What She Wants

What she needed was a virtual boyfriend: a sophisticated robot who could cuddle her, make love to her and ask her about her day at work, and who shut up when she was tired and who never said things like ‘I’ve been thinking about our future and I want to take up this job offer on Mars…’

She grinned to herself. How weird that nobody had ever thought of it before. A virtual boyfriend would be perfect for millions of women. No emotional hassle but all the physical advantages.

Lily smiled engagingly at her.

Sam smiled back. ‘Sweet, isn’t she?’ she said.

‘When she’s asleep,’ Lily’s mother said with feeling.

Back in London, Sam picked up some groceries from the nearest shop and cooked herself some vegetable pasta with organic pesto sauce. Stir-frying vegetables, boiling pasta and adding a sauce and some parmesan shavings was the nearest thing to cooking that Sam ever got.

She piled it all onto a large white plate and sat down at the table with her favourite Nina Simone CD playing softly in the background and the Sunday papers spread out in front of her. But strangely, she didn’t feel hungry. Normally, she adored pasta and hoovered up anything with pesto sauce on it but tonight her appetite had deserted her.

After a while, she gave up and shoved the almost untouched plate away from her. If she wasn’t hungry, it was her body’s way of telling her she didn’t need any more food. Anyway, after two days with Hope shovelling down Sally Lunns, she could hardly expect to be hungry.

On Monday before lunch, Steve held a top level meeting where the subject was company cutbacks. Ten senior executives sat around the glossy boardroom table and focussed on their departments. All present looked outwardly unconcerned but quivered inside their designer jeans and hoped they personally weren’t for the high jump. All except Sam. She was fed up with quivering at things Steve Parris or anybody else said. She’d had a hellish morning and didn’t care a fiddler’s toss if she was fired at that precise moment, not least because she’d just signed a three-year contract. She’d spent the entire morning on the phone to Density’s manager who was explaining all the things that his charges wouldn’t do to promote their album. So far, the ‘wouldn’t do’ list included talking to any interviewer who hadn’t been at one of their live gigs and doing any breakfast television or any other media the band described as ‘…facile and cretinous…’. They didn’t want to pose for any photos on the basis that they liked the publicity ones and couldn’t go through all that hassle again of having make-up applied and having to look moody for hours. And they were not, absolutely not, letting any tabloid journalist near them.

Sam had tried pointing out that this little list would make the record company’s job extremely difficult but the manager was having none of it.

‘Steve Parris said we could have what we wanted,’ he hissed down the phone. ‘This is what we want.’ With that, he hung up.

Because she didn’t want any blood spilled just yet in relation to Density, Sam hadn’t rung him back and threatened the manager with a do-it-yourself vasectomy. But she was tempted to. Now she sat at the meeting and caught a sympathetic glance from the publicity director, who had heard all about Density’s can’t-do list. In Sam’s first weeks at Titus, the LGBK publicity director, a tall black American woman named Karen Storin, had been the friendliest of all her new colleagues.

‘Welcome to Steve’s elite club,’ Karen had joked quietly the first time they’d met.

‘Elite club?’ inquired Sam.

‘The women execs club,’ Karen explained. ‘Steve’s not big on female empowerment.’

‘You mean I’m here because I’m a woman and you’re here because you’re a black woman?’ Sam joked.

Karen grinned. ‘We’re here in spite of those facts – and because we’re damn good.’

Sam knew there was another reason she was there: because the European President had put his foot down.

‘OK?’ Sam asked Karen now, hiding a smile because they’d just had a variation of this conversation minutes before on the way to the meeting, safe in the knowledge that they could talk freely before they reached the boardroom where Steve’s earwigging second-in-command would be listening. Karen was handling Density’s publicity schedule and was encountering the same problems Sam had.

‘Everything’s under control. The schedule for Density is working out just fine,’ Karen said gravely, which was a million miles away from what she’d said originally.

Then, she’d been in a rage. ‘I’ve just been on the phone to their manager and I have never dealt with anyone like him in my life. If I didn’t know he was working with them, I’d swear he was trying to sabotage them. They refuse to do anything I ask. Do they want the album to flop?’ she’d hissed at Sam.

