remained silent.
‘Er . . . same as,’ said the scruffy young man next to Paddy, who, for reasons unknown to Alexa, was known as Biscuit. She remembered him from her first day; he’d been the one brandishing the voice-distorting megaphone. He was responsible for the jokes pages of Banter.
‘Any news on the Guy Thomas thing?’ asked someone.
Biscuit screwed up his face. ‘He’s threatening to sue.’
‘Bastard.’
‘Fucker.’
Alexa looked around, perturbed. ‘Sorry . . . could someone explain the Guy Thomas thing?’
Derek sighed, loudly. ‘Could someone please explain the Guy Thomas thing, for the benefit of our managing director,’ he said, in a tired monotone.
‘We, um, printed a “fun fact” about him in the Celebrity Banter section,’ said Biscuit, not meeting Alexa’s eye. ‘Said he had a phobia of peas. He’s claiming it’s not a phobia, it’s an aversion.’
‘He’s going to court over an aversion to peas?’ Alexa frowned.
‘He always threatens.’
Derek leaned forward again. He had the same look on his face as before.
‘Round here, you see, lawsuits come with the territory. Not a lot you can do about them.’
Alexa disagreed, but said nothing.
‘Anyway! Good news,’ said Neil, tactfully changing the subject. ‘We’ve had Ricky Lewis confirmed as our lead feature next week. Got the green light for a “Love Rat Tells All” piece.’
‘Fan-fuckin’-tastic,’ said Derek, shaking his fist in what Alexa could only interpret as a display of jubilation. There were nods of respect from all round the room. A couple of men punched the air.
Alexa said nothing. She didn’t share their enthusiasm. Ricky Lewis was a premiership footballer whose exploits, as far as she knew, included: drink-driving, speeding, cheating on his girlfriend with a teenage prostitute and then walking out on said girlfriend, who had taken him back and was five months pregnant with his child. Was it right, she wondered, to splash heroic images of such a man across the pages of a magazine aimed at impressionable young lads?
‘Love the angle, too,’ added Derek. ‘Really get him to talk – you might get some juicy tit-bits.’
‘Some sordid truths about the wife, maybe?’ someone else suggested.
Neil nodded and jotted it down. Alexa nearly spoke out, but stopped herself. She was new to this market. There was clearly a lot for her to learn about what worked and what didn’t. If this was a feature that pulled in the readers, she could hardly speak out against it.
‘Other stuff . . .’ Neil was taking the lead as Alexa had suggested, she noted, his shiny pate bobbing from side to side as he skimmed down his list. ‘Ah, yes. This week’s Ten Sexiest is nurses, which is always a winner. I think there was only one that didn’t get her baps out, so that brings the nipple count to eighteen, from just the one feature.’
Alexa joined in with the general noises of appreciation, finding herself inadvertently glancing down, checking that her own nipples were hidden away under the dark, shapeless top – one of five almost identical garments that had become her own unofficial uniform since the day one faux pas with the suit. She felt uneasy. Did they seriously use nipple count as a metric to gauge an edition’s prospects?
‘Then we’re just deciding on whether to do a men’s summer diet feature – “The Mankini Diet”, we were thinking – or just a how-to on barbecuing. Or maybe some sort of how-much-sex-do-you-need-to-burn-off-the-calories type thing.’
Alexa tuned out as various suggestions were bandied about. It amazed her, how differently things happened here compared to two floors down. At Hers, features writing was seen as an art form. It was hard enough just to think of a theme that was topical – not just appropriate for the time of year, but based on real-life global trends. On discovering that, say, a wave of fifty-somethings were taking up extreme sports, or that refugees were crossing the channel and moving in with local pensioners, the challenge would be to find a hapless features writer willing to find a fifty-something mountain-biker or a Dover landlady harbouring immigrants. At Banter, it seemed, features were plucked from thin air. Funny surnames, whacky hair-dos, tasty breakfast cereals – anything would do.
The discussion eventually ran its course and Alexa looked around hopefully. She wasn’t going to bring the meeting to a close – not with Derek sitting three seats down.
‘One more thing,’ said Neil, just as Derek started noisily bashing his papers against the desk in a conclusive manner.
‘Mmm?’
‘As usual, we’ve had a shockingly bad set of Banter Confessions in this week.’ He pulled a face. ‘I was hoping Sienna might have time to write a few?’
All eyes turned to the peroxide blonde next to Derek.
‘I reckon I could fit it in,’ she replied, with extra emphasis on her last three words.
Alexa frowned, ignoring the ripple of smutty laughter that was travelling across the room. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘But shouldn’t we be getting real girls to send in their confessions?’
Derek rolled his eyes. ‘That’s the idea, yeah,’ he said. ‘But like Neil said, we don’t always get enough and most of them are too crap to print. Sienna does a much better job, don’t you, darling?’ He turned to his PA and winked.
‘Apparently I do a very good “compliant”,’ explained Sienna, smiling demurely at Alexa as the dirty laughter flared up again.
‘I just wonder . . .’ Alexa feared that she might already be testing Derek’s patience, but she wanted to get something straight. ‘I was just wondering why we don’t get more confessions in. We offer a fifty pound incentive for the best one, right?’
Derek nodded reluctantly. Marcus rolled his eyes. The pallid redheaded news editor always seemed to side with Derek. It was as though they had some secret allegiance. Alexa persevered, nonetheless.
‘We have nearly fifty thousand female readers . . . But we have trouble eliciting three decent confessions from them each week?’
‘Yeah. Look, this isn’t exactly a new problem.’ Derek rolled his eyes impatiently and exchanged a look with Marcus. ‘It’s just the way it is.’
Alexa disagreed, again, but this time she was willing to speak out. Something was ringing bells.
‘Last year,’ she said, ‘when I was working at Hers, we noticed a massive drop-off in letters coming through to our agony aunt.’ She looked around. Sienna was inspecting her nails. Derek was spinning a pen around his thumb. Marcus was trying to do the same only failing and most of the others looked half-asleep. Only Neil and Riz seemed to be listening.
‘We realised that the drop-off coincided with the new editor mugshots. Our agony aunt’s new photo made her look about twenty years younger and a lot more attractive. It was putting the readers off. They wanted to see someone they could relate to. What mugshot are you using for the confessions?’
Neil looked up immediately. ‘It’s a picture of a random lad, looking kind of curious. I’ve always thought it’s a bit seedy, actually. My wife thinks it looks like a paedophile. Maybe we should change it? We could pitch it as “send your confessions to our secretary, Sienna”.’
‘Hey,’ Sienna pouted, pushing her breasts a little further onto the desk. ‘Not if it means an ugly mugshot.’
‘It doesn’t have to be ugly.’
‘Medium-ugly,’ said Marcus, raising a ginger eyebrow.
‘Oi!’
‘Tell you