What She Wants. Cathy Kelly

this morning. Wearing a suit, even if it was a pretty slick grey one with a discreet DKNY label, she’d stand out like an elderly sore thumb amidst crowds of combat-trousered trendies with Kangol hats and trainers. Bugger the paperwork: she was going home to mainline anti-flu products and to change her clothes. She locked her door and walked past the glass offices, and past the open-plan section of the fifth floor, LGBK’s centre of operations. Luckily, Steve’s office was on the seventh floor, with all the Titus presidents, vice presidents, and other assorted control freaks. She hoped nobody was looking at her, sure she had a guilty look on her face that said ‘Going Home Early’.

      But even though she didn’t know it, as she strode along the glass corridor, people were looking; people just looked at Sam Smith. Not that she was beautiful or supermodel-tall or startling in any movie star way. But because energy emanated from her like electricity and because she moved like a dynamo.

      At five foot six, Hope was two inches taller, physically bigger, and yet when the sisters were together, Sam was the one people noticed.

      While her sister was a mixture of pale shades, with fragile colouring and a rounded, welcoming face, Sam was the opposite: all strong colours and strong features. Sam’s hair, mouse at birth, was long and a gleaming dark blonde. She had it blow-dried at a salon most lunchtimes and it fell in severe, gleaming straightness to her shoulder blades. It was a classy look, one which she’d deliberately chosen so that people would look at her and instantly know she was a player: a somebody. Her face was oval with a strong chin, a long straight nose and slanting eyebrows that showed up intensely coloured tawny brown eyes. Her skin was darker than Hope’s, almost olive. In the summer, she could pass for an Italian because she went a rich, golden brown. At school, people never believed she and Hope were sisters. Only their mouths were similar: they shared the same soft plump lips, a feature which made Hope look unsure and innocent and which gave Sam the look of a woman who’d had collagen injections. To counteract this model-girl plumpness, Sam drew her lipliner inside her natural lip line and only ever wore pale lipstick so as not to draw attention to her mouth. Hope’s mouth was vulnerable and slightly sexy, both looks Sam was keen to avoid. As far as Sam was concerned, once you let your hard-as-nails façade down, you were finished in business.

      Slim, due to hyperactivity rather than because of any time spent in a gym, Sam looked like the perfect career woman in her tailored grey trouser suit, with a sleek nylon mac, mobile phone and briefcase as accessories. Straight out of Cosmopolitan’s career woman pages, except that at thirty-nine she was a fair bit older than the Cosmo babes. The vibes she gave off said ‘unapproachable’ and that suited her just fine.

      ‘If you were seaside rock, you’d have a line through you saying “tough cookie”,’ joked her best friend, Jay, on those nights when they shared dinner together in the local Indian restaurant they both loved.

      Sam always laughed when Jay said that but lately it didn’t sound as funny as it used to. Jay was a willowy Atlanta woman she’d met in college, part of a small group of people who were Sam’s closest friends. Jay who wore bohemian chic clothes, worked in a bookshop and was only interested in her job as a means to pay the bills. She admired Sam’s single mindedness but said the career fast track wasn’t for her. Tonight, Sam didn’t feel as if it was for her, either.

      On the packed underground train, she clung to the side of a seat as they hurtled along. Sam hated it when the train was full. She got off at Holland Park, bought some anti-flu capsules in the chemist, and trudged through sleeting rain to the flat, one of four in a huge, white-fronted converted house in an expensive, tree-lined street.

      The place looked as if it had been burgled, which was pretty much the way she’d left it that morning. A huge pile of ironing lay on one corner of the dining room table; the previous few days’ papers were scattered on the rest of it and the coat she’d been wearing yesterday was thrown on the sofa. Usually chronically tidy, she hated mess with a vengeance. And when the flat was messy, the cool, clean lines of the all-white rooms looked all wrong.

      Since starting her new job at Titus, Sam had been working horrifically long hours and the housework had fallen by the wayside. Her cleaner had left a month before and Sam hadn’t managed to find a new one. The flat wasn’t enormous or anything, but doing any housework at the end of a murderously hard week was the last thing she had energy for. The flat was a two-bedroom, financially crippling, investment in a posh bit of London and the living room cum dining room was the only decent-sized room in the entire place. The kitchen was so small that two people really needed to know each other intimately if they wanted to spend any amount of time in it together, while the bathroom was minuscule and without one of Sam’s favourite amenities: a bath. Showers were functional, she’d always thought, but a bath was luxury. Still, with her mega new salary, she’d be able to move soon, to somewhere bigger, more opulent and with a bathroom where you couldn’t stand in the centre of the floor and touch both walls with your outstretched hands.

      She couldn’t face the effort of sticking anything in the microwave, so she spread a few crackers with cream cheese, poured herself a vodka and red bull to give herself energy and took the first dose of her anti-flu medicine.

      In the bedroom, she sat down at the computer and connected to Outlook Express.

      Hi Hope, she wrote. How’s it going with you, love? I’m a total grump today because I’m feeling fluey and work is a nightmare. Sorry, shouldn’t be bothering you with this but I’ve got to tell somebody. Going mad. It must be my age. I am running out of the ability to talk crap to people, which is worrying in this business. Talking crap is how I got hired in the first place. (Only kidding.) Plus, I’ve got to go to a gig tonight and the band in question make the sort of music that Toby and Millie might make if you left them alone in a room with two guitars, an effects pedal and a drum kit. Just as well there’s paracetamol in the flu stuff I’ve taken. Talk more at the weekend,

       Sam xx

      She had a speedy shower to rinse off the sweaty flu feeling and dressed quickly in black nylon trousers, a small orange T-shirt and a long black leather coat that clung to her like it had been tailored to her body. The stuff in the bag in the hall would be creased and would have had to be ironed again. Wearing crumpled clothes was not her style. Draining her vodka, she was out the door only an hour after arriving.

      ‘I hope you’re not going to have any wild parties this week,’ yelled a reedy male voice from the landing above hers. ‘I’ve got guests and they couldn’t sleep last night with the noise.’

      Sam resisted the impulse to answer back. There was no point. Mad Malcolm, as the rest of the residents called him, was oblivious to reality. He lived on the top floor flat and spent his life accusing the other residents of having orgiastic late-night parties and disturbing him, which was utterly untrue. The most noise Sam had ever made since moving into her flat a year ago had been the night she’d dropped a saucepan of hot pasta sauce and it had splashed onto her leg, making her yelp in pain. Used to getting up at dawn to be at her desk by seven thirty, her idea of a late night at home was being in bed at half eleven watching the late movie. The people who lived downstairs were similarly quiet and it was only Mad Malc himself, who had wooden floors, bad taste in music and a constantly barking Pekinese, who disturbed the peace. Neighbours. As if she didn’t have enough on her plate without a nutter living above her.

      The club was hot, sweaty and already full of Density fans when she got there. Her name was on the guest list and she slipped past the queue near the backstage area.

      Backstage, long-haired roadies humped equipment around, biceps glinting with sweat in the hothouse club environment. They ignored her completely. Sam had no idea where she was going and had no intention of asking.

      She blindly followed a winding corridor and found herself in a big cool room where tables, plastic chairs and two kegs of beer were positioned. Two record company people were sitting in a corner, drinking beer from cans and chatting to a skinny young bloke with a shaved head.

      She didn’t know the Titus people very well yet but at least she recognized these two. Darius was a handsome, upper-class sort of boy in his late twenties from Artists and Repertoire, commonly known as A & R. Normally