Chapter 2
Four months before the cheesecake conversation with her mother, Marnie walked into Café Caramba HQ in swanky central Leeds to find the new head of Merchandising in situ in his office. He was certainly a sight to warm up the frosty first working day of the year, her dilating pupils decided: tall, slim, dark hair with an unruly wave, brown-black eyes, sharp suit and a bleached-tooth smile worthy of a Colgate commercial.
If ever a man suited his name, it was Justin Fox, Marnie came to realise over the next fortnight. He was super good-looking with an arrogant swagger in his shoulders that said he was quite aware of his effect on the female workforce – and Glen from accounts. Marnie couldn’t stop her heart giving an extra thump of pleasure whenever her eyes came to rest on him, but she had no intention of advertising the fact. It wasn’t her fault, she kept telling herself, it was just her body reacting to ‘the type’ of man it had decided was a match for her. Jez, Robert, Harry, Aaron – all tall, dark, handsome snappy dressers. All tall, dark, handsome, complicated arseholes. And she didn’t want another one walking into her heart and stamping all over it with his size twelve lawn aerator spiked shoes – thank you!
She suspected that she was pretty safe from Mr Fox though. She had never felt the warmth of his tobacco-brown eyes coming to rest on her back/bum/tights whenever she passed his desk or when they were in meetings together. No flirty banter bounced between them, no hunting for her attention occurred. She pigeon-holed him as the sort who would go for skinny, leggy, blondes, and she was none of those things. And that could only be good news.
Marnie knew that she functioned much better without a man in her life, corrupting her focus. Whenever she didn’t have one of them trying to screw with her head, she could plough her energies into creating, forecasting, delivering. Work made her happier than any man ever had and she loved her job. She’d been at Café Caramba for six years now and worked her socks off for the company. When the last department head – Jerry ‘Tosser’ Thomson – left two years ago, there had been no one better to inherit the mantle than Marnie, even though HR had a bias towards men for the top jobs. No man wanted Beverage Marketing, though, because it was in a terrible state so the job slid easily to her. But Marnie Salt proved that she could turn a ship around in a force fourteen crosswind. Beverage Marketing was no longer a joke barge but a sleek cruise liner. There was even a waiting list in HR for people who wanted to join its crew and Marnie’s reputation, as captain, couldn’t have been higher. She was recognised throughout Café Caramba as naturally gifted at organising; an ideas person, an intuitive grafter with foresight who scoffed at comfort zones and a trailblazer for female employees of the company because there had been no other women top execs there – ever. Though Café Caramba, on paper, did most things that a progressive twenty-first-century workplace should be doing, the fat cats liked to see men in their boardroom, give or take the women in wipe-clean aprons pouring out coffees and distributing sandwiches. There wasn’t so much a glass ceiling there as a two-foot-thick lead one covered with razor wire.
Three and a half weeks after Justin Fox joined the company, Marnie arrived at work expecting nothing but a normal day. She took the escalator and made a right through the first set of double doors, where the Product Development team sat under the leadership of ‘Sweaty’ Andrew Jubb, who could only achieve eye contact with women when their pupils were situated on their tits. High on the agenda was a morning executive huddle at one of the tall tables that the superboss Laurence Stewart-Smith had had implemented around the building. Standing meetings got to their point quicker and were over faster was his reasoning, and he was right. Laurence had transformed a number of failing companies into major success stories with streamlining initiatives like this. He was a business genius, adored by shareholders, oiled over by his minions who secretly thought though, beneath their fawning smiles, that as a human being, Laurence was an utter first-class knobhead. But Marnie knew that this morning, thanks to the fabulously shaped mug she’d sourced in the far east, Laurence was going to be a suitably impressed knobhead. They’d carry the company logo much better than the very ordinary ones they used at present. She had the sample in her bag and couldn’t wait to present it to him – in front of an audience. She’d had too many of her best ideas pirated in the past, so now she made sure that they all bore a big fat Marnie Salt stamp on them.
As excited as she was about the morning get-together, still her thoughts drifted to Justin when she passed his office. She’d noticed that he didn’t wear a wedding ring. But he had to have a partner, she reasoned. He was far too gorgeous to be on a shelf. And he was definitely straight because he flirted heavily with the canteen ladies who brought the refreshments into the boardroom meetings, sending them twittering off like a swarm of sparrows.
Straight on through Merchandising, she took another right into her department: Beverage Marketing, which had once been a merry band of six, but was now a small barrelful of four jolly apples with two rotting, maggoty additions. There was herself, of course; Arthur, a year away from retirement and solid as a rock; Bette, quietly efficient, who did her job and went home and Roisean, the office gopher who was bright and sweet and would end up running the company one day. Then there was Vicky, a twenty-nine-year-old busybody – and the thorn in her side, the stone in her shoe, the hair in her sandwich: Elena. A cocksure graduate eight years her junior who would have garrotted her own mother to get a rung further up the corporate ladder. She was head girl in the ‘to get on in anything you have to be a cock’ school of life. She’d presented well in her interview for the job and Marnie had since cursed herself for being sucked in by her superficial charm.
‘Morning,’ Marnie called to them all collectively and as usual received three cheerful echoes, one grumbly mumble and a blank. Within the minute, Roisean had put a coffee on her desk, just as she liked it.
‘Thank you, love,’ smiled Marnie.
