Air Kisses Read online

  ‘But we need to make it look as though it’s editorial. Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Yes, Marley, we did it for Crunch gym-wear, remember?’

  ‘Good, cool, nice one. Hey, is Hannah around?’

  ‘Not sure, she might be in the goo room.’

  ‘What do you think of her?’

  ‘I love her. Why?’

  ‘But isn’t she like, boring?’

  ‘You’re such a bitch. She’s gorgeous and cute and has become a very good friend while you’ve been away. Be nice.’

  ‘I’m always nice.’

  ‘No you’re not; you’re a bitch. A rotten advertising bitch, single-handedly proving why stereotypes exist.’

  ‘I resent that.’

  ‘You know it’s true.’

  ‘All right, but does she have to come tonight? You’ll have to babysit her all night and you’ll be boring.’

  ‘I will not. It’s you who’ll be hard work.’

  ‘All right, shit, I’ll be nice! Be ready at six. And can you wear your hair up? I love it up.’

  ‘Jesus, anything else? Should I buy a new top at lunch? Pop into Prada, maybe?’

  Still facing my computer, I turned my head a very surreptitious nineteen degrees to watch Marley leave. She was wearing possibly the best-fitting jeans I’d ever seen, lush brown boots that went past her knees to romantically cuddle her child-like thighs, layers of white and grey singlets, and a cool cropped black jacket that radiated a price in the high three digits or low four. Her hair was a shade of rich-woman caramel. Her arse was a video-clip arse. It was perfectly round and high and smugly suggested that she worked out with a handsome young personal trainer to maintain it.

  I knew she was close to Jay, but why mystified me. Jay was so warm and affectionate, while Marley strutted around the joint as though her last name were Beckert. She was on the Gloss advertising team. She was a demonic saleswoman, and earned triple the salary of us editorial kids, a fact her wardrobe reflected: she was always extraordinarily well-dressed.

  She was an account manager now, but there was talk she was soon going to be made advertising director of Gloss, aka ‘top dog’.

  Which meant I would have to deal with her. A lot. I was constantly being pulled into meetings to discuss events and sponsorships with Karen and Laura, the current ad director. Thing was, Laura was pregnant, and her pregnancy brain was becoming a major issue. She had recently presented us with a proposal for doing a sponsorship deal with a lawnmower company.

  Despite the fact I found Marley to be a complete bitch, I desperately wanted her to like me. I tried to figure out why, and it took about three seconds: she’s pretty and dresses immaculately. Obviously, she appealed to my inner caveman. Or magpie. Whichever it was that liked shiny, pretty things.

  As Jacinta tapped away nonchalantly on her keyboard, I wondered if she knew I’d heard her exchange with Gnarly Marley. I was too lame to ask her in person so I sent an email – yes, to someone sitting five metres away – and asked if she was sure it would be cool if I came tonight, because I could easily not, it’d be no problem at all.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Atkins,’ she yelled out. ‘We’ll have fun; Carter Communications know how to throw a good party. Too much money, that lot.’

  ‘Okay, cool,’ I said, dying to ask if it was okay with Marley, because from what I could ascertain, my simple jeans, top and heels combo was going to make the whole crew look unfashionable and repulsive.

  Then with a ding, a name dropped into my inbox: a group email from Marley.

  To: (undisclosed recipient)

  From: [email protected]

  Subject: Eating’s cheating. Sort of.

  Let’s get sushi before the party. Want to line my stomach with more than slithers of duck on a skewer tonight. We leave at 6. Meet in the foyer. X

  I was stunned. She included me. This was monumental. I decided to swallow my insecurities and accept her Fendi coat-hanger of kindness tonight at the party. After all, it’s easy to be confident and friendly when you’re drunk.

  And I’d know. It’s no fiction that when you’re single you go out drinking more. Around 400 per cent more. In fact, if I was honest, part of the reason I’d been okay about the whole Jesse thing was because I was drinking four nights out of seven.

  Tonight’s party was the perfect example. It was on a Wednesday night and it was for a cable TV show none of us had to write about. Regardless, a group of mag fillies were off to consume exotic cocktails and deep-fried canapés like we hadn’t just done it on Monday night and wouldn’t follow it up with a similar imprint on Friday night.

