Part One
London
Chapter 1
As Bo Hazlehurst stood swaying on a packed tube carriage on her way to work one Monday morning, she couldn’t help but worry that life just didn’t feel like it was supposed to. The twenty-six years of her life so far had been blessed with good fortune: she had a respectable job, a loving family, and an active social life, all of which she knew she ought to feel grateful for. But she had read a feature in a magazine that weekend about the quarter-life crisis, and it had resonated with Bo’s sense that something was not quite right; that somehow, she was not a real grown-up, but rather a little girl who was just faking the whole adulthood thing.
Bo lurched sideways sharply, losing her footing as the train screeched to an abrupt halt in the tunnel. Mortified, she regained her balance, adjusted her bag over her shoulder and mumbled an apology to the balding businessman whose armpit she had just face-planted into. Her fellow passengers tutted and assumed the glum expressions that were appropriate to the unexplained delay and Bo did the same, trying to take her mind off her escalating quarter-life crisis by thinking about the day ahead.
She worked in the capital’s West End, for a firm which specialised in accountancy software. IT was, admittedly, not a field she had particularly aspired to during her three years studying psychology at the University of East Anglia, and she had dithered when she was offered the office assistant position at the end of her first summer after graduation. She had wondered whether something more enticing, more ‘her,’ might come along. But her parents had encouraged her not to turn down the opportunity to get her foot in the door with a reputable firm in a secure sector (‘The world will always need accountancy software,’ her father – himself an accountant – had intoned sagely), and so she had accepted the job.
Mildly elated that she had found a ‘proper’ job so quickly (while many of her friends were making do with temping or bar work), Bo had tried to put her reservations aside and enter working life with an open mind. It may not have been the most stimulating job, but she would be working in the heart of the West End, a stone’s throw from Oxford Street, which seemed like manna from heaven for a twenty-one-year-old who had spent the last three years living in student digs on a campus on the outskirts of Norwich. She envisaged lunch-hours spent browsing the clothes shops, meeting friends for lunch, or nipping into Selfridges to splurge at the make-up counter.
As the most junior member of the workforce, Bo was answerable to just about everyone in the company, and she spent her first six months at Aspect Solutions franking mail, updating the client database, fetching drinks for the company directors and, if she was lucky, taking the minutes at board meetings when one of the PAs was off sick. The job managed to be at once both boring and stressful and it didn’t take long for disillusionment to set in. The splurges at Selfridges were few and far between, as her modest salary did not stretch much beyond paying her rent, transport costs and chipping away at her stubbornly unyielding credit card balance. Besides, her office was located at the wrong end of Oxford Street for Selfridges, and sat squarely among the souvenir outlets and shops selling mobile phone cases. She stuck with it, however, and five years on had worked her way diligently up through the administrative ranks to the heady heights of marketing executive, with responsibility for the content and production of the company’s promotional material.
The stalled tube train eventually shunted back to life and fifteen minutes later, Bo emerged into the grey November drizzle at Oxford Circus station. She rummaged inside her handbag for her umbrella and shook it open on the pavement, waiting amid a surly crowd of commuters at the pedestrian crossing. At the appearance of the flashing green man, the throng surged forward, moving en masse in front of the line of buses and taxis waiting impatiently for the lights to change. Lowering her head to avoid the umbrella spokes of oncoming pedestrians, Bo turned right in front of the flagship Topshop store. She stole a fleeting glance at its huge glass-fronted displays, in which one of the androgynous white mannequins was wearing a cropped top and skin-tight jeans so low cut that its plastic hip bones protruded above the waistband. ‘She’ll catch her death in those,’ Bo muttered under her breath, before realising with a flash of embarrassment that she sounded just like her mother.
Bo took a left down a side street, keen to leave the busy thoroughfare behind, and held her breath as she darted between a line of queuing taxis, trying not to inhale the black fumes belching from their exhaust pipes. She hopped up onto the kerb to avoid being clipped by a lycra-clad courier weaving recklessly on and off the pavement, and inadvertently stepped into an oil-slicked puddle which had filled the dip in a cracked paving stone. She tutted, feeling the squelch of water inside her shoe and the cold dampness spreading up her tights.
