Nice to meet you tonight. Thank you for taking me home in your big car. Suspect you won’t ever see this. Okay bye.
She tapped the ‘Send’ icon and fell asleep.
THREE
Rose arrived at the office with bags under her eyes and two large black Americanos from the place Minnie liked over the road. She didn’t feel too hungover to work, particularly not after popping two paracetamols this morning, but she didn’t exactly feel fresh either. This became more apparent when she pulled her chair out from underneath her desk and spilled one of the coffees all over her keyboard. The entire press office – a small airless room with just one tiny window that barely opened – would smell like coffee beans for the rest of the day. And Rose would spend the next hour on the phone to IT getting a new keyboard.
When Minnie jangled her way into the office, she instantly clocked Rose’s tired face.
‘You all right, darling? Hope you didn’t end up babysitting that pop star all night, did you?’
‘No, no. He was fine, actually.’ She paused, debating whether or not to go on. ‘I went with him to the afterparty.’
‘Good for you. And how was that?’
‘It was all right, thank you. But not really my scene.’
‘No, can’t imagine it would be. There’s a very limited number of people who should feel like they belong at a party like that. Hope you managed to get some cheese. I took a Tupperware with me one year.’
‘Damn, I should have done that.’
‘Was Milo all right with you?’
‘Yeah, he was nice actually. He surprised me.’
‘In a good way?’
‘In a good way.’
‘Brilliant. Let me know if you need any help with the spreadsheets this morning.’
Rose nodded and returned to setting up her keyboard. The day after a major event required an inordinate amount of admin. It was Rose’s job to trawl through all of the media coverage, ascribe each piece or mention a monetary value using a formula Minnie had given her, and put it all into a spreadsheet that would then be sent to Jasper and all the company’s executives, editors and publishers. It would take all day and be more tedious than waiting for a kettle to boil a hundred times. But it was excellent hangover work.
She started with the best-dressed round-ups as these were usually fairly easy to find. There was an email system set-up that meant she received alerts every time anything related to Firehouse was mentioned in the press – but sometimes things went amiss, which meant she had to do a lot of manual searches too. Almost all the best-dressed articles led with Milo in the lead image. The purple suit he’d been wearing was from Louis Vuitton – he was one of the faces of their summer 2017 campaign – and the shoes were Prada. In total, the outfit cost £2,500, though the brands would have given everything to him as a gift. There were a few worst-dressed articles that Rose would not include, the reason being that they only ever featured women and often only because they’d had the audacity to wear something other than a straightforward black tie gown.
Rose actually liked the outfits on the worst-dressed list more. They had more personality. There was one pink sequin mini dress worn by a breakfast radio presenter and a neon green lace suit that, admittedly, was a bit much but the model wearing it looked fantastic. People were cruel: the caption underneath one photo of her described her as a ‘sexy Kermit gone wrong’.
Next were the standard award-winner lists; some publications would just publish lists of who had won what. Dull, but it still counted as coverage, which meant Rose had to put it into the spreadsheet. Then there was the task of checking for a sponsor credit in every post. They’d send out post-event releases urging people to use the full credit so that it included the sponsor: The Firehouse Awards 2017 presented by Firehouse and Roberts. Roberts was a menswear brand that almost always sponsored the awards and dressed as many of the guests as they could. Very few publications included the sponsor, so this would then involve sending countless emails to journalists asking them to do so. They were almost always ignored but Rose still had to send them.
The only mildly interesting part of collating coverage was when it was in some way salacious. There were a few gossip pages in some of the nationals that sent journalists to afterparties to try to pick up titbits of celebrity scandal that they could write about. Rose read them all thoroughly and found several photographs of guests leaving the venue she was at last night looking ‘bleary-eyed’. There was one story about the model she’d seen in the bathroom queue, who had left the party with another, much more, famous model that she was ‘rumoured to be dating’. That meant her publicist had called the tabloid to tell them they were romantically involved, probably to raise her profile.
