‘Heartiest congratulations on a sterling performance, Cassandra my dear,’ says Bob Thornton, the social diarist, coming over and pecking me elegantly on each cheek. ‘Caught the show on the old telly-box just now and may I just say, you were the absolute epitome of grace under pressure.’
‘Oh, thanks . . . emm . . . Bob,’ I mutter, mortified at everyone looking at me and feeling, as I always do, cheeky for even calling him by his first name.
Bob, I should point out, is actually Sir Bob, although he doesn’t use his full title as he considers it vulgar ever since, as he puts it, the Queen started knighting supermarket barons and soap stars. He’s wearing a beautifully cut, slightly crumpled white linen suit today, with a pink hankie just peeping out of the top of his breast pocket. In short, he looks as if he just stepped off the set of a Merchant Ivory movie and is having a nice little breather before he goes back to governing India with the rest of his pals from the Raj. All the girls in the office think he’s adorably sweet and cuddly, which, as we all know, is girl-code for: ‘Hmm, very nice guy, absolutely lovely, but let’s face it, probably gay.’
‘May I offer you a refreshing cup of peppermint tea after your ordeal, my dear? I’ve just infused some.’
That’s the other thing about Sir Bob – sorry, I mean Bob. He categorically refuses to go to Starbucks downstairs like the rest of us because he feels it’s tasteless and crude to drink out of paper cups with bits of cardboard wrapped around them. Instead he brings his own cups and saucers to work, on the grounds that the correct way to drink herbal tea is out of posh china and nothing else. I wouldn’t mind, but he can’t be any more than about thirty.
‘Oh thanks, Bob, you read my thoughts,’ I say. ‘I’d love one.’
‘Cassie! I’m so bloody proud of you!’ squeals Sandra Kelly, coming over to give me one of her trademark bear-hugs. Sandra is the magazine’s restaurant critic and for a split second I have to squint hard to recognize her; not that I’m losing my marbles, at least not entirely, you understand, it’s just that today she’s resplendent in a jet-black, bobbed wig with a huge, face-covering pair of wraparound sunglasses. Sandra, who’s known and feared throughout the restaurant community, once read about a critic in New York who disguised herself every time she went out to eat, on the grounds that this meant she was treated exactly the same way as any other punter, for better or for worse. Worse, usually. Sandra’s reviews have been known to make or break a kitchen and one well-known restaurateur has even nicknamed her Foodzilla of Fleet Street.
‘Saw the Breakfast Club and you were a total wow,’ she squeals, thumping me on the back. ‘When you saw yer one’s engagement ring inside her gardening gloves, you should have seen that snotty presenter glaring daggers at you. What’s her name? The one with a face like a beaten tambourine?’
‘Oh, you mean Maura,’ I say, gratefully taking a nice cuppa from good old Sir Bob. Sorry, sorry, I mean Bob. ‘Love the new wig, by the way. Very . . . lemme think . . . Dorothy Parker.’
‘You’re on the money, honey. Exactly the look I’m going for. I’m having lunch today at that new place in town—’
Just then Lucy from Features shrieks over from the window, ‘Look out, everyone! Piranha in the tank! Just getting out of a taxi! Now!’
There’s instant panic as people scatter to the four winds, racing back to their desks; Sandra disappears into a lift and immediately a library-like hush descends on the whole office, broken only by the tap-tapping sound of fingernails busily clickety-clacking off keyboards. The only person who looks and behaves exactly as before is Sir Bob, who strolls back to his desk, cool and unflappable, sipping tea from the good china with his little finger up in the air, looking like he’s a guest in the royal enclosure at Ascot.
I should explain. ‘Piranha in the tank’ is the Tattle office code word for when our esteemed editor is on her way in. Yes, the Dragon Lady herself. And believe me, you know neither the day nor the hour when she’ll appear. Her actual name is Amanda Crotty and for a while there she was nicknamed Snotty Crotty, but somehow the Dragon Lady just stuck. Honestly, it sums up her personality a helluva lot better.
Here is a vox pop of how we all feel about her, in no particular order.
