Never Mind The Botox: Rachel

by Penny Avis

  Rachel, Carl, AJ and Rosa all stood up as they came into the room, being the only ones who hadn’t met them before. They then played rather a long game of musical handshakes, as each of them introduced themselves.

  ‘Really pleased to meet you all,’ drawled Lawson Green, vigorously pumping each hand up and down like he was jacking up a car. Brenda Martinez, on the other hand, was much more reserved, holding out a rather cold and stiff hand with a thin-lipped smile. Rachel was terrified that she’d been the American voice that had talked to her in the ladies’, but Brenda didn’t seem to show any reaction when they shook hands. Ryan Miller was quite charming, smiling and laughing as he walked round. Rachel thought he was acting more like he was at a baseball game than a crucial business meeting.

  It didn’t take long for the meeting to get into full swing. After the usual introductory pleasantries, Carl stood up and spent about five minutes giving an outline of the work they’d been doing, which was greeted by lots of enthusiastic nods from the American contingent. Carl was a very proficient speaker, with a low and methodical tone that was almost mesmerising. Rachel found herself so engrossed listening to him that she almost forgot she was up next.

  ‘So, I think that it’s best that I sit down and let those who really know what they’re talking about take you through our findings,’ said Carl. He turned to look at Rachel.

  ‘Oh, yes, right, thank you,’ said Rachel, jumping up. God, she was glad that she’d been practising. Strong start − that was what she needed. ‘Thank you, Carl. Good morning, everyone. As Carl mentioned my name is Rachel Altman and I’ve been leading our work here at Beau Street.’

  Rachel talked through the slides slowly and carefully, making sure she kept regular eye contact with Lawson Green as she did so. ‘Know who the most important person in the room is and make sure they feel like you’re talking to them personally,’ Natalie had said.

  ‘So, Lawson, as you can see the core business has been growing steadily with sales growth each year of between seven and eight per cent. Now, I believe you’re all aware of the fact that Dr Lloyd Cassidy has been suspended, pending an investigation into some irregular transactions?’

  There was a series of disappointed nods from the Equinox team across the table.

  ‘Well, we have adjusted these figures so you can see them both with and without his sales figures. This lowers the growth rates a little, to between five and six per cent,’ said Rachel.

  ‘That’s not so great,’ said Ryan. ‘Our offer was based on the higher numbers.’

  ‘But if we look at some of the faster growth areas − the newer procedure types − then the impact is much less apparent, as Lloyd Cassidy didn’t undertake many of these new procedures. You can see that the growth rates are largely unchanged when you exclude his sales figures,’ said Rachel.

  ‘And our newer procedures are some of the areas that you’re most interested in,’ said Charles enthusiastically to Lawson Green. ‘Our toe-reshaping business is going like a train, helped by the fact that these super high heels are all the fashion at the moment. More than fifty per cent of women have bunions, you know, and just as many hate their toes in open sandals.’

  Rachel couldn’t quite believe that this sort of image madness was such big business. She had visions of some goliath of a woman with huge, fat, hairy legs coming in to have her feet reshaped to the size of a pixie.

  ‘Thank you, Rachel, for explaining that. Very helpful,’ Charles added.

  Rachel nodded modestly at Charles, secretly delighted with the public praise, and turned to the next slide, which was the one with the two pie charts. The sides of Rachel’s mouth twitched as soon as she saw it and she felt the urge to giggle well up in her chest. She took a deep breath and started to talk.

  ‘Now, these two pie charts…’

  But she quickly had to stop as a small laugh escaped from her mouth that she tried to disguise as a sort of high-pitched cough. She looked at the floor and desperately tried to compose herself. She tried to replace the image of a huge pair of tits with the thought of her parents dying in agony in some terrible car crash or of small children starving in Africa. But it wasn’t working.

  Rachel could tell that the assembled audience was starting to become uncomfortable with her silence. AJ was sitting looking into his lap with his hand over his mouth. His shoulders were shaking. That was the last straw. Rachel’s face began to crack and she was just about to start laughing when AJ leapt about ten feet in the air with a shout. Everyone turned round to look at him.