Roisean coughed then gave her front teeth a discreet rub with her finger. It was code for you’ve got lipstick on your incisors, boss. Marnie swept her tongue over them and then test-smiled for Roisean who gave her the thumbs up. Little considerations like that made the day slide on a smoother track, Marnie always thought.
Elena and Vicky were gossiping. Again. And, if the look over the latter’s shoulder was anything to go by, Marnie was the subject. Again. Marnie wasn’t a hardline boss but Vicky pushed her buttons almost as much as Elena did. They faffed about every morning chatting and drinking coffee between signing in and starting work and now those faffs were getting too long to ignore.
Marnie, on the other hand, had logged on to her iMac and pulled up a report she needed for her meeting before she had even taken her coat off. She took a glug of coffee, pressed print and nothing happened. Her desk printer had been on the blink for a while and this time the usual bang on the side with the flat of her hand technique failed her.
‘Elena. I’ve sent you a file. Could you run it off for me please?’ Marnie asked her still-gossiping deputy. ‘And Vicky, ring maintenance and get them up here as soon as, to look at my printer.’ Her lips were curved upwards but she wasn’t smiling as she added pointedly, ‘If you have the time.’
‘What’s Roisean doing?’ asked Elena, looking down her thin ski-slope of a nose at her boss.
‘Yes they are urgent, thank you, Elena,’ replied Marnie with a tone in her voice that sent the folie à deux begrudgingly back to their desks.
Marnie opened her diary and checked what was coming up next week. The yearly job reviews were pending. She would recommend that Roisean, Arthur and Bette be given pay rises and would have no qualms in telling Elena and Vicky that they needed to pull their socks up. Vicky was as slack as a prostitute’s elastic. Elena was a much better worker when she wanted to be, but sullen and difficult to get on with. Neither of them felt part of the well-oiled machine the way Linda and Annie had, both happily on maternity leave. Burke and Hare, as Marnie had privately renamed them, were more like people who would nobble the cogs given half the chance. She had an awful foreboding that Linda and Annie wouldn’t come back either and she’d be stuck with the terrible twosome.
Five minutes later, Elena strutted across to Marnie’s desk in her really tall stilettos. Marnie hadn’t been the only one to notice that her clothes had become decidedly more figure-hugging, her heels higher and her lipstick had inched from orchid pink to slapper red since Justin Fox had joined the company. She held her hand out for the report but Elena put it down on her desk instead. Marnie tried not to let the growl inside rush out of her throat as she thanked her, albeit through gritted teeth.
‘Pleasure,’ replied Elena, sounding as if her duty had been about as pleasurable as cauterising the linings of her nostrils with a red-hot poker. She turned on her ridiculous heel far too fast to keep her balance, stumbled and did a comedy walk that said, I am going to recover this and not fall flat on my face. Then she fell flat on her face in a none too graceful way whilst her left shoe flew off her foot, did a perfect double pike back in the air and came to land on the back of her head. Arlene Phillips couldn’t have choreographed it better.
‘Oh dear,’ said a male voice from behind Marnie. She turned to see Justin Fox striding into the department.
‘My ankle, my fff . . . bloody ankle,’ Elena was crying. A big pink toe bearing chipped purple nail varnish was protruding from her now laddered black tights. Justin rushed forward like a gallant knight although he was hardly crushed in the queue to help.
‘Here, lean on me. You came quite a cropper there. I’m surprised you didn’t make a crater in the floor.’
Marnie had to turn around to compose herself. Schadenfreude was shameful, but just for once, she allowed herself to savour it.
As if Elena’s embarrassment didn’t have enough elements to it, her dark blue skirt had collected a million light-coloured fibres from the relatively new carpet and she appeared to have snapped the heel of the shoe that had managed to stay on her foot.
‘Is this yours too?’ asked Justin, picking up not only the escapee stiletto but a floppy gel Party Feet insert.
If Elena had gone any redder her head would have blown off her shoulders.
He examined the long pin-heel of the shoe, which looked decidedly tatty at close quarters. ‘My goodness, no wonder you fell.’
‘I think you ought to go straight to the medical room,’ said Marnie, in her best concerned boss voice which she knew would feel like a hundred bees stinging Elena’s ears. ‘Look, your ankle is swelling up terribly.’ And it was. Ballooning. It was almost a cankle. On its way to being a thankle.
‘I’ll take her.’ Vicky stepped forward and Elena put her arm around her shoulder. She couldn’t have hopped off faster if she’d tried.
‘Are you all right?’ Justin asked Marnie who was covering up her mouth and really really trying hard to look sympathetic. Had it been anyone else, it would have come naturally but not with Elena and it probably wouldn’t have with Vicky either. But then, she was wicked, she’d heard that often enough to believe it might be true.
‘I’m fine,’ she coughed. ‘Just worried about my colleague.’
‘I brought these for you to cast your eye over before the meeting in . . .’ he consulted his watch. A black-faced Rolex. As classy and striking as he was. ‘. . . ten minutes.’
‘Thank you,’ said Marnie, taking hold of the sheets of paper he was proffering, but he didn’t let go of them. Then he leaned in to her and said in a whisper: ‘Something tells me you rather enjoyed that little floorshow.’
Marnie gulped and gave a demure pat to her chest. ‘I think you are very much mistaken, Mr Fox.’ It wouldn’t have convinced a grand jury.
‘See you in . . . nine minutes and counting,’ said Justin with a lazy grin and Marnie’s heart gave a perfidious kick. No, no, no. She heard her brain protest. Not again.