‘How about you?’ she said now to Sam across the board room table.

Sam smiled: ‘Utterly under control too,’ she said deadpan, as if moments before she hadn’t told Karen that the Density manager was ruining her entire week. Maintaining the façade that everything in your label was hunky dory was vitally important when you worked under Steve Parris.

The great man himself arrived bringing with him the noxious smell of a cigar. Sam quite liked cigar smoke, having once been a twenty-Dunhills-a-day woman, but she objected to the fact that Steve ignored all the office signs and smoked anywhere he liked. Everyone else who smoked had to rush downstairs to the street so that at coffee break time, the pavement outside the Titus office was jam packed with hollow-cheeked people inhaling furiously to make up for the previous, stressful, nicotine-free hours.

Steve threw himself into a leather chair, shoved it back from the table and put his leather-booted feet on the blotter his assistant had neatly laid out in front of him. ‘So what’s happenin’, gang?’ he asked.

Sam could hear a growl deep inside her body. Where did he think he was? A biker’s club with a bottle of beer in front of him? He was such a weedy little shit. She hated him.

‘Great, just great, Steve,’ said Zak, the Titus A & R director, who probably did think they were in a biker club with beer in front of them. Too much cocaine in the eighties, Sam had been told. If he hadn’t been one of Steve’s personal pals, he wouldn’t have been in the job.

‘Cutbacks and reorganization,’ Steve intoned gravely. ‘We have to lose at least ten senior people to go along with the global restructuring.’ Everyone stared at him, stricken. Ten jobs. Ten senior level jobs. That meant ten people in their building, people who worked for them, people they liked. People they would have to sack. Sam felt the by-now familiar clenching sensation deep in her insides, a painful knotting spasm that she’d half-diagnosed as irritable bowel syndrome. What else could it be? And she felt nauseous too. She still wasn’t over her flu, that had to be it. She hadn’t been able to touch her wholemeal toast this morning and she’d felt so exhausted, it had taken three strong mugs of coffee to get her out the front door.

‘The staffing levels in Europe are way too high and we’ve got to cut back,’ Steve said. ‘The international office say we’re top heavy with staff and this is the only way. Making our powerbase smaller is going to streamline the whole organisation, stop us getting lazy.’

‘Have you identified any particular departments or is it going to be across the board?’ Sam was amazed to discover that she’d spoken.

Steve cleared his throat. ‘Your label is going to be badly hit,’ he said. ‘The ratio is way off compared to the American offices. You need to cut four people.’

Sam felt sicker.

‘We’ve got four hundred people working for us in this country, so it’s not that big a percentage,’ cut in Steve’s favourite yes-man, a smooth guy from finance.

‘But it’s a big deal,’ snapped the company’s head of legal, a dynamic dark-haired man named Curtis. ‘We’re talking about your colleagues, not worker ants. What about my department?’ he asked Steve.

Steve was nervous of Curtis, Sam had noticed. Probably afraid to browbeat a man who knew employment law backwards and could draw up a constructive dismissal suit in ten minutes on the back of an envelope. ‘You’re fine, nobody from your department,’ he said now.

The meeting lasted another twenty-five minutes with Steve giving them the party line on how this was to be dealt with, both within the company and publicly. The trade papers would have a field day speculating on the company’s bottom line if the cutbacks were explained incorrectly. Personnel had already identified the people who were first on the list: they’d inform each department head at a private meeting. Sam’s was scheduled for an hour and a half later.

As they all left the boardroom and walked to the lift, nobody spoke. Suddenly she couldn’t face standing in the claustrophobic lift. She needed some air. Turning away from the lift, she hurried to the stairs and practically ran down four flights to the street. Curtis was there already, lighting up a cigarette.

‘Can I scab a cigarette from you?’ Sam asked, hating herself for having one after all these years.

‘I didn’t know you did,’ Curtis remarked, handing her the pack.

‘I don’t. Not any more. That was a bit rough, wasn’t it?’

He nodded silently.