  ‘Oh my goodness! I’m so sorry,’ said Rosa, getting up too. ‘I’ve knocked my glass of water everywhere. Are there any napkins?’

  Tom Duffy jumped up and grabbed a large handful of napkins from the coffee tray on the sideboard. He handed them to AJ, who dabbed at the large wet patch in his lap. AJ looked at Rosa in bewilderment, who just gave him a small knowing look and began mopping up the puddle of water on the table. Carl looked at them both furiously.

  ‘Perhaps we should take a quick break,’ said Charles. ‘Let’s reconvene in a few minutes.’

  Rachel almost sprinted out of the room in relief and headed straight for the ladies’. She leant over the sink and gently splashed some cold water onto her cheeks. Shit, she’d very nearly blown it.

  A few moments later Rosa followed her.

  ‘God, I’m so sorry, Rachel, but I couldn’t think what else to do. You looked like you were about to lose it, so I just panicked and threw my glass of water into AJ’s lap.’ Rosa was white and shaking.

  Rachel grabbed her and hugged her tightly. ‘Oh my God, Rosa, you totally saved me. I can’t believe that just happened! I’ve spent weeks discussing every type of body part imaginable without laughing and then I completely lose it over a fucking slide with two pie charts on. Can you believe it?’

  ‘It was probably just the pressure,’ said Rosa. ‘Are you feeling okay now? We should probably go back in a minute. Carl looked cross enough as it is.’

  ‘I’ll handle Carl, I promise. Don’t worry; he’ll be fine. And thank you, Rosa, I really mean it. I don’t normally need my team to save me by chucking water over each other.’

  Rosa grinned.

  ‘Hey, no laughing,’ said Rachel, grinning too.

  When they got back in the room, Carl was still apologising profusely to Charles and Tom.

  ‘Absolutely no problem,’ said Charles. ‘It’s just one of those things. We’ll be back on track in a few minutes.’

  Rachel managed to finish her presentation without laughing and sat down feeling incredibly relieved that it was over. The trauma of nearly fucking up so badly meant that she’d been a bit shaky and had stumbled over her words a few times − nothing too disastrous, but her performance certainly hadn’t been the triumph she’d been hoping for. She’d really wanted to impress Carl, show she was ready to be a director, but somehow she didn’t think she’d succeeded.

  She had also found it hard to read the team from Equinox. Were they still interested? She couldn’t tell. Ryan had asked lots of questions about what the business looked like without Lloyd Cassidy, probably so they could re-cut their offer. Alfred King had furiously scribbled down all the answers as it was undoubtedly his job to work out a new valuation for the business, probably by the next morning or some other equally ridiculous deadline, the poor guy.

  As the meeting broke up Brenda Martinez came over to chat.

  ‘Thank you for your presentation, very informative,’ said Brenda. She leant towards Rachel and dropped her voice to a low whisper. ‘And by the way, your little toilet psyching-up session seemed to do the trick. I thought you did very well.’

  Rachel’s face dropped. Oh no! How embarrassing. She would definitely have to kill Natalie later.

  ‘Er, thank you,’ said Rachel, totally lost for anything else to say.

  ‘I used to find that sort of thing really useful too when I was training,’ said Brenda wistfully.

 
Training! Rachel was hardly a trainee. Patronising old cow.

  ‘Actually, I qualified several…’

  But before Rachel could finish, Brenda had turned away and started talking to Lawson Green.

  Rachel shook her head. Fuck it. More humiliation.

  As she headed out of the room she almost walked straight into the team of lawyers who were waiting to go in for their meeting with Equinox and Beau Street. She remembered Alex Fisher from their previous meetings.

  ‘How did it go?’ Alex asked.

  ‘So, so,’ Rachel replied. ‘Good luck in there. There’s a cast of thousands.’

  Rachel, AJ and Rosa headed back towards their project room. Carl managed a cursory ‘well done’ before disappearing for the lifts to head straight back to the office. Rachel’s heart sank as he left. If he’d been impressed with her then he’d kept it well hidden.

