What She Wants

But Lydia had been snuffling and sneezing all day Wednesday and had given Sam her germs. Lydia, a carefree twenty-five-year-old, could afford to take a few days’ sick leave. Sam, teetering on the abyss of forty and the most recently hired executive with a lot to prove, couldn’t. Illness in female execs was viewed with as much disfavour as working mothers racing home from important meetings to take care of toddlers with high temperatures. At least Sam, childless by choice, didn’t have to worry about the latter.

The telltale click of her door handle alerted her to the fact that someone was about to enter the office. Immediately, she jerked upright, flicked back her glossy dark blonde hair, and opened her eyes wide to banish the exhaustion from them.

The door opened abruptly to reveal Steve Parris. Sam mustered up her best, most professional smile. When the company chairman himself deigned to arrive at your office at half-past five on a Thursday evening, it was your duty to look alert, on top of things and enthusiastic. Not half-dead with flu symptoms.

Sam shoved her seat back and got to her feet in one fluid movement. ‘Steve, what can I do for you?’ she said, hoping to infuse her words with the correct amount of deference. In her two weeks at LGBK, the biggest label at Titus Records, she’d divined that Steve Parris, no matter how much he slapped workers on the back and went about with his hail-fellow-well-met routine, was a control freak who needed subservience the same way other people needed oxygen. Short and skinny, he was still a formidable presence in his black Prada suit. People who underestimated Steve because he was so physically unprepossessing rarely made the same mistake twice.

With his shock of hair, heavy eyebrows and disconcerting habit of smoking a cigar the size of a nuclear weapon all along the no-smoking corridors of Titus, Steve was the sort of man who made people nervous. Sam was no exception.

She was no coward but she knew Steve didn’t like her. He’d wanted a man for the job. The Titus European President, who was Steve’s superior, had wanted Sam. Steve had given in but he wasn’t happy about the decision.

‘Just dropped by,’ he said now, small black eyes constantly moving over Sam, her messy desk and the office, which was still only half-furnished. Sam had dumped the previous incumbent’s furniture, an act designed to show people that she was the new broom.

Sam smiled at him as warmly as she could manage. Steve never ‘just dropped by’.

‘You’re going to see Density tonight,’ he said, half-question, half-statement…

That was it, Sam realized. Density, the band Steve himself had signed at huge expense, and who had just finished recording their first album, were performing in a small club in Soho. Sam, as head of the label they were signed to, would be very involved with their future, so it would be interesting to see them live for the first time. A future that would mean big trouble for Steve and Sam if they didn’t make it. He was in her office to make sure that she was giving his protégés every help, so that their album would be a mega success and he’d get the kudos for signing them. If it wasn’t, someone’s head would roll and Sam would bet her enamelled golly badge that it wouldn’t be Steve’s.

For the first time, Sam felt the strain of being the boss. Suddenly she wondered why she hadn’t stuck with her enjoyable first job all those years ago in the film distributors where the biggest stress was looking after some neurotic movie star on a promotional tour who wanted Earl Grey tea and lemon in a motorway café where the only serious menu choice was what sauce you got with your deep fried chicken. But no, she’d wanted power and a fabulous career and had left the film industry to spend fifteen frantic years in the music business. Fifteen years of hard slog to end up with Steve Parris growling at her every day. Had it been ambition or masochism? It was the flu talking, she thought, angry with herself for such weakness.

‘I’m really looking forward to seeing Density live,’ she said now. ‘I love the parts of the album I’ve heard.’

Steve’s beetle eyebrows bristled and the small black eyes got smaller and meaner.

‘You mean you haven’t heard it all before?’ he barked.

‘I’ve heard most of the tracks but they’re remixing three. The producer is going to send the final version tomorrow,’ Sam said, trying to remain cool.

‘Jeez, you should have heard it before tonight. It’s out in a month. I’ll see you at the gig tonight and we’ll talk about the album tomorrow,’ he said, slamming the door shut on his way out.

Sam sank back into her chair and automatically put one finger to her mouth to nibble the nail. Shit, shit, shit.

