Ollie had seemed delighted I’d actually made the big scary break, but when it came to my first day at Surface two weeks later he wasn’t there to see me off. He’d gone off to Milan for the furniture fair, where Slap was having a stand. He sent me a text to wish me luck the night before, but that was it. I had rather expected flowers.
When I arrived at the magazine’s offices in a rather obscure corner of Bloomsbury, near King’s Cross, half of the furniture still hadn’t been unwrapped. In fact the first thing I had to do was to set up my own room, which was more like a generous broom cupboard, wrestling acres of plastic sheeting off a really nasty pale grey desk and chair. The rest of my facilities comprised a second-hand filing cabinet. I didn’t have a computer yet – or a phone.
The staff weren’t particularly welcoming either – all one of them. The first issue was due out in just over four months and at that point the only person in place, apart from me and Rosie, was the art director, a lanky young man called Steve, who she had recruited from Wonderdog.
Although I did think he was very talented, Steve, in person, was not my scene. He had multiple piercings, overcomplicated facial hair and a shaved head. We looked each other over and in that first instant I knew we were unlikely ever to be buddies. It was clearly mutual and I hoped we could just rub along. The ad sales were being handled by an outside agency – all part of Rosie’s determination to keep the two sides of the magazine completely separate – so there wasn’t even a jolly commercial team to pad things out and lighten the atmosphere.
At least Rosie made an effort to make me feel welcome, inviting me into her office for a rosehip tea, before realizing, after a few minutes scrabbling on her desk, which was covered in great piles of paper, books and unopened envelopes, that she only had one mug. I tried not to compare it with Bee’s office, with her immaculate glass-topped desk that she cleared of paper every night before she went home, and Nushka walking in with freshly brewed espressos in Limoges demitasses.
‘It’s great to see you,’ said Rosie, clearly doing her best. ‘It’s really starting to feel like a magazine now you’re here.’
‘When is everyone else arriving?’ I asked.
Rosie looked at me blankly.
‘The rest of the team?’ I continued.
‘This is it,’ said Rosie, apparently surprised that I had expected there to be more than three people. There were thirty on the staff of Chic – and that was just editorial. There was a marketing department and a big ad sales team as well. That was when I realized there were an awful lot of questions I hadn’t asked Rosie before taking this job.
‘But what about my assistant…?’ I asked, hesitantly. That was one thing I had made a point of raising with her and I remembered very clearly that she’d said, ‘We’ll sort it out when you get there.’
I’d taken that to mean, we’d sort out the details of the salary and starting date when I got there, and had been planning to ask Gemma to join me.
‘Well, obviously we can’t take anyone else on the staff at this stage,’ said Rosie, as though it was the most normal thing in the world to do an international fashion magazine with three staff. ‘But once we are more established, you’ll be able to have someone part time. For the time being, you can use fashion students. It would be great experience for them.’
But probably not for me, I reflected.
‘What about your assistant?’ I asked, starting to feel quite alarmed.
‘Oh, I’ve got work experience people booked from Saint Martins and the London College of Fashion, to cover all that, and Steve’s going to use graphics students to help him when we get nearer the deadline, and the odd freelancer for the really busy time.’
I was horrified, but she seemed so confident about it all, I decided I just had to go and get on with it for the time being and hope things improved. I sat at my desk and wondered what to do with myself. It was so weird to be in what was supposed to be a magazine office and not be surrounded by endlessly ringing phones and overexcited people. It was almost creepily quiet in there.
I unpacked my office essentials – a photo of me, Frannie and Nelly taken at a Jasper Conran after-show party, a handwritten thank-you note from Karl Lagerfeld, a postcard of my father’s painting from the Tate Modern and my shoot kit. This was a Prada washbag – a Christmas freebie – packed with safety pins, tampons, aspirin, Sellotape, tit tape, scissors and other essential emergency supplies of my trade. Paul had once slipped a packet of condoms into it as a joke.
Then I went looking for the stationery cupboard to try and make my little cubby-hole look more like a working office. There wasn’t one. I sat in my horrid grey chair for a moment feeling quite stunned about it all, then I roused myself and made lists on envelopes I had floating around in the bottom of my handbag, of all the things I needed to bring in to the office and all the people I needed to ring with my new details.