  ‘I think that went okay, don’t you think?’ said Rosa when they were back in their project room.

  ‘What, apart from you throwing water over me! I’m bloody soaking,’ said AJ.

  Rosa and Rachel looked at the wet patch on his crotch and couldn’t help giggling.

  ‘AJ, I’m so sorry, it was totally my fault. Rosa was just trying to save me from making a complete arse of myself and I think she was actually pretty inspired. Look, why don’t you go home and change, take a few hours off,’ said Rachel.

  ‘Oh that’s okay, it’ll dry.’ AJ stared down at his damp trousers. ‘And besides, I want to come and see the Fox woman with you. I don’t want to miss out on my chance of some action. I’ll go and stand under the hand dryer in the gents’ for a bit.’

  ‘God, don’t burn anything, will you,’ said Rachel. ‘Although I guess we’re in the right place if you do!’

  AJ grinned and wandered off towards the gents’ with a slow wide-legged walk.

  Rachel had temporarily forgotten that they’d arranged to meet Audrey Fox. It wasn’t going to be easy and she’d decided to bring AJ for moral support. She hoped that Audrey might react better if there was a man in the room.

  ‘Now make sure you use your charm on her,’ said Rachel to AJ when he returned. ‘We really don’t need her to go nuts at us, like Lloyd did with Charles.’

  AJ was fiddling with his groin as she spoke.

  ‘Everything alright down there?’ Rachel asked, nodding towards his crotch.

  ‘Yeah, yeah. It’s just that my boxers are made of this stretchy material that doesn’t seem to dry very quickly. You’d have thought that it’d be the sort of thing that they’d design to do exactly the opposite.’

  Rachel held up her hand and looked away. ‘Yeah, too much detail, thanks. And you can’t start doing that when we meet Audrey. She’d have a fit. Actually, she’d probably leap across the table to give you a hand, knowing her. But either way, it wouldn’t be good,’ said Rachel.

  ‘Alright, noted. Do you want me to flirt with her?’ AJ asked.

  ‘No! Just be polite, charming, make her think we don’t really suspect her.’

  AJ was walking pretty much normally by the time they were outside Audrey’s office.

  ‘Ready?’ Rachel asked.

  AJ nodded.

  They knocked on the door and waited. Audrey opened the door wearing a pair of linen wide-legged trousers and a tightly fitted, navy, satin blouse. As she turned around, Rachel could see the hint of some very high cut knickers though the linen material. She saw AJ look too and then quickly avert his gaze.

  ‘Thank you very much for seeing us,’ said Rachel in her politest voice. ‘We know that you’re very busy, so we won’t take long.’

  Audrey sat down behind her desk and looked at them impassively.

  ‘What is it you want?’

  ‘In the light of the recent, um, issues with Dr Cassidy, we’ve been performing some additional tests so we can try to assess the scale of the problem. And we need a little bit of help from you, if that’s okay,’ said AJ, beaming at Audrey like some sort of demented spaniel.

  Rachel hoped Audrey couldn’t see the remainder of the small damp patch on his trousers.

  ‘Oh yes? How’s that then?’ Audrey asked.

  AJ pulled his chair forward towards the desk and handed a small pile of invoices across to Audrey. As she leant forward to take them, she gave them both a good flash of her ample cleavage. Her gold leaf necklace flapped forwards and backwards and came to a halt, nestled neatly where it had started.

  ‘We think you raised these invoices; is that right?’ Rachel asked, resisting the temptation to lean across and shut AJ’s open mouth next to her.

  Audrey looked at them. ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘Well, we were just wondering why they still have the front sheet on,’ said AJ, cocking his head sideways, trying to look innocent. ‘We thought that was the copy that was sent out to the clients.’

  Audrey looked down sharply at the invoices. ‘Gosh, I can’t remember that. I raise hundreds of invoices. Perhaps the client asked us not to send it or something.’ She sounded quite irritated.

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry, I’m sure it is difficult to remember. But there are quite a lot of them. We’ve found at least fifty so far. It seems like it happens quite often,’ said AJ.