‘I don’t know how I’m going to sack four people. Sorry, “lose four members of staff to keep us in line with company guidelines”,’ Sam said bitterly. ‘I haven’t been here long enough to make any judgements on the staff and yet, now I’m going to be the bitch from hell and get rid of some of them. That’ll be great for morale. And Steve looks as if he doesn’t give a shit about them. He almost smiled when he said I had to lose four people. I swear he hates me.’

Curtis smiled slowly. ‘Steve doesn’t like anybody,’ he said. ‘Understand that and you’re going to be fine, although it’s no secret that you’re not on his Top Ten list because he wanted someone else to get the job.’

Sam rolled her eyes. ‘Tell me about it.’

‘I’ve known Steve for ten years and he’s always been the same,’ Curtis added. ‘He’s good at his job, though. This company was screwed up when he took over. He’s hell to work with but he gets the job done.’

‘He enjoys making people sweat,’ Sam sighed. ‘He deliberately told us there was a redundancy meeting this morning but never said who was going to be made redundant so that everyone would be nervous.’ She didn’t mention that since she’d just signed a three-year contract, she’d known that she, personally, wouldn’t be on the list. Just her staff.

‘Psychology,’ Curtis shrugged. ‘Steve’s plan is that by the time he tells you that you have to fire four people, you’re so pleased that your name isn’t on the list, you agree to it like a shot. Steve rules by fear. He likes terror and arguments among the staff: divide and conquer are his management rules. That’s the way he learned and he thinks it’s the only way things work. He’s terrified that if he ever tries to be nice, he’ll be taken over in a bloody coup.’

Nauseated after her forbidden cigarette, Sam went back to her office feeling nervous. She shouldn’t have said anything to Curtis about Steve Parris. That was stupid, unprofessional behaviour. She hadn’t been at Titus long enough to understand where allegiances lay and was only guessing that Curtis and Steve didn’t get on. They could be bosom buddies behind it all. She really was losing her marbles when it came to how to behave in the corporate jungle. What was happening to her? It must be the after effects of the flu. She’d better get some perk-you-up supplement in the chemist.

At three o’clock, Sam steeled herself to enter the lions’ den. Steve and the personnel director were sitting in front of a list of names and the personnel director launched into the list of people Sam was to make redundant even before she’d sat down.

Sam listened calmly, hiding her distaste. One of the women on the list had just made it public that she was four months’ pregnant. A young guy in publicity Sam had been very impressed with had just bought an apartment and had signed up for a huge mortgage. Sam’s insides did their clenching routine.

What could she say? Nothing. She was a boss now, she had to make tough decisions and implement them if necessary. Four people from her department had to go and if she balked at it, all she’d be doing was undermining her own position. The personnel guy kept talking and Sam listened, feeling wooden.

When he was finished, she coolly pointed out that there was a pregnant woman among the names. ‘You should check whether she could sue us for getting rid of her at this time,’ Sam said unemotionally, as if she was talking about squashing a spider instead of discussing another person’s life.

Steve laughed from behind his vast desk. ‘I told you Sam Smith would be able to sack her entire department and it wouldn’t bother her in the slightest,’ he said triumphantly to the personnel guy. ‘We did good the day we hired you, Sam. We needed somebody who understands the game. Not some dumb cow who’s going to sob her eyes out whenever she has to sack people.’

Sam blinked. She remembered back to her final interview, the one where Steve had delicately – well, as delicately as someone as bull-headed as Steve could manage – tried to find out her views on kids. They couldn’t ask outright, of course. Asking a woman if she planned to have children, and was therefore looking for maternity entitlements and leaving them with six months of a problem, was illegal. Sam had always understood this interview difficulty and had made it plain to prospective employers that she was not one of those biological-clock-about-to-go-off women. It was an advantage and she used it. Always had.

She remembered giving Steve and the other board members her steely look as she had said ‘I’m not the mumsy type.’

They’d all breathed a sigh of relief, and Steve had given her a matey look.

‘Tough as old boots,’ he said now, looking as if, under other circumstances, he’d pat her shoulder in a friendly manner. But Sam wasn’t the demonstrative type. Shoulder patting, double kissing and all that stupid, fake affectionate stuff drove her mad. She shook hands. Why pretend to be best pals with people you didn’t know? It was hypocritical.

