Being Bess

by Blueberry Pie

(part 2, continued on from here)

The soft precision of the day moved on, and I let it bring me with it. The tube was heavy with sweat and voices, and the walk to work lined with sleepy pigeons, all in agreement that this was a day to spend under duvets.

I work in an upstart PR firm in Shoreditch. But for all our pretensions of east end cool, our main clients are an international fruit corporation who want us to infiltrate social networking sites with strawberry recommendations and a company that mainly produce stair lifts. For a meeting that morning, I had produced a presentation on the merits of a cherry iPhone application.

“Morning darling,” I heard from the office kitchen. I peeked my head around the door in return. Sarah, my boss, sat at the office kitchen table eating a huge pile of toast smothered in peanut butter and honey, the crumbs dripping over her almost-ready pregnant belly. “Morning Sarah.” She looked up at me from under her blond bangs, her rosy face and red lips revealing themselves. I always thought she looked a little like some kind of milkmaid, skin ruddy from the outdoors, big eyes too innocent for her PR soul.

“So I hear you bumped Ivy Walters last night? Jackie said she saw you chatting to her for ages.”

I blushed. Sarah didn’t notice. She continued, words buoying themselves up in between each slice of toast.  “You’ve got to get her on board with us. We could do some PR for her people for free.” Ivy owned a kind of hybrid celebrity agency, for which she promoted a handful of actors, singers and poets. Although how she did this was impossible to fathom – just like television characters never seem to work, Ivy was a modern flâneur, always to be found wandering from one friend’s flat to another, stopping off at cafés along the way. I’m aware this sounds a little mythical, but some people are that way – their personalities too big to fill their very human shoes.

“Yes of course Sarah, I’ll see what I can do.”

“By the way Bess, Charlotte’s back from New York for a month or so to work on the new stair lift project.”

I had been making some tea all this time, and had just been about to drink it. It dropped to the floor, smashing and splashing its hot contents all over my ankles.

“Oh, Bess! What’s wrong with you today. Hungover?”

“A little.”

Charlotte, I should explain, was my ex-girlfriend and colleague – but we had kept our relationship secret to “keep work and sex separate” she had always said. Compartmentalising had never been my favourite trait, but since we’d parted, I’d taken on the tendency, safely placing Charlotte in the faraway land of pretzels and bagels. It had been six months since she moved, and now she was apparently back.

I picked up the shattered mug pieces, wishing I’d broken twenty of them so that I could stare at the safety of the floor all day. But the day was plodding on, and each of its steps drew a collision with Charlotte ever-near. Buses don’t just come at once, they come in bendy bus batches weighed down with people and luggage. I am not averse to bad analogies.

[more soon]