But what new details? I didn’t have a phone number or an email address to give out, for a magazine no one had ever heard of. Feeling more and more wobbly, but still determined not to allow panic to set in, I decided to use my mobile to let a few key PRs and agents know where I was. There was no signal in my so-called office, so I spent the next hour crouching in the building’s drafty stairwell making my calls and telling them all to use my mobile number for now.
It wasn’t until I went back into my broom cupboard that I realized that if any of them did ring me, I wouldn’t be able to pick up the calls in there. What an idiot.
As I sat there my mind drifted inexorably to what it would be like in the Chic offices that morning. It was mid-April and everyone would be wearing their new spring looks and comparing purchases. There would be lots of excitement as they packed to go on trips to impossibly glamorous places. Rails and rails of gorgeous clothes coming in to be selected for shoots. Pre-release CDs blaring out from the features department’s stereo.
There would come Bee, clicking through the office in new Prada sandals with a perfect pedicure, a freshly sprayed-on tan and gleaming hair. Frannie would be sitting at her desk eating for two. Gemma screening calls like a pro, between reading out Kent’s horoscope from the Evening Standard as evidence he was just about to call her. Janey throwing darts at a notice-board with a pure cover pinned on to it. Tim squealing over some hot bod he’d found on the internet. I shed a small tear, then slapped my cheeks and told myself to keep it together.
Despite the unpromising start, I was determined to give Surface a fair go – out of pride, more than anything. Rosie had promised me a phone number and an email address the following week and as the days went by, with a few of my fashion pictures pinned up on my walls, a newly purchased Roberts radio playing and a large vase of flowers on my desk, I was starting to feel a little better.
Art director Steve was about as communicative as a speed hump when I tried to engage him in office banter, and I still hadn’t found anywhere nearby to do my lunchtime yoga, but I set my mind to staying positive. Even with nothing to do. I kept trying to have meetings with Rosie about planning some shoots, but she seemed to be perpetually busy.
Her office door was always closed and her phone – the only one in the entire office at that stage – had started to ring non-stop as Surface’s number had finally been published in London’s fashion PR Bible, The Diary. Her response was to leave it off the hook. We must have been the only magazine office on earth it was impossible to contact, I reflected.
By the end of the week I was getting so frustrated I typed up a memo with a list of shoot ideas on Ollie’s computer at home and took advantage of one of Rosie’s occasional mystery disappearances to get into her office and put it on her desk.
I wasn’t snooping, but she had left her computer screen active and as I put my memo down I saw what was keeping her so busy. She was finishing her book on the Fifties American sportswear designer Claire McCardell. I knew that’s what it was because she’d told me all about the project ages before, in one of her mini lectures. I’d just assumed she would have finished it before she took on a magazine editorship. It was getting more and more weird in there.
I left the office at lunchtime that Friday, because I still had nothing to do, and I thought it would be nice to cook Ollie a special welcome-home-from-Milan dinner. He always appreciated that kind of gesture. As I walked back from Fresh & Wild with the ingredients, I waved to the man in the dry-cleaner’s. He waved back and gestured for me to come in.
‘I have your husband’s shirts,’ he said and handed me seven of them, freshly laundered on hangers.
When I got back to the flat I went to put them away on his side of our closet and as I hung them up the way he liked them – stripes, checks and plains all in separate blocks – I noticed something strange. They were all duplicates of shirts he already had. It must have been some kind of new grooming system he was introducing, I thought, making a note to ask him about it later.
He got back just after 3 p.m. and judging by the surprise on his face when he opened the door, he hadn’t been expecting me to be home.
‘Em!’ he said. ‘I thought you were at the office.’
‘Surprise!’ I said. ‘I came home early to make you a special dinner.’
‘Oh, that’s great, but damn,’ he said, clicking his fingers. ‘I’m such an idiot, I’ve just remembered I left something important at Paddington, in the left luggage. I’d better go back and get it.’
And he disappeared again, apparently taking his luggage with him. It was most peculiar. He came back about twenty minutes later with his bags and seeming a little more normal.