She shuffled her papers again and then made up her mind. An executive decision. After all, she was a bloody executive, so she could make a decision. She was flu-ey, she had a gig to go to and she really needed to change her clothes if she wasn’t to look like a complete dork at the gig. The change of clothes she’d meant to bring was still sitting in the hall of the flat where she’d left it this morning. Wearing a suit, even if it was a pretty slick grey one with a discreet DKNY label, she’d stand out like an elderly sore thumb amidst crowds of combat-trousered trendies with Kangol hats and trainers. Bugger the paperwork: she was going home to mainline anti-flu products and to change her clothes. She locked her door and walked past the glass offices, and past the open-plan section of the fifth floor, LGBK’s centre of operations. Luckily, Steve’s office was on the seventh floor, with all the Titus presidents, vice presidents, and other assorted control freaks. She hoped nobody was looking at her, sure she had a guilty look on her face that said ‘Going Home Early’.

But even though she didn’t know it, as she strode along the glass corridor, people were looking; people just looked at Sam Smith. Not that she was beautiful or supermodel-tall or startling in any movie star way. But because energy emanated from her like electricity and because she moved like a dynamo.

At five foot six, Hope was two inches taller, physically bigger, and yet when the sisters were together, Sam was the one people noticed.

While her sister was a mixture of pale shades, with fragile colouring and a rounded, welcoming face, Sam was the opposite: all strong colours and strong features. Sam’s hair, mouse at birth, was long and a gleaming dark blonde. She had it blow-dried at a salon most lunchtimes and it fell in severe, gleaming straightness to her shoulder blades. It was a classy look, one which she’d deliberately chosen so that people would look at her and instantly know she was a player: a somebody. Her face was oval with a strong chin, a long straight nose and slanting eyebrows that showed up intensely coloured tawny brown eyes. Her skin was darker than Hope’s, almost olive. In the summer, she could pass for an Italian because she went a rich, golden brown. At school, people never believed she and Hope were sisters. Only their mouths were similar: they shared the same soft plump lips, a feature which made Hope look unsure and innocent and which gave Sam the look of a woman who’d had collagen injections. To counteract this model-girl plumpness, Sam drew her lipliner inside her natural lip line and only ever wore pale lipstick so as not to draw attention to her mouth. Hope’s mouth was vulnerable and slightly sexy, both looks Sam was keen to avoid. As far as Sam was concerned, once you let your hard-as-nails façade down, you were finished in business.

Slim, due to hyperactivity rather than because of any time spent in a gym, Sam looked like the perfect career woman in her tailored grey trouser suit, with a sleek nylon mac, mobile phone and briefcase as accessories. Straight out of Cosmopolitan’s career woman pages, except that at thirty-nine she was a fair bit older than the Cosmo babes. The vibes she gave off said ‘unapproachable’ and that suited her just fine.

‘If you were seaside rock, you’d have a line through you saying “tough cookie”,’ joked her best friend, Jay, on those nights when they shared dinner together in the local Indian restaurant they both loved.

Sam always laughed when Jay said that but lately it didn’t sound as funny as it used to. Jay was a willowy Atlanta woman she’d met in college, part of a small group of people who were Sam’s closest friends. Jay who wore bohemian chic clothes, worked in a bookshop and was only interested in her job as a means to pay the bills. She admired Sam’s single mindedness but said the career fast track wasn’t for her. Tonight, Sam didn’t feel as if it was for her, either.

On the packed underground train, she clung to the side of a seat as they hurtled along. Sam hated it when the train was full. She got off at Holland Park, bought some anti-flu capsules in the chemist, and trudged through sleeting rain to the flat, one of four in a huge, white-fronted converted house in an expensive, tree-lined street.

The place looked as if it had been burgled, which was pretty much the way she’d left it that morning. A huge pile of ironing lay on one corner of the dining room table; the previous few days’ papers were scattered on the rest of it and the coat she’d been wearing yesterday was thrown on the sofa. Usually chronically tidy, she hated mess with a vengeance. And when the flat was messy, the cool, clean lines of the all-white rooms looked all wrong.

