“Happy six-month anniversary, hon! Here’s to you!”
A raised champagne glass came toward me on the screen, contents gently fizzing. I clinked back; my own glass filled with sparkling apple juice instead. It was, after all, early Tuesday afternoon, and I was supposed to be working.
“And you! Can you believe we’ve been married this long… Seems like only yesterday that I was Gabrielle Amelia Richardson, spinster of Great Yarmouth, weeping and wailing and wondering if I would ever meet the man of my dreams?”
Slight sarcasm there, but it flew over my fellow celebrant’s head. “Oh, same! Y’know, Gaby honey, the best advice I ever received was…”
The story made me smile. I’d heard it countless times—the meeting that changed two people’s lives, bringing bliss to one and a tonne of money to the other.
“… and now you’re Gabrielle Amelia McAllan and sooooooo happy waking up beside the man of your dreams every single day…”
I snapped back to attention. Slight sarcasm there too? And every single day was an exaggeration. This week, for example, I woke up to him four days ago and no sign of him since. Phone calls and FaceTime are all very well but in person works best for me.
That is what happens when you marry someone who works in the tourist industry. It was June, though you might not know it from the temperature outside, and Jack was ferrying people to and from various scenic destinations. Thanks to the resemblance he bore to a particular red-headed fictional Scottish character, he ran Outlander themed tours. They took in Doune Castle, Skye, Clava Cairns and Glencoe.
Earlier this year, he’d employed an assistant to help lessen the amount of time he was away. Sadly, it didn’t work out, and we were back to situation typical—prolonged absences and him exhausted and grumpy when he returned to the house at the end of each tour.
And if anyone had the right to be exhausted and grumpy just now, it was me. But best face forward for the boss and all that.
“Yes,” I sipped my apple juice. “Soooooooo happy. What are you doing for the rest of the week?”
A huge sigh. “Filming today, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. A date night late Friday with Donal to celebrate our six-month anniversary. Then, off on a promotional tour to South Korea for five days, plus an interview with Women’s Health to launch my new fitness app, and I need to do a work-out with Pop Sugar to highlight that, and then at the end of the month, I’ll be—”
Do not ask a world-famous reality TV star/‘self’-made billionaire about her schedule. Her busyness was insane. It was 5 in the morning in LA, the only break in her day she could take. I often wondered why Caitlin Cartier chose me as her occasional confidant, but she went on and on about how the best thing in her life—Donal—was thanks to little ol’ me.
I married Jack the day before her wedding. She then borrowed my ‘proper’ wedding day, my venue and all my guests and decided this bonded us together. We were ‘besties’ even if my real ‘bestie’ objected strongly to Caitlin’s claim to the title.
“Doesn’t mean anything, Katya!” I told her when she’d brought this up recently. “Caitlin has more than 700 ‘besties’. You’re one of them too!”
Katya wrote Caitlin’s ‘autobiography’ qualifying her for close status to the famous one—hence their friendship. And she too was a frequent recipient of the Caitlin 5am in LA Skype calls. Caitlin was also ‘besties’ with a lot of other famous people who might need their autobiography written by someone who knew how to spell and where to place commas and apostrophes, so when her laptop vibrated as a call came through on Skype, Katya plastered a smile on her face.
“My mom wants me to try for a baby,” Caitlin said, fiddling with the stem of her glass, making me inhale sharply. Timely. Was Caitlin able to see anything…?
“Your mum?” I asked, screwing my face up. “But that’s…”
“She says it’ll push the show’s rankings up again.”
Keeping up with Caitlin was an offshoot programme of the original show, which featured all the Cartiers. The original show idea came from Caitlin’s mother, a woman so Botoxed her eyebrows haven’t moved in decades. Caitlin had been in the show most of her life until she decided to go her own way. She still appeared in the family show occasionally, which wasn’t as popular these days. Adrienne Cartier must have reckoned lots of hints about Caitlin, and her sex life would win At Home with the Cartiers more viewers. Especially if she did conceive.
“What does Donal say to that?”
Caitlin’s husband point blank refused to appear on either show, though you often heard him speaking to Caitlin in the background. His witticisms had earned him fan forums, all dissecting every remark. He did his best to give his in-laws a wide-body swerve.
Caitlin grimaced. “He says it’s up to us and my mom can shove her rankings where the sun don’t shine.”
She put on a Northern Irish accent to mimic Donal, making me laugh. It must be hard living with a famous person when you don’t like attention. I rubbed my belly in sympathy.
Caitlin gestured her glass towards me. “How are you, anyway, hon? Y’know if we got pregnant at the same time, it would be absolutely amazing, right?”
The apple juice went down the wrong way—or rather, that’s what I told Caitlin as I went off on a massive coughing fit.
