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Text message from Owen:Nice seeing you earlier. Hope you’re OK. And Toni and Mitch Chandler will be all right, Mills. I know it. Trust me. x
Chapter Fourteen
From: Gail Fryer (PA)
To: all FLYE TV office
Subject: HTG Pictures Summer-Ween party
Dear all,
This is a reminder for all those staff members who have been invited to our client HTG Pictures’ annual Summer party Saturday. As many of you know, the Summer party was rescheduled due to CEO, Glenn’s, knee replacement surgery, and has subsequently been re-named to Summer-Ween to fit with the time of year. Please find a slightly revised invite attached, but venue and timing details remain the same. A minibus will be leaving from the Flye TV car park on Saturday at 6 p.m. This isn’t compulsory and guests can make their own way there if preferred.
We’re sure the party will be yet another enjoyable evening and will further solidify the relationship between us here at Flye and one of our most important clients.
Best wishes,
Management
*
‘Jeez, look at this. All their miserable fucking faces. Waiting for a meeting, and it’s like they’ve all been given a week to live.’ Lin gazes through the glass on other side of the office, a finger hooked on one of the slatted blinds, kinking the middle. She’s spying out to the lobby as people start to gather for a planning meeting for a football match tomorrow, while we’re in here, in a room at Flye that everyone simply calls ‘Vince’s room’.
Vince is Flye’s repairman, and this cluttered, garage-like office is where everyone drops off broken equipment, and Vince attempts to fix it, in the manner of a vet who has been handed an abused animal by the abuser themselves. ‘This is aCanon,’ he’ll say, through gritted teeth, ‘and justlookat the way it’s been treated. But oh, Vince’ll sort it, won’t he? Vince’ll bring life back from the bleedin’ dead, he won’t mind.’
I’m in here packaging up truly too-far-gone equipment that needs to be posted to the manufacturers for repair, Vince is working silently on a camera at his desk, and Lin – she’s hiding because she ‘wants to avoid the agonising pre-meeting small talk’. Lin sits upstairs, at a chaotically messy desk and spends her days chatting to clients on the phone in the same way people talk to their best friends at 10 PM at home on the sofa. Loud cackles, hand gestures, gasps, sometimes while painting her fingernails, and as if nobody else is in the room.
‘Seriously, dude,’ groans Lin. She has her phone out, checking her blunt-cut, cherry-cola hair in the camera. ‘The vibe in here continues to beoff.Corporate hell. It’s like we’re .?.?.’ She lowers her phone, and locks it. ‘Attending a memorial or something. You know?’
‘Mhm,’ grunts Vince without looking up, and I force a smile, make an agreeable, ‘I know what you mean’ sound in the back of my throat but carry on filling in the endlessly long return form for a broken monitor.
I love Lin. Nobody is more suffers-no-fools than Lin. But the last thing I need is to be overheard agreeing that I’m working amongst people who look like they’ve just attended a cremation. Even if it’s only by Vince. Of course, what I really want to say is, it feels more like a memorial site than you know when people pass my desk these days. Iamthe car crash itself. I’m that receptionist who did that thing,and ‘oh my God, did you hear she emailed her ex in front of the whole company and now his new fiancé has left him? Imagine. IMAGINE!’
Lin stares at me, a perfect chalk-blue dot of eyeliner blobbed on the centre of each lower lash line. ‘Millie?’ she asks. ‘Babe.’
‘Yes?’
‘What, kindly .?.?. isthat?’ Her eyes drop to my –ah.
‘My phone?’ I reply.
‘Yourphone?’ Lin looks horrified. ‘Is it really? I thought it might be one of Vince’s weird contraptions. No offence, Vin.’
‘Mhm,’ grunts Vince again.
My face glows hot. I knew people might notice it, assume I dropped my iPhone in the toilet, was using something temporary that I pulled from the depths of my odds and sods drawer full of wires and random keys nobody will ever use again. ‘I changed it out a few weeks ago,’ I say. ‘It’s a 2010 Nokia .?.?.’
‘It’s a relic, man,’ Lin says, with an almost impressed, wide smile. Lin looks like she should be in a pop band. She’s naturally cool; has perfectly square white teeth, high, plum-like cheek bones when she smiles, wears the coolest blend of colours on her eyelids at all times, different everyday. ‘My brother had one of those. I thought he was theshit.Oh my goodness, look at the actual, pressy buttons .?.?.’
‘They do take some getting used to!’
‘And can you have apps?’
‘Technically, but the phone’s old and it has zero space, so, no. No apps. Just calls. Just texts.’
Lin looks at me, her head tilting, just a tiny bit, to the left, as if I’m some sort of strange specimen in a petri dish. ‘Why, though?’
I freeze for a moment, and then give a stiff, unconvincing shrug. ‘I .?.?. well, I guess I wanted a little break. A tech cleanse. To – disconnect a little? After .?.?. everything.’