  ‘Well, I don’t know why, I’m afraid,’ said Audrey, folding her arms.

  ‘What happens if you don’t send this copy?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘Nothing. The client doesn’t have a copy, that’s all,’ said Audrey.

  ‘How do they know what to pay then?’ AJ asked.

  Yes, good point, thought Rachel.

  ‘Well, er, they probably had already agreed it with their doctor,’ said Audrey.

  ‘Surely they’d still want a receipt, though. It does seem very odd that so many haven’t been sent,’ said Rachel.

  ‘What are you implying?’ Audrey asked.

  ‘We’re not implying anything. We just need to understand why it might have happened.’

  ‘Well, I don’t have an explanation, other than it must have been an oversight,’ said Audrey.

  ‘And you’re sure that you can’t think of any other reasons?’ AJ asked.

  ‘No,’ said Audrey, holding AJ’s gaze as she sat back in her chair, uncrossed her legs and crossed them back the other way.

  This is getting ridiculous, thought Rachel.

  ‘Well, we think there’s another reason,’ said Rachel.

  AJ looked at Rachel in surprise.

  ‘These invoices are all for people who were booked in under false names and the amounts aren’t what they’d agreed to pay. We think that’s why you didn’t send them out: because you knew they weren’t real,’ said Rachel.

  Audrey glared at her. ‘Do you now! Well, an interesting theory but total rubbish,’ said Audrey.

  Rachel began to get angry. Audrey was lying through her teeth, again. ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to lie to us.’

  AJ took a sharp intake of breath and looked at his shoes.

  ‘I saw you with Lloyd when you met Francesca Hart. You were there when she gave Lloyd cash and you saw him write down her record in his black book − you know, the one that you denied ever having seen before,’ said Rachel.

  Audrey opened her mouth to speak, then shut it again.

  ‘Did Lloyd also give you some of the cash he took?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘How dare you!’ said Audrey.

  ‘Oh we dare, because we know it’s true,’ said Rachel, feeling increasingly bold: Audrey had nowhere to go.

  ‘And what does Carl say about all this?’ Audrey asked.

  Rachel heard the warning note in her voice.

  ‘He’s fully briefed and totally supportive of our position,’ said Rachel.

  Audrey threw back her head and laughed. ‘Fully briefed! That makes a change for Carl. He looks so much nicer without.’

  AJ gasped and Rachel looked at Audrey in shock.

  ‘Oh, didn’t you kno
w? Oh yes, I have to say, Carl is an expert in customer service.’ Audrey raised her eyebrows suggestively and leaned forward towards them. ‘And let me tell you, there are plenty more shocks where that one came from. You want me to tell your place all about what Carl has been up to, do you?’

  Rachel looked at Audrey in horror.

  ‘Oh, but then he’d be in terrible trouble, wouldn’t he? What a shame that would be. And what would his wife say?’ Audrey held up her hands in mock horror.

  ‘You wouldn’t do that,’ said Rachel.

  Audrey smiled at Rachel. ‘Wouldn’t I? Are you sure?’

  Rachel looked at Audrey’s smug face, her eyes glinting with pleasure. No, she wasn’t sure. Shit! Rachel couldn’t bring herself to say that, so she said nothing. AJ also seemed speechless with fright.

  ‘Well, I suggest if you don’t want that then you take your half-baked theories, put them neatly back in your little boxes and kindly leave my office.’

  Neither of them moved.

  ‘I said this discussion is finished. Off you run,’ said Audrey, waving them away.

  Eventually Rachel got up and marched out of the room and AJ scurried after her.

  ‘Oh my God, do you think she was telling the truth?’ AJ asked when they were out of earshot.

  Rachel sighed. ‘I know she was. She’s been seeing Carl for nearly two years.’

  AJ stopped dead. ‘What?! And you knew already? How come?’

  ‘Long story but it’s over between them and I told Carl I wouldn’t say anything. And you mustn’t either.’

  ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe it,’ said AJ, his eyes wide with a mixture of shock and excitement. ‘Can I tell Rosa?’