Never Mind The Botox: Rachel

by Penny Avis

  ‘And so, Miss Altman, just to conclude, what are your views on penis enlargement?’ Natalie asked.

  ‘I’m definitely all for it, particularly after a few glasses of wine,’ said Rachel, picking up the glass of wine in front of her.

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ said Shali, raising her glass.

  The three of them clinked glasses and then burst out laughing.

  ‘Well, there’s no doubt that you know your stuff,’ said Natalie, catching her breath.

  ‘You think?’ Rachel asked, still needing plenty of reassurance.

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Shali.

  Rachel knew that Shali and Natalie were hardly a knowledgeable audience, with what little they did know about cosmetic surgery having been gleaned from magazines or TV shows − unlike the Equinox Practise, who were leading experts in their field. Still, it was better than nothing and she certainly felt more ready than she had done earlier.

  ‘Right, now Miss Whiplash has finished with you, on to the important stuff,’ said Shali. ‘What are you going to wear?’

  ‘God, I’ve not even thought about that. I’m not sure it really matters that much,’ said Rachel.

  ‘Of course it matters! People only listen to about half of what you say − the rest is all based on appearance. Or something like that anyway,’ said Shali.

  ‘I think what you mean is that only about twenty per cent of the impression you make is what you say, the rest is all non-verbal. And Shali’s right, appearance is a huge part of that,’ said Natalie.

  ‘The bedroom it is then!’ Shali declared and stood up, grabbing her glass and the rest of the open bottle. They went through into Rachel’s bedroom where Natalie and Shali took up positions sitting on the bed while Rachel dipped in and out of her immaculately organised wardrobe.

  ‘How about this?’ she asked, holding up a black trouser suit.

  ‘Too dull,’ said Shali. ‘You need something with more personality than that.’

  Natalie nodded in agreement.

  Rachel flicked through the hangers and pulled out a navy trouser suit with a dusky pink pinstripe.

  ‘Better, but still a bit safe,’ said Shali.

  ‘How about a dress?’ suggested Natalie.

  ‘With boots,’ added Shali.

  Rachel thought of Audrey Fox flouncing across the foyer of The Brook Hotel in her dress and boots. She had certainly made an impression. She took out a damson checked shift dress with cap sleeves and a pair of black knee-length, suede boots. She raised her eyebrows enquiringly at Shali and Natalie.

  ‘Perfect − professional with attitude,’ said Shali.

  ‘Yup, that will do the trick,’ said Natalie.

  As Rachel put away her clothes, Shali and Natalie sat chatting on the bed. Natalie idly picked up a CD of Harry’s that was still on the bedside table.

  ‘Bit trendy for you this, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s Harry’s. He’s well into them.’ Rachel paused. ‘Or he was, anyway.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Natalie, putting the CD down. ‘I shouldn’t fiddle.’

  ‘That’s okay. I was probably going to throw it away soon anyway,’ said Rachel. She looked at the floor, didn’t move for a few moments and then burst into tears.

  Natalie leapt up off the bed and put her arm round Rachel. ‘Sorry, Rachel,’ she said, ‘that was really thoughtless of me.’

  ‘It’s alright, it’s not your fault,’ said Rachel. ‘I’m just really tired, that’s all. Bloody Harry. I don’t know what to do. He’s desperate for me to forgive him.’

  She blew her nose, sat down and recounted to Shali and Natalie their pub encounter earlier in the week.

  ‘He really is an arse,’ said Natalie. ‘You’re way more interesting than him; he’s just too arrogant to see it.’

  ‘No, Natalie, tell us what you really think,’ said Shali.

  Natalie grinned. ‘Sorry, again. Mouth engaging before brain, as usual.’

  ‘I’ve said I’ll ring him to let him know my final decision in the next few days,’ said Rachel.

  ‘Final decision on what?’ Natalie asked, somewhat incredulously.

  ‘On whether I’ll give him another chance,’ said Rachel.

  Natalie raised her eyebrows and opened her mouth to speak. But Shali glared at her and she shut it again.

  ‘Only you can decide whether to do that,’ said Shali. ‘Look, let’s go back into the sitting room and I’ll raid the cupboards for chocolate.’