Since starting her new job at Titus, Sam had been working horrifically long hours and the housework had fallen by the wayside. Her cleaner had left a month before and Sam hadn’t managed to find a new one. The flat wasn’t enormous or anything, but doing any housework at the end of a murderously hard week was the last thing she had energy for. The flat was a two-bedroom, financially crippling, investment in a posh bit of London and the living room cum dining room was the only decent-sized room in the entire place. The kitchen was so small that two people really needed to know each other intimately if they wanted to spend any amount of time in it together, while the bathroom was minuscule and without one of Sam’s favourite amenities: a bath. Showers were functional, she’d always thought, but a bath was luxury. Still, with her mega new salary, she’d be able to move soon, to somewhere bigger, more opulent and with a bathroom where you couldn’t stand in the centre of the floor and touch both walls with your outstretched hands.

She couldn’t face the effort of sticking anything in the microwave, so she spread a few crackers with cream cheese, poured herself a vodka and red bull to give herself energy and took the first dose of her anti-flu medicine.

In the bedroom, she sat down at the computer and connected to Outlook Express.

Hi Hope, she wrote. How’s it going with you, love? I’m a total grump today because I’m feeling fluey and work is a nightmare. Sorry, shouldn’t be bothering you with this but I’ve got to tell somebody. Going mad. It must be my age. I am running out of the ability to talk crap to people, which is worrying in this business. Talking crap is how I got hired in the first place. (Only kidding.) Plus, I’ve got to go to a gig tonight and the band in question make the sort of music that Toby and Millie might make if you left them alone in a room with two guitars, an effects pedal and a drum kit. Just as well there’s paracetamol in the flu stuff I’ve taken. Talk more at the weekend,

Sam xx

She had a speedy shower to rinse off the sweaty flu feeling and dressed quickly in black nylon trousers, a small orange T-shirt and a long black leather coat that clung to her like it had been tailored to her body. The stuff in the bag in the hall would be creased and would have had to be ironed again. Wearing crumpled clothes was not her style. Draining her vodka, she was out the door only an hour after arriving.

‘I hope you’re not going to have any wild parties this week,’ yelled a reedy male voice from the landing above hers. ‘I’ve got guests and they couldn’t sleep last night with the noise.’

Sam resisted the impulse to answer back. There was no point. Mad Malcolm, as the rest of the residents called him, was oblivious to reality. He lived on the top floor flat and spent his life accusing the other residents of having orgiastic late-night parties and disturbing him, which was utterly untrue. The most noise Sam had ever made since moving into her flat a year ago had been the night she’d dropped a saucepan of hot pasta sauce and it had splashed onto her leg, making her yelp in pain. Used to getting up at dawn to be at her desk by seven thirty, her idea of a late night at home was being in bed at half eleven watching the late movie. The people who lived downstairs were similarly quiet and it was only Mad Malc himself, who had wooden floors, bad taste in music and a constantly barking Pekinese, who disturbed the peace. Neighbours. As if she didn’t have enough on her plate without a nutter living above her.

The club was hot, sweaty and already full of Density fans when she got there. Her name was on the guest list and she slipped past the queue near the backstage area.

Backstage, long-haired roadies humped equipment around, biceps glinting with sweat in the hothouse club environment. They ignored her completely. Sam had no idea where she was going and had no intention of asking.

She blindly followed a winding corridor and found herself in a big cool room where tables, plastic chairs and two kegs of beer were positioned. Two record company people were sitting in a corner, drinking beer from cans and chatting to a skinny young bloke with a shaved head.

She didn’t know the Titus people very well yet but at least she recognized these two. Darius was a handsome, upper-class sort of boy in his late twenties from Artists and Repertoire, commonly known as A & R. Normally young, musical and deeply hip people, A & R staff trawled clubs and venues spotting talent. They worked on the road and were rarely in their offices before half ten, arriving with tired eyes and demo CDs people had pressed on them the night before. A & R people sometimes resented people like Sam, whom they saw as ‘suits’ who screwed up their wonderful signings and who refused to sign up avant garde stuff the A & R people were passionate about. Sam had heard that Darius was brilliant at his job and had a fantastic ear for music; vital in a job which involved working closely with bands, songwriters and producers.

The other Titus person was a publicity woman whom Lydia had said was nicknamed Cher because she looked exactly like the American singer as a thirty-year-old and loved wearing Seventies hippie clothes to emphasize the effect. Sam couldn’t for the life of her remember Cher’s real name.

‘Hi guys,’ she said, pulling a chair up. ‘You been in to see the band yet?’