By lunch, Rose had got halfway through completing her spreadsheet and opened Instagram seventeen times, hating herself a little more as she did so. Her message to Milo had not been read. Of course, she was a fool to think of any other possibility. The man must receive thousands if not millions of DMs a day from fans trying to get his attention. Rose had been working at Firehouse long enough to know that the likelihood of Milo seeing any of them, or even managing the account himself, was low. And yet, whenever Rose looked at her message, she could not bring herself to un-send it.
It was human nature to want to get in touch with someone after you’d had a nice time together. That was what people were wired to do. To form connections – and then solidify those connections by finding them on Instagram and sending a message. She had nothing to be ashamed of and kept telling herself this as she furiously googled his name to see if anyone had written anything about him last night.
All of the articles were about his outfit apart from one, which had gone live twenty minutes ago: ‘Milo Jax spotted getting close to Polly Jenkins at Firehouse Awards afterparty.’ She clicked on the article. ‘The revered pop sensation couldn’t take his eyes off the high-flying It girl. The pair were seen talking closely in the corner all evening and sources say Milo is “quite taken” with her. Polly would be the latest in a long line of gorgeous women the superstar has bedded …’ Rose stopped reading and went to the bathroom. She put the toilet seat down, lowered herself and waited for her heart to stop racing as the previous evening felt even further from reality.
Rose checked the message again. Still nothing. If her experience with Milo was supposed to start and end last night, then so be it. There was nothing she could do to change that. She had to trust the universe. Rose returned to her desk and continued working through the spreadsheet while mentally repeating this mantra, which she’d definitely stolen from an Instagram post.
At 4 p.m., Minnie called a team meeting. She’d just returned from a four-hour lunch with Jasper, a monthly affair after which she was usually in one of two states. The first (and most frequent) was drunk, because Jasper had plied her with vodka martinis at his latest culinary haunt in Mayfair while they traded industry gossip. The second possibility was flustered because he’d just asked her to do something very ambitious with very few resources. Today it was the latter.
‘Right, I have news,’ Minnie began as she, Rose, Oliver and their intern, Annabelle (her uncle was an old friend of Jasper’s from Cambridge), huddled around a rectangular table in the second-floor meeting room. There was a plate of custard creams laid out in front of them and a large silver cafetière surrounded by white china teacups. As Rose poured herself a coffee, Minnie explained that Firehouse was launching a new digital-first publication. It would be called StandFirst and its target audience would be women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, though this was just a guideline. The company had invested a huge amount of money in it already, hoping it would boost advertising revenue – something that was now urgent given that so many of Firehouse’s key advertisers were ploughing more money in social media influencers and less money in publishing companies. Firehouse needed to remind the world it was still relevant; and this was part of the wider plan to do that. But none of that mattered, really, the point was that the press team had been given the task of handling StandFirst’s launch.
‘Now, this campaign is going to be a little different from ones we’ve done in the past,’ said Minnie, slowly dipping her custard cream in a mug of coffee she’d brought into the room with her. It had the word ‘GIRLBOSS’ stamped on the front, which meant it definitely wasn’t hers and probably belonged to someone in the commercial department.
‘As opposed to a regular launch party, they want us to host a reception with a fashion show afterwards,’ Minnie continued.
‘But it’s not a fashion magazine?’ asked Oliver.
‘Well, the idea is that it will encompass everything that demographic is interested in. So fashion will be one of the primary sections on the website alongside beauty, travel, relationships and well-being.’
‘Sounds great!’ enthused Annabelle.
‘Who’s the sponsor?’ asked Oliver, deconstructing a custard cream and laying it out on the table.
‘Ah, well. This is where you’re going to have to bear with me.’ Minnie exhaled.
‘Oh God, is it eBay or something?’ Oliver looked panicked.
‘Not quite. It’s Jimson & James.’
‘Wait. What?’ His eyes widened.
‘I know. But they’ve offered an inordinate amount of money and quite frankly we had no other options.’
‘Don’t they sell towels?’ asked Rose.
‘Yes, Rose. They sell towels and other household goods. It’s hardly Chanel, I know,’ Minnie sighed.
