What She Wants. Cathy Kelly

How had poor insecure Hope ever produced such a confident child?

      The woman extracted a carton of juice from a huge shoulder bag, the same sort of bag Hope always seemed to drag around with her, Sam noticed. Mothers were all lop-sided from schlepping round giant shoulder bags that contained everything from toddler outfits to entire meals with plenty of toys, books and bumper boxes of baby wipes thrown in for good measure.

      Sam looked out of the window and tried not to notice Lily staring at her while sucking on her juice straw. The more Sam gazed out of the window, the more Lily leaned towards her, standing up on the seat beside her mother and leaning over the table until she was lying on it. Her big eyes were fixed on Sam, willing this new grown up person to look at her, intent on being noticed.

      ‘Lily!’ warned her mother.

      Lily moved back a fraction and stopped sucking on her straw. She inadvertently squeezed the carton and an arc of juice sailed up in the air like a fountain and then down onto Sam’s beige shearling coat.

      ‘I’m so sorry,’ said the child’s mother with a deep weariness.

      Sam, thinking of Hope dragging Millie and Toby around, desperately hoping they wouldn’t cover other people with orange juice or smears of chocolate, shook her head. ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘It needed to be cleaned anyway.’

      The woman shot her a look of such gratitude that Sam was pleased she’d been polite. Once, she’d have snapped about people not being able to control their children in public. It must be age creeping up on her. She was getting mellow now that she was on the brink of forty.

      Forty. She shuddered. It sounded so old. Karl would never fall for her if she met him now, she thought ruefully. It was odd thinking about him: he never crossed her mind most of the time. She didn’t miss him per se, just the experience of being with somebody. That was nice; cuddling up in bed with a man, having someone to share the day with, someone to occasionally buy coffee or milk when she forgot.

      She liked that side of things but not all the other hassle that went with it. All that crap they were forever talking about in women’s magazines or at women-only dinners: maintaining relationships, worrying about whether he felt happy or not, trying to keep the spice in your sex life…sheer hell. Sam couldn’t see why women were supposed to do all the hard work. Men carried on doing whatever they felt like while women did questionnaires to see if He was happy or if He would stray or if He needed to talk more. Why the hell bother? Sam thought. Let Him worry about Himself, she wouldn’t.

      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