by Lindsey Kelk
‘But where will I put all my stuff?’ I asked with a frown. She knew I needed my stuff. It was all essential to my process, from my signed framed photo of Robert Downey Jr to the Hannah Montana Magic 8 Ball I used to make any and all difficult decisions.
‘Besson doesn’t encourage personal artifacts at the work station,’ Kanako recited from an invisible rulebook. ‘A decluttered environment promotes a more efficient workflow.’
I felt a dark look cross my face.
‘If any so much as thinks the words “spark joy” I’m going home.’
She shrugged and turned back to her computer. ‘We all like it this way.’
We. There was a ‘we’ here and I, the new girl, was not a part of it.
‘I’m sure I’ll figure it out,’ I said, my hand never leaving my satchel for fear of my photos of Alex and our daughter leaping out and exposing me to all the world for the hoarder that I was. ‘Nice to meet you.’
‘Let me know if you need me to show you around,’ Kanako said without looking back.
It sounded like a nice thing to say but I could tell what she really meant was ‘now go away’.
‘I can give you the tour,’ Cici offered as a short but beautiful man with a shaved head appeared at her side. ‘Do I have time to give her the tour?’
‘You have seventeen minutes until your conference call with the investors,’ he replied, glancing down at a small tablet.
‘Plenty of time,’ she replied, shrugging off her bag and her sunglasses into the man’s waiting arms. From the look on his perfectly symmetrical face, I had to assume he was her assistant. It was the exact same expression last seen on Bambi, right after his mother was killed.
‘I’m Angela,’ I said, holding out a hand to the assistant. He looked down at it, his own hands full of thousands of dollars of designer goods. ‘It’s my first day.’
‘He knows who you are,’ Cici said, already striding off to survey her domain. ‘He’s my assistant, he knows everything.’
I really hoped he knew how to write a CV and find a new job ASAP.
‘Well, it’s nice to meet you …’
‘Don,’ he replied before turning back to Cici. ‘I’ll put these away and prepare for the call.’
‘Thanks, Don,’ she smiled as he scuttled away before sighing and lowering her voice. ‘It’s so hard to find a good assistant. You were so lucky to have me.’
‘Remember that time you had my suitcase blown up at Charles de Gaulle airport?’ I replied, watching as he ran.
‘No.’
It was a blatant lie. That was the kind of memory that kept Cici warm on the cold winter nights.
Before Besson, Cici and I had both worked at Spencer Media, one of the biggest publishers in the world, and a company founded by Cici’s grandfather. When she told me she wanted to strike out on her own, I knew she’d find her feet but I hadn’t realized just how fast she’d do it or how very big her feet would turn out to be. Within six short months, Besson had become a major player in digital media with some of the highest-trafficked sites in the US. While Cici could never claim to have been one of the world’s best executive assistants, she certainly could boast an innate ability to throw her family’s money at the most talented people in the industry, which resulted in absolutely brilliant content that was thriving in a market where everyone else seemed set to struggle.
‘I’m so glad you’re finally here,’ Cici said as we made our way around the open-plan office. ‘How is baby Ellis? Such a cool name. Alex pick it?’
‘Ellis is a cool name but my baby is called Alice,’ I answered, following her away from the hodge-podge of standing and sitting desks. ‘She’s named after my grandmother, actually.’
Fantastic. Now I was not only anxious about my first day at work, I’d also have to spend the rest of the morning wondering whether or not it was too late to change my baby’s name.
‘How old is he now? Like, three?’
‘She is ten and a half months, remember? You were there when I took the pregnancy test. How fast do you think babies age?’
‘Is that all? I guess they do say time flies,’ Cici said with wide eyes. I could tell it was taking an awful lot of energy for her to show this much interest in my personal life and I appreciated it, even if I knew she didn’t really give two shits.
‘They do and it does,’ I replied. ‘But I’m excited to be here, back at work. I’ve been going kind of crazy at home, I can’t wait to get stuck in with my site. I’ve got some really fun ideas—’
‘Yeah, I’m sure they’re great, that’s why I hired you,’ she interrupted. ‘So this is the conference table where we have most of our editorial meetings.’
