CHAPTER 1
Ten Thousand Spoons
The third floor of the Soho office block smelled of instant coffee and disappointment. Outside, London was in high spirits, alert and hectic. Inside the air was tepid, made of plastic and powered by static.
Emma Derringer was the first to arrive, because nobody at APRC was ever half an hour early for work. Motion-detecting lights blipped on as she passed through the office, which throbbed with the low sound of wasted energy. Smoky rainbow screen savers swirled and the air con hummed with electric persistence. The office was kept just short of warm in winter, and just short of cool in summer, so that everyone was slightly uncomfortable all year round. It made Emma’s curly hair go fluffy and meant that everybody got everybody else’s illnesses, regardless of how many Beroccas they drank.
The APRC Values had been engraved into the plasterboard that ran the length of the office.
INNOVATION
VALUE
QUALITY
PURPOSE
Emma was incessantly punctual; it wasn’t deliberate, she was born that way – literally, on the morning of her due date. Time seemed to move differently for her friends, who plucked hours from Emma’s life indiscriminately. Hours that she spent standing outside stations or alone in bars.
She played through the events of the night before. She’d been waiting for a mate in Soho Square, sitting on a bench and rolling a cigarette when a bike courier sat next to her. Glancing sideways at him Emma noticed that he was scruffy and handsome. He asked her for a light.
Twenty minutes later they were deep in conversation. Emma had calculated all the time she’d spent waiting for her friends and the fact that if she could take it back, she’d still be twenty-four. Instead she was twenty-seven, and sitting on a park bench with a cute courier, waiting.
He had smiled at her use of ‘cute’. Emma allowed a cheeky grin to surface at the brief flashback that tingled through her system, happy that she had abandoned waiting and spent the night drinking and kissing and mucking about with him instead.
Innate punctuality aside, Emma was the first to arrive at APRC so that for the first half an hour of the day she could pretend the office was a sanctuary of quiet creation. Could start her computer on her own terms; could, for a brief moment, be a proper writer, and not an executive assistant.
She walked past the deserted PR department where the desks were covered in sweet wrappers, cuddly toys, branded pens and photos; framed pictures of loved ones, pets in hats, nights out with the girls or couples embracing on the beach.
PR was comprised of eleven women whom it was near impossible to tell apart. It was a high-pitched minefield of femininity. They each had names that ended in ‘y’ and their desk drawers were filled with shoes, hand cream, Tampax and Nurofen.
Emma had specialised in feminism and women’s media as part of her literature degree and worried that her contempt for them was inherently sexist. But she shuddered at their seemingly endless conversations about lunch. Whenever she walked past them she wished, briefly, that she cared enough to wear make-up or heels to work.
If the APRC carpet colour were on a paint chart it would be called Electric Snooze. Next to her desk there was a red swoosh in the carpet that marked the end of PR and the start of creative. She pictured the meeting where that decision had been made. Some horsey grey-brained office manager piping up with ‘I’ve got it! How about a lovely red swoosh for the creative department? That will have SUCH impact.’
Whenever Emma thinks of the term creative department, her brain puts ‘creative’ in inverted commas.
She pressed the button on the back of her computer and waited for the techno sigh that signalled the start of the day. She typed in her password (Fresh_He11) and shoved her jacket under the desk. (DEAR ALL, Please keep your coats and bags out of sight and NOT on your chairs as they are unsightly. Thx.)
In the kitchen, they had a coffee machine that ate aluminium capsules and spat out tepid, coffee-flavoured water. Emma had staunchly disapproved when they’d bought the machine and told the receptionists that it was the environmental equivalent of throwing ten thousand spoons at the moon. They had looked at her blankly, and walked away. She stood and waited for the machine to heat up, staring at the logo.
Built for life.
She pictured the advert: people holding cups and smiling – proud mums, executive dads, other gender archetypes and maybe an arty sort to mix it up, a rock climber, a skateboarder and someone not white for demographic and then blam, built for life.
That’s how it would go.
Emma had been working in advertising for nearly a year, but had started thinking in straplines after a few months. She worried that her brain was permanently broken.
She made a professional-strength coffee, vowing to quit coffee next week. Her other perennial goals were to stop smoking, binge drinking and biting her nails. She’d made no progress with them either.
Aim high, she thought, and miss.
Back at her desk Emma sat and stared at her screen – a Mac standard image of a long white beach with crystal-blue waters and palm trees swaying in the breeze.
Fuck you, desktop.
She opened her emails, preferring the junk mail to any real messages about work. ‘50% off!’ ‘Book Now!’ ‘Last Chance!’ ‘Coming Soon!’
The first message she opened was from Slick magazine. She had submitted a sardonic opinion piece called ‘Girls Gone Mild’, a response piece to an article she had read about the ‘empowering rise of onesie culture’. Emma wanted to address the idea that dressing as a cartoon tiger was only empowering until you had to strip naked to go for a wee. Slick were ‘not interested at this time’.
She gave her disappointment a few seconds to subside, shut her mail and opened her blog.
She typed a new post and called it ‘Bicycle Guy’. She stared at the empty screen for a moment, trying to pinpoint what about him had been so appealing … Strength, maybe? His arms had been taut under his courier outfit. His light Scottish accent hadn’t done any harm, but it may have been the enthusiasm with which he described his job and his concern for her safety – he begged her to wear a helmet if she took up cycling – that had made her lean forward and kiss him. Two bottles of red wine later, she had realised he was boring and walked away, but he had watched her go with a satisfying mix of glee and disappointment. She saved the post as a draft to her magazine blog, Stupid Shit Machine.
By the time the receptionists turned up and started bringing the office to life, Emma was ready to face the day as her alter ego: someone who worked in advertising and meant it.
Copyright © 2017 by Lauren Berry