  The thing about working in magazines – well, in beauty or fashion magazines – is that there are way too many functions. We weren’t celebrities, but as we made the party look good with our bright colours and shiny hair, we got invited to most things.

  And because with invites comes pressure to look good, my wardrobe was taking an absolute hiding. I no longer had a line between ‘work clothes’ and ‘going out’ clothes.

  My shopping expeditions had become not dissimilar to working out long division:

  ‘All right, so, if I buy this dress, I can wear it to afternoon tea or breakfasty beauty launches, but I won’t be able to wear it to that posh fragrance cocktail party because I’ll look like I’m off to a baby shower. No good. Put it back. Oooh, but this Stepford Wives blouse will make the crossover beautifully. Sextastic with a pencil skirt. Reeowr – you clever little minx. Oops, hang on! Get a load of those puppies! Toooo much cleavage. Terrible if I suddenly get pulled in to make a presentation with the advertising team. Okay. Ooh, this dress looks good. Pretty… What a delicious Salma Hayek-esque shade of red. Innocuous enough in the breast department to see me through a fine-dining lunch, but still slinky enough for Friday-night drinks without making me look like I went home and got all tarted up. Perfect. Excellent work, Hannah. Take five…’

  And this was only when I was buying the threads. Once I had them safely home, I was expected to:

  a) coordinate them with shoes, non-visible undie-lines, the right bra, belt, necklace and earrings

  b) consider all of the functions they must cater to on that particular day

  c) take into account the weather (exclude all suede materials, or add a jacket or cardigan, which will inevitably not match and thus render the rest of the outfit unfit)

  d) factor in any long periods of standing around, and question if five-inch heels would be appropriate (hint: no)

  e) think of all of these things at 7.12 a.m. on a weekday morning, while feeling dusty from the previous evening’s champagne-soaked function.

  It was utterly exhausting.

  My alarm screamed into my skull the morning after the Carter function, and it took thirty-five minutes of snooze-buttoning for me to finally shift from my cotton cocoon. I saw roughly fifteen packets of chewing gum on the floor, and remembered that they’d had bowls of them at the party last night, and that I’d thought it would be hilarious and entertaining to thieve them really obviously for what I’m sure was a fascinated audience.

  Idiot.

  When I finally got to work, wearing an outfit even Stevie Wonder would’ve rejected, Jay caught me as I walked into the office, echoing similar requests for hospitalisation, or at least greasy food. Immediately, if not sooner.

  ‘Oh Han. What went wrong?’

  ‘No idea. Maybe it was dinner?’ I was pretty sure it was. That and the cheap wine.

  ‘Shall we go to that diner on Thomas Street and get breakfast?’

  ‘Oh, that’d be perfect.’

  I turned around with Jay and went straight back downstairs. I had no meetings or launches that morning, so what did it matter?

  We waited silently in the diner for our egg-and-bacon rolls, both deeply entrenched in self-sympathy mode. Jay had her sunglasses on inside, which spoke volumes.

  Once I got to my desk, filled with grease and caffeine and feeling vaguely more human, it dawned on me that I had a
function in the afternoon that I would not be able to get out of, even though the idea of making small talk was on a par with a large angry horse kicking me in the stomach.

  Jesus, what was that fricken smell?

  It was unbearable. It wasn’t one of my regular beauty-office smells; they’re usually quite lovely and reminiscent of clean hair. This was more like…like…off food, or a bunch of rotting flowers. I had to find the scent, which meant attacking all the bags, boxes and parcels that surrounded my chair like a cosmetic moat. This was a good move, I decided. Being physically busy would, hopefully, use enough brain power to stop me from thinking about how revolting I felt.

  I started with the pretty bags first, and the brands I liked best. The ugly boxes that required scissors and caused cuticle damage could wait until last. Served them right for ignoring the power of pink tissue-paper.

  A new colour collection for NARS. A new variant of Bumble and Bumble hair powder. Bo’s new first-signs-of-ageing face cream. A new M.A.C lipstick range. A new self-tanner from Clinique. A skin-brightening range from Show Off. A fruit-infused Decleor body oil. Revlon’s latest lip-gloss assembly. Maybelline’s new crème bronzer/blush hybrid. A fresh, flirty new fragrance from Marc Jacobs.