She paused in front of a giant slab of crystal, propped up on a metal frame. If Coachella made office furniture.
‘The crystal channels your energies and creates a more harmonious working environment,’ Cici explained. ‘And it cost thirty-five thousand dollars.’
‘Bargain.’
‘I got it from an artisan I met at Burning Man.’
‘Of course you did.’
It really was just crying out for a ritual sacrifice with unicorn dip-dyed hair and a flower crown.
‘Over by the elevators we have our reading rooms, our privacy pods and meditation centre.’ She pointed at a row of frosted-glass doors. ‘While we encourage all our team players to invest their energy in our open-plan dynamic, we understand sometimes they need privacy.’
‘Oh yeah, sometimes,’ I agreed, trying not to vom at the term ‘team players’. I couldn’t help but wonder which Instagram influencer she had hired to do her HR. ‘Phone calls, difficult conversations, lactating.’
‘Lactating?’ Cici reared back as though I’d slapped her in the face.
‘Breastfeeding,’ I explained, making unnecessary honking motions in front of my own boobs. ‘Or pumping, I suppose. I have to pump.’
‘Still?’ she screwed up her pretty face. ‘Isn’t it a little old for that?’
‘Again, she, and again, not even eleven months,’ I repeated, staring at the privacy pods and wondering how many times a day they were used for the very important purpose of crying at work.
‘So gross,’ she muttered, adjusting her own perfect B cups inside her Tom Ford jumpsuit. ‘Anyway, this is where you would do that, I guess. The kitchen is right by the movement studio and the bathrooms, showers and dressing rooms are over there.’
She pointed off in the vague distance as I tried to log all the information. Things like this were more difficult to remember these days but I was fairly sure I’d be able to remember the place where the food was and where I needed to go for a wee.
‘And before you freak out and call HR, it’s one bathroom for everyone. That way no one can get offended.’
I lit up with a smile. ‘Like Ally McBeal?’
Cici looked back at me, stony-faced.
‘Don’t make that reference again,’ she warned. ‘People know I hired you. Don’t make me regret it.’
‘I promise you will not be the one with regrets,’ I assured her.
This was your choice, I reminded myself. You could have been sitting in your cosy office at Spencer Media right now but, nooo, you had to take a chance, you had to trust your gut and leave. Only my gut had a baby in it when I made that decision. It couldn’t be trusted. I should have been stopped.
‘And that’s it. I’m sure corporate culture went over the basics with you: no official start and finish hours, vacation is taken as and when it’s needed. We have a chef on staff to create round-the-clock snacks and beverages for all possible dietary restrictions and no orange in the office. I think that’s it.’
‘Sorry, what?’ I said, tearing my eyes away from the man who had just arrived with a small pig on a leash. ‘No oranges in the office?’
‘No orange,’ she repeated. ‘The colour. I hate it so I banned it.’
Brilliant. Starting her own company definitely hadn’t sent her mad with power.
‘Right. So, is now a good time to discuss my ideas for my site?’ I asked as she started back towards the elevators. ‘I have a name. It’s going to be Recherché dot com, it’s French and it can mean “to search for” or “exquisite”, which I think is perfect, don’t you? And content-wise—’
‘Sounds great, go for it,’ she nodded. ‘Have the design team get started.’
‘How do I get in touch with the design team?’
‘They’re in the directory,’ Cici replied.
‘And where is the directory?’ I asked.
‘On your computer?’ she answered.
‘And where’s my computer?’
‘I have to go to my office,’ Cici said, folding her arms across her chest. ‘I have a conference call.’
‘I thought we didn’t have offices,’ I said as she pressed her fingertips against a touch screen to summon a lift.
‘You don’t, I do,’ she replied. ‘If you have any questions, please go talk to corporate culture. Otherwise, get started. I hired you because you’re good at what you do so, like, do it?’
The lift dinged softly and I felt a wave of panic wash over me.