ME: No kidding, the woman is about as cuddly as a diamond-cutter.
CHARLENE (before she got fired): The Dragon Lady is actually a man in drag who shaves with a cut-throat razor every first Friday of the month. I have proof.
SANDRA: She’s like a female Gordon Ramsay, except with even worse language.
SIR BOB: That ghastly woman is snappier than a crocodile handbag with a pair of matching shoes.
LUCY FROM FEATURES: I’m not saying for definite that she’s gay; all I’m saying is that she goes around in flat shoes dressed like a prison warden, she never wears make-up, the hair is cropped like k. d. lang and I have yet to see the woman wearing a bra. Go figure.
Secretly, I once had a flash about the Dragon Lady that she’d find love on a gay-and-lesbian mountain hike, but I didn’t dare tell her for fear she’d throw me out of the window. I have a very highly developed sense of self-preservation, as you see.
Anyway, it’s gone as quiet as a tomb in here and I take advantage of the silence to start wading through the mountain of letters waiting for me for next week’s column. I’ve got to see something; I just have to.
OK, focus.
I’m running my fingers over my letters pile, as if I’m some kind of human metal detector or divining rod, willing something to jump out at me and grab my attention, when whaddya know, it does.
It’s handwritten, in spidery writing that I’d swear looks almost tear-splodged. Perfect. A good, juicy relationship dilemma, with a bit of luck. I rip it open.
Not to put too much pressure on myself or anything, but my entire future livelihood depends on what, if anything, I can see here.
Dear Cassandra,
I wouldn’t be writing to you at all, only I’m at my wits’ end here and I really don’t know who else I can turn to. Freud once said that we are never so helplessly unhappy as when we lose love and that’s exactly the position I find myself in.
The thing is, Cassandra, what do you do when your ex moves on and you don’t? It’s barely five months since our break-up and I just found out he’s got engaged to his latest. ENGAGED. No matter what way you look at it, this is meant to be his transitional person; she’s not, under any circumstances, supposed to be The One. I’ve been phoning and texting him and when we first went our separate ways, he would always get back to me and even though we’d broken up, at least we’d still talk, but now he doesn’t even return calls. All my friends say I should look through the relationship rear-view mirror and try to focus only on the negative things about our time together. I presume they mean this as a sort of cheer-up-you’re-so-much-better-off-without-him exercise, but the thing is, I can’t do it.
I’m still in love with him. And now he’s with someone else and he’s happy and it’s just killing me. Cassandra, I’m almost thirty-five years old and of course, as everyone around me says, the sensible thing is for me to forget about this guy, get back out there again and try to meet someone else but I just can’t bring myself to, mainly because I really do believe that this is the man for me. It just mightn’t look that way, that’s all. So now I find myself cast in the incredibly embarrassing role of ‘needy and desperate ex who just won’t let go’, and I can just envisage him physically shuddering every time he sees my number coming up on his phone, before he shuts it off. Which he does, every time, unfailingly.
Please understand, Cassandra, I’m neither needy nor desperate; this is purely and simply the way this guy makes me behave. I just can’t believe I’ve turned into this Glenn-Close-from-Fatal-Attraction type. For God’s sake, I live in a house where my curtains match the duvet covers. I have wooden floors and underfloor heating. This is NOT me. All I want is for this man to re-evaluate me and for us to get back together.
Help me. Please help me.
&
nbsp; Barbara in Dublin
Oh God, I suddenly feel so achingly sorry for her. I mean, we’ve all been there, haven’t we? The amount of times I’ve been devastated over a guy and then, after some time has passed, looked at him and thought: ‘This man put my heart through the wringer and all the while I barely made the tiniest little foothold in his.’
Now, normally I’d do my level best to bounce back and try to save face by claiming I never fancied him anyway, but somehow, I feel that kind of advice just isn’t good enough for this poor woman.
OK, Cassie, you’re on, hop to it.
I sit and finger the paper, madly trying to get a picture of her as she wrote me this heartbreaking letter with such searing honesty.
Nothing.
OK. I try not to get panicky and instead focus on how intelligent and articulate she comes across in her letter.
