One Day in Cornwall. Zoe Cook

in need of fried breakfast items and carbs the morning after. Lucy cautiously took a bite from her bacon sandwich – white bread, buttered, brown sauce – offering it up as a gift to her stomach, aware it might be rejected. It tasted good, the salt kissed her cheeks and each chew released more and more smoky juice into her mouth. She could’ve cried at the pleasure of eating.

      It was nearly lunchtime before conversations really started in the office. Everyone had made it in to work this year. There was normally one casualty who overslept, couldn’t move or had woken up in another town and couldn’t get in to the office. This was the ultimate crime at Spectrum. It was accepted, encouraged actually, to join in and party after a big event, to ‘let your hair down’ by drinking to excess. The only rule was that you made it in to work the next day. Regardless of what state you arrived in, you had to arrive, you had to be there, and you had to get on with it. Julia, an associate producer on Make My Dinner, Spectrum’s long-running ‘hilarious’ celebrity cooking show, had been sacked last year after calling in sick the morning after the Food and Drink Awards, Lucy remembered. Perhaps that had helped to motivate everyone to get in today.

      Stories from the after-show party were beginning to emerge as the communal hangover level was reduced from a solid seven to a more manageable three or four post-feed. It emerged that Charlie had told Emma she loved her, which was mildly amusing but not really news, as she did this each year, as far as Lucy could recall. More interestingly, and depressingly, Teresa, one of the runners who had just been promoted to junior researcher on a baking programme, had been caught kissing a recently engaged production manager and was vehemently denying the incident. Lucy felt sorry for her, as she seemed so desperate to make it not true with her refusals and protests. That guy is a total creep, she thought to herself. Everyone who worked at Spectrum knew what Matt got up to, and he had cheated on his fiancée at least five times that Lucy knew of: once, classily, in the disabled toilet at a wrap party. His post-incident tactic, and perhaps this was what was inspiring Teresa, was to flatly deny every single thing, regardless of who had caught, seen, or heard him and his prey, until eventually everyone pretended to forget.

      It annoyed Lucy how it had become something of a joke amongst the team, and how there was now an eye-rolling sense of ‘oh what’s he like’ about the whole thing. A sleazy prick, Lucy always thought, but didn’t ever offer up. He somehow remained a truly popular and powerful member of staff. It was the girls who became the laughing stock each time, and they were bloody stupid to get involved, Lucy thought. She couldn’t figure out how on earth he even managed to do it – what his appeal was. He was a balding, slightly overweight man, the wrong side of forty. She had concluded that it was simply because of the tiny number of men in TV and the huge amount of single girls. Nice odds for a midlife-crisis-wielding sex pest.

      ‘And what about YOU?’ Laura turned to Lucy with a devilish look of glee pasted across her wide, stupid, pale face. Laura, a researcher who’d really worked there long enough to have been promoted by now, was one of those terrible people who was always there on a night out, wouldn’t miss it for the world, but who, judging by her chronic lack of hangovers, never actually drank along with everyone else, choosing instead to sit back and observe. She collected stories from drunken nights and loved drip-feeding them the next day.

      ‘What?’ Lucy asked, trying to think back through the evening to what she had done.

      ‘You don’t remember?’ Laura trilled. This was the best-case scenario for a serial shamer.

      ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Just leave it, okay?’ Lucy replied, trying to sound casual and laid-back.

      ‘Oh, this is hilarious!’ Laura continued, and people from the other side of the office were listening now, sensing the shift in tone.

      ‘Do you honestly not remember? That’s amazing! You gave that guy a LAP DANCE!’ Laura exclaimed really loudly, unnaturally loudly, Lucy thought. Lucy’s face filled so quickly with blood she imagined she had turned purple.

      ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Laura. Just shut up, will you?’ she snapped back, shocking herself with the force of her words.

      ‘Touchy, touchy,’ Laura sniggered, turning around to check her audience’s reaction. The office was quiet. It wasn’t just Lucy who couldn’t stand Laura. She’d made herself an unpopular figure many times over for snitching on people and generally stirring up trouble so she could sit back and watch the fallout. Lucy racked her brain for any memory involving anything resembling a lap dance. And then it came, an image of herself, wine in one hand, the other outstretched over the shoulder of a man, seated on the edge of a booth, and her laugh ringing out over the music as she wriggled her hips and rippled her body over him as people watched and laughed. She turned to Warren, who looked embarrassed for her and gave just the slightest head movement that confirmed her fears. Yep, you did. Lucy stood and walked quickly to the toilets. Locking the door, she felt the tears come: big, hot, heavy tears that ran down her face silently and blocked her sore nose – and just would not stop.

      I’m a total mess, she thought. Why can’t I just drink like other people? Have a good time, have some fun, then stop. Why do I always get myself to the point where I can’t remember anything, where I do something stupid? Why didn’t I just go back to Scott’s, like he asked me to? Lucy gasped slightly at the thought of Scott, choking on her tears. She cared about Scott, he was good to her, looked after her when she was tired from work, took her out to nice places, tried to make her happy. And this is how I repay him, she thought, hating herself for being the kind of girl who behaved like that when drunk. ‘Making a spectacle of yourself’, her mum would’ve said. And God knows who saw – all those people in that room; people I work with, and work for, people who I need to respect me! That one image she had of herself leaning over the as-yet-unidentified man, made her feel physically sick, not least because she couldn’t finish the scene, had no idea of how it had played out. She didn’t want to find out from Laura; she didn’t actually want to find out at all. She’d never understood people like Warren and Charlie, who loved hearing about what they’d got up to on a night out. Lucy would rather never know, and wished there was some kind of code of silence about the whole thing. Laura was an utter twat for telling her, telling everyone, like that, but she, Lucy, was the biggest fool, she acknowledged painfully, because this wasn’t exactly a one-off. How many times had she drunk herself into this position? What, two or three times already this year? How did she forget this shame and terror each time?

       What the hell is wrong with me?

      She took her phone from her pocket and thought about calling Scott, before pressing cancel and letting more tears come at the realisation that he couldn’t comfort her, and that it wasn’t actually fair to expect him to.

      Warren took her out for lunch on her own and tried to make light of the whole thing.

      ‘You were joking around,’ he told her, ‘It really wasn’t as seedy as Laura made it sound.’

      But it didn’t matter to Lucy, who pushed her pizza around her plate, struggling to make eye contact, filled with shame and self-hatred.

      ‘What does this say about my relationship?’ she asked, quietly.

      ‘Nothing, babe,’ Warren said gently, ‘You were drunk; he was a hot guy. Really hot, actually… and you were just messing about. You didn’t even kiss him. It was just a friendly thing.’

      ‘Oh yeah,’ Lucy smiled at Warren, ‘Just your average friendly lap dance.’ She almost laughed, but Warren reached across the table and took her hand. The tenderness of the gesture shocked her and she thought she might cry again. ‘You’re a good egg, Lucy. You could do with giving yourself a break sometimes, you know. You’re not so bad’, he said, looking her into the eyes and squeezing her hand in his. ‘Chin up, missy.’

      The pizza and a walk back to the office helped to ease the hangover and back at her desk Lucy made a deal with herself. Just get through the rest of today and tomorrow everything will seem better. She kept her head down, worked through a good chunk of her red-flagged emails and counted down to 6pm and home time. It was easy to keep a low