cabinet,’ Shelley said as she marched past Briony and out the door.
After lunch, they were too nervous to do any work. Shelley didn’t see much point in continuing with her column – ‘Noughties Loving’ – if everything was going to be changed around. And as far as she knew, she might end up getting the sack after all, especially after correcting Aidan’s grammar during his grand speech.
Aidan had posted up a schedule on the notice board giving everyone a 15-minute slot for an individual meeting in his office. Shelley was about half-way down, just after Freya who in turn was straight after Briony. She and Briony sat and watched as people filed in nervously and came again a quarter-hour later, some looking happy, some looking glum but most just looking gob-smacked. Stella Stargazer, who did the horoscopes (real name Moira something), stormed back out to her desk, packed up her things in a cardboard box and stomped straight out muttering ‘disgusting’ under her breath every few seconds.
Shelley looked on wide-eyed.
‘She didn’t predict that,’ Freya reflected as she passed, then giggled at her own joke. Shelley watched her go.
‘What a cow!’ she muttered. ‘And why is she so confident?’
Maybe Freya did know something.
‘You know what else I read about him on MySpace?’ Briony said, out of the blue.
‘What’s that?’
‘He has a back, sack and crack done every three months.’
‘What!’ Shelley spat. ‘He wrote that on MySpace?’
‘Well, as good as. His blog said he visited Jen’s Unisex Hair removal salon last week for his quarterly treatment.’
‘That’s not necessarily to have his … ball-hair torn out,’ Shelley protested.
‘What else would he go for? His nostril hair?’
‘Why would someone write that on a blog? Is there no personal space anymore?’
‘Not everyone is as prudish as you, Shell, Aidan has over two hundred friends on his space, he can’t possibly keep up with all of them all of the time, so he writes a blog letting everyone know what he’s up to. Anyway, the reason he mentioned the trip to the salon was to recount an amusing anecdote about what happened while he was there. I don’t think he’s one of those losers who keep a meticulous log of his every waking move.’
Shelley wasn’t really listening though, she was thinking about Aidan’s sleek, well-muscled back, his rock-hard, hairless buttocks, and two shiny-smooth …
‘Bollocks!’ someone shouted from Aidan’s office, which happened to be situated right behind Shelley. Then the door was flung open and Maya, one of the subeditors, marched out. Then she turned around and shouted back through the open door. ‘It’s all bollocks, Aiden Carter, and I’m not having it!’
She followed Stella Stargazer down the stairs.
The other subs went back to checking copy. It was Briony’s turn next; Aidan popped out before she went in and said:
‘I’d love a coffee, anyone else want one?’
The room went as quiet as a library. No editor had ever made even their own coffee, let alone made one for someone else. No one replied except Briony.
‘Yes. I would, thanks. White with three,’ she said.
‘Righto,’ Aidan said cheerfully and disappeared into the kitchen.
Shelley looked at her quizzically. ‘You already have a coffee,’ she pointed out.
‘I know. I want to see how well made his coffee is. Is he just trying to create a good impression by offering to make a cup? Is this the first cup he’s ever made? Or does he make a habit of it? If it’s shit, we’ll know he’s a fraud. If it’s good, we know we can trust him.’
Almost without thinking Shelley answered. ‘I trust him.’
Shelley surfed the net absently while she waited for Freya’s interview to be finished. Briony had come out of Aidan’s office looking thoughtful, but told Shelley she wanted to think things over before talking much about it. All she’d say was that Aidan had presented her with a challenge, an assignment tougher than anything she’d done before.
‘We’ll talk about it tonight, yeah?’ Briony said absently, checking her phone for messages. This of course made Shelley even more nervous and she tried to do some work to take her mind off it.
She was half-heartedly researching an idea she’d had for her column, which she was sure would never see the light of day again, at least not in its current form, but she needed to do something. Her column was supposedly about twenty-something singletons looking for love in the big city, but she was no Carrie Bradshaw and sometimes wondered if she should rename the column ‘Sad in the City’. For the past three issues she’d written pretty much the same column, how difficult it was to meet a man who wasn’t gay, hygienically-challenged, socially inept or carrying more baggage than a kleptomaniac Sherpa. She needed something new.
She had an idea to write about the new craze supposedly sweeping the singles bars – Nude Speed Dating. The reasoning was this: why go through all the trouble of spending five minutes finding the right life partner, only to find when you got them into bed that they had an unpleasant mole somewhere intimate? Or that the blonde hair came out of a bottle? It’s the future after all, who has that kind of time?
Shelley clicked on the site of one of the companies that organised the evenings and waited for the page to load up on the crappy old Mac, only to be greeted by a full-screen, hi-res image of the naked torsos of a man and a woman, each holding a drink. Shelley stared in horror at the well-toned bodies, the woman’s perky breasts and the man’s only partially flaccid penis. She stabbed with the cursor to close the image, but the computer was old, and had to think a while before attempting to perform the simplest tasks.
The door to Aidan’s office opened behind her and Shelley turned, feeling her face turn crimson. Aidan stepped out first and turned to wait for Freya to emerge, glancing curiously at Shelley’s monitor as he did so. Freya came out afterwards, beaming and shook Aidan’s hand warmly.
‘Thanks so much, Aidan,’ she said ingratiatingly, ‘I really appreciate this opportunity.’ She walked back to her desk, swinging her hips and looking very much like the cat that’d got the cream.
‘I hate her,’ Briony whispered. Shelley nodded.
‘Come on then Shelley, let’s be having you,’ Aidan said. Briony snorted as she walked into Aidan’s new office and the door closed behind her.
‘Now we have met before, haven’t we?’ Aidan said as he ushered Shelley into a comfy chair.
‘You held the lift for me yesterday,’ she replied. ‘Such a gentleman.’
Oh God, she thought, who do I think I am, Elizabeth Bennett?
Aidan smiled, then immediately frowned, ‘Yes, but I’m sure we met before that, properly …?’
‘Yes,’ Shelley confirmed, ‘at the …’ and she blushed again. What was wrong with her? ‘… at the Christmas party last year.’
‘Yes of course,’ Aidan said beaming, ‘“Macarena”, wasn’t it?’
‘I … no. That was …’ she said.
‘Good,’ he said, looking down at the sheaf of papers in front of him. ‘Now, I’m going to cut to the chase here, we don’t have much time. Your column, though well-written and very funny, is not going to be suitable for the new look of the magazine.’
Shelley was disappointed, even though she’d been expecting this. She’d half-hoped Aidan would say something like ‘Yours is the only bit I’m not going to change – it’s brilliant!’
‘Instead,’