‘They don’t like seeing people before a gig,’ said Cher severely. ‘Except Steve,’ she added reverently, as if Steve Parris was God. Steve certainly thought so, Sam thought ruefully.

‘Is Steve here yet?’ she asked, knowing she’d have to stand beside him during the gig.

‘No, he’s delayed,’ said Darius. ‘Would you like a cigarette?’ he added politely, proffering a pack.

Sam momentarily wished she still smoked. Everyone else was dragging deeply on full-strength cigarettes. At least it gave you something to do.

‘Given up,’ she said. ‘But thanks.’

What she could have killed for was a cup of tea to soothe her throat. There was a huge hot water urn in one corner complete with teabags, plastic cups and sugar but in this beer ’n’ fags atmosphere, Sam felt it would mark her for ever as a dorky ‘suit’ if she had tea now.

After fifteen minutes of chat, the support band went on and the room cleared while everyone went to stand backstage and look at them. The noise was terrible. Like the sound of two wrestlers having a fight in a saucepan factory. Sam managed to look interested for two songs, then sloped back to the hospitality room and made herself a cup of tea. Who gave a damn who saw her. She wasn’t a kid who had to pretend to be cool, she was probably fifteen years older than most of the people backstage and if she wanted tea, then she was going to have tea. Age had to have some compensations.

When the support band were mercifully finished, she rejoined the others at the side of the stage and waited for Density. Finally, after ten minutes of screaming and clapping from the fans, they appeared, none of them looking over the age of twenty-one, all lanky young guys with weird haircuts, mad clothes and strange piercings. Their music wasn’t her scene but she could sense the raw intensity of it. She only hoped that the people who bought CDs agreed with her.

Steve appeared, deep in conversation with the band’s manager, so Sam was able to just nod hello to them. She’d have to speak to them both later and say how wonderful the band had been, but for now, she wanted to listen and not have to make polite small talk.

After half an hour, she decided to go down into the club itself and watch the band from the audience’s point of view. She liked doing that: seeing how the fans reacted was one of the essential litmus tests for a band. Seeing if people bought their album was the other, more important one.

Telling the backstage bouncers that she’d be back, Sam slipped out into the crowd and was hit immediately by the scent of young bodies, sweat mingling with perfume and the tang of dope. She stood at the back and breathed in a waft of what smelled like l’Air du Temps.

The smell of floral perfume at gigs always astonished her. There she was, surrounded by gyrating young bodies, a mass of humanity in leather jackets, hipster trousers and death-defying heels with hard young eyes staring at her arrogantly. Then she smelled the fresh scents of their perfume rising in the heat: floral bouquets from their mums’ dressing tables mixing with the fresh scent of carefully applied deodorant, innocence meets sexy. Suddenly they weren’t tough little cookies any more, but vulnerable young girls anxious before they went out, hopeful that they were wearing the right clothes, yelling that ‘Honestly, Dad…’ they wouldn’t be home late as they blasted themselves with a spritz of something suitable for a wood nymph.

They were all so young really; trying hard to be grown up. And she felt so old. Sam rubbed her temples tiredly. What was wrong with her? She’d been feeling so old and worn out all day: too old to be standing at a heavy rock gig trying to get it. She didn’t want to get it any more, she didn’t want to have to stand in a smoky club and tap her foot to some incomprehensible beat.

She wanted to be sitting at home, drinking a nice glass of red wine, perhaps listening to some mellow Nina Simone and feeling relaxed.

Sam closed her eyes and gave herself a mental pinch. Get a grip! she told herself. You’re a working woman, so work. She went looking for Steve to tell him he’d signed the band of the century.

The following morning, the flu hit her like a ten-tonne truck. She woke at half past five, bathed in a cold sweat with her head aching and her throat the consistency of rough gravel. Moaning as she dragged herself out of bed, Sam stumbled into the kitchen and boiled the kettle. Hot lemon and honey might help. So much for the anti-flu stuff she’d gulped down the night before.

Enveloped in her big navy towelling dressing gown, she slumped in front of the television with her hot lemon and flicked through the channels.

