What I loved most about Florence, besides her intoxicating smell, was her clothes. From behind my ergonomically-adjusted computer monitor, I waited impatiently for her to unbutton her pea coat, peel open her leather trench. I arrived fifteen minutes before our working day officially started, at nine o’clock. She floated into the office between nine thirty and ten o’clock, sometimes later. Sometimes she brought her toy poodle, Billie, who I pretended to love. It felt like I was the only person in the industry, in the world, who didn’t love dogs more than human beings.
The minimum-wage internship that had got me my job with Florence had broken any faith that I had in managers. The internship was at a commercial photography studio in East London and it lasted eleven months, although they only paid me for the first three. For the remainder of my time there, they reimbursed my travel expenses. I had a white boyfriend called Alex who I resented like a brother. I lived rent-free with him and his parents, doctoring receipts for train tickets on his MacBook, on Preview, so that I could claim back more than I had actually spent. I told myself that if the company didn’t offer me a paid position after three months, six months, a year, I would leave. But the months rolled past and I still had nowhere else to go.
Alex’s parents told me that I should threaten to quit, so that the company would try to keep me. But the company didn’t care about keeping anyone. There were enough leaving drinks that they didn’t have to bother throwing Christmas or summer parties. Amy told me that the company was a great place to start your career because you were expected to perform duties above your pay grade. She seemed to believe this, genuinely. She was the Studio Assistant, and I was the Studio Intern. Everything that she asked me to do was pointless, and she ostentatiously answered emails on the weekend.
The Studio Manager was called Pauline. She never once smiled at me, although sometimes she smiled near me, so I knew that it was possible. She told Amy, who then told me, that my taking the full hour for lunch showed that I wasn’t serious about my career. Weren’t Asians supposed to be more hard-working than normal people? ‘You need to be more on it,’ she hissed in my ear, leaning in so close that we could have been lovers. She joked that my misspelling her name in an email to a client was a ‘sackable offence’, but neither one of us laughed. She left post-it notes the colour of bile on my laptop while I was at lunch. In my leaving card, she wrote, ‘Best of luck with your future endeavours, Pauline,’ as though addressing herself.
Amy told me that she thought Pauline’s highlights made her look like a cross between a racoon and early-90s Robbie Williams. ‘I thought you liked Pauline,’ I said, and Amy mimed being sick.
I opened tabs on my computer, endless opportunities. For months, I was rejected or ignored. I only applied for the job at the company where I ended up because it had a one-click application on LinkedIn. And when they said that they loved me, and when could I start, I was so shocked that I handed in my resignation from the internship the next day, as though if I waited for a moment longer I would have to work there forever. Even though I didn’t technically owe a notice period, Pauline bullied me into staying for another fortnight. Amy said that because the creative industry was all about connections, it was best not to rock the boat. The new company was an all-encompassing production company specialising in luxury fashion and beauty. The new office had glass walls and bowls of free fruit and a cycle to work scheme and twenty-three days of annual leave. Everyone was very nice to me and said that they had heard great things.
*
Florence was still on sabbatical when I started. I spent a week and a half waiting for her, customising my email signature, wearing Mango blazers, and photocopying a coffee table book of catwalk pictures for the Print Producer, Louie G. Louie G insisted that he always did his own photocopying, and that he didn’t believe in delegating menial work just because you could, but if I really was stuck for things to do, would I mind terribly? I quoted the email that I had sent out to everyone in the office on my first day: I was happy to help with anything at all!
It turned out that neither Louie G nor I knew how to change the default settings on the photocopier, so we printed a pamphlet’s worth of photocopies of the same photograph while trying to figure out how to force it to feed from the A3 tray instead of the A4 tray. The photograph was of a boyish Asian woman wearing a dress made out of plastic fish scales. I collated the rejected photocopies and flipped through the pages. ‘Could this be some sort of statement?’ I said, which made Louie G laugh a lot, unexpectedly.
Florence returned the following week. Over email, we arranged coffee. I waited for her behind the large monstera plant in reception. I saw her exiting the lift, and stepped
forward.
‘You scared me,’ she said.
Clearly, no one had thought to warn her that I was Asian too. Which was good, I guessed. My surname was Lee. Over email, I could have been an English person.
‘Sorry,’ I said, grimacing. ‘By the way, I love your outfit.’
She wore a rust-coloured midi dress with puffy sleeves and lace-up leather boots, which reminded me of the Jeffrey Campbell Litas I had become obsessed with the idea of owning as a teenager. I religiously watched Asian-American fashion and beauty vloggers on YouTube, and they all owned Litas.
‘Thanks?’ said Florence.
We took turns to swipe our passes at the gate. Her Lita-style boots clicked neatly against the hardwood floor, and I felt uncouth in my loafers.
