For my Mum, Di, the real make-up artist and my children, Ellie & Matt, whose love of theatre has been infectious.
From: [email protected]
URGENT – Possible loo roll crisis
Working late tonight, pls record the Arsenal game and don’t forget loo rolls!!! Can you get some when you go shopping tonight – and remember no gummy bears or chocolate peanuts, we need food we can actually cook with!
And have you seen my book, The Rosie Project, I’ve got a horrible feeling I might have left it on the train.
Tilly x
No! No! Stop! Despite knowing it was probably completely hopeless, I stabbed at the keys on the keyboard, bracelets clinking like maracas as I watched the computer screen. It was the Sorcerer’s Apprentice all over again. With horrifying speed, the number of emails leaving the outbox increased.
Five!
Then ten!
Twelve, eighteen, twenty-one, thirty-three.
‘Oh hell.’ This couldn’t be happening. Emails with the title Urgent – Possible loo roll crisis which should have gone to Felix were busy whizzing off to goodness only knows where.
Jeanie, my boss, glanced up from the wig she was working on.
‘What have you done now?’ she asked, rolling her heavily kohl-lined eyes as she came over to stand behind me. ‘Don’t tell me, you’ve sent another email to Alison instead of Felix? Attached a picture of Dr Who instead of our leading man and sent it to the head of costume at La Scala?’
Give me a make-up palette, a couple of pencils and the right hair-piece, and with a deft touch of shading and brushing, I can transform a sixty-year-old granddad into an irresistible Lothario. Give me a computer and there’s more chance of me splitting the atom in my own kitchen with an egg whisk.
I blame my biospheres; apparently, I have dodgy ones. Mobile phones give up the ghost on a regular basis and I can’t wear a watch without it losing time. Me and technology are a disaster. I just don’t have the patience. Even so, I thought I’d cracked email.
Unfortunately, once you’ve clicked that mouse, there’s no going back. It’s Pandora’s Box all over again. And just like Pandora, how could I resist. After all, what’s a girl, on the wrong side of twenty-nine, to do, when it’s coming up to Christmas and her fiancé seems to be spending more time potting snooker balls than checking out her erogenous zones, and some random person sends her an attachment called ‘Santa Baby’.
It sounded cute and harmless. When I opened the attachment up, it was even cuter still – a very handsome Santa danced across my screen to the tune of jingle bells before dropping his trousers to reveal a full moon of pert buns, flashing a very naughty grin over his shoulders. The moment I moved the cursor to try and close the picture, Santa started zinging about, bashing the edges of the screen with the speed of a demented bluebottle.
Although amusing at first, after the initial dancing, his frozen image didn’t do much but ricochet off the sides of the screen as erratically as a pinball on speed. It was only when I tried to close the thing down that everything went haywire.
Now, as I watched the identical subject lines of the emails racing, like armed and dangerous carrier pigeons from the inbox, regarding the imminent loo roll crisis at home, I guessed something more sinister had been going on.
Flipping dip, the numbers in the outbox were still going up.
Fifty-six, sixty-nine …
Did I even know that many people?
The whirring from the hard-drive under the desk was getting louder and faster, with the intensity of a plane revving up. I didn’t think kicking it was going to help. Any moment now it might take off.
Jeanie pointed one of her neat, shortly trimmed nails at the screen. ‘It’s six weeks until Christmas. What’s that?’
‘Santa baby apparently, except I can’t get him to go away.’
She shook her head. ‘You didn’t open an attaché, did you?’
Now was not the time to correct her casual misuse of the English language.
‘Who? Me?’ I gave her a big smile and a shrug of my shoulders. ‘Might have done. Oops.’
‘What are you like, Tilly?’
The two of us stood there staring at the computer and I vaguely registered the squeak of the studio door.
‘Only one thing for it.’ I dived down onto my knees, bum high in the air and took the most obvious course of action.
I pulled the plug.
I heard a gasp from Jeanie.
‘What?’ I wiggled out, feeling my skirt riding up. ‘It can’t do it any harm, can it?’
There was silence and somehow, I just knew someone else was there. Someone else getting a bird’s eye view of my favourite lilac silk and lace cami-knickers which were more lace than anything else, if you get my drift.
Still on all fours, I managed to manoeuvre around to find Mr drop-dead-gorgeous glaring down at me, although the expression on his face was decidedly Sir-seriously-pissed-off.
‘Hi,’ I squeaked like an over-sized guinea pig. My heart stuttered as I stared at him. Someone had been more than generous when handing out the good-looking genes.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
How bloody