by Jane Fallon
I’m about to give up. The idea of being caught is too humiliating to contemplate. It’s already Wednesday; the scripts came in on Monday. I absolutely know Roz will have scheduled something in with the writer before the weekend, such is our punishing schedule. Twice I have to stop myself from asking her outright. The whole point is that – even though she will almost certainly guess it was me – she will have nothing concrete to go on, no trail of breadcrumbs I’ve dropped to follow.
I suffer another lunch with her and Lorraine, listening to more details of the party (celebrity guest DJ – ‘I’ll leave you to guess who it is but let’s just say if you named three DJs you’d heard of he’d be in there’; cake made by Dominique Ansel – ‘Hugh handled the opening of the flagship UK store’), but I’m still none the wiser. Finally, in the afternoon, I’m in the main office talking to Joe when Emma shouts over at Roz that Michael – the writer – has called to ask if they could make the meeting ten thirty tomorrow instead of ten because he has to take his daughter to school first.
Roz sighs. She is not a fan of professional people who put their children first. I learned early on not to bang on about Ashley too much in front of her because she would glaze over. If Ashley had been younger I certainly would never have let her know if a childcare issue had got in the way of work.
‘OK. If we have to. Tell him to get here as early as he can. Tell him we need to be done by twelve because I’ve got something else after.’
This probably isn’t true. She just wants to make a point. We pretty much all know this but no one says anything.
‘No problem,’ Emma says, picking up the phone. ‘I’ll call him back.’
Now I just have to find a way to lose the scripts without anyone knowing.
I’m lucky that, for once, everyone leaves promptly at six, apart from Juliet who will be in the studio until seven. I have a minor panic when I think Roz might be about to take the scripts home with her to look them over one last time, but then I see her put them in the bottom drawer of her desk. She doesn’t turn the key in the lock. Why would she? I just have to wait until the coast is clear, grab them and run.
I wait way longer than is necessary, terrified that someone might remember something they’ve forgotten and come back for it. And then I start thinking what if the filming wraps early and Juliet walks in, so I check the TV screen on the wall to make sure they are in the middle of a scene, steel myself, put my coat on, stride over to Roz’s desk, open the drawer and stuff the three scripts in my bag before I can change my mind. I don’t have time to shred them. I have no option but to take them home with me. I just want to get out of there.
On the train platform I consider throwing them in the bin but I have visions of all the TV shows I’ve seen where the police go back over the CCTV to catch the criminal in the act. OK, yes, I admit, I may be overreacting a tiny bit. But besides, it would be just my luck that a member of the public would pull them out and go running to the press with one of our closely guarded storylines. I sit there with them burning a hole in my bag. Once home I stuff them under my bed in one of those big plastic boxes where I keep jumpers I never wear. My heart pounds. I’m not cut out for this.
Thursday goes exactly as I imagined it would. I’m in my little glass office when Roz arrives at about ten to ten. She takes her coat off and hangs it up. Waves a hello. I try to act naturally, wave back and smile. She goes off to the kitchen and returns with a coffee. Joe, Lorraine and Emma are already at their desks. Juliet’s coat is slung over the back of her chair. I made sure I was a couple of minutes later than usual in the hope I wouldn’t be first in and therefore prime suspect, and Emma and Joe will be able to vouch for the fact that they, at least, were here before me. Roz perches on the side of Lorraine’s desk. I can’t hear what they’re saying but they’re laughing about something, oblivious – or more likely indifferent – to the fact that the others are trying to work.
It’s five past ten. Roz goes round and sits at her own desk. She opens the top drawer, reaches in and pulls out her make-up bag. Gets out a lipstick and a little mirror and touches up her magenta gloss, something she does at least five times a day. Runs her tongue over her teeth. I can hear my pulse in my ears. I try to keep my head down, concentrate on working – or at least, looking as if I am – but my eyes keep drifting over, like a motorway rubbernecker. Lorraine leans over and shows her something on her phone. Roz cackles.
Ten past. Roz calls over to Emma to ask if she’ll go to the café and pick up decent coffees when Michael arrives.
‘Of course,’ Emma says. ‘No problem.’
