Luce’s phone was inches away from Rose’s face; a small rectangle showing several close-up photos of Milo posing on red carpets. He did have a good jawline.
‘Pretty sharp,’ Rose replied, scraping out the dregs of Luce’s mascara, kneeling down in front of the floor-length mirror in her bedroom. It wasn’t that she didn’t find him attractive, it was more the expectation that she should find him so stupendously attractive that made it hard to know whether she really did or not. Like not fancying Milo Jax made you some sort of social leper so most people wouldn’t even consider the possibility.
‘What are you going to do with your hair?’ Luce asked, twirling her own thick blonde tresses through her fingers.
Rose stared back at herself, gathering thin, frizzy strands of hair together into a high ponytail before twisting them into a bun. She looked at Luce for confirmation.
‘I think you should wear it down. You never do that.’
‘It just looks so shit,’ Rose replied, releasing her grip, allowing her hair to flop back down into its default position that made her look like the love child of Brian May and Hermione Granger.
‘No, look. Like this.’ Luce ran her hands through Rose’s curls, scrunching sections up and letting them go so that they loosened. She reached for a shiny pink bottle, pumped twice into her hands and ran it through, smoothing the frizz. ‘There, now you don’t look like you’re hiding a spider in there,’ she said. ‘How nervous are you?’
‘I’m fine,’ she replied unconvincingly.
‘Don’t be nervous. I reckon he’s cool. You don’t become that successful by being a dick to everyone.’
Rose sighed and stared silently back at her reflection. ‘Can I borrow a dress?’ she asked.
Rose had emailed the invitation to Milo’s publicist on a whim. She knew he’d be in London that week for tour promo and figured it was worth a shot. Joss Bell was a large and loud New Yorker who had apparently once made Mick Jagger cry. A total stereotype of a music publicist, she usually had a cigarette in one hand while the other was reserved for wild gesticulations inches away from someone’s face. People had written articles under pseudonyms about what it was like to work for her; one was headlined ‘Stalin in stilettos’.
MJ will be there, Joss’s reply stated. Walk him down the red carpet. No interviews. JB.
Minnie was thrilled when Rose told her. ‘Well done, darling, I’m very proud of you,’ she cooed, swooping in from a meeting at The Wolseley, the familiar jangle of gold bangles signalling her arrival.
The dress Luce had lent Rose was too small, leaving her in a constant state of tugging and wriggling whenever she moved more than an inch. It was discreet – black velvet with long sleeves – so in keeping with the dress code, but it also had an open back that scooped to the exact point where Luce had a tattoo of a butterfly, which had been done when they were at school together. Oliver would probably clock Rose’s bare back and ask who she was trying to fuck; thankfully, she hadn’t seen him yet.
Milo was now over an hour late. The photographers were either packing up their bags or looking around for the free sandwiches Rose had Ubered over from Pret. Joss hadn’t given Rose a phone number but assured her that Milo would call her when he was close.
Rose resented that her job constantly made her feel inferior. Not just to her boss and her boss’s boss because that, she reasoned, was how employment worked. But to hordes of people she didn’t know, like Milo, who were simultaneously treated like gods and children everywhere they went. It was an odd thing, having to genuflect at the altar of people who generally never did anything for themselves.
She once heard a famous comedian talking on a podcast about how funny it was that she could perform on stage in front of hundreds of people without getting nervous but had no clue how to put petrol in her car. The host admitted that he also did not know how to put petrol in his car. Both of them cackled as if this was something to be proud of, a stamp of societal superiority by dint of their own ineptitude.
Rose had little sympathy for celebrities, particularly ones like that. And so her job didn’t make much sense to anyone. Least of all her. Nonetheless, this was something she consistently felt compelled to rally against. She was in a perpetual state of trying to prove her depth to the people around her. The second you tell someone your job involves famous people and parties with open bars, they write you off as someone that knows who each of the Kardashians is sleeping with but probably couldn’t name the Foreign Secretary.
She checked her phone: no missed calls. Milo hadn’t posted anything on social media, either. The last photo on Instagram was a blurry one of him on stage from his last tour, holding a microphone in one hand with his other outstretched towards a sea of smartphones, like he was trying to knock them all down. There was no caption, which she always found smug.
It was at this point that she started to consider he might not show up. He’d be photographed on a hike with a mystery brunette in LA, drinking kombucha and everyone would realise he was never coming at all and how adorable it was of Rose to think she could pull this off. That would be the moment she’d be told to go back to work at the private members’ club. And the private members’ club wouldn’t take her back because she still couldn’t tell the difference between non-dairy milks.
It had been almost two years and Rose still wasn’t sure why Minnie had given her this job. She had applied because the members’ club paid terribly and the majority of customers were rude. At best, they’d ignore her completely, grumbling orders for spicy margaritas as if they were at a drive-thru. At worst, they’d click their fingers, threaten to have her fired because their food arrived differently to how they’d asked, or offer her money to spend the night with them. Rose knew she was conventionally attractive – olive skin, dark green eyes, relatively slim – but there was nothing remarkable about the way she looked. Luce was the one with the big lips and a Victoria’s Secret body she barely had to do anything to maintain. Luce had the exact right amount of beauty: enough to turn heads in a room but not so much that nobody took her seriously. This was not the case for Rose. Rose went straight up and down like an eight-year-old boy and did YouTube workouts titled ‘Booty Burn’.