  I tried to imagine how this could become routine for anyone. Jay said she no longer got excited by the things that hit her desk, but I didn’t believe her. How could you not be thrilled when every day was Christmas? Plus, sometimes we got gifts with the product – as if the luxury of trying the product months before everyone else wasn’t enough of a treat. In my stash I had already scored an underwear set, a key-ring, a desk mirror, some chocolates, and a voucher for a session with a personal trainer.

  Last week I had even been sent a list of possible gifts from Sheen, a haircare company that had recently sent us Tom Ford sunglasses to go with their new ‘solar protect’ range. One of the questions was:

  WHICH WOULD YOU PREFER TO RECEIVE WI TH A PRODUCT?

  (circle your preferences)

  Gift vouchers

  Trips

  Food items

  Gadgetry (i.e. iPod)

  Flowers

  Jewellery/accessories

  Clothing

  I couldn’t take it seriously. It felt like it was some form of prank and that if I actually answered the question, my response would be met with shrieks of laughter and then forwarded with great speed and fury. I’d ended up writing, ‘I am grateful for anything you choose to send as a gift.’

  And I was.

  The last box I opened was from a small natural-cosmetics company who were only stocked in one state, in one store, had no online shop, and who constantly called and emailed me wondering why I wouldn’t put them into Gloss. Straightaway I knew the rank stench was coming from this bag. Had they sent me dead vermin in their rage? It wouldn’t surprise me. As I delicately peered into the box, I saw the culprits – a small collection of tropical fruit gone very, very bad. As in, ‘be sixteen, get drunk, steal the mayor’s car and drive it into the police station’ bad. The fruit was covered in a film of mould and had spread slime throughout the entire box.

  This was not a friendly smell to my already volatile stomach. I dry-retched, packed up the box and bolted out of the office to the industrial bins near the lifts, into which I slammed the box. Who knew beauty could be so ugly?

  Two coffees, an enormous salty-sweet stir-fry for lunch and roughly 0.9 per cent of the work I had planned for today completed, and it was 5.30 p.m. Which meant it was time to head off to the Torture Function. Woooonderful.

  In my numb state I lost some of my nerves about the beauty ed clique. I decided to email Yasmin, the beauty editor at Foxy magazine – another women’s glossy owned by Beckert – to see if she wanted to share a cab with me. I chose Yasmin as she was even newer than me to beauty. I liked that. She had come from an online magazine I’d never heard of, which I also liked because it was clearly underground and edgy, just like her.

  Yasmin was half-Japanese, with an ironic mullet and beautiful deep pools of black liquid for eyes. She liked skull motifs, had a penchant for the word ‘fuck’, and looked as though she might date a tattooist called Slayer. Although her ‘uniqueness’ was obviously frowned upon in Beauty Land, she did her best to play the part of ‘pretty girl’.

  When I got to the foyer, wearing more make-up than I’d normally wear in an entire week in an effort to look ‘alive’, Yasmin wasn’t there yet.

  I took a seat, musing that being in our foyer was like being inside an iPhone. I’d never seen so much black. Everything from the floor to the desk, chairs, coffee table and sofas were gleaming with just-been-polished blackness. Even the front-desk girl’s hair was jet black.

  But the foyer was lively for all its parallels to a Bond villain’s underground lair. A constant stream of amazingly dressed women passed through to the lifts, and there was a small, always busy espresso cart in the corner, hissing and steaming with fresh coffee for The Addicted.

  After a minute, Fiona Rogers stepped out of a lift and walked towards the exit. She was the beauty editor on 21 Magazine, and I had failed to really bond with her yet.

  ‘But did you see his face when she said that,’ Fiona said loudly to the girl she was with. ‘Un. Be. Lievable.’ Dramatic pause. ‘I loved every second!’ They dissolved into laughter, applying gloss as they walked out. Fiona gave me a sideways glance and, after a second, kept walking.