‘That’s what I like about you, Sam. You don’t take any prisoners. That’s what they say and it’s true. I like that in my team. Sacking people isn’t easy but we’ve all had to do it.’

Steve waved his cigar, leaving a trail of smoke. Sam was dismissed.

She went back to her office thinking of the irony of Steve saying there was anything about her he liked. Yeah, right.

She also wondered what else people said about her. Tough as old boots. You don’t take any prisoners. Hell, she sounded like a hoary old sergeant major at a boot camp who scared the hell out of the rookies and who could drink rotgut with the best of them. Smith is tough as old boots but boy, can she do the job. There’s a heart in there somewhere, if you can find it. Not bad looking but too tough for any man…Women like her always end up on their own.

Being tough had seemed like a good idea when she was twenty or thirty and desperate to prove herself in the corporate jungle but now, with forty facing her like the north face of the Eiger, she wasn’t so sure. Tough but able to carry off a trendy designer dress was one thing. Tough but wrinkled like an old chicken was another thing entirely. How would she come across at sixty-five when she was tougher, older and with a hard little face grooved into a lifetime of wrinkles?

At that moment, she thought of Aunt Ruth. Ruth Smith, civil servant and scourge of those beneath her in the planning department, had not been the maternal type either and having two small children unceremoniously dumped on her hadn’t changed that. She’d continued to live her life exactly the same way as before her brother and his wife had been killed. To cap it all, Ruth had never even looked motherly: she’d looked like an eccentric maiden aunt from a novel.

Sam could remember the boys across the road teasing herself and Hope about their mad aunt.

‘She’s a witch, she is, eye of bat and leg of toad!’ they’d chant nastily at the girls.

Secretly, the girls had to admit that their aunt bore more than a passing resemblance to a witch, mainly because she insisted on wearing her hair in an antediluvian bun and fancied herself in pince nez spectacles which did nothing for her pinched, narrow face.

Sam felt weary. She’d always had a difficult relationship with her aunt, and swore she’d never be anything like her. And here she was turning into a carbon copy. Aunt Ruth would probably have run Titus Records with a rod of iron and made it the most successful record company ever.

There was a giant skip outside the house next door when Sam arrived home that night. The builders had finally moved in. Sam glared at the rather run down building which was the next in the terrace. For the two years she’d lived in her flat, she’d been irritated by the dilapidated state of the adjoining house which was owned by a dotty old lady who clearly had no time for painters, window cleaners or gardeners. When she’d died, the house had been put up for sale and all the neighbours watched the property pages with interest, dying to know how much it would go for so they could figure out how much their own places were worth.

It had taken ages, but when the sold sign was finally pasted on, all breathed a sigh of relief. Except now, Sam thought grimly, there would be building work going on for ever as the new owners ripped it apart. Kango hammers thumping at dawn and scaffolding positioned so that builders could peer curiously through her windows, not giving her a moment’s peace. Feeling put upon and miserable, Sam stomped up the stairs.

‘Stop making noise,’ roared Mad Malcolm reedily from the top landing.

Sam growled deep in her throat and just managed to stop herself telling him what orifice he could stick his head into.

Inside the sanctuary of her own apartment, she dropped her briefcase wearily, shed her coat and sat down on the big pale couch in front of the fireplace. Determined to ignore the fact that the place was a mess, she switched on the television and watched the end of the evening news. But when it was over, she couldn’t relax. It was no good, she had to tidy up. Compulsive tidiness, Karl had teased her when she’d start changing the sheets on the bed while he was still in it.

Pulling on an absolutely ancient pair of jeans and a threadbare old grey jumper, Sam planned the clean out. The bedroom to start, she decided, tying her hair up into a ponytail.

It took two and a half hours to clean every area of the apartment to her satisfaction. By the time she was finished, the kitchen was restored to its sparkling, pristine perfection and the sitting room was once again a restful, Zen-like spot with all clear, white surfaces free of old newspapers, magazines and scribbled yellow post-it notes about work. The four big modern oils that hung on the warm cream walls stared down at a tranquil, clutter-free room furnished cleanly with big white couches, a low pale wooden coffee table and a muted cream rug on the pale floorboards. The grouping of fat creamy church candles on the fireplace was dust free and perfectly aligned, while the blond driftwood carving on the windowsill had been dusted to within an inch of its life. Even the big Indian silver elephant that stood in the corner beside her towering ficus plant gleamed. Sam knew that not everybody liked the clutter-free look but she adored it. She liked the order and the sense of calm that it brought.