Taking shelter under a coffee shop awning to shake the grimy water out of her shoe, she caught sight of her scowling reflection in the tinted window. It seemed to have become her habitual expression of late, to the point where Bo had noticed the beginnings of a permanent wrinkle forming between her eyebrows. It struck Bo as ironic that she was already developing wrinkles when, inside, she still felt that she was not yet a proper grown-up. Perhaps ‘premature ageing’ was another woe to add to her list of quarter-life concerns.
Bo generally rated herself a solid seven in terms of attractiveness, stretching to an eight-and-a-half if she had made a particular effort. She was not especially tall, but had been blessed with a naturally slim figure, clear skin and blue-grey eyes, and hair which, though naturally curly, could be tamed into elegant waves with the help of straighteners. There was no denying however, that she was not looking her best on this particular Monday morning. Dressed in the drab office-worker uniform of grey trench-coat and black trousers, she looked pallid and washed out. She raised a gloved hand to smooth the strands of hair currently clinging to her clammy forehead back into place, cursing the genetic inheritance that had given her hair that turned to frizz at the merest hint of moisture in the air.
Bo slipped her foot back inside her wet shoe and continued to weave north towards the ugly grey office block which housed Aspect Solutions. There she pushed open the heavy glass door and walked across the tiled lobby to the lift, letting her eyes rest on the list of companies located on each floor. Most of them had names which gave away nothing about what purpose they served or even what sector they were in. Several professed to be ‘agencies’ or ‘consultancies’, with meaningless abstract names that sounded to Bo more like the names of characters in Science Fiction than they did business organisations: Zeneca, Sentralis, Clostridia (this last one, on reflection, sounded to Bo more like a sexually transmitted disease than an alien overlord).
An electronic ping indicated that the lift had arrived at the fourth floor and, as the metal doors slid open, Bo steeled herself for another week at work.
‘Morning, Bo,’ chirped Chloe, the receptionist. Chloe had platinum hair, eyelash extensions and eyebrows which looked as if they’d been etched onto her forehead with a stencil.
‘Morning, Chloe,’ Bo smiled in reply, dropping her umbrella into the stand beside the water cooler. ‘Good weekend?’ She knew that Chloe liked nothing more on a Monday morning than to talk about her weekend’s antics.
‘Yeah, good thanks,’ beamed Chloe. ‘Out with the girls Saturday night for Kelly’s birthday. Oh. My. God. That girl can drink.’
Bo had met some of Chloe’s friends, when they had come along to her birthday drinks in the wine bar which served as Aspect’s regular after-work haunt. They had been all been equally as groomed as Chloe, their hair primped and teased to within an inch of its life, their skin an alarming shade of orange. Bo had felt positively middle-aged and prudish by comparison, especially once they had had a few
drinks and got on to the subject of their boyfriends and their sex lives (loudly and in graphic detail).
‘It was Jägerbombs all round,’ Chloe continued proudly. ‘Ended up getting a bit messy, y’know?’
Bo nodded, although inwardly she grimaced at the thought of what a messy night out involving Chloe, her girlfriends and Jägerbombs might involve.
‘Kelly was sick in the cab on the way home,’ Chloe went on, as if answering Bo’s unvoiced question. ‘"Oh my God, Kels,” I said. "Are you for real?” It was running all over the floor, under the seats, got on my shoes and everything. I went ape-shit. Those shoes were brand new!’ Chloe looked at Bo for outraged sympathy and Bo tried to assume an expression of empathy rather than revulsion.
‘Oh no,’ she murmured half-heartedly.
‘I ran them under the tap, when I got home, and they look all right now,’ she went on breezily. ‘Might need some deodorant on them to get rid of the smell, though,’ Chloe concluded with an air of practicality, rifling through the morning’s mail to find the wad of envelopes destined for the marketing department. ‘How ’bout you anyway? Get up to anything nice at the weekend?’ she asked, handing over the stack of mail.
‘Um, nothing special,’ answered Bo, flicking distractedly through the wedge of post.
