place or mine?’ and ‘If I said you had a beautiful body would you hold it against me?’) they remained blankly unresponsive. One of them was called Tiffany and the other was called Shannen and they both had the yellow-haired, yellow-skinned look he usually found so attractive in a girl-type. Although, perhaps not as much as he once had.
The meeting went well and the orange men and yellow girls listened to Ros as she outlined a proposal to buy products from them. When they said the price she was offering was too low she was able to stop her voice from shaking and reel off prices from many of their competitors, all of them lower. Bib was bursting with pride.
When they stopped for lunch, Bib watched with interest as Tiffany used her fork to skate a purple-red leaf of radicchio around her place. Sometimes she picked it up on her fork and let it hover in the general vicinity of her mouth, before putting it back down on her plate. She was miming, he realized. And that wasn’t right. He switched his attention to Shannen. She was putting the radicchio on her fork and sometimes she was putting some into her mouth. He decided he preferred her. So when she said, ‘Gotta use the rest-room,’ Bib was out of his seat in a flash after her.
He’d really have resented being called a peeping Tom. An opportunist, he preferred to think of himself. An alien who knew how to make the most of life’s chances. And being invisible.
But how strange. He’d followed Shannen into the cubicle and she seemed to be ill. No, no, wait – she was making herself ill. Sticking her fingers down her throat. Now she was brushing her teeth. Now she was renewing her lipstick. And she seemed happy! He’d always regarded himself as a man of the universe, but this was one of the strangest things he’d ever seen.
‘I should be nominated for an Oscar,’ Ros thought, as she shook her last hand of the day. She’d given the performance of a lifetime around that conference table. But she tried to take pride that she had done it. Between jetlag and her lead-heavy unhappiness over Michael she was surprised she’d even managed to get dressed that morning, never mind discuss fixed costs and large order discounts.
However, when she got back to her hotel, she insisted on shattering her fragile good humour by asking a not-quite-right Ralph Fiennes if anyone had phoned for her. Ralph shook his head. ‘Are you sure?’ she asked, wearing her desperation like a neon sign. But unfortunately, Ralph was very sure.
Trying to stick herself back together, Ros stumbled towards her room, where no force in the universe – not even one from Planet Duch – could have stopped her from ringing Michael.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, as soon as he picked up the phone. ‘Were you asleep?’
‘No,’ Michael said, and Ros’s weary spirits rallied with hope. If he was awake at two in the morning, he couldn’t be too happy, now could he?
‘I miss you,’ she said, so quietly she barely heard herself.
‘Come home, then.’
‘I’ll be back on Friday.’
‘No, come home now.’
‘I can’t,’ she said gently. ‘I’ve got meetings.’
‘Meetings,’ he said bitterly. ‘You’ve changed.’
As Ros tried to find the right words to fix things, she wondered why it was always an insult to tell someone that they’d changed.
‘When I first met you,’ he accused, ‘you were straight up. Now look at you, with your flashy promotion.’
He couldn’t help it, Ros thought. Too much had changed too quickly. In just over eighteen months she’d worked her way up from answering phones, to being a supervisor, to assisting the production manager, to assisting the chairman, to becoming vice-production manager. None of it was her fault – she’d always thought she was as thick as two short planks. She’d been happy to think that. How was she to know that she had a natural grasp of figures and an innate sense of management? She had bloody Lenny to thank for ‘discovering’ her, and she could have done without it. Everything had been fine – better than fine – with Michael until she’d started her career ascent.
‘Why is my job such a problem?’ she asked, for the umpteenth time.
‘My job!’ Michael said hotly. ‘My job, my job – you love saying it, don’t you?’
‘I don’t! You have a job too.’
‘Mending photocopiers isn’t quite the same as being a vice-production manager.’ Michael fell into tense silence.
‘I can’t do it,’ he finally said. ‘I can’t be with a woman who earns more than me.’
‘But it’ll be our money.’
‘What if we have kids? You expect me to be a stay-at-home househusband sap? I won’t do it, babes,’ he said, tightly. ‘I’m not that kind of bloke.’ She heard anger in his voice and terrible stubbornness.
But I’m good at my job, she thought, and felt a panicky desperation. She didn’t want to give it up. But more than her job, she wanted Michael to accept her. Fully.
‘Why can’t you be proud of me?’ She squeezed the words out.
‘Because it’s not right. And you want to come to your senses, you’re no good on your own, you need me. Think about it!’
With that, he crashed the phone down. Instantly she picked it up to ring him back, then found herself slowly putting it back down. There was nothing to be gained by ringing him because he wasn’t going to change his mind. They’d had so many fights, and he hadn’t budged an inch. So what was the choice? She loved him. Since she’d met him three years ago, she’d been convinced he was The One and that her time in the wilderness was over. They’d planned to get married next year, they’d even set up a ‘Meringue Frock’ account – how could she say goodbye to all that? The obvious thing was to give up her job. But that felt so wrong. Oughtn’t Michael to love her as she was? Shouldn’t he be proud of her talents and skills, instead of being threatened by them? And if she gave in now what would the rest of their lives together be like?
But if she didn’t give in … ? She’d be alone. All alone. How was she going to cope? Because Michael was right, she had very little confidence.
For some minutes she sat abjectly by the phone, turning a biro over and over, as she pondered the lonely existence that awaited her. All she could see ahead of her was a life where she jumped on hotel beds by herself. The bleakness almost overwhelmed her. But just a minute, she found herself thinking, her hand stopping its incessant rotation of the biro – she’d managed to get all the way from Hounslow to Los Angeles without Michael’s help. And she’d managed to get a taxi to and from work. Had even held her own in a meeting.
To her great surprise she found that she didn’t feel so bad. Obviously, she felt awful. Frightened, heartbroken, sick and lonely. But she didn’t feel completely suicidal, and that came as something of a shock. She was so used to hearing Michael telling her that she was a disaster area without him that she hadn’t questioned it lately …
How about that? She remained on the bed, and her gaze was drawn to the window. In all the trauma, she’d forgotten about her ‘toadally awesome’ ocean view and it couldn’t have been more beautiful – Santa Monica beach, the evening sun turning the sea into a silver-pink sheet, the sand rose-coloured and powdery. Along the boardwalk, gorgeous Angelenos skated and cycled. A sleek couple whizzed by on a tandem, their no-doubt perfect baby in a yellow buggy attached to the back of the bike. He looked like a little emperor. Another tall, slender couple roller-bladed by, both sunglassed and disc-manned to the max. Hand-in-hand, they glided past gracefully, their movements a ballet of perfect synchronization.
‘Fall,’ Bib wished fiercely. ‘Go on, trip. Skin your evenly-tanned knees. Fall flat on your remodelled faces.’ He had hoped it might cheer Ros up. But, alas, it was not to be, and on the couple glided.
Ros