‘Are you here now?’ I said, handing him a glass of chilled white wine.
‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘I just needed to collect another bag and put some stuff in the car to take straight to the office tomorrow. I picked up a load of reference material over there and I didn’t need to clutter up the house with it.’
I didn’t think any more of it. Ollie was always shunting stuff about. It was one of the inconveniences of being a consumer on his level. We always had bags of crap going out of the house to make room for all the new crap coming in.
Dinner was fun. We rarely ate in, sitting at the table, just the two of us, and it made a nice change. He was very excited about his trip and the amazing response he’d had to the Slap stand and all the great connections he had made for promoting cosmetics to a whole new market. He listened attentively when I told him about my strange first week at Surface and was very reassuring.
‘New offices are hell, Emily. It’s always like that. I’m sure you’ll get a proper assistant once you actually start pumping out issues. Start-ups are scary and hard in any kind of business, but very exciting as well. Wait until you have that first issue in your hands and the fashion world is swooning, desperate to be in your pages.’
The only sour note in an otherwise lovely evening was when I opened the present he’d brought me. Usually, Ollie was a first-class present giver. I’d been quite stoked up about what he would buy me in Milan and had dropped a few hints, but even without any help I knew he always managed to find me the perfect thing and was generous too. But not this time. It was a toothbrush.
I just looked at him when I got it out of the bag. He was beaming at me.
‘It’s – a toothbrush,’ I said. Wondering if it was a joke and the real present, in a large Prada carrier bag, was about to appear. Maybe that was what he had been collecting from Paddington.
‘Yes,’ said Ollie, in his most enthusiastic mode. ‘Isn’t it great? It’s by Marnie Stallinger. It’s her first venture into mass-produced universal consumer objects. It’s brilliant isn’t it? It’s going to be an iconic piece and you have one of the first hundred to come off the production line. I’ve got the next one in the series. They’re numbered. They’ll be worth a fortune in twenty years’ time, as long as we don’t take them out of the packaging, of course.’
I looked down at it again. It was an over-designed purple plastic toothbrush. I didn’t even like it. I only used clear plastic GUM toothbrushes I bought in bulk in New York. This was an ugly toothbrush I couldn’t even use.
‘Thanks, Ollie,’ I said flatly. ‘That’s great. An historic toothbrush. I’ll put it away for posterity.’
I got up to clear the table, so disappointed I forgot to ask him about the duplicate shirts.
The following week I made huge strides forward at Surface. Ollie gave me a spare laptop to take in and I got an email address and a telephone, of my very own. Rosie seemed to have given up working on her book and was keeping her office door open. Making it look even more like a real office, the first fashion student had arrived to assist her, which seemed like progress. It was just unfortunate she had the phone manner of a serial killer.
It took her two days to master the system for putting calls through to Rosie’s extension and even once she could do it without cutting the caller off, she had no discrimination about which people to put through and which to take messages from. I sat in my office trying not to listen to the telephonic PR catastrophe that was going on out there, until in the end I couldn’t stand it any longer.
‘Shona,’ I said brightly, going to sit on the edge of her desk. ‘Shall I give you some hints how to deal with the phones?’
The girl just looked back at me from under her bright green fringe and carried on popping her bubble gum.
‘OK,’ I said, determined not to give up. ‘When the phone rings, you pick it up and say: “Hello, Surface magazine, how can I help you?” Sound friendly. OK?’
Shona said nothing. She certainly didn’t look friendly.
‘Then you ask who’s calling. If you don’t recognize the name as someone important – like Giorgio Armani, or Alexander McQueen, ha ha ha – or someone you have heard Rosie talking about, ask them: “Will she know what the call’s about?” If they then go into a long explanation, or they are clearly a PR, take a message, including their name, phone number and what they are calling about. Obviously do the same if Rosie is out.’
I handed her an exercise book.
‘Write the messages in this book with the date and time, the person’s name and a reply number, and give it to Rosie to look at twice a day, OK?’
Shona carried on looking at me like I was asking her to walk around Hoxton in a Laura Ashley dress.
‘OK?’ I asked again. She popped her gum at me and went back to reading the manga comic she had brought in with her.
I went back to my office and heard her answer the phone.
