldo heels, had she? Oh no, like most terrorists-in-training, this one had great taste. I had got up at six a.m. on the first day of the Saks sale and then fought like a dog to get those Mary-Janes, there was no way they were going out like this.
Things had started off so well. I’d sat Grace in the armchair with an old copy of the magazine, a pad and the closest thing I had to felt-tips – a Sharpie marker and a highlighter – and had gone back to my desk to review the fashion pages. The next time I’d looked up, she’d given herself a David Bowie makeover with the pens and shredded the magazine. Before I could even get to my feet, she was off, tearing around the office and knocking over anything she could get her hands on. At first I thought she was tired and then I put it down to acting out because her mum had stuck her with me for the afternoon. Within three minutes, I decided she was clearly mentally imbalanced and needed electroshock therapy.
‘Help me?’ I begged. ‘Every time I get near her she screams.’
‘Oh, I figured that was you,’ Cici cooed, waving at Grace who had sat herself in my chair and was happily spinning in circles. Not that I could call her for that, I obviously did it every time the office was empty. ‘I thought maybe you were just super excited about that holiday sweater spread.’
‘Well, I was,’ I admitted. ‘But most of the screaming was the baby.’
‘Hey, honey.’ She tilted her head to the side and smiled at Grace. Grace stopped gnawing on the heel of my Choo and smiled back. ‘Want to hang out somewhere fun?’
Of course. It made sense that they would have a kinship – they were both completely mad and dead set on destroying my designer footwear.
Cici held out her hand and Grace clambered out of the chair to take it, gathering up her colouring in as she went.
‘Bye, Anala,’ she said as they sailed out of my office together. I held my breath and counted to ten, waiting until they had locked themselves in the tiny meeting room, and then ran to the toilet. My bladder couldn’t take all this stress. Or the four cups of coffee I’d drunk already.
Post-pee, I immediately felt better. Now, to conquer the fashion pages and get the magazine sign-off back on track.
As soon as I found the fashion pages.
I scoured my desk, searching underneath my keyboard and my mouse pad, even getting on my hands and knees to look underneath, which seemed a bit like overkill when the entire bloody thing was made out of glass, but still, you could never be too sure. I just couldn’t work out where they could be. There wasn’t enough room in my office to swing a cat, or at least a very nice Alexander Wang handbag, as Jenny had proved the first time she came to visit and did just that. She broke a mug and knocked over a massive jar of Skittles. I couldn’t have nice things. But that wasn’t the pressing issue at that exact moment. The pressing issue was that ten pages of magazine had completely disappeared from my desk in the three minutes I had taken out to have a wee. This was why we needed Jesse. To stop me from going for a wee whenever I felt like it.
Maybe, I thought in desperation, just maybe Cici had come in and taken them back, thinking I was finished. I looked over to her desk but she wasn’t there. She wasn’t in the meeting room either.
‘Megan,’ I said, running over to the door and pasting an unconvincing smile onto my face. ‘Did Cici give you the fashion pages?’
‘Nuh-uh.’ She shook her head and tapped her watch. ‘Did you give them to her?’
‘No.’ I was reluctant to admit I couldn’t find them. I really didn’t want an arse-kicking. ‘Do you know where she is?’
‘Should I reprint the fashion pages?’ Megan clearly had one priority and one priority only. ‘I’d need to get Chloe to go over them again.’
‘Let me have one more look.’ I ducked my head back into my office. Maybe they had fallen off my desk during Grace’s explosive exit. ‘And can you see if you can drag Cici up from whatever crack in the floor she’s fallen into?’
It wouldn’t be difficult to lose Cici – she was so skinny she could easily get stuck behind a filing cabinet or something – but it seemed really unlikely that Grace would be so hard to find. Between the trail of sticky handprints and the banshee-like wailing-slash-maniacal laughter, she was usually a bit of a giveaway. Satisfied, or rather desperately freaked out, that the pages were in fact no longer in my office, I went back to ask for them to be reprinted. Yes, it was going to be embarrassing but it was still going to be better than Megan coming into my office in five minutes to beat me with a massive stick.
‘I’m really sorry but I’m going to need those pages again.’ I attempted to woo Megan with my shiniest smile, showing almost all of my teeth, and another gingerbread man but for whatever reason she wasn’t reacting. In fact, she looked more freaked out than I did. So I pulled the second gingerbread man out from behind my back. Still nothing. This girl had a heart of stone.
‘Uh, Angela, did you tell Cici to take that little girl out someplace?’ she asked, an incredibly hopeful look on her face.
This didn’t sound good.
‘I did not,’ I replied, magazine panic falling, Grace panic rising.
‘Because Chloe said she saw them putting on jackets and taking the elevator.’ Megan pointed over at the fashion desk, basically directing me to blame another messenger. ‘While you were in the bathroom.’