Roz reaches down towards the bottom drawer of the desk. Slides it open. It’s as if everything is playing out in slow motion. Her hand reaches in. Feels around. She leans over. Opens the drawer wider. Stands up and crouches next to it, peering in.
I force my head down towards my desk, even though I’m now staring at nothing. I allow just my eyes to drift back up.
Roz opens all the other drawers in her desk in turn and rifles through them, getting more frantic.
She looks over at Lorraine. ‘I can’t find my scripts.’
Lorraine jumps up to help her and they start going through the desk drawers again. I can hear Roz saying, ‘I put them in here last night. For fuck’s sake. Emma, do you …’
Emma’s phone rings. She answers. Looks over apologetically at Roz. ‘Michael’s here.’
Roz slams down a pile of papers on her desk.
‘I can print you off another set,’ Emma says and Roz snaps back at her, ‘That’s no use. They have my notes on.’
She glares around the office accusingly. I make myself look up, look confused and sympathetic. Her eyes alight on me.
‘What’s happened?’ I say.
She turns away. She knows it’s me; of course she does. But there’s nothing she can do to prove it. Welcome to the club, I think. Welcome to my world.
‘You’ll have to tell him we need to postpone till tomorrow,’ she barks at Emma. ‘He’ll have to come back in.’
I know that Michael lives way down in Sussex somewhere. It’s not a question of him just hopping back on the Tube and popping in.
‘OK,’ Emma says, picking up the phone. ‘What time shall I say?’
Roz ignores the question. ‘And then print me off a new set and I’m going home to work on them there.’
Emma gets on the phone. I can’t hear what she’s saying but then she covers the mouthpiece with her hand and calls over to Roz. ‘He says tomorrow is difficult. He could do Monday.’
‘Fuck’s sake,’ Roz says again too loudly. ‘Just tell him to rearrange things. He needs to come in tomorrow.’
‘Do you want to speak to him?’ Emma pleads, understandably not wanting to be the one to have to deliver Roz’s unreasonable demand.
‘No,’ Roz barks. ‘Just tell him.’
Ten minutes later she has her coat back on, a new batch of scripts in her bag and she’s stomping out of the office. Michael held his ground and said that he had family commitments and he wasn’t going to ruin everyone else’s plans just because Roz had had to cancel at the last minute. He’s booked to come in on Monday. Good for him. I briefly wonder if I should try hiding Roz’s scripts again but I think I’d be pushing my luck. And besides, there’s no way she will leave her notes somewhere I can find them after this.
At lunchtime Juliet walks into my office without knocking. I look up, irritated.
‘Yes?’
She looks down at me, sitting behind my desk, and I immediately feel at a disadvantage. ‘I just wondered what was going on. Emma told me about Roz’s scripts going missing, and I know similar things have been happening to you. If there’s a problem shouldn’t Glen be told about it?’
‘Everything’s under control,’ I say snappily. The last thing I need is her questioning my judgement.
‘Let’s hope so,’ she says, turning and walking out.
Later I shut my office door and pick up the phone to call Michael in my
capacity as head of department.
‘Listen,’ I say once we’ve got the niceties out of the way. ‘I heard what happened this morning. I just wanted to check you were OK about coming back in on Monday.’
‘I’ve got no choice, have I?’ He’s still in a bad mood. I wonder if I can steer him towards complaining to Glen about Roz, but it’s a risky move. ‘I’ll be honest, Holly, I was a bit pissed off by Roz’s attitude. I mean, she’s the one who fucks up and then she tries to insist I cancel my plans and come back up tomorrow.’
I think about how I would handle this if I were just doing my job properly, without any of the politics. I would try to smooth things over. ‘I know. It was out of order, but I think she was just in a panic. She probably feels like an idiot for overreacting.’
He sighs, unconvinced. ‘Let’s hope so.’
‘Go off and have a nice weekend. Look on the bright side, you don’t have any work to do now.’
Thankfully he laughs. ‘You should be a politician.’
‘Like I don’t have enough problems,’ I say.
‘I appreciate you calling. You didn’t have to.’