  She came into the sitting room a minute later holding various packets of biscuits. ‘Chocolate chip cookies, Viennese shortbread or some oat baked crumbly things?’

  ‘Chocolate chip cookies,’ said Natalie and Rachel in unison.

  As they sat on the sofa chatting and eating cookies, Rachel suddenly felt an overwhelming desire to go to bed. Her head was starting to ache and she was totally worn out.

  ‘Guys, I’m really sorry but I think I need to crash,’ said Rachel.

  ‘No problem, we’ll shoot,’ said Shali.

  ‘Thank you both, for everything,’ said Rachel.

  ‘No problem. And don’t worry − you’re going to be great on Monday,’ said Natalie.

  ‘And go with your gut feeling on Harry. In my experience it’s nearly always right,’ said Shali.

  Shali was probably right. The problem was that Rachel’s emotions were in such a whirl that she couldn’t work out what her gut was telling her. The only message she was getting from her body right now was that it needed sleep, and plenty of it.

  By Sunday morning, Rachel was feeling much more energetic. She’d spent an easy Saturday pottering round the shops, followed by some serious pampering at her favourite beauty salon. She’d been scrubbed, buffed and oiled to within an inch of her life and had drunk gallons of herbal tea. It had made her feel so relaxed that she’d been in bed just after nine o’ clock and had slept for ten straight hours.

  She got up slowly, dressing casually in jeans, silver trainers and a plain white t-shirt. She tied her hair back into a ponytail and sat down on the sofa with a huge mug of tea. She rubbed her neck, which was still feeling slightly sore from her tension-relieving massage. She’d agreed to meet AJ and Rosa at Beau Street at ten, so she didn’t need to leave for another half an hour or so.

  She picked up the presentation that had been sitting on the coffee table since Friday night. Shali was right: it did look pretty smart. She put the presentation back in her briefcase and checked her phone. She had three text messages, all from Harry, each one increasingly incoherent. She checked the sent times. The first was sent about midnight with the other two being sent quite close together at around three a.m. No early night for him then. Still, at least he was thinking about her. The fact there was no chance he’d be up and that she had no idea what to say to him stopped Rachel from calling him back.

  As she sipped her tea, she tried to work out what her gut feeling was telling her. She didn’t feel so angry with him any more, but she also didn’t know if he was really the right guy for her. She had to look long term. The image of the cot she’d assembled at her parents’ house jumped into her head, but however hard she tried, Rachel simply couldn’t imagine a scene there that included Harry in it. He just didn’t fit.

  She sighed and stretched her arms out. Time to make a move.

  Rachel was first to arrive at Beau Street. She was greeted by the young, burly security guard who’d helped Fred escort Lloyd Cassidy off the premises. He greeted her very politely, checked her off against his list and then waved her through.

  ‘Lovely morning, don’t you think?’ Rachel asked.

  He looked at her in surprise and then out of the window, as if he needed to check. ‘Er, yes, I guess so.’

  Rachel smiled to herself. He wasn’t a patch on Fred.

  Rosa joined her a few minutes later carrying a tray of coffees for the three of them.

  ‘Ooh, thanks, Rosa, proper coffee − just what the do
ctor ordered,’ said Rachel, grabbing hers.

  ‘AJ not here yet?’ Rosa asked.

  ‘No, not yet,’ said Rachel.

  AJ arrived over half an hour late, by which time his coffee had gone cold. He was clearly hugely hungover.

  ‘You look like shit,’ said Rachel.

  ‘I feel like shit,’ said AJ. He sat down and took several large gulps of his cold coffee.

  ‘That’s really not very helpful, AJ. You know we’ve got a load to do,’ said Rachel.

  Rachel felt a bit guilty about having a go at AJ. How many times had she rocked up to work with a bad hangover? Thanks to Harry, more times than she cared to remember. But she was in charge and they had a big deadline looming.

  ‘Sorry,’ said AJ. ‘I got a bit led astray by a load of my old university mates. I’ll be alright in a bit. I don’t suppose you have any headache tablets?’

  Being master of the work hangover, Rachel had a bagful. She grabbed AJ a couple of painkillers that had probably been supplied by Marco from her local pizza place. She also gave him some indigestion tablets and Rosa went to get several glasses of water from the water fountain.