“Er…yes. Amazing. Anyway, I’ll let you get on. Talk again soon?”
Caitlin had never worked out ‘I’ll let you get on’ is British-speak for ‘seriously, leave me alone. Do not talk to me a second longer’. Luckily for me. But I did need to do my own work. Jack always put his fingers in air quotes when he asked me about my working day. Because I had wangled a deal where I worked from home, he thought I spent all my time taking personal calls and watching cat videos on YouTube.
But so far this week, I’d only managed to see Cat Man Chris, Kitten Lady’s latest litter rescued from a dumpster and the Vet Ranch’s operation to save a cat injured in a car accident. And another five I’d had to put on my list to watch later.
A woman entered the room behind Caitlin tapping her wrist. Caitlin screwed her face up once more—her assistant also wanting her to end the call. “Bye-bye bestie,” she called out before the screen went blank. Behind me, in the not-so-glamorous Gaby world, a cat yowled. Lunch had only been two hours ago, and it was time for Mildred’s afternoon snack.
I got to my feet, hands going to the small of my back so I could stretch. These days, it only took a few hours of sitting down for me to became uncomfortable. Maybe I needed to invest in one of those Swiss ball chairs perching on top of half of a beach ball to work.
“Okay, okay,” I told Mildred as we made for the kitchen. “The finest Felix coming up.”
Another yowl. Possibly a protest. Mildred worked out a long time ago that I was a pushover. We’d been trying to persuade her Felix cat food was delicious. Not so when you were used to organic venison and lightly poached chicken breast. I opened the packet, its off-fishy tang making me grimace.
Mildred fed, I wandered back into the living room, trying to motivate myself to design amazing web pages that made people want to spend too much money on fake tans, glow serums, false eyelashes and eyebrow shapers.
My phone pinged. A message from Jack. “Hey, gorgeous. How are you…?”
Always a tell-tale sign. As a Scotsman, Jack kept the soppy stuff to a minimum unless he had at least three pints in him. I discounted tipsiness. The greeting was meant to soften me up.
“I’ll be back Friday, not Thursday as the tourists want to squeeze in a whisky trip to Speyside. Think of the extra money!”
Huh.
There was a knock on the door. I didn’t get to it before the door swung open and my mother-in-law bustled in, loaded with shopping bags she dumped on the floor. “Broccoli. It was on special offer in Tesco’s!”
She straightened up and put her hands on her hips. “How’re ye, Gaby? Sit doon, sit doon, and I’ll make ye a tea!”
One of these days I was going to insist Jack took the front door key she had to our house off her. A month earlier, she barged in when Jack and I had decided to spend a Sunday afternoon finding out if a roaring fire lent itself to… let your imagination fill in the blanks. I was on top too, all the better to eyeball her in horror when she burst in. “Was that nipple piercing no’ awfy sore, Gaby? Mind, ye’ll need tae take it out seven months fae now.”
Privacy issues aside, the key thing had its advantages. Such as now when answering the door zapped energy from me.
“D’ye want some shortbread wi’ it?” Caroline called through from the kitchen.
Yes. No. At this rate, I’d never fit into my favourite jeans again. I could hear Caroline talking to Mildred, telling her off for her impatience. She scraped out wooden pellets from the litter box, sending wafts of pee through to the living room. I did my best not to heave, the smell of it overwhelming.
Urgh. I stumbled to my feet and lumbered upstairs, making it to the bathroom just in time. Up came this morning’s Special K, the fizzy apple juice and the beans on toast I’d eaten an hour ago. I flushed the toilet and rinsed my mouth out.
By the time I managed to get back downstairs, Caroline was in the living room once more. She handed me a glass of water and made me sit down.
“Still bein’ sick, then?” She took my hand, turning my wrist over and glancing at her watch so she could take my pulse. “You poor wee thing. But that’s the cat litter cleaned out for the day, so ye dinnae need to worry about that. Drink your water, and I’ll fetch ye another glass. When’s Jack home?”
“Friday.”
“Och, that’s too bad. I thought he promised you he’d no’ work so hard this year?”
She didn’t let me reply. Just as well because it would turn into a bitch-fest. “Anyway, I better go. I’ve got five patients booked in the surgery this afternoon. And then I’m meeting wi’ that whisky company about this year’s sponsorship o’ the Highland Games. See you tomorrow.”
With that, she was off, a car engine starting up a few minutes later despite the GP surgery only being four doors away.
My iMac screen had blacked out—sleep mode activated. I’d been too long not using it when I should have been working. Those glow serum product pages weren’t going to create themselves. Still, the big boss was to blame. Caitlin insisted on phoning me while I was doing my best to work for her company, Blissful Beauty—currently the most successful start-up make-up company in the world, ever. It was the only beauty brand that had managed to crack the South Korea market—a country where people viewed skincare as a religion.
