Thom came in with the children moments later to find me bent over the worktop as Susie held my ponytail and rubbed my face in the flour, both of us weak with laughter. Susie called the Twins over.
Susie: [sternly] I don’t ever want to see you doing this to another child, do you understand?
Twins: Yes, Mummy.
Edward: [thoughtful] But can we do it to adults?
Susie: No.
Lily: But we can do it to Aunt Kiki?
Thom and Susie: Yes.
TO DO:
Dress
Venue
Food
Honeymoon
Find out if I absolutely have to invite own sister
August 18th
My colleagues at Polka Dot Books were exactly as supportive as I’d expected: Alice was excited, Carol suspicious (‘And how long will you be expecting to take for Honeymoon?’ Me, to self: Why is she making that sound like a disgusting illness?) and Norman apathetic. Carol’s our Commissioning Editor at Polka Dot and one of the grumpiest people I’ve met, but she speaks with such a beautiful tone, like a cross Joanna Lumley, that I never really mind her irritable pronouncements, while Norman, Head of Accounts and taciturn to the point of muteness mostly, would be newsworthy if something caused him to react at all. Alice is my closest friend there, and a member of the Hamilton family, of Hamilton Industry fame, the tooth-achingly rich owners of 60% of the world’s chalk mines. I still can’t tell if Alice works here for a dare, or if she’s trying to prove something to her parents. She got the job through connections, of course, her father being the godson of our boss’s mother (this is what Alice’s whole life is like), so I was tempted to tip her off the fire escape when she joined the company. She’s always immaculately dressed in DVF or modern Chanel with a few choice pieces of Whistles and Topshop thrown in, and I’ve never, ever seen her with egg on her blouse or a large bump of hair sticking out the top of her ponytail. Her handbags alone would be enough to make a grown woman weep, but combine that with the face of an angel and the wallet of a Trump and Alice completely terrifies most of our authors (while others are completely in love with her – one a little bit of both), so she turned out to be a great guard dog for the office. It also gradually became clear that like many of those lusciously maned ex-Edinburgh Uni girls, she was great at publicity, pulling on her spiderweb to get our authors into great magazines and media slots, so we all had a meeting behind her back and decided we’d let her live. She’s incredibly posh but undercuts it all with a deadpan humour that took me three months to get but now is my favourite thing about going to work each day. She can say anything – literally, anything – to our authors and to Tony, the boss, and they might blink for a second but will never, ever disbelieve her or question quite how filthy/offensive/untrue what it is she’s saying.
But it was a surprise for my boss to be so gleeful. He doesn’t really approve of personal lives.
Tony: What’s all this fuss about?
Me: [nervous] Oh … It looks like I’ll be getting married next year.
Tony: Fine. [suddenly paying attention] Really? That’s brilliant! Brilliant! What great news!
Me: Ummm … yes?
Tony: No, that’s great! Have you got much planned?
Me: Well, it’s still pretty early, so—
Tony: Brilliant stuff. Good. Well, this couldn’t have come at a better time. I’ve got a new book for you!
New book was selling it somewhat short. Through some hideous Machiavellian scheming that I definitely don’t want to know about, Polka Dot Books have somehow landed model/soapstar/popstar Jacki Jones’s book – and it turns out that since she too is getting married next year, it’s going to be a wedding book.
I’m a humble editorial assistant at Polka Dot Books, a smallish publisher of very commercial titles (the books you’d see at the supermarket mostly) which was opened in the eighties by Tony’s parents. They kept their small family firm under the radar by publishing nothing arthouse, nothing controversial, nothing groundbreaking, just making cheap populist paperbacks available to a hungry public. Tony’s father died when he was young, but his mother, Pamela, is still around, and Tony lives in awe and terror of her. She, in her turn, has rewritten the importance of Polka Dot into something comparable to the Gutenberg press, defending the honour of her publishing house by criticising most of what we publish. She also holds the family purse strings, and is the majority stockholder here (rumour has it she gave Tony 10% of the company on his 21st birthday, certain – and correct in her certainty – that those shares would keep him attached to the Polka Dot where mere maternal threats might fail). He’s worked harder than his 10% would warrant, some might argue, doing a fairly good job (although the office hasn’t been repainted in almost a decade, at least it’s still open) with little from her but an occasional visit to snoop at the books ‘she’s’ publishing.
Since arriving here four years ago my duties have officially been limited to office diary management and author care (patting the authors on the head, making sure they know how to get in and out of a taxi, taking them to the BBC and showing them where the door is for them to walk through, giving them a snack and carton of squash when they get fractious) with a little bit of editing on the side, although actually I’ve done so much ‘editing on the side’ that Tony’s been promising me my own titles for almost a year now. So I should be excited that I’ve finally got one, and such an exciting one at that. But the fact that Tony’s given me a book to work on at all (and such an exciting one, etc.) has rather set alarm bells ringing. What’s so wrong with this author or this book that Tony is happy – and I mean happy – to hand it over to his assistant? The thought that this is finally a charitable move on his part is quite literally incredible, so I shall have to wait and see why Jacki Jones’s Perfect Wedding is so monstrous that Tony Cooper, big fish in this small Polka Dot pond, has washed his hands of it. At least I might be able to pinch something from the photo shoots, I suppose.
When I came out of Tony’s office, Alice was smiling wistfully.
Alice: I was engaged once.
Me: [shocked] Were you?! When? How?
Alice: Thank you for your incredulity, Kiki. I was engaged when I was seventeen, to the first man I ever slept with. Mummy and Daddy didn’t really like him, and it didn’t last long. After we broke up, he kidnapped a girl who looked exactly like me but he got off on an insanity plea.
Her tale was so awful, but Alice’s straight-faced delivery and shrug – what? Doesn’t that happen to everyone? – meant that I couldn’t stop laughing for fifteen minutes. She came out as gay in her early twenties, to everyone except her parents. She now lives with a man she describes as ‘so dim it hurts to talk to him’, sharing a two-bed flat and moving into one room when her parents visit. Soon after I met her, I asked her why she was with him. She said, ‘I’m not with him, with him. Anyway, he’s really kind, he has an amazing collection of obscure science-fiction novels and my mother loves him. It keeps them off my back.’
It’s not a large company – Tony, Editorial Director; Carol, Commissioning Editor; Norman, Accounts; an Art team of three, Dan, Mark and Nayla; a part-time Sales team of five; Alice and two others, one freelance and one part-time, make up Marketing and Publicity; a marvellous Production duo; whichever intern we’ve signed up for the month (currently Judy the Intern, who, now I think about it, seems to have been here forever); various other freelancers; and me. In the early glory days of Polka Dot Books there was talk of moving to a building with a reception desk where guests would be warmly greeted and actually assisted, rather than bumbling up the stairs until someone recognises them, but one thing after another meant we’re still in this sad office block off Baker Street – a lovely location, but a structure that is surely only standing because the developers haven’t decided what to build on top of its shattered wreckage. The office itself is some odd hybrid of Dickensian lair