‘Yeah?’ was all she said, then she put the call straight through to Rosie.
I couldn’t stand it. I went over to her desk again.
‘Shona,’ I said. ‘What did I just tell you? You have to announce the magazine. It’s really important. You are the first point of entry to Planet Surface and it is really important people get a positive impression.’
I sounded like Ollie, but I didn’t care. I was right. But Shona clearly didn’t think so. She put her comic into her army surplus bag and stood up.
‘I’m not a bloody secretary,’ she said and walked out. She didn’t come back and I got the blame for alienating her.
‘They’re only kids, Emily,’ said Rosie, quite crossly. ‘You can’t expect them to know how to be a top-flight PA. And anyway, this isn’t British Airways, we’re a cool magazine, we don’t have to do all that corporate image bullshit.’
I just looked at her. How could I answer her without being incredibly rude?
‘I just didn’t think she was giving people a very good impression of Surface,’ I said. ‘And I thought you might like a bit of call screening.’
‘Yes, well, just leave it to me in future,’ said Rosie tersely, and I saw her pick up the message book and look at it curiously.
That was when it hit me. She’d never seen one before, because she’d never actually worked on a magazine before. She’d worked on a newspaper – but mainly out of the office as a correspondent – and then as a freelancer on magazines. She didn’t have the first idea how magazine offices worked. Or any office for that matter. The seriousness of this situation hit me again when I finally had a planning meeting with her that Friday. I had now been there for two weeks and it was the first time the entire staff – all three of us – had sat down together to discuss what we were going to put in the flaming magazine.
I had my list of ideas ready and it seemed like Steve already had his reactions to them ready too, because he didn’t like any of them. He thought they were all ‘lame’, ‘old’, or ‘obvious’. Rosie clearly didn’t know what she thought. Because after I presented each suggestion she would say ‘great, I like it’, only to change it to ‘actually that is quite predictable’ after Steve had made his comments.
After an hour of this we were no further towards having a shoot schedule in place and Steve and I were deeply established in mutual contempt.
‘OK, Steve,’ I said to him in the end, determined to keep trying. ‘What do you think we should shoot for the first issue?’
Upon which he came out with a string of ideas which were basically on the same themes as mine, just put more wankily. Looking positively at the big picture – it was getting exhausting, but I forced myself – I decided that at least it meant I could go ahead and shoot what I had wanted to in the first place and just make him feel like they were all his ideas. For a moment I had thought he was going to start asking me to do things with papier mâché horses’ heads.
But despite my best Pollyanna efforts it went seriously downhill from there. After we had established a basic list of the fashion stories we were going to do, I brought up the subject of locations.
‘There isn’t any budget for foreign travel,’ said Rosie.
‘What?’ I said. ‘Do you want me to do the whole first issue in the studio? With a few exotic shots from Camber Sands?’
Now this was something I had made a point of asking her about before I took the job and she had promised I would be able to do exactly the kind of trips I had done at Chic. ‘As behoves a parameter-redefining international fashion magazine,’ she had said at the time with the self-satisfied smile I was starting to detest.
‘What’s changed, Rosie?’ I said. ‘This is not what we discussed. I didn’t come here to shoot catalogue pictures.’
She looked uncomfortable.
‘That’s just the way it is at the moment. When we get more advertising, we can start to do more trips. For the time being, if you can get freebies, that’s great, but there’s nothing in the budget for travel.’
That was when I went back to my office and called Bee. It was the last day of her one-month deadline and I was going to take her up on her offer to come back. It was so nice to hear Nushka’s welcoming professional voice when she answered the phone, I could have wept with relief.
‘Hello, Chic magazine, how can I help you?’ she had said, all sophisticated warmth and Chic-ness. ‘Oh, hi Em, it’s great to hear from you. We really miss you. But I’m afraid Bee’s all tied up this afternoon. Will she know what it’s about?’
That was when I knew I was buggered.
Two hours later it was all confirmed. I’d popped out to the nearest café to get a coffee that was slightly less emetic than Rosie’s herb teas and found I had a tearful message from Gemma on my mobile asking me to ring her. I did and got the news like a bucket of cold water in the face.
Natalie had my job.