Seriously, a girl couldn’t even go for a whizz around here without the entire world falling apart.
‘Right, I’ll call her.’ I tried to block all images of Cici kidnapping Grace and running off to India to live in a commune from my imagination. Now wasn’t the time for it to be active. Now was the time for it to be very quiet and sit in a corner. ‘And you print out the pages because all this is fine and they’re probably outside getting some fresh air or maybe fetching me a coffee or something and it’s fine.’
‘Maybe they went out to look at the snow?’ Chloe suggested, raising her voice but not daring to stand up.
‘It’s snowing?’ I squealed and ran to the window. Snow! Christmas snow! ‘Yes, I’m sure that’s it. I’ll call her. Me, phone, you, pages, everybody’s happy.’
‘Sure.’ Megan’s eyes widened and her mouth narrowed into a tiny cat’s arse of terror as she clicked away at her computer. ‘Everybody’s happy.’
My phone was ringing as I stepped back inside my office and I grabbed the receiver without hesitation, a) because my assistant wasn’t there to do it for me and b) because I was hoping it was said assistant calling to see if I wanted two or three sugars in my chai latte and not to explain that she had kidnapped my goddaughter.
‘Hello?’ I answered, breathless. ‘I mean, Gloss, Angela speaking.’
‘Angela.’ It wasn’t Cici. Not unless she’s gone through a very speedy sex change or possibly been punched in the throat. Oh God, what if Grace had punched her in the throat and run away? ‘It’s Jesse.’
Ohhh. Luckily for him, he was currently much farther down my shit list than he deserved to be.
‘Jesse, I don’t really have time to talk right now,’ I said, speedily tearing through the online address book for Cici’s mobile number. Which of course wasn’t there. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow is Christmas Day,’ he pointed out. ‘And I’ll be quick … I wanted to apologise. For not coming in. And the other thing, I—’
‘Then I won’t speak to you tomorrow,’ I said, fingers flying as they frantically typed out an email to Delia, asking for her sister’s number. ‘I’ll see you on Thursday.’
‘I know it was stupid not to come in today,’ he carried on, completely ignoring the stress in my voice. ‘I panicked about Friday and I’m an asshole and I should have known you’d need me when the system was down but then that bitch-faced assistant of yours—’
‘Jesse, I’m not dicking about,’ I snapped. ‘I really don’t have time for this. We’re having to do all the approvals by hand, half the magazine is missing and so is said bitch-faced assistant. So I’ll see you on Thursday, yeah?’
‘Oh, that sounds rough,’ he replied, only not nearly as upset as I might like. ‘But yeah, Thursday.’
‘Hang on.’ I stood up sharply. ‘How did you know the system was down?’
‘Uh, Cici told me?’ he said, the line crackling as he spoke. ‘I’m on the bridge, I’m losing you.’
‘Why are you on the bridge? I thought you were sick?’ I was losing my tiny mind.
‘Obviously I’m not sick. I said I was sick because I felt weird about the whole scene in the cab,’ he explained, beginning to sound a little annoyed himself. Wanker. ‘I feel really bad. Should I come? Maybe I can fix Censhare?’
‘Can you?’ I asked, half hopeful and three-quarters incredibly suspicious. Which made more than a whole but maths was never my strong point.
‘I figure maybe?’
‘Jesse.’ I leaned over my desk, attempting to look intimidating, hoping that it would make me sound the same. ‘Did you fuck up the system on purpose?’
‘How could I do that?’ he laughed, sounding nervous. ‘I’m not even there. Sounds more like something Cici would do, doesn’t it?’
‘Are you in on this?’ I barked. ‘Are you in on this with her? Because I won’t fire you, I will destroy your fucking life. I will literally end you. Christmas or no Christmas.’
And as I said it, I meant it. And the tiny, effeminate whimper down the end of the line suggested he knew I was telling the truth. I knew reading half of the first chapter of Executive Toughness would pay off.
‘I didn’t, Angela, of course I didn’t.’ He sounded terrified. Good. ‘Do you want me to come in?’
‘Yes,’ I replied, my fingers rolling up the desk until my hands looked like little claws. At last I felt powerful but not in a good way. More in a ‘kneel before Zod’ way. And I’d seen all the Superman films – it never went well for Zod. ‘Get your arse in here and fucking fix it.’
As I hung up, Delia responded to my email with one word – ‘Problem?’ Instead of replying, I dialled Cici and prayed that she would pick up, hopefully while laughing at me as she walked out of the lift, holding Grace’s hand which still had all of its original fingers. But she didn’t pick up and the lift doors didn’t open and it was almost two o’clock which meant she’d been missing for fifteen minutes and Louisa would be back in two hours and the magazine had to be completely signed off in three.
Merry fucking Christmas.