Minnie was one of the only regulars at the club who remembered Rose’s name. One afternoon, she came in complaining that her publicity assistant had been caught stealing clothes from one of the magazine’s fashion cupboards. ‘I don’t understand how she thought she’d get away with it,’ Minnie sighed, tugging the olive out of her martini and popping it into her mouth. ‘She was posting photographs of herself in a missing Dolce dress on Instagram, for fuck’s sake. If you’re going to pinch something, at least be smart enough not to tell the entire internet about it.’
Rose laughed. ‘I guess there’s no point in stealing something like that and not showing it off, though,’ she replied.
‘Remind me where you went to university?’
‘Central Saint Martins.’
‘And what did you specialise in?’
‘Painting. Portraits, mostly.’
‘Can I see some of your stuff?’
Rose hadn’t so much as picked up her paintbrush since leaving CSM. Being surrounded by people for whom art was their entire personality had turned the thing she loved most into some sort of exclusive clique predicated on suffering and sacrifice. Blood was a new medium, masturbation was performance art. And if you thought otherwise, you were an outcast with no vision. All Rose wanted to do was paint faces.
‘My phone is in the back room,’ Rose replied.
‘Why didn’t you want to work in the art world?’
‘Because I’ve always wanted to serve overpriced drinks to overpaid people who treat me like their personal slave.’
Minnie laughed and the two of them spent the rest of the evening sharing stories about terrible people they’d both come across at work in between impassioned conversations about artists they both loved: Francis Bacon, Egon Schiele, Jenny Saville. ‘The ones that you can’t look at for too long without fear of convulsing,’ as Minnie put it.
Rose joined the company a week later. Arriving at Firehouse HQ was like walking onto the set of a film you’d watch for the tenth time when you’re drunk on a Saturday night. Buried in the depths of Mayfair, it was one of those enormous Regency buildings with pillars either side of the doors. Flashy enough to signify its significance, but subtle enough to pass as, say, a gallery, so as not to advertise the fact this was a place regularly frequented by the famous people whose faces fronted the magazine covers that lined each of its corridors. Firehouse published six titles in total, each appealing to a different demographic and with different circulation figures, though all were dropping annually thanks to a new thing called the internet. The most-read magazines were MODE and Intel, the company’s women’s and men’s titles, respectively. But there was also Veil, a bridal magazine, Shelf Life, which covered interiors, and Flight, which focused on travel. Then there was Hives & Dives, a society gardening magazine whose raison d’être was the upper classes and sexual innuendos. It only had about 500 monthly readers but they were furiously loyal, which everyone had to pretend had nothing to do with the fact they were all aristocratic landowners that went to Harrow with Jasper, Firehouse’s CEO and chairman. Despite the fact that Minnie was constantly trying to convince Jasper to drop the title, given its tiny readership (‘It basically costs us money to keep publishing it,’ she explained during Rose’s interview), he was adamant about keeping it. Hives & Dives was Rose’s favourite magazine to work on, mostly because it ran cover lines like: ‘Is it Wrong to Feel Turned On by a Gargoyle?’ and ‘How Not to Get Lost in Your Own Garden Maze’. Her favourite, though, was: ‘How to Maintain a Royal Bush’, which prompted a complaint from the Buckingham Palace press office.
As publicity assistant, Rose was responsible for collating monthly press releases for each of the titles. It was straightforward, tedious work that involved reading through each upcoming issue in detail, identifying the highlights, and coming up with a strategy to get other publications to write about them. Essentially, she was just reading through the celebrity interviews, picking out the most newsworthy quotes, and emailing them to showbiz editors so that they’d publish articles about them in their own publications. But this, as Minnie told her in her interview, was the ‘least interesting part’ of the job.
Working in the Firehouse press office was really only about one thing: the parties, except they were supposed to call them ‘events’. As print media continued to fall further out of fashion, the parties had become a financial lifeline for the company. They were the way the ‘commercial girls’, as Minnie referred to them, seduced luxury advertisers, convincing them that it was actually a very good idea to continue investing millions of pounds in a traditional media empire struggling to stay relevant in the digital world. It wasn’t that Firehouse was doing badly, per se – people were still reading the magazines religiously, and the circulation figures were decent compared to other publishers – but the threat of irrelevance was constantly looming, like an expired dairy product you’ve forgotten is tucked in the back corner of your fridge.
Rose often overheard people talking about Firehouse events in the members’ club: who was invited and who wasn’t, which editors were seen flirting with which guests, and who had to get carried out the back door by a security guard because they’d taken too much ketamine. But just a few weeks into the job, Rose discovered that, thanks to Minnie, the real stories stayed out of the tabloids. Like when a Hollywood actress suddenly refused to turn up to a jewellery party she was hosting for MODE unless she received £4,000 in cash that evening, presumably to buy drugs, so an intern had to walk it over to her suite at Claridge’s. Or when a major music legend in his sixties missed his cue to deliver a speech on stage at Intel’s 50th anniversary party because he was going down on an editor’s PA in the disabled toilets.
There were around two events each month. And the press team were in charge of making sure they were well-publicised, which meant ensuring they had high-profile guests and key journalists in attendance. The most important event in the calendar was always the annual Firehouse Awards, where MODE and Intel would come together to reward various people in film, fashion and music for, well, nothing in particular. There were categories like ‘Best Musician’ and ‘Actress of the Year’ to disguise the fact that the whole thing was basically one big branding exercise for Firehouse, its sponsors, and the people they invited. The award winners were seldom chosen for any reason other than they had already planned to be in London at the time.
When Rose felt her phone vibrate in her pocket, her heart started to twist into itself. The screen read: ‘NO CALLER ID’. Did people actually sell celebrity phone numbers? How much would you get for that on the black market?
‘Hello,’ she answered, her voice several pitches higher than normal.