  Well, that was a bit bitchy. She must know who I am by now. She must. We’d been to loads of the same functions. Maybe she genuinely hadn’t recognised me…

  My thoughts were interrupted by Yasmin screaming out of the lift and apologising for being late. She was wearing a black leather pencil skirt, black strappy heels and a silky peach singlet, but because she had the height and frame of a Ukrainian supermodel, what was a very simple outfit looked incredibly beautiful on her.

  ‘Hannah, I’m so sorry; my editor had me by the balls in a meeting and then I couldn’t find my heels but I’d actually taken them to get re-heeled at lunch, so I had to fucking borrow some from the fashion girls and they weren’t there and—’

  ‘Yasmin, Yasmin, it’s cool. You’re not even late.’ I smiled at her and stood up. We hailed a cab and she told me about the rest of her shitty day. I was grateful not to have to talk, still numbed by my hangover and fatigue.

  Arriving at the venue, all ready to learn about a new unisex razor, we had to walk up five flights of stairs because the lift had broken. When we finally got inside, the bar was packed, but was lacking the only thing that was of interest to me right then: food. Okay, there were oysters, but everyone knows they don’t count.

  I grabbed a glass of mineral water and sidled up to Yasmin. She was talking heatedly with Fiona – how come they were already friends? – and another girl about the latest Big Brother housemates.

  I smiled at them without showing teeth (too much effort), nodded occasionally and drank my water.

  ‘Oh come on. As if she didn’t give him a hand job under that duvet! Please! Ray Charles could have seen that!’ Fiona said adamantly.

  ‘She didn’t, I’m telling you. Big Brother said to confess or get out, and she still swore she didn’t do it,’ the other girl retorted with equal conviction.

  ‘That’s just ratings bullshit. As if they’d kick off the big-titty blonde. She’s the show’s ticket to getting male viewers,’ Fiona guffawed.

  ‘Are you serious?’ Yasmin cried. ‘Men don’t like her! They’d probably like to fuck her, sure, but she’d never get a hello at the family roast. All men prefer brunettes deep down.’

  ‘Is that true, do you think?’ said a male voice behind me, and in my sleepy, stupid daze I flinched about ten centimetres.

  I turned my head, with my hand on my heart, took a deep breath in, and said, ‘You scared the absolute shit out of me,’ to whoever it was that had spoken.

  I then realised that the person who owned the voice was Jude Law. Or his antipodean twin, maybe. He was gorgeous. A
ll olive skin and slim-fitting grey suit, with sexy stubble the same dark-blond shade as his tousled-but-completely-styled hair. And he had beautiful green eyes. He was the reason they made posters for teenagers’ bedrooms.

  And he was smiling at me.

  ‘Sorry for scaring you, it’s just that I’ve been dying to talk to you since you arrived. My name’s Gabe. It’s Hannah, right?’

  ‘Yeah…it is,’ I said, shocked by the fact he knew my name.

  ‘I’m not a stalker, sweetheart. You’re wearing a name badge.’

  I looked down, and there was the large white plastic rectangle with ‘Hannah’ emblazoned in bright red.

  ‘Oh,’ I said sheepishly. ‘I’m not really with it today.’

  ‘You went to the party last night too, then?’

  Something about the way he spoke was overly familiar, like we’d been friends for years. It should’ve been creepy, but it was actually quite nice. I felt instantly comfortable around him.

  ‘I did,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Feeling pretty wrecked from it, truth be known.’ I laughed a nervous little laugh so he wouldn’t think I was a total trashbag, raving about how smashed I had been last night.

  ‘I missed it, but I heard it was a circus – everyone filled to their wigs with cheap wine and carrying on like a bunch of frogs in a sock.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s a pretty good description.’

  ‘So, the reason I wanted to speak with you, sweet Hannah’ – I blushed – ‘is that you’re flaunting possibly the best haircut this city has ever seen.’

  Wow. That was a pretty amazing compliment coming from a guy – Jesse barely noticed when I chopped off ten centimetres, and this guy was assessing my haircut on our first meeting? He needed to be my future husband.

  ‘Thanks, Gabe, that’s really nice of you to say.’

  ‘Who cut it?’

  Wow, he was keen to make a good first impression!

  ‘Okay, I promise I’m not bragging, but it was Gisele Bündchen’s hairdresser. He was in town last week, launching his new hair-care range, and I was one of three who scored a haircut.’