‘I’ll probably see you on Monday,’ I say, putting the phone down. I’m glad I made the call. I remind myself that I mustn’t lose sight of the fact that the most important thing is doing my job well. If I can do that then I can keep it, I can keep on helping my daughter out, I’ll be bulletproof.
20
Dee is on the phone. It’s Saturday evening and I’m home alone. I have no plans this weekend. None. With everything that’s going on at work I just need some time to veg out on my own, to process what’s happening. I’m thankful that Hattie, although she hasn’t gone to her mum’s, has gone out for a drink with friends in south London, and will be staying over afterwards. We did have a coffee together this morning because she came in to fill her kettle when I had just boiled mine and it would have felt churlish not to offer. She’s easy to talk to. I was tempted to tell her the latest – the party, my retaliation – but I held back because I don’t know her well enough yet. I don’t want her thinking I’m some kind of vengeful psycho. I’ll fill her in next time she, Dee and I share a glass of wine. That way I can make it sound more like a funny anecdote and less like a bad B movie.
Anyway, this evening, far from relaxing, I’ve been pacing the floor waiting for news from Dee’s mission. She called me just before they left home, to tell me that Gavin, far from being annoyed once he’d found out where they were actually going, thought it was completely hilarious. He had offered to be the one to strike up a conversation with Hugh. I could hear him laughing in the background, and it made me happy that they were having fun, that they sounded more like the Dee and Gav of old.
‘Just be careful,’ I said. ‘Don’t say anything that’ll give the game away, either of you.’
‘You don’t say,’ she said sarcastically.
I ignored her. ‘I love that you’re doing this. Take photos.’
That was an hour and a half ago. Anxious though I’ve been I didn’t expect to hear anything from her until late in the evening. Until, probably, they were on their way home at the earliest. Maybe even until tomorrow. That hadn’t stopped me checking the time every five minutes, or motoring my way through the lion’s share of a bottle of Pinot Gris.
My mobile rings. Even though I’ve been staring at it most of the evening I still jump and spill my wine.
‘Are you there?’ I say by way of greeting. I mop ineffectually at the spillage with a cushion.
‘We are.’ I can’t hear any background noise. ‘The weird thing is that Hugh isn’t.’
‘Maybe he’s making a big entrance later. Guest of honour and all that.’
‘I don’t think so,’ she says. ‘Because it’s not just him that’s not here. No one’s here. There’s no party. I asked one of the bar staff in case you got the night wrong and they had no idea what I was on about. They said they never let the upstairs room out for parties any more because they had too many complaints from the neighbours.’
‘Are you in the right place?’
‘We’re where you told us to be.’ She quotes the name of the pub and the road at me. It’s definitely the place where Roz claimed the party was going to be. At least I think it was. Shit, what if I’ve got it wrong?
‘I’m sure that was it. Damn.’
‘Hold on,’ Dee says. I can hear Gavin saying something in the background but I can’t work out what. I feel terrible that I’ve made them traipse halfway across London for nothing. Ruined their fun night out. ‘Ooh, good idea,’ I hear her say.
Then she’s back on the phone. ‘Gav says what’s their address? It’s near here, isn’t it?’
‘What? No, you can’t go round there …’
‘We’ll drive past it and have a look. Just out of interest. See if they’re having it there and she made up the stuff about the pub to make it sound like a bigger deal.’
I have to admit I’m curious. I want to know the extent of Roz’s lies, how much anything she says is based on the truth. ‘OK.’
I give her the address, double-checking the number of the house. ‘I don’t know which flat they’re in, but I guess it’ll be obvious if there’s a party in one of them. You can’t gatecrash it if it’s there, though. It’d be way too obvious.’
‘We’re just going to have a look. Stop panicking.’
I make her promise to call me again once they’ve established anything. And then I pour myself another glass of wine.
Twenty minutes later my mobile finally rings. I answer so quickly she must realize I’ve practically had my finger hovering over the key for that whole time, because she says, ‘Sorry, sorry. It took longer than it should to find it and then we parked up outside for a while …’
‘And?’ I say impatiently.
‘She’s got short blonde hair, right? With pink bits?’
‘Exactly. So it is there? The party?’