‘Oh, right.’ Chloe looked disappointed, as if Bo had let her down by not having at least one scandalous anecdote with which to liven up her morning duties of answering phones and greeting visitors.
‘Well, see you later,’ Bo said with a faintly apologetic smile and a ‘must be getting on’ tone of voice.
‘See ya,’ Chloe chirruped in reply, distracted by the electronic ping which heralded the arrival of the next lift-load of Aspect workers.
Conscious of her left shoe squelching with every step, Bo made her way through the open-plan office to the bank of desks which comprised the marketing department. The first of her team to arrive, she pulled off her coat, switched on her computer and sank onto her swivel chair. Above the faint electrical hum of her computer, she heard a phone was ringing and, beyond the triple glazed windows, she could make out the distant pounding of a pneumatic drill from the Crossrail site on Oxford Street. It was the familiar soundtrack of the office, virtually unchanged since she had started working at the company five years earlier. Would it be the same five years from now, she wondered, and would she still be here to find out?
Claire, the marketing manager, arrived at her desk just as Bo had begun to scroll through the thirty-seven emails which had arrived since she had shut her computer down at six o’clock on Friday.
‘Morning, Claire, good weekend?’ Bo asked.
Claire was in her late-thirties, with two children under three and a perpetual air of harassed anxiety. This morning, she looked exhausted.
‘Don’t ask.’ Claire answered, grimacing. ‘Sick bug. Coming out of both ends of both children.’ Bo pulled a sympathetic face and fleetingly wondered whether she could ever love a child enough to be sick-nurse in such circumstances, or whether, when faced with a projectile-vomiting infant, she would simply recoil in horror and run from the room. She suspected the latter.
‘That can’t have been much fun,’ she said.
Claire took a deep, stoical breath. ‘Well, you know what they say,’ she replied in a long-suffering voice, ‘you’re not a real mother until you’ve had to wash your child’s puke out of your cleavage.’
‘Tea?’ asked Bo, standing up abruptly. There was only so much vomit-based chat she could handle first thing on a Monday morning.
‘Oh, yes please, Bo,’ Claire whimpered gratefully. Natasha, the department’s other executive and the assistant, Hayley, had arrived together and were removing their scarves and coats at the desks opposite. ‘Tea?’ Bo mouthed across the royal-blue desk dividers, and they both nodded.
The acrid aroma of burnt toast greeted Bo before she entered the office kitchen. Inside, Becky and Alison, two administrators from payroll, were side by side at the worktop. Becky was scraping a layer of black crumbs off the incinerated slice of Mother’s Pride, while Alison watched, sipping tea. The women were in their mid-thirties, one dark-haired and the other fair, but both with the same stocky build and surly expressions which had always made Bo feel slightly nervous around them. They reminded her of the girls she used to come up against in netball matches at school, who seemed to be all elbows and fingernails and would think nothing of flattening a smaller, slighter opponent such as Bo.
Bo gave a friendly nod of greeting, but the two women made no effort to let her pass, obliging Bo to squeeze past in the few spare inches between their combined width and the units on the other side of the narrow, windowless kitchen. Having salvaged the unburnt core of her slice of toast, Becky began to spread margarine liberally over it. She and Alison were chatting about their weekends, and they both steadfastly ignored Bo as she filled the kettle at the sink.
‘Good morning, ladies.’ Bo turned around to see Ben, one of the account managers, stride into the kitchen with the relaxed, lithe movements befitting to a twenty-nine year old who was confident of his appeal to women.
‘Morning, Ben,’ Alison and Becky replied in unison, instinctively moving aside to make space for him to pass. Bo said nothing, but turned back to face the kettle, concentrating on watching the plume of steam which was now issuing urgently from the spout.
‘Morning,’ Ben repeated in a quieter voice, as he arrived at the sink beside Bo and reached up to take a mug from the cupboard above her head. Bo glanced sideways at him.
‘Oh, hi,’ she mumbled. Ben dropped a teabag into his empty mug then placed it at the end of the row of four she had neatly lined up on the worktop, watching in silence as Bo filled the cups with boiling water. Bo sensed he was about to say something, when Becky’s voice piped up.