‘You spent three months in South America, right?’
‘How did you know that?’
‘Louie G told me.’
He had also told me that the reason for Florence’s sabbatical was a long-time-coming but also unexpected mental breakdown. The official story, however, was that the trip was in celebration of her thirtieth birthday.
It was humid outside. Florence sniffed the air. ‘It’s strange to be back,’ she said. ‘It feels like forever ago that I left. But three months is no time at all, in the scheme of things. Isn’t it funny how that happens?’
‘Time works in mysterious ways,’ I said. ‘Or is that love?’
‘I think it’s God.’
I followed Florence down the street. London in the summer was oppressively silly. In the winter it was all thought, no feeling, and nothing grew except for the price of things. I counted back the months. Florence’s mental breakdown must have happened in
February, which made total sense.
We passed a pub called The Regent. ‘This is where all the real work happens,’ said Florence, rolling her eyes ironically. I laughed, she was so funny. There were three men standing on the pavement outside, wearing shirts and gilets, and holding pale, frothy pints. I knew that Florence and I were thinking the same thing. That we looked the same to these men, and perhaps also to each other.
At the coffee shop, Florence sipped iced coffee through a paper straw, while I slurped peppermint tea from a cappuccino cup and felt childish for not drinking coffee. It was almost as embarrassing as not drinking alcohol.
Florence opened her Moleskine leather notebook and bent the spine back so that the page stayed open. The paper was creamy and unlined. She wrote my name, Meg, with a uni-ball ink pen and underlined it, leaving a gap for the glistening loop of the g to fall
through.
‘Let’s talk about your goals,’ she said.
‘My goals?’
‘Yes, your goals. What are they?’
No one had asked me about my goals before. At my previous company, I had no aspirations beyond making it to the weekend and having something, anything, to put on my CV besides my education.
‘I want to learn new things,’ I said.
Florence nodded and wrote this down in her notebook.
‘I love learning,’ I added, laughing nervously. ‘I’m like a sponge.’
Florence smiled, perhaps out of pity. ‘What do you want to learn?’
‘Anything.’
Florence wrote ‘generalist?’ next to the second bullet point in her notebook beneath my name. She paused, her pen poised above the page.
‘Anything else?’
I stared into my tea. There were two thin fibres floating in the muddy water. I followed them around the cup as I tried to think of another goal. I sensed that I had failed her, not knowing what I wanted for my future. I thought of my parents, my Asian parents. I
thought of hers, and wondered what she had told them about her mental breakdown.
‘I didn’t really click with my last manager,’ I said, slowly. ‘I don’t know if that was my
fault, or -’
I had a flashback to Pauline yelling ‘insubordination!’ at me. Was that a dream, or had that really happened?
‘-or what.’
For the first time, Florence seemed genuinely intrigued. I continued. ‘It means a lot to me to have a manger who -’ Florence raised her eyebrows, so I didn’t say ‘is Asian’. ‘-
who gets me. Who gets it.’
Florence sat back and considered me. She lifted her plastic cup, which was sweating condensation, and put the limp paper straw in her mouth. I kept my eyes on the table, on the wet moon left by the iced coffee.
‘Will you be my mentor?’ I whispered. ‘Will you guide me?’
Finally I looked up at her. There was a reflection of my silhouette in her eye, and a wink of mischief. I watched her take a long, smooth drag of her iced coffee.
‘Of course I’ll guide you,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that the point of having a manager?’
*
I laughed for no reason. I loafed around in my loafers, ate free apples, and waved at my colleagues through glass walls. I vomited exclamation marks and kisses and reacted to everything on Slack with the person-raising-both-hands-in-celebration emoji. I ate pasta salads from Tesco on the strip of grass near the office which passed for a square. Laurence, a Production Assistant who had joined the year before me, helped me chase away the pigeons. Did I like Laurence, or did I like the attention, like seeing how far I could make it stretch? During Zoom meetings, we sent each other Will Ferrell gifs on Slack, announcing that we were hungry or bored.
I booked taxis, updated spreadsheets, and filed expense reports. I fetched proofs and invoices and jugs of water. My proficiency in these tasks made me grateful for my internship. I was soon promoted to looking after Billie when Florence took a client out for lunch. I painted Billie’s licky mat with peanut butter and fed her treats from a mason jar, anything to get her to stop yelping at the door. She smelled like a damp bath mat. She missed Florence so much. I never left the office before Florence at the end of the day, as a sign of respect for hierarchy, the way that Florence never let Billie step out of the door before her, made her sit at the threshold.