  ‘Right, let’s go through the presentation from the start. I’ll be leading it but you two should chip in, particularly when I’m talking about the areas you covered. You need to be ready to support me with the detail,’ said Rachel.

  She got up and went through her presentation. Her Friday night rehearsal session had really helped. She felt far more confident. But as she got to the slide with the two pie charts, she started laughing.

  ‘What’s funny?’ AJ asked, staring at the slide. ‘Have we done it wrong?’

  ‘No, the slide is fine. It’s just that I was practising on Friday night and my judging panel thought that this slide looked like a giant pair of breasts,’ said Rachel, giggling. ‘Sorry, I know that’s very childish.’

  ‘Very apt,’ said AJ, grinning.

  ‘Don’t say things like that!’ said Rosa. ‘I’ll start laughing tomorrow if you’re not careful. I’m a hopeless giggler, especially when I’m nervous.’

  ‘I’m sure that none of us will feel like laughing with a mass of serious looking Americans in the room. Not to mention Carl, Tom Duffy and Charles Sutton,’ said Rachel.

  ‘That’s true. I feel terrified already just thinking about it,’ said Rosa, shuddering.

  Once they’d finished practising, Rachel turned her attention to AJ’s sample testing on a load of the black book entries.

  ‘Right, talk me through what you’ve done, step by step,’ said Rachel. There must be a link to Audrey somewhere, she thought.

  AJ opened his files. ‘I’ve been through each entry from the beginning. The paperwork trail starts with the false name being entered onto the system. We don’t have access to medical records, but I would guess that even if we did, none of these would have any, as they’re not using the right names. Audrey has done all the paperwork. You can see her name against these records as the person that input them. I’ve then checked all the way through to the paper invoices. They all have some missing procedure details, as they were all just coded to “other”, and they were paid in cash, but we already knew that. It doesn’t show that Audrey knew the real names or knew that the clients agreed to pay more than went through the books.’

  ‘Can you show me some invoices?’ said Rachel.

  AJ handed Rachel a handful from his pile. Rachel sat and flicked through them, shaking her head. There must be something.

  ‘They’re all very neat, those invoices,’ said Rosa, looking up. ‘Most of the others have been quite dog-eared.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Rachel asked.

  Rosa got a file from her desk. ‘These ones aren’t Lloyd’s clients, mind you. I got these for another part of the analysis I was doing,’ said Rosa.

  The invoices in Rosa’s file all had a small strip at the top of the page where the front page had been torn off. The strip was generally quite ragged from where the invoices had been pushed in and out of filing cabinet drawers. Many of the strips were loose or sticking upwards.

  Rachel clapped her hands in delight. ‘Rosa, you’re a genius.’

  ‘Am I?’ said Rosa, looking confused.

  ‘Look at these invoices!’ said Rachel, excitedly waving the pile AJ had given her. ‘They’re all produced in triplicate. Back one for deep filing, middle one for the office and the top one is for…?’

  Rachel paused, waiting for AJ and Rosa to finish her sentence.

  ‘The client,’ said AJ.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Rachel. ‘For the client. But these aren’t torn off. Audrey hasn’t sent these ones, has she? And why not, I wonder? Perhaps it’s because she knew that the client names aren’t real! If she was “just doing the paperwork as Lloyd asked”, then surely she would have sent the front copy to the client just like all these others.’

  Rachel sat back in glee. That was it: they had her!

  ‘Wow, of course she would. Who’d have thought it would be so simple? If she’d just torn the front page off and thrown it away we would probably be none the wiser,’ said Rosa.

  ‘We’ll need to talk to her about it first, surely,’ said AJ. ‘Make sure there’s not some other reason we haven’t thought of?’

  ‘Yes, yes, you’re right, we should. We can do that as soon as we’ve got the presentation out of the way tomorrow. But I’d like to see her get out of this one,’ said Rachel, trying not to sound too jubilant.

  Chapter 22

  Rachel whacked the toilet seat with her rolled-up newspaper and shouted ‘I can do this!’ at the blank wall behind the cistern. A small bead of sweat started to appear on her forehead, which she dabbed with a piece of toilet paper. She closed her eyes for a few seconds, took a couple of deep breaths and then repeated the whacking and shouting process. After a couple of minutes her arm started to ache, so she put the newspaper down on the toilet seat and began jogging up and down, touching her right hand to her left knee and vice versa, while sucking air loudly in and out, like she was a boxer in training.