‘But we haven’t actually established what I’m here to do, have we?’
‘You know, I think this whole mom vibe is working for you,’ Cici said as she stepped into the lift. ‘I mean, I get it. Once you have kids, it’s hard to not be lame but you’ve really leaned in to mom-dom, Angela. Maybe you were fighting against this normcore vibe all along.’
Normcore? Did she just call me normcore? Admittedly I wasn’t one hundred percent certain what it meant but I was one hundred percent certain I should be offended. What did this woman want from me? Higher heels? Tighter clothes? Should I have whipped out the Sherbet Dip that lived in the bottom of my handbag and pretended it was a gram?
‘I’m going to go and find a desk,’ I said, smiling politely as the lift doors closed on my smiling CEO. ‘I’m so excited to get started.’
Hell hath no fury like a British woman mildly offended.
‘Right,’ I said, turning my attention back to the sea of desks in the middle of the bright room. Squeezing the strap of my satchel, I steeled myself and entered the fray, looking for an empty desk. Note to self, buy Apple AirPods on the way home. All the cool kids at school had AirPods.
‘Work,’ I corrected myself under my breath. ‘Not school, work.’
Only this felt very reminiscent of my first day in sixth form when absolutely everyone else had Doc Martens and I was wearing Converse and I never, ever lived it down.
Things are different now, Angela, I thought to myself. You’re a married woman. Living in New York. You’ve got a cool job in the media, loads of interesting friends and an actual baby. You are a parent. If you can heave a living being out of your vagina and make it home from the hospital in time to watch RuPaul’s Drag Race, you can certainly make it through your first day back at work.
I smiled, settling on a desk right by a window that looked out over Lower Manhattan. There, wasn’t so hard, was it? And besides, it wasn’t the first time I’d thrown myself head first into a situation with no idea what I was doing and I’d always survived before. Just barely on occasion but I’d always figured it out, one way or another.
‘This is going to be brilliant,’ I said out loud to the city below. ‘Just you wait and see.’
CHAPTER TWO
‘I’m home, I’m home,’ I wailed as I barrelled through the door, closing it firmly on a day I was keen to leave behind me. ‘Sorry, I totally lost track of time and the subway ran local and I had to stop to buy wine and tell me she’s not asleep already.’
Dropping my satchel on the dresser by the door, I kicked off my boots and looked up to see the most gorgeous man to have ever lived, holding Alice Clark Reid, no hyphen, the best baby in existence, standing in front of me. Admittedly, there was a chance I was a little bit biased on both counts because they were both mine.
‘Hey,’ Alex whispered, handing over the milk-drunk bundle of soft, sleepy wonderment. I met his green eyes as I took my daughter’s weight and felt my day fall away. ‘She’s still kind of with us. I just gave her a bottle and we were just about to go to bed. How did it go?’
‘I’ve no idea what I’m doing, Cici is worse than she’s ever been, I forgot to lock the door of the privacy pod while I was pumping and so the entire office has already seen my tits and I dropped my phone in the toilet before I’d even got into the office,’ I replied, checking Alice still had all ten toes I’d left her with that morning. ‘Does she look bigger to you? She looks bigger to me.’ I rubbed my cheek against her fine baby hair.
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘She waited until you were gone this morning and, boom, she shot up half an inch. It was incredible.’
I flashed him a look but it was a look tempered with a smile. I already felt so guilty for leaving her and it was only one day. Christ, the next twenty-one years were just going to fly by, weren’t they?
‘Sounds like you made a good first impression. Did you say you brought us wine?’
‘Yes but Alice has to wait until she’s fifteen, just like Mummy did,’ I replied softly, tilting my head back for a kiss as I continued to stroke Alice’s hair. I still couldn’t quite believe I had made something quite so brilliant. Admittedly she was occasionally revolting, especially after we gave her avocado for the first time, but for the most part, she was incredible.
‘I can’t believe I married a teenage alcoholic,’ Alex said, grabbing the woodwork around the doorframe and stretching his long, lean body. ‘Let’s hope she takes after Daddy and doesn’t start drinking until she’s twenty-one.’