Still nothing.
Shit, you wouldn’t exactly have to be psychic to come to that conclusion about her character, now would you? Come on! The silence in the office is almost like a mortuary at this stage and you’d think that would help me concentrate, but it doesn’t.
Oh hell, now I’m really in trouble.
I’m frantically racking my brains, trying to pick up something, anything, a feeling, a face, an initial, a star sign . . .
Still nothing.
Right, now I’ve bypassed panic and am starting to feel terror, real terror. This could really be it. This could spell the end of my career. My palms are starting to sweat, my mouth is all dry and I’ve barely even noticed the Dragon Lady stepping out of the lift and into the main office.
Keep the head, Cassie, keep the head. You can do this.
Another deep, soothing breath. I remind myself that an awful lot of the advice that I give readers is just plain, practical common sense.
Right then, good start. What would I say if it was one of my pals in this position? Charlene, for example? Oh God, we’d all give her a dog’s abuse. I can just hear Marc with a C slagging her off and saying things like: ‘Isn’t it such a shame that we don’t live in a universe where needy and desperate are turn-ons?’
I pick a pen and paper and start drafting a rough response. Really rough.
Dear Barbara,
I felt so sorry for you, reading your letter. We’ve all been in that awful, post-break-up dark place where it’s nigh on impossible to see the wood for the trees. And anyone who says they’ve never got in-text-icated and sent a few messages they shouldn’t have, particularly after a few glasses of wine, is a dirty big liar. But then, it’s only when you come up for air that you really get true relationship perspective and think: What was I doing? You really should listen to your friends and even though it probably feels like medieval torture, try to get yourself back out there again. You’re only mid-thirties and, sure, that’s nothing. You could try joining a book club or a gym. My friend Marc with a C says the fitness centre he works at is a total pick-up joint and that if they turned the lights down a bit lower and put Barcardi Breezers in the water coolers instead of Volvic, there’d be more mad coupling going on there than in Lillie’s Bordello, any night of the week.
I stop for a sec, reread what I’ve written, scrunch it up and throw it in the bin. Total crap; my granny could have come up with that gem of advice. To get over a guy you should try joining a gym? Ugh, vomit. Can’t believe I even bothered writing that.
‘Morning Cassandra. Having difficulties readjusting to your day job after all the glamour of television?’
Oh shit, I don’t believe this. It’s the Dragon Lady herself, standing over my desk and glowering down at me, all five feet ten of her. Just when I thought my day couldn’t get any worse.
‘Oh hi, emm, morning . . . emm’ – at this point I’m frantically racking my brains to remind myself to call her by her real name – ‘Amanda.’ I beam, trying to sound all cheery and confident and upbeat, as if she comes over to talk to me every day.
Which she doesn’t ever, to anyone. Not unless you’re in really, really majorly big trouble. Like the last time I missed my deadline and there was blue murder.
It was through no fault of my own, you understand. I just left everything till the last minute, as per usual, but I had a watertight schedule all worked out in my head – I was going to get up at four a.m. on the morning my column was due – but then something urgent came up and I ended up delivering it late. Very late. Flirting with disaster late. Can’t even remember what it was that delayed me now . . . Oh yeah. Charlene threw a surprise party for herself (to mark the fact that it was exactly six months to the day between her last birthday and her next birthday). I’m not joking, there were guests still wandering around her house/mansion three days later, which in Charlene-land is the mark of a triumphantly successful night.
Anyway, I knew I had a very good reason for being so – ahem – eleventh hour.
That time.
‘Earth to Cassandra?’
Oh shit. She’s still here, still standing in front of me, and now I’m dimly aware that most of the office is looking over. Nor can I blame them; whenever the Dragon Lady decides to tear strips off any of us, you’re pretty much guaranteed a highly entertaining side-show.
‘If your head hasn’t been completely turned by your fifteen minutes of fame, perhaps you’d step into my office for a minute?’
And with that the old Nazi in nylons strides off, at her usual two steps at a time, leaving me to trail behind her in my little kitten heels with what feels like the whole office staring at me. I’m not joking, it’s just like in that film, Dead Man Walking.