  A sharp rap on the toilet door made her jump.

  ‘Hey, are you alright in there?’ asked a voice that to Rachel’s horror had an American accent.

  ‘Er, yes, fine, thanks. Just, umm, warming up a bit.’

  Rachel stood frozen still in the cubicle until she heard the footsteps leave. She opened the door and peered out. Shit, who had that been? Could it have been someone from the Equinox team? Rachel prayed that it wasn’t. She hadn’t heard anyone come in. Maybe she’d been shouting too loudly to hear the door go. It was Natalie who’d persuaded her to do warm-up exercises before she presented when she’d rung to wish her good luck last night.

  ‘You need to get the adrenaline pumping,’ Natalie had said. ‘Get your energy levels up. That way when you get in the room you’ll already be on fire.’

  She’d also told Rachel that doing exercises that connected one side of the body to the other helped make the two sides of the brain work together. This meant that her brain would be alert and ready to problem solve should she get any difficult questions. Natalie had read about it in some book or other. It had all sounded pretty convincing at the time. But rather than feeling on fire, Rachel now felt like a prize idiot. She was hot and sweaty and red with embarrassment. Great!

  She left the toilets and went back to the project room where Carl, AJ and Rosa were all waiting. AJ looked slightly pale and Rosa was fidgety with nerves, hopping from one foot to the other. As usual Carl appeared calm and composed. Rachel had briefed him earlier on the link to Audrey that they thought they’d found. Although he didn’t say as much, Rachel could tell from the glint in his eyes that he was delighted.

  ‘Shall we go up?’ Rachel asked, hoping that no one had noticed her flushed face.

  Carl nodded and they left the project room and made their way up to the Beau Street boardroom. The vast room was empty when they arrived to give them time to s
et up and organise where they would each sit. After a few minutes of fiddling with technology and rearranging chairs, they were ready. As they waited, Rachel realised she was feeling pretty good about her presentation. In fact, she was almost looking forward to it. Maybe Natalie’s exercises had worked after all.

  However, as more and more people began filing into the room, Rachel’s confidence began to ebb away. The bankers arrived first. Meredith Romaine swept into the room, followed by her colleague, the rather tired looking Alfred King. It looked like he’d really been burning the midnight oil. Rachel bet that Meredith was a right slave driver.

  Meredith came over to greet them. Her shoulder-length, curly, dark hair had been pinned into a high quiff at the front that made her look even taller and more intimidating than usual.

  ‘My client is very much looking forward to today,’ said Meredith. ‘As you know they were pretty unhappy to hear about the whole fraud business. But they’re carrying on with the sale process, for the moment at least. Let’s hope you guys can show them some good news.’

  For some reason, even though she was smiling broadly at them, she sounded ever so slightly threatening.

  ‘We can only do as well as the company has,’ said Carl.

  Quite right, thought Rachel. We’re not miracle workers.

  Charles Sutton and Tom Duffy arrived next.

  ‘The Equinox team are on their way up,’ said Charles. ‘I will suggest they sit here opposite Carl. There are three of them: Lawson Green, their CEO, Brenda Martinez, their in-house legal counsel, and Ryan Miller, their commercial director. Ryan has been the one leading most of the negotiations from their side so far.’

  Everyone sat down, leaving three places free opposite Rachel and Carl. Rachel’s palms began to feel a bit sweaty and she rubbed them on the lap of her checked dress. It was rather warm to be wearing knee-length boots but Rachel hadn’t had the time or the energy to pick out another outfit.

  After a few minutes the Equinox team arrived. Lawson Green was in his late fifties and looked rather like a giant bowling ball. He was dressed in beige, chino trousers with a huge waistband and a blue, short-sleeved shirt with a white collar. His hair was combed to the side with a military-straight parting and was very thick right down to his ears. Rachel couldn’t help wondering if it might be a wig. Brenda Martinez was about the same age and was dressed in a pillar-box-red suit with big shoulder pads that matched her big hair. She looked tough as old boots. Ryan Miller was probably in his late thirties, sporty looking, suntanned and, Rachel thought, actually rather good looking.