Maya is winding down for the day, filing printouts of dresses, shoes, knits and jewels into box files marked by the week in which they will drop. Emma can’t believe it’s already the end of the day, even though she can see from her window seat that the sky is a shade of home time. LA is only just waking up and that’s when a lot of the stars FASH follows are getting dressed by their stylists and posting #OOTDs.
‘God I can’t believe it’s 5.30 already! Where did today go?’ asks Emma. She stands and sees Maya looking in a mirror at her desk. ‘Doing anything nice tonight?’
Maya pulls down a lower lid to examine an unenthusiastic eye. Even though she had her eight hours last night, she just wants to go home to bed.
‘Oh,’ she lets out a sigh. ‘I’m meeting Game show Guy for a drink,’ she says, looking across at Emma while still holding the mirror in front of her left eye. ‘I really can't be bothered.’
‘That doesn’t sound like you, Maya.’
‘Well we’ve got this one thing in common so my sister said I should go for it, but, I dunno… I think Clara’s just bored of Train Man chat.’ Maya looks back to her mirror and pulls the other eye down to her cheek, as if to find an excuse in her eyeball. ‘It’s definitely drinks, not a date.’
Emma is as kind and as honest as usual. ‘You can’t force it, Maya – if you didn’t fancy him the first time you met, you’re not going to fancy him now are you?’
Maya feels the feeling of compromise hug her throat.
‘Did you fancy Paul when you first met him?’ Maya asks, still searching. Apart from their boss Lucy, Emma is the only other married person on the editorial team, which makes her the only other proper grown-up.
‘Erm, no!’ she laughs, holding a sweet hand to a delicate nose. ‘It was a slow burn. So yes, maybe you should go for it with Game show Guy!’
Emma and her husband met back in the good old days of magazines. She was website editor at HoneyBee where Paul sold advertising space. It took three Christmas parties and two Maggie’s awards – the industry's annual knees-up – before Emma finally agreed to go on a date with him, and they’ve been together for ten happy years, although the past four haven’t been without their struggles.
‘Well, you’ve got nothing to lose – as long as he pays.’
‘I won the money, Emma, I ought to pay.’ Maya looks guilty, even though she won the money fair and square.
‘Well good luck, I want a full report in the morning.’
Emma flutters out of the office, along with most of the other staff, back to the lovely husband she didn’t fancy from day one. Maya stays with Lucy to talk about the Christmas campaign, even though it is September. Maya doesn’t mind staying late. She likes her job, she likes how her boss entrusts her with such important projects, and is grateful for the distraction from her looming evening plans.
Last year’s most searched item on the FASH website was ‘Christmas jumper’. That was over the entire year. Christmas is huge: December always has the company’s biggest sales day of the year, and there is always an elaborate Christmas party for all FASH employees in a Soho nightclub. DJs spin records. Canapés and cocktails are endless. Next Big Things sing on stage. Staff pretend to be rock stars in the dress-up corner and the photo booth, and Maya is under pressure to invent a new spin on FASHmas. Which is tricky, as last year’s was such a success. Maya came up with FASHmas Wonderland and Chloe and Olivia put together a magical ethereal look for the website, which went down a storm.
‘We need to go one better,’ says Lucy, perching on Maya’s desk in her pussy-bow blouse and pencil skirt. ‘And I know you’re capable of it.’
Maya blushes.
‘We need to reinvent the wheel, give Christmas a whole new meaning to twenty-something women. Make it all about the fashion. The office party outfit, the Christmas Eve down the pub with your mates outfit, the Christmas Day outfit, the sparkly New Year’s Eve outfit – this has to be all we eat, sleep and breathe over the next few weeks to really nail the tone of it, right?’
‘Sure thing, Lucy, I’m already working on it.’
Maya has already begun researching ideas in the evenings, but soon her nights will be taken up with marking and preparing too.
When Maya started to feel guilty for having a fun and frivolous job in fashion retail, and not saving the world as her parents would have expected her to, she started volunteering as a Spanish teacher at night school. All classes at the Hazelworth Collective College are free and all of the staff are volunteers. It’s about sharing knowledge and paying back to the community. One evening a week, Maya teaches Conversational Spanish in a small classroom in the 150-year-old building next to the library. Maya has loved her evenings teaching at the college for the two academic years since she moved back to the town she was born. Last year she even tried a course herself, studying cake decorating, but realised by Christmas, when her angel Gabriel looked more like Simon Cowell, that sugarcraft wasn’t her strong point and perhaps she should stick to working on macaron shells.
Teaching keeps Maya on her toes and she is a good, thoughtful teacher who listens as much as she speaks. That year she spent in Central America before university wasn’t wasteful soul-searching on Herbert Flowers’ credit card. Maya learned the language and worked her way from Ciudad Juarez on the Texan border down to Bogota, teaching English, learning Spanish, and doing stints as a waitress in bars and cafes along the way, so that when she returned in time to start university, and her sister and two brothers picked her up from the airport, she was ready for anything college life might throw at her. It was the bravest thing Maya had ever done, until she decided to stand up in front of a roomful of strangers and teach them.
Next week Maya will meet her new students for the next academic year.
Maya doesn’t mind working late tonight, she might not even touch up the lilting make-up on her face. It hasn’t gone unnoticed that she’s worn more make-up of late, in fact Sam is surprised how well Maya scrubs up compared to the wild-haired girl he has teased for a year and a half, but Maya has already made her effort for the day, for Train Man.
‘Right, I have to get back for the boys,’ says Lucy. ‘Let’s reconvene tomorrow. Have a look back over last year, look at the mood boards Chloe has put together for this season, and let’s have a breakfast meeting tomorrow to brainstorm ideas, right?’
Maya wishes Lucy wanted to work even later, give her an excuse to get out of this meet-up, but now she’s the last one in the office. Just the sound of the vacuum sucking up a day’s fashion while the cleaner from Ecuador hums Rubén Blades salsa songs. Maya looks in her little compact mirror and steels herself.
I wish I was meeting Train Man.