As the Dragon Lady makes for her office/torture chamber, Lucy from Features has the misfortune to look up and catch her eye. ‘Morning, Amanda,’ she chirrups brightly.
Whereupon the Dragon Lady barks back at her: ‘Nothing to see here, dearie, so why don’t you just go back to flicking through your Gary Larson desktop calendar and saying, “I don’t get it, I don’t get it,” over and over again.’
Jesus, she’s really in a firing humour this morning.
Poor Lucy looks really shaken at her sheer rudeness and I give her a weak smile as I walk past her.
Lucy’s only been here a few weeks, I should point out. No one who’s worked here for a long time would ever dream of trying to exchange pleasantries with the Dragon Lady. Complete waste of time trying to be sycophantic with her.
Everyone’s looking at me and everyone, myself included, is thinking the same thing. There’s really only one reason why you get hauled into that office and it begins with ‘F’ and ends with me standing at the back of the dole queue.
So, trying really hard not to throw up with nerves, I step into the lair of the she-wolf, she bangs the door tightly behind me and I’m immediately struck by the sheer horribleness of her workspace. It’s sparse and clinical, a bit like a doctor’s surgery, with not as much as one item that would personalize the place and – I dunno – humanize the Dragon Lady a bit more. Like a family photo or a novelty mouse mat. Or even a mug that says ‘World’s most terrifying boss’. Something. Anything. This place is about as close to a prison cell as you can get. There are two empty seats across from her desk and as I make to sit down on one of them, her mobile rings.
‘Not there,’ she growls at me before answering her call. ‘Do you mind? That seat is reserved for my bad mood.’
Oh help, I must really be for it.
I do my best to keep a cool head as I slither into the chair furthest away from her while she snaps away at some poor eejit down the phone.
‘Well, I sincerely hope, for your sake, that this is a phone call of apology,’ she’s snarling and, I swear to God, she sounds just like a female version of Alan Sugar or Donald Trump or one of those I-eat-your-type-for-breakfast types. If you know what I mean. Anyway, while she’s verbally savaging away, my mind races.
OK. I can think of two possible reasons why she wants to see me and, let’s face it, neither one of them will have me coming up smelling like guest-room soap.
The old gizzard saw me on TV this morning and somehow, without even knowing it, I’ve inadvertently broken some clause in my contract with Tattle that says, ‘Thou shalt not ever go on the telly without obtaining prior permission from thine editor, signed in blood on a full moon on Halloween night with bloodhounds baying in the background for dramatic effect.’ Or something like that.
OK, this one isn’t actually too bad, this I might just conceivably be able to blag my way out of. I’ll plead complete and total ignorance. Brilliant. Which is the truth. I mean, everyone knows you just sign work contracts and wait for your pay cheque to roll in and that’s the end of that. No one actually reads all the tiny little small print – do they?
She’s had it with the way I’m always late with deadlines and me going on the TV this morning was the final straw and now she’s firing me. For not being a model of efficiency and getting through the mound of letters I get sent every day.
Can this really be happening to me? In a single morning, I lose my job, my psychic ability and my livelihood? Oh God, this is a living nightmare. I’ll have no money, Jo earns even less than I do so she won’t be able to support me so I’ll have to move back in with my parents and be twenty-eight and pathetic with no career, and I’ll have to go and stack the shelves part-time in our local Tesco and every time I get sent by the dole office to a proper job interview, I’ll tell them I used to be psychic but completely lost it and they’ll all roar laughing at me.
Sing, fat lady, sing, my career is almost at an end . . .
OK, there’s nothing else for it. I’ll just have to beg/ grovel/plead to hang on to my column with the added condition thrown in that I will never, ever, as long as I live, miss any deadline ever again. Really, truly, cross my heart.
If I can just get my gift back and hang on to my job, I will become a model employee. I will never disappear off for long chats and cups of leaf tea with Sir Bob, sorry Bob. I will stop using Tattle magazine time to surf the net looking for cheapie flights/holidays/discount sample sales. I faithfully promise.
I Never Fancied Him Anyway Page 9