‘No. No sign of a party. Nothing. But we did see a woman with hair like that in the ground-floor flat. It looked as if she was cooking. She was in her PJs so I don’t think she was expecting fifty people to descend any second.’
‘So she made the whole party thing up? Unbelievable. I wonder if it’s even his birthday. Did you see him?’
‘No. But then we could only see into the kitchen. It’s a bit of a shithole, to be honest.’
‘This whole thing is so fucking weird. So what are you going to do now you’re all dressed up and nowhere to go?’
‘Best night we’ve had for ages,’ Dee says, laughing. ‘Now we’re going to drive home via the chippy and fall asleep on the sofa.’
‘Sounds perfect,’ I say. We make a plan to see each other on Tuesday evening, but not before I promise to ring her and report back on whatever Roz says about the party on Monday.
‘Not that she’s likely to be chatting to me about it. She one hundred per cent knows I was the one who took her scripts.’
‘Good,’ Dee says. ‘That means she knows you’re on to her. She won’t dare try and fuck things up for you again.’
‘Let’s hope so,’ I say. More than anything I just want things to be back to normal.
‘I guarantee it.’
Roz is holding court in the weekly meeting. We’re all there but, in truth, her audience numbers are dwindling. The only person lapping up her stories now is Lorraine. Well, and me today, because Roz is describing the fabulous birthday party that she threw for Hugh at the weekend, in colourful detail.
I want someone to ask her where it was, just so I can check I had my details right, and thankfully Glen – who is for the most part oblivious to the tensions swirling around just under the slick surface of the department – does just that.
‘The Admiral,’ she says, clearly pleased that someone is showing an interest. ‘In Holland Park. We took over their upstairs on Saturday night.’
OK, so I wasn’t going mad. Right place. Right night.
‘So who else was there?�
� Lorraine says, tongue practically hanging out. This should be my cue to call the meeting to order but I’m in no hurry today. I see Juliet shoot me a look.
Roz has already name-dropped Richard Branson and Sting and Trudi. Now she lists two celebrity chefs, an early-morning-TV host and an actress from the biggest show on TV. Lorraine oohs and aahs like the crowd at Wimbledon.
‘Please tell me you took pictures,’ she drools.
‘God, no,’ Roz says. ‘I wanted them all to feel relaxed, not like they were on show or anything.’
It all sounds so implausible now I know it’s not true. I can’t believe I used to fall for it myself. She burbles on some more about the food (‘Heston did it as a favour!’) and the Dominique Ansel cake. She’s about to enlighten us about a conversation she had with Nigella in the queue for the Ladies when I remember I’m supposed to be at work here, so I interrupt.
‘I guess we should get on. Just in case anyone has to be anywhere else …’
Lorraine looks crestfallen. ‘I totally want more details later.’
‘Oh, me too,’ I say with sincerity. ‘Now …’
Later I shut myself in my office and call Dee.
‘Fuck me,’ she says once I’ve filled her in.
‘My thoughts exactly.’
I’m interrupted before I can say any more by Glen sticking his head round my door.
‘Fancy lunch?’
‘Sure,’ I say, even though the idea makes me a bit nervous. I’ve never had lunch with him before.
‘One o’clock? I’ll get Emma to book that Italian near the station. I’ll meet you there because I have a meeting in town with the big boys first.’
‘OK. Great.’ I assume by the big boys he means the channel. ‘I’ll see you then.’
I wait for him to leave and then turn my attention back to the phone. ‘Gotta go. See you tomorrow.’
I’m at the restaurant by five to one. It’s raining and I’m half soaked after my walk from the studios, but it’s hard not to be cheered by the sight of the fairy lights twinkling in the windows. The whole place looks as if it’s been designed for a ‘Most Italian-Looking Italian Restaurant’ competition. There are empty Chianti bottles hanging from the ceiling, checked tablecloths, dripping candles – unlit at this time of day – and bunches of dried red chillies poking out from behind watercolours of azure skies. Attentive waiters in crisp white shirts hover with giant pepper mills. I love it. But that doesn’t make me any less nervous. I tell myself I’m halfway through my probation period, so it makes sense that Glen would want to catch up. It’s routine.