‘Good weekend, Ben?’ she asked, taking a bite of her jam-smeared slice of toast.
Bo’s back was to the room but her hand faltered momentarily in mid-pour and she splashed a puddle of boiling water onto the Formica. She tutted and reached for a cloth to wipe it up.
‘Great weekend, thank you,’ Ben replied, stepping away from the sink to reach for the plastic bottle of milk which he passed to Bo without making eye contact. She took it from him in silence. ‘Yourself?’ he asked Becky. ‘Get up to anything exciting on Saturday?’
Bo thought she detected a hint of sarcasm in his tone, but his rapt audience seemed not to have noticed.
‘Oh, nothing really, just a quiet night in in front of Strictly,’ answered Becky dejectedly.
‘Hey, don’t knock Strictly,’ Ben shot back in a tone of mock-reproach. ‘I won’t hear a bad word said against that show. Best thing on television.’ His charm offensive was working: Becky and Alison tittered. Stirring milk into the tea with her back to the room, Bo rolled her eyes.
‘I wouldn’t have had you down as a Strictly man, Ben,’ Alison chipped in. There was no mistaking the flirtatiousness in her voice.
Ben had heard it too, and reacted accordingly. ‘I’m a huge fan!’ he protested earnestly. ‘Dancing, celebrities, what’s not to love? And then of course there’s Tess Daly . . .’ Ben trailed off and, as if on cue, the two women started to giggle girlishly.
Bo dropped the used teaspoon into the sink where it clattered noisily against the stainless steel.
‘Ooh, fancy Tess Daly, do you Ben?’ Becky asked coquettishly.
Oh, for God’s sake, thought Bo. She glanced fleetingly sideways and caught the unmistakeable glint of enjoyment in Ben’s eye.
Ben feigned concentration for a few seconds. ‘Well, of course she’s the wrong side of forty,’ he said regretfully, making Alison and Becky gasp in horror, ‘but she is still fit.’ His face contorted as if he was tortured by indecision. ‘On balance, I think . . . I probably would.’
The two administrators erupted in a cacophony of ‘you can’t say that’, ‘she’s a married woman’ and other admonishments. Delighted by their reaction, Ben gave a ‘just bei
ng honest’ shrug. Bo yanked a battered plastic tray out from the cupboard beneath the sink and roughly assembled her four mugs onto it.
‘Your tea’s there,’ she said crisply, without looking at Ben. Then she picked up her tray and left, with the sound of Alison and Becky’s cackling laughter still ringing in her ears.
Bo returned to her bank of desks and distributed the teas to her team, to a chorus of grateful noises. She felt irrationally cross with Becky and Alison for being so easily manipulated by Ben, and for behaving like silly schoolgirls around him. Couldn’t they see that they had played into his hands? She dropped into her chair and stared blankly at her dormant computer screen. It wasn’t just Becky and Alison she was cross with. It was Ben, for his hypocrisy. Bo knew Ben’s real feelings about Strictly. They had discussed it that very weekend, in fact. She had mentioned the show in passing, on their way back to Ben’s flat after dinner, and he had given a scathing laugh and teased her for being prematurely middle-aged. Bo had become used to Ben’s acerbic sense of humour, which had a tendency to verge on spiteful. It was one of several things which had begun to bother Bo about their relationship, which had been going on, in secret, for the past eight months.
Chapter 2
Bo nudged her mouse to bring her monitor back to life, then absentmindedly clicked open the first email in her inbox, an all-users’ missive from human resources regarding company restructuring. She frowned at the screen, hoping to look like she hadn’t noticed Ben carrying his tea past her desk on his way back to his department. A couple of minutes later, a flashing icon indicated that she had received a message. Looking hot this morning, it read. Fancy being my plus one for a cocktail bar launch on Friday?
Bo stared at Ben’s message in a state of indecision. She felt indignant about the scene she had just had witnessed in the kitchen, and knew that to accept Ben’s offer would be a tacit acknowledgement that she had let him off the hook. And yet the pragmatic part of her considered the possible alternatives for her Friday night, knowing that the most likely scenario would be a solitary take-away on the sofa, in front of Gogglebox.
Hygge and Kisses Page 1