Florence pursed her lips when she drafted difficult emails. She listened to 90s hip-hop on Spotify. She had a clipped, slightly plummy voice. I asked her where she had grown up, and she said simply, ‘Kent.’ I couldn’t resist asking whether there had been many other Asians there. ‘Not really,’ she said, seemingly without emotion. Was she impenetrable, or were my expectations too high? I looked for her online, found her only on LinkedIn. She had 137 connections. She had studied Management (Marketing) at the University of Manchester. In this, and in everything, I searched for a deeper meaning that I never found.
Jules and JC, both Senior Producers, started calling us the ‘Double Act’. No one could say that this was racially motivated. After all, didn’t we work splendidly as a pair? I feared that Florence would panic and sever all ties with me, a hit and run. But she continued to delegate to me by default, and I continued to be grateful. The person who the ‘Double Act’ comments offended the most turned out to be Louie G, who had an identical twin. People were always getting them confused. He hated it when two people who looked alike were treated as a singular novelty, and not unique entities, just as complex as anyone else. ‘It’s so dehumanising,’ he would say, his forehead knotted into a frown.
We ended up at The Regent most Friday nights. We split bottles of frigid white wine and traded in gossip and drama. I learned that Stevie was sceptical about climate change, and that Dianne’s hill to die on was her hatred of people who ate burgers with knives and forks instead of their hands. I nodded along, wondering whether perhaps she had a point, woozy from all the wine that I had drunk on an empty stomach. The talk of burgers had made me ravenous. It amazed me that no one ever ate anything at The Regent. I barked this in Laurence’s ear, and he bought me a packet of sweet chilli and red pepper crisps. The wine had numbed the inside of my mouth, so I couldn’t tell if I found them spicy.
‘Do you want to go outside?’ said Laurence.
‘WHAT?’ I said.
‘I said, do you want to go outside?’
I followed Laurence outside and we watched the sky, searching for stars. But it was too early for stars, the summer sky a moody wash of periwinkle. You could never see stars in the city anyway, only satellites.
By then, Alex and I had broken up. It was mutual, in that when I broke up with him, he was relieved. He had wanted to break up with me for a long time, but he hadn’t felt able to live with the guilt of making a woman of colour homeless. He was grateful that he was now able to pursue things with a girl from his neuroscience masters, who also loved bouldering. I knew that whoever she was, she was white. I bawled and begged him to get back together with me. His parents, Paul and Genevieve, bought me a money plant as a leaving present. ‘We know how much you always admired ours,’ they said.
I moved into a house share in Clapham with three girls from Spareroom, whose names were Katy, Katie and Leanna. Katy and Leanna worked in PR, and Katie worked in recruitment. I was particularly taken by Katie, who spent all her money on Ubers and Deliveroo, and fucked people who looked like Love Island contestants. I sat at the foot of her bed, on her fluffy white rug, which was shaped like a Christmas tree. I told her about Alex, fishing for sympathy. ‘Look at me,’ she demanded. I looked at her small, hard mouth. ‘What’s your problem?’
‘Any plans for tomorrow?’ I said. I realised that I was trying to work out how likely it was that Laurence and I were going to sleep together. The odds would be lower if he had to get up early.
‘I’m going to the Pride parade,’ he said, with an air of finality.
In the distance, a siren howled. I felt a disappointment that was at once shallow and bottomless.
‘But I’m not gay,’ he added, hastily. I rearranged my features, fixed my eyes on the invisible stars. ‘I’m going with my friends, who are gay. As an ally.’
I felt awful for not even considering the possibility that Laurence could be bisexual, although I was bisexual myself, and always harped on about microaggressions.
‘It would be ok if you were gay,’ I said. ‘Or whatever.’
‘No, I know. I just thought – because I’m a man in this industry.’
I saw him in the periphery of my vision. He was rosy from drinking in the heat, the wisps of his hair slick against his neck. He looked nervous, unsteady on his feet. The crowd jostling past on the pavement could have knocked him to the ground.
I stared at the spire of the church in the distant skyline. I guessed that Laurence was trying to tell me that he found me attractive. I didn’t know what to believe. Kids had made fun of my slitty eyes, and relatives had bought me whitening sun cream, and boys had only chosen blonde girls in their round-ups of the worldies of our year. But now men on the street were crossing the road to ask where I was from, and Pornhub were reporting that ‘Asian’ was one of their most searched categories.
I decided that I didn’t fancy Laurence after all, that I had been wearing work goggles. I announced that I was going back inside, and I didn’t wait for him to follow. I swallowed a beer to forget the awkwardness of the encounter, and offered to help Stevie carry over the tequila shots when he proposed buying a round. I purposefully avoided Laurence as I distributed my tray of shots. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught him waiting. I could practically hear him whimper.