Hope hated it.

‘You’ve no…stuff, no knick knacks,’ Hope had said the first time she’d seen the apartment in all its spartan modern glory. ‘It’s all too perfect for me,’ she’d added, eyes sweeping over heavy cream brocade curtains that would be speckled with grubby fingerprints if Millie and Toby were ever let run riot there.

Seeing the place through Hope’s eyes, Sam had to agree. Hope would have had tonnes of junk on every occasional table, instead of simply placing a lamp or a piece of sculpture there.

When they’d been kids, they’d shared a bedroom and Hope’s side had been a riot of cuddly toys, empty boxes kept because they were pretty, bits of tangled up jewellery and hand-sewn lavender sachets for her clothes, most of which were hung on her chair.

Sam’s side had the only colour co-ordinated wardrobe in their school. Graded from white to black, Sam’s clothes hung in a regimented line that awed Hope just to look at it.

Tidying her wardrobe properly would have to wait tonight, she decided, as she finished the bedroom. It annoyed her when the wardrobe was messy with the greys infiltrating the rail of blacks and skirts hanging with the trousers, but she’d do that tomorrow.

In the kitchen, she put away her cleaning equipment and put some cheese on a couple of water crackers. She poured herself a glass of crisp Sancerre and sat down on the couch again, this time content. As the strains of Mozart echoed softly around the apartment, Sam finally felt herself relax. She willed herself to forget about work and the job losses.

Then, the noise started. It was strange, because at first she wasn’t sure where it was coming from. Surely not upstairs? Even Mad Malcolm wasn’t mad enough to be playing loud rock music at ten o’clock at night. And then the penny dropped. Next door. Still clutching her glass of wine, Sam stared out the front window at the adjoining house and saw two young women lugging a crate of beer up the path. Standing beside the window, the music seemed louder. A taxi pulled up and disgorged more people, all happy and clearly party-bound, judging by the number of off-licence bags they were carrying. Sam felt the veins in her head throb. This was not wild party land. This was a wildly expensive neighbourhood where the notion of a wild party was one where the caterers served too much Bollinger or where guests tripped on their Manolos while staggering out to the chauffeur-driven Mercedes.

Whoever had bought the house couldn’t, wouldn’t, dream of ruining the discreet peace of Holland Park with a party? Or if they thought they could, they’d soon discover the error of their ways, Sam snarled.

Just as abruptly as it had started, the music stopped and Sam felt some of the anger leave her body. Good. Some other resident had complained; therefore she didn’t have to go in and do so. In her current mood of pent-up tension, who knew what she’d have said. The police would have been called sooner rather than later.

She curled up on the couch again, sipping her wine and letting the Mozart soothe her.

With a loud bass thump, the music next door cranked up even louder this time, sounding as if Black Sabbath had turned up and were playing a live gig.

As the music reached a crescendo, so did Sam’s temper. Downing half her wine in one gulp, she grabbed her keys, slid her feet into the espadrilles she used as slippers and rampaged downstairs and out into the street.

‘Oh no, a party,’ sighed one of the nice couple from the basement flat, who were just coming in after an evening out. ‘Have you rung the police, Sam?’ he asked.

‘No,’ snarled Sam. ‘But phone for an ambulance because whoever’s having this party will need it when I’m finished with them.’

With giant strides, she raced up to the other door and pushed. It wasn’t locked and opened easily. From here, the music was eardrum-splitting. The house, which was just a shell with stripped walls and bare, elderly floorboards, had excellent acoustics. Sound reverberated through it. Sam stepped over a rolled up rug and a crate of beer. The place was a disgusting mess. She could just imagine the thought process of whoever had bought it: have the party now, before the wallpaper was up and the carpets down. Or rather, Sam thought grimly, the spoiled teenage children of whoever had bought the house had thought it was a good idea to have the party now and their stupid parents had agreed, not caring about their new neighbours. Big mistake.