wasn’t even time for a Boxing Day lie-in for me. The only downside to working at Selfridges – although based on my Christmas, it could be classified as a bonus – was that I had to be at work at five in the morning on Boxing Day. Alongside our regular team we had twenty contractors and, behind huge vinyl stickers, we carefully stripped the fairy-tale festive display from the windows, and then the glass was covered with shouty red paper advertising the January sales. As Big Ben chimed nine in the morning, a stampede of hungry customers from all around the world charged through the doors and set to work dismantling the entire store, snapping up the designer bargains of the year. It was the shopping equivalent of the bull-run through Pamplona. As fervent fashionistas turned the shop into a glorified jumble sale, our windows team sloped back to bed. This time I headed to my own bed in Kensal Rise. Work was a distant memory by evening, because Rob came over in a Christmas jumper with a mountain of leftover cheese and we roasted chestnuts and scoffed Quality Street cuddled up on the sofa watching Elf. All I needed was him. We were lost in each other and I had never felt happier.
But now, the heady glow of Christmas had disappeared, along with the shine on my relationship, it seemed.
As I entered my super-cool work place through the staff entrance round the back of Oxford Street at nine thirty, I felt a sense of pride. I’d been working as a window designer at Selfridges for six months now and it was my dream job. Finally, that irritating voice in my head telling me to ‘get a proper career’ could shut up because I finally had a proper career. Instead of dreading the point in conversation with friends of my parents or mates of mates down the pub, that would eventually crawl around to the inevitable, ‘So, what do you do, Amber?’ I could embrace the question, invite it even, because I had a decent response.
‘Oooh, what are you working on now?’ they often asked.
‘It’s all a bit hush-hush,’ I’d tease, though it was actually the truth – pulling back the vinyl to unveil the new Selfridges window display was a big, closely guarded event.
‘Jesus, what happened, babe?’ my boss, Joseph, exclaimed as I entered the studio.
‘Happy Tuesday to you, too,’ I sneered.
‘Sorry, babe, but if you’re sick, perhaps you should go home. Pale and interesting is not this season.’
‘I’m not ill, just tired,’ I muttered, marvelling at how stupid I was not to get a muffin as well as a coffee from Starbucks on the way in. Thankfully, our studio office was at the very top of the shop, and when we weren’t tucked away up here, we were downstairs tweaking the windows. I was rarely required for face time with senior management.
Joseph, the creative director for visual merchandising at Selfridges, never looked sloppy, just like his name was never abbreviated to Joe. Tall, handsome and confident, he was fancied by literally the entire female workforce – despite the fact he was gay. He wasn’t particularly camp, which made a certain portion of his admirers cling on to the fantasy that he could be ‘turned’. And of course all the gay guys – which was most of the male staff – had a deep yearning for him, too. Joseph blatantly knew he was God’s gift, and strutted around the store like Mr Selfridge himself. His hair was wavy and shoulder length and he wore it tightly tucked behind his ears, like ram’s horns. If you didn’t know better, to look at him you’d think he was French – arty, Gauloises-smoking, air of superiority – but when he spoke his dialect was pure Joey Essex. Everyone was a ‘babe’ and life was ‘sweet’.
After working with him for half a year, I was getting to know the real Joseph and, although he genuinely lived the life of a moisturising modern man who adhered to the five:two diet and had been known to get hooked up to a reviving vitamin-packed IV drip during his lunch break, at the end of the day he was a first-class creative director and I loved having him as my boss. As well as my solid experience styling the windows at Smiths boutique, I think he was wowed by my time spent assisting Mona – in our world, it would be hard not to be – as he gave me the job without a second interview. When I started, he took me under his wing as a protégée of sorts and it was a great position to be in. It gave me some protection from the less friendly, uber fashiony senior managers who swanned around our floor in their top-to-toe designer threads, trying to catch a glimpse of Joseph.
Then there was Shauna: white fingernails with gold tips, big gold hoops and curly afro hair, channelling a modern day Diana Ross. Her iPhone clicked in my face and then traced my body. A deeply unflattering video of my stunned mug and greasy-looking hair was now playing live on Snapchat. Shauna loved to share. She worshipped at the altars of Instagram and Snapchat and was dedicated to the daily documentation of selfies, shoefies, Instafood, Instacocktails, Instacats – and fairly often me, with #nofilter.
‘You’re so ’grammable today, babe,’ she said, crouching down to snap my Starbucks cup as I placed it on my desk. Until that moment, I had failed to noticed that the barista had scrawled the word ‘Antler’ on it, instead of my real name. Shauna found it hilarious and shared the image with her 1.4 thousand followers. ‘Big night, deer? Get it – Antler, deer?’
I frowned. ‘So I look like something the cat dragged in, can we all just get over it, please?’
Shauna sucked in her cheeks and waggled her finger at me, intimating that I was not one to talk about anything this morning.
Joseph broke us up. ‘Now, now ladies, there’s no time for bickering today, Jeff wants the final designs for the summer windows by EOP, so I need you to finish the edit. And that’s before we get cracking on phase two of the “Chelsea” display.’
The great thing about my job, especially on days like today, was that time passed quickly. I loved putting the mood boards together and then sourcing clothes from the collections about to hit the shop floor to bring it all to life. We were always working on two themes at any one time, currently we were completing the spring windows, inspired by the famous Chelsea Flower Show, and also planning our big summer production, a homage to the ‘Traditional British Seaside’, which would come into play soon after. I was transported from grey January to sunny July and a world of ninety-nines, beach huts, rubber rings, candy-coloured Kate Spade bags, Linda Farrow sunglasses, Matthew Williamson bikinis, palm-print dresses and everything in between. Heaven.
Although Shauna and I didn’t always see eye to eye outside work, we were a great team in the studio, her eye for props perfectly complementing my choice of fashion from the designer look books. The time flew as I busied myself finalising clothes for the Chelsea windows and lining them up on rails ahead of Joseph’s inspection – a cacophony of vibrant pink, lemon, lilac, peach and turquoise, the sartorial equivalent of a fragrant bouquet. Bright clothes were amazing for lifting my mood. But they couldn’t stop me from checking my phone every five seconds. Nothing from Rob.
Two days had passed since Rob told me the news that he was thinking of moving to New York. In that time I had cried in the loos at work once, eaten MacDonald’s for dinner twice, bought a Marc Jacobs top I couldn’t afford, despite my staff discount, and looked at the Angel Wear website five thousand times as a conservative estimate. Krystal, Jessica, Roxy, Leonie, and Astrid were the names of the main Angel Wear ‘Icons’. I could tell you their vital stats by heart. And I hated their perfect thirty-four–twenty-four–thirty-four guts. It was now Thursday and today Rob had been unnervingly attentive, texting me more than usual just to see how my day was going and wanting to arrange to meet up. He’s taking the job and he’s feeling guilty, I know it. In my head, we were already on opposite sides of the Atlantic. But I hadn’t worked out how to handle things the next time I saw him, so I hadn’t yet replied. The reality was that we’d only been dating for five months. I couldn’t stop thinking about his feather tattoo. This could be Rob’s perfect opportunity to just catch the wind and fly.
Work continued to be a good distraction, but Joseph and Shauna didn’t do compassion. I’d come clean about Rob to Shauna in the loos the first morning, when she caught me redoing my mascara and, of course, she had blurted it out to Joseph.