‘Useless rubbish,’ she muttered as she discovered that the breakfast television shows hadn’t started yet and the only alternative was Open University or news. After half an hour watching a programme about mountain gorillas, Sam still felt physically sick but mentally much improved. She never read anything any more apart from marketing reports and Music Week, and her daily culture came in the bio yoghurt she tried to eat most mornings. She really must learn more stuff. It was terrible to be uninformed, capable only of discussing sales, royalties, budgets and the marketing spend per unit of the latest hot CD. She dimly remembered a time, fifteen years ago, when she went to museums and galleries; when she had a bit of a life.

She went into the bathroom and showered, determined to make herself feel ready for work. Calling in sick so early in the new job was not a possibility, no matter how swollen and painful her head felt. Then, wrapped in her dressing gown again, she slumped down in front of breakfast TV. Just another little rest and she’d be ready to leave the house. Seven ten, Sam’s normal time for leaving for work, came and went and she still felt as if her head was the size of a basketball.

She’d call a taxi instead of going by train. She was sick, she had to cosset herself.

The taxi driver finally arrived at half eight and turned out to be one of the cheeky Cockneys so beloved of tourists and so hated by anyone with the flu and a thumping headache.

‘…so you see, they nicked him for having six people in the cab even though they were all one family. Ridiculous, it is. You can’t break up a family who’re looking for a cab, even though the rules say you can only carry five passengers. Mad, that’s what I’d call it…’

Sam sat in the back and made heroic efforts with her Clinique base. However, being mere base and not miraculous make-up straight from the Jim Henson creature shop, it couldn’t hide her blotchy, feverish skin, or make her look anything other than a sick, 39-year-old woman who hadn’t slept well. To compensate, she made her eyes up heavily, hoping they’d distract from the rest of her.

‘…so I says to him, don’t go busting me, mate. I’m just doing my job…’ said the taxi driver.

She got into work at ten past nine to find a chirpy Lydia behind her desk.

‘You look rough,’ Lydia said.

Sam glared at her and wondered where she’d gone wrong in the choice of this particular assistant. Normally, her assistants would never volunteer such personal opinions. She must be getting soft in her old age. The only consolation was that Lydia was proving to be very efficient, despite her breezy, carefree demeanour.

‘Thank you for that, Lydia,’ Sam replied, ‘and thank you for giving me your flu.’

‘You poor love,’ Lydia was sympathetic. ‘It was a bad dose. Do you want me to get you tea or some tablets?’

‘Tea would be nice,’ Sam said tiredly. ‘Any calls?’

‘Yeah, Steve Parris’s assistant’s assistant, wondering where you were because you’d missed the half eight meeting.’

‘Shit!’ Too late, Sam remembered the all-important breakfast meeting. She was forty minutes late, unforgivable. Well, unforgivable when the person you were meeting was Steve. Her mind sprinted through several plausible excuses but the only real one was a no-no. She’d already heard that Steve was phobic about illness. He’d have the entire office fumigated if he thought anyone in it was ill. Not for the rest of the staff’s benefit, mind: for his own.

Lying was the only option. She phoned his assistant and lied that she’d been sure the meeting was for half nine. ‘It’s my fault,’ she said apologetically, ‘my assistant was away and I mistakenly scribbled it in the wrong line of my appointments book.’ She dutifully wrote ‘Important meeting with S Parris – NNB’ on the half-nine line of her book just in case Steve appeared and asked for proof. She wouldn’t put it past him.

‘The meeting’s over and Steve isn’t happy,’ said his assistant in nervous tones.

Steve was never bloody happy, Sam groaned. He’d been born bad tempered. After knowing him for two weeks, she knew this to be true.

‘Oh gosh, I’m so sorry. What do you think I should do to make it up to him?’ she asked sweetly, knowing that if anybody knew how to handle Steve, it was the poor woman who had to put up with him all day.

‘Grovel,’ was her advice.

Grovelling didn’t work. Steve roared into her office just before lunch, evicting the two publicity people who’d been discussing a forthcoming album release with Sam. He hadn’t waited until they’d fled before he’d started shouting abuse at her. Sam sat calmly, then apologized for her mistake.

‘But,’ she said, naked steel in her voice, ‘coming into my office and screaming at me is not the answer. That isn’t the way I run my office and it’s not the way I expect to be treated, Steve. I am not some junior you can intimidate.’ Her tawny eyes were as hard as nails. She glared at him.