I was their second-in-charge graphic designer for the company’s UK operation, allowed to work remotely and under a super-understanding boss.
On cue, his name flashed up on my phone. I hit the FaceTime button.
“Hyun-Ki! How is the most marvellous designer and boss in the whole wide world?”
“Magnificent!” I’d done my best teach my South Korean boss the English language’s most excellent words. He came up with a different variation every time I asked him how he was. “How is the nine hundred and thirty-first best designer and eight hundredth best employee in the whole wide world?”
I blew him a ginormous raspberry. Good job he wasn’t a formal kind of guy.
“I have big news, Gaby,” he said, face solemn. “I wanted to tell you first.”
“Oh, that’s a co-incidence I’ve-—” But my words were cut off by Mildred who miaowed in the background.
Hyun-Ki broke off to blow her kisses. Always, always choose a boss who loves cats.
“The LA office wants me to work on a brand-new campaign,” he said, giving me thumbs up with both hands. “And I’m going to be heading over there next month. If it goes well, I might end up the creative director for Blissful Beauty, Gaby!”
Ooooohhhhhh. Unlike me, Hyun-Ki ate ambition and the need to over-achieve for breakfast. When I first met him last year, he was a mere 22 and had already been promoted twice. In his spare time, he favoured self-improvement on a grand scale, signing up for advanced coding courses and working on improving his already excellent English.
He wasn’t a hideous person to work for if you forgave him the 7am starts and the nit-picking perfectionism. But how on earth would I cope with a new boss? One who might, whisper it, not want to spend the first half-hour of the day comparing notes on the cat videos we’d watched on YouTube?
As I pondered the awfulness of this, Hyun-Ki’s voice broke through. “… so, as it’s a temporary secondment, I’ve recommended you for my position in the interim. What do you think?”
My jaw dropped open. “What?! Are you kidding? They’ll never let me do that job remotely, and I’m not working in London again. It’s hideous.”
The thought of it made me shudder. I’d spent three months there at the end of last year. Sometimes I woke up from nightmares where I’d dreamt about being on the Tube in rush hour, squashed up against a stranger’s sweaty armpit.
Hyun-Ki smiled. “I knew you’d say that. You’d only need to come to London once a month. And look at that fantastic job you did for the Tantastic launch earlier this year. The launch broke all records for a beauty product.”
Tantastic was a sponge on/sponge off fake tan ridiculously easy to apply and remove. The streaks and patchy bits that came with your usual fake tan? Not the case with Tantastic. Determined to get it right, I’d worked 16-hour days on the campaign for a week. I created an anime figure website that Blissful Beauty’s social media followers could customise with their own faces, which then became avatars, demonstrating themselves applying the fake tan. It took Instagram by storm.
Then, as Tantastic was deliberately put on limited release, every time stores or the website restocked it, the product sold out in seconds.
Hmm. My imagination took over. Gaby McAllan, international jet-setter, hopping on a plane in Glasgow, waking 45 minutes later in London (Stansted), drifting into work, phone glued to ear as I negotiated critical work-related things before sitting at a desk while minions scurried around me.
“Here, Gaby—we got you a coffee. Black, no sugar, right? Do you want a doughnut?”
That happened when you were the big boss, right?
Blissful Beauty’s HQ in central London included a flat. Katya stayed there most of the time with her significant other, Dexter, the head of marketing for the company’s European, Middle East and African market. Might be nice to catch up with them once a month.
Be serious, Gaby.
I shook my head, making my earrings jangle. “I don’t think I’m boss material. “Literally. Today, I was half-dressed. FaceTime and Skype let a caller see only the top half of your body, so I’d kept on my pyjama bottoms. International jet-setters, with their phones glued to their ears, while yelling at people about the design for the fake tan’s summer advert, was wrong, wrong, wrong, did not wear their pyjamas to work.
Bosses also had to deal with budgets. Last year’s planning for the wedding fiasco had convinced me that budgetary control wasn’t within my skill set.
Hyun-Ki pressed his face closer to the screen, dark hair flopping forward. “Will you think about it? It’s only for nine months.”
“Okay. I’ll give the idea serious consideration,” I said, waving him goodbye, and saying, “Absolutely not!” out loud as soon as he’d gone.
Much as the idea of Gaby Boss had its merits, one crucial point stood in its way. I rubbed my stomach again, the tiny bump that made my jeans too tight but was for the time being discreet enough for no-one to notice.
Why would Blissful Beauty want a head designer who was planning to start extended maternity leave in five months?
©Emma Baird 2020