‘Yes, let’s hope she takes after Daddy and runs away to join a band and shag everything on the Eastern Seaboard for a straight decade,’ I muttered, covering Al’s tiny ears. ‘That’ll look good on her college applications.’
Before we met, it was fair to say my husband had sown an entire field full of wild oats but, against all laws of god and man, I really didn’t care. Alex was a vision. Tall and skinny with perfectly square shoulders that were made for vintage T-shirts, beaten-up leather jackets and holding onto when we kissed. His skin was so pale, it was practically luminous, and the contrast of his jet-black hair only made his green eyes shine even brighter. And if that wasn’t enough to get him laid, he had the uncanny ability to make absolutely everyone he met feel like they were the most important person on earth. Also he was a musician. In a band. In Brooklyn. That made money. Honestly, it would have been more worrying if he hadn’t spent a good decade putting it about.
‘Slut-shaming your own husband,’ Alex said with a dramatic sigh as he leaned against the doorframe. ‘Go put that baby to bed. I’m making dinner.’
‘I always knew you’d make an amazing wife one day,’ I called, doing as I was told and carrying Alice through to her bedroom. Was there anything more erotic than a man making you dinner when you were totally knackered? No, I thought not.
Our Park Slope apartment was easily my favourite place in the entire world. Bloomingdale’s, Shake Shack and that random bodega that stocked Jaffa Cakes on 12th Street all ran a close second but, like, home is where the heart is and – more importantly – it was full of the best people and all my snacks.
Our place wasn’t as swanky as Erin’s West Village townhouse or as cool as Jenny’s new Financial District loft but it was my home; all comfy sofas and soft rugs and prints and pictures and things that made me happy. And right in the heart of it all was Alice’s room, a.k.a. the nursery of dreams. Alex had painted it four times before we found the perfect shade of pale pink, something that was harder to find than you might think. Of all the hills to die on, the colour of my daughter’s bedroom had been a fight so many people had chosen to go to war over. Jenny wanted to paint it blue to defy the patriarchy, Delia said it should be green to stimulate intellectual development, and my mother, despite saying she didn’t think it mattered one way or the other, had fourteen litres of Farrow & B
all ‘Middleton Pink’ shipped over from England in an attempt to instil some regal British backbone into her long-distance granddaughter. Unfortunately, when we got it on the walls, it looked a little bit like we’d dipped a brush into a bottle of calamine lotion that had gone bad in 1987 but, as far as Mum was concerned, Alice was absolutely sleeping in a nursery painted in a random shade of pink chosen by someone in marketing who wanted to make a quick buck off the royal family.
But far and away my favourite part of the nursery was Alice’s wardrobe. It turned out almost all designers made baby clothes. Teeny, tiny versions of their adult togs that were so much more affordable than their grown-up counterparts. There was no way I could spend three thousand dollars on a Gucci sweater for myself but two hundred dollars on a romper for the best-dressed baby in town? Um, yes. Al was already a sartorial masterpiece. Even though all she did was throw up on them. Actually, throwing up was best-case scenario. If I’d done what she did while decked out in head-to-toe Stella McCartney, I’d never have been able to look at myself in a mirror again.
‘But it’s OK when it’s you, isn’t it?’ I whispered, pulling back the sheets and laying her down gently. Crouching down at the side of the cot, I stared at her through the wooden bars of her tiny baby prison. Every night I wondered when I would get bored of this but it hadn’t happened yet. Al turned her head to look at me, fixing me with the same green eyes as her daddy. The spit of Alex, people said – his hair, his eyes, his full lips – but every so often, I could see a flash of myself in there. Usually when she was hungry or angry or both. Which made perfect sense, really.
‘So, do you think you’re going to sleep through tonight?’ I asked with the newfound optimism I’d discovered immediately after pushing eight pounds and six ounces of human being out of my body. Would she sleep through the night? Probably not! Would I keep hoping she might? Yes! For all eternity!