I lost everyone, and found them again. I could have puked, but I didn’t. I spent a large portion of the night very earnestly telling Louie G that I couldn’t think of anyone more deserving of achieving their dream of being cast on Made in Chelsea. I fell out of the pub on my own, looking for strangers to charm a cigarette from. I drafted a drunk text to send to Alex, containing a poem that I had been writing on the Notes app on my phone. I didn’t send the text, because when I looked up to check if any more promising smokers had arrived, I saw myself in a full-length mirror, making out with Laurence. He was chewing my face, combing my hair with his fingers.
I realised that it was what I wanted, and felt relieved. But it wasn’t me, of course, it was Florence. I had assumed that she had gone home already. But here she was, wearing that gorgeous black midi skirt I had tried to find on Google earlier in the day. I didn’t want her to think that I was pathetic for always asking her where her clothes were from. She opened her eyes, and looked into the heart of me.
*
Arriving at the office on Monday morning, I was disappointed to discover that it was just another day of work. Jules and JC talked loudly about who and what they had seen at the Groucho Club, and Stevie and Dianne slated the television series that critics were raving about. Nobody mentioned Friday night, Florence kissing Laurence. I avoided Florence and I especially avoided Laurence.
‘Meg?’ said Florence. ‘Shall we go for a coffee?’
Louie G was charged with watching over Billie while the Double Act left the office. Florence asked me cursory questions about my weekend, which I answered in a cursory way, the way that I talked to my parents.
‘About Friday,’ said Florence. She sounded annoyed. Suddenly, I was afraid of her again.
Her scent danced in the air, lovelier and lighter than perfume. I became increasingly annoyed with myself for being such a coward. I realised that we were walking nowhere, that we were following traffic down the endless main road.
‘I need you to take ownership of what happened with Laurence.’
‘You what?’
Florence pursed her lips. I looked away quickly. I thought that she was stomping her foot, but the noise turned out to be the vibrations from a nearby pneumatic drill. It opened a hole in the bus lane, splintering the tarmac.
‘As you know, it’s not always easy for women of colour to be taken seriously in this industry.’
The vibrations intensified, chattering mindlessly. Florence went on, although it was only possible to hear her when the drilling stopped.
‘And men do it all the time! They impregnate their secretaries, for God’s sake.’ I nodded, but I didn’t know why. I agreed that yes, sometimes men impregnated their secretaries.
‘But you,’ said Florence. She shook her head disbelievingly. ‘I’ve always thought that you and Laurence would make a cute Assistants couple. Aren’t you always eating lunch
together anyway?’
I couldn’t help but feel flattered that Florence had taken notice of anything I was doing, beyond serving her. The drilling resumed, but we were far enough away. I wondered where we would end up.
‘I don’t think anyone saw,’ I offered.
‘You saw.’
‘I was the only one around.’
‘You were so drunk, you don’t know that. And I can’t take any risks. Laurence is my direct report.’
I watched her tilt her head towards the sky. It was very pale grey, almost white. Somehow she was no less beautiful to me.
She spoke into the air. ‘Everyone gets drunk at these things. And people get mixed up, misremember. These things happen.’
I scoffed. ‘Did you sleep together?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
She looked at me sharply, signalling the end of the conversation. We were halfway back to the office when she added, as an afterthought, ‘I think that this could be beneficial for the both of us.’
*
My temples throbbed, and I realised that I was still partially hungover. I had spent most of Saturday spewing and crying. I had spent most of Sunday messaging unusual people on Hinge. I looked for Laurence across the open-plan arrangement of hot desks, saw his elbows sticking out from behind his ergonomically-adjusted computer monitor. I opened Slack and clicked on his profile picture, which showed him climbing Machu Picchu. I remembered that Florence had climbed Machu Picchu during her sabbatical. Had they bonded over this?
I hovered my cursor over a brief that a client had sent, which I couldn’t bring myself to forward to Florence just yet. I fiddled idly with the margins of a spreadsheet. When I saw Laurence standing up, I stood up too. I followed him into the copy room. He didn’t
seem surprised to see me.
‘How was Pride?’ I said, forcing cheerfulness.
Laurence glanced at the panel of fluorescent light which flickered overhead, the only relic in this modern office. The light illuminated his rosebud mouth and the pale purple bags beneath his eyes.
‘Yeah, fun,’ he said.
‘I was so drunk on Friday. Were you?’
Laurence nodded very slowly, as though at any moment he might be required to change his answer, shake his head. I realised that he was holding the same coffee table book of catwalk pictures that I had photocopied for Louie G in my first week.
‘Are you doing anything on Thursday?’ I said. ‘I was thinking we could go for a drink after work, or get some food.’
‘Just us?’ said Laurence.
I nodded.
‘Like, a date?’
I nodded again. Laurence said that he was free on Thursday. He turned away from me and opened the coffee table book to the first page. The photocopier bleeped as he changed the settings. It whirred to life at his touch, drowning out the sound of everything that was unsaid between us.