flinched in my chair. As far as I could tell, during the ten minutes I’d been in the office, Donna hadn’t even looked at my synopsis and yet she was still managing, quite adequately, to pull it apart, word by word.
‘Why do you think you should be writing for Belle, Angela?’ she asked.
‘Well, I—’
‘I mean, seriously, what makes you think that you –’ she paused to hold her hand out towards me and then wave the hand up and down to make sure I understood her critique encompassed every last little thing about me. ‘– that you should be allowed to write for Belle?’
Silence. Allowed? Why should I be allowed?
‘I’m waiting for an answer,’ Donna said.
I was stumped.
Donna wasn’t very nice.
‘Well, I might not have written a specific travel piece before, but I write about a lot of different things in my blog and I interviewed James Jacobs for Icon earlier this year so I think that I could do this,’ I said. Very quickly. All of my confidence had vamoosed and all I wanted to do was get out of the office, bury my face in a pan of chocolate brownies and cry, like the porky talentless excuse for a human being Donna so clearly thought I was.
It was fair to say that Donna Gregory wasn’t the glamazon dragon lady you might expect to find sitting behind the features editor desk of a fashion monthly. She wasn’t that tall for a start, her glossy (OK, very glossy) brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she was actually wearing jeans. Very skinny and presumably expensive jeans, but jeans nonetheless. But while she might not be wearing Prada, she was certainly proving herself to be the devil. From the second I’d walked through her door, she’d more or less done nothing, but insult me.
First, I wasn’t allowed coffee because I looked like I needed a good night’s sleep and the caffeine wouldn’t help, then I was refused water in case I needed to use the bathroom, which was for staff only. The implication being that I was not now and would never be staff. But she did suggest I try drinking at least two litres a day outside of her office because I really did look a lot older than thirty. When I mentioned that I was only twenty-seven she actually made a little gasping noise and held her hand to her mouth.
Bitch.
‘Hmm, I heard about the Icon piece,’ she said, flicking through some printed out emails. ‘You’re the girl that turned James Jacobs gay, yes?’
‘For fu—I mean, no, not exactly.’ I wasn’t quite sure why I was still sitting in the office. There was no way I was going to get this job. ‘I’m pretty sure he was gay before I walked in on him and his boyfriend going at it in a public toilet. But I suppose you never know. It’s possible that my extreme level of dehydration turned him.’
Donna paused for a split second and looked at me again.
‘That dress, I don’t recognize the designer. Where’s it from?’ she asked.
‘I got it from Beacon’s Closet, it’s vintage,’ I said with a modicum of pride. Vintage was cool, wasn’t it?
‘Right.’ She sighed and leaned back in her chair, stretching up to let her tiny cropped Alexander Wang T-shirt reveal a couple of inches of taut, gym-toned stomach. And I knew it was Alexander Wang because she had gone out of her way to tell me almost as soon as I walked in the door. ‘Of course it’s vintage. And your boyfriend’s in some band?’
‘Alex? Yes?’ I was confused. Which, to be fair to the witch, was pretty easily done. I didn’t want her taking any sort of pleasure in that achievement. ‘But I don’t really see what that has to do with a travel piece?’
‘It has everything to do with it, Angela,’ Donna said, leaning towards me across her desk. ‘I’m going to try and be as kind as I can when I explain this to you, but whatever, there’s no point trying to sugarcoat it. You’re really not the sort of person I would have write for Belle.’
‘Really?’
This was just getting embarrassing now. How badly did I want this again? Oh yeah, really badly.
‘Really.’ Donna nodded, missing my sarcasm. ‘But Mr Spencer is very keen for us to use you for something. And don’t get me wrong, it’s not that people who wear vintage don’t have a place at Belle, it’s just…it wouldn’t usually be writing for me. One girl in the art team once wore this amazing Diane von Furstenburg original. To a fancy dress party. That’s a beautiful bag though.’
‘Thank you, it was a gift.’ I lovingly stroked the soft blue leather on instinct, momentarily forgetting the torrent of insults that were coming my way.
‘Of course it was.’ Donna sounded almost relieved. As if the idea of my buying my own Marc Jacobs bag might cause the end of the world. ‘Basically, the only way I can see this working is if we position this as a two part piece. I’ll have someone else put together a high end Paris piece, a feature on the haute couture, the salons, the five-star hotels, and you, the quirky “vintage” girl with the boyfriend in a band, can provide the other side of things. The, oh, I don’t know, the cool, hipster side of Paris?’
‘Oh God, honestly, I’m not cool,’ I said altogether too quickly. ‘I don’t have any tattoos. I don’t even live in Brooklyn. I’m just very, very English.’
‘Oh. Well that could be a problem then.’ Donna leaned back in her chair. ‘Because either you give me Paris’s best flea markets, vintage stores, late-night cafés and dance clubs, or you don’t give me anything.’
Meep.
After sitting through another hour of Donna’s directions on exactly how she wanted the piece to come out – quirky, but not too quirky, edgy, but not too edgy, underground, but not grimy. Just very, very Belle – I was finally released from the office, none the wiser, but actually relatively chipper. I might not have received any compliments, but I had got the job. That was good, wasn’t it?
There was only one person I could talk to about this. And that person better not be screening her calls.
‘Pick up the phone, Jenny,’ I said quietly, dashing into the shade of the nearest skyscraper and following it along 42nd street.
‘Angie, baby, it’s seven-thirty a.m.,’ Jenny crackled all the way from LA. ‘Are you dying?’
‘No, listen, I just had this meeting at Belle—’ I started.
‘You’re not dying, I only got in two hours ago, I’ll call you back later,’ Jenny interrupted.
‘No! Jenny, listen, I have the most amazing news. Did you hear what I said? I’ve got a job writing for Belle magazine.’ I hoped that dropping the name of one of her style bibles might keep her on the phone for five minutes more. ‘Belle. Your favourite magazine. B-E-L-L-E.’
‘No offense, Angie,’ Jenny yawned into life, ‘but what are you going to write for Belle?’
‘None taken.’ I pouted. What about me was so fundamentally un-Belle-like? I had sorted myself out massively in the last year. Well, Jenny had sorted me out massively, but I could do my own eyeliner and everything now. I could do an entire evening out in proper heels if I had my roll-up ballet pumps in my bag. ‘They want me to write an insider’s guide to Paris. They’re going to get some other girl to write the swanky high-end stuff, she’s going to do, who did Donna say, uh, Balmain? Is that right? And you know, Chanel and whatever, and I’m supposed to write about the cool, underground stuff. But I could really use your help, I want this to be good. Do you know any stylists in Paris? Anyone who might know some cool second-hand shops or flea markets?’
‘Balmain? Oh…’ she breathed.
‘Jenny, listen to me,’ I said slowly. I should have known better than to start talking designer at her. ‘Do you know anyone who can help me in Paris?’
‘Oh