|
|
|
Bantam • Modern fiction
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 
Chapter One
Endorphins! Those were exactly what she needed!
Ella Nesbit was sitting on the white Formica counter of the small coffee room, swinging her legs and waiting for the coffee to perk. She had filched a magazine from the selection she had fanned out on the glass-topped table in reception earlier, and was idly leafing through the pages. There was a feature in the health section about these things called endorphins that supposedly triggered a chemical reaction in your brain to produce a natural high. Apparently these endorphins kicked in when you were feeling good about yourself and enjoying life - like when you were eating chocolate, or when you'd finished a workout in the gym. The chocolate thing she could understand, the gym thing she couldn't. 'Endorphins are also generated by great sex,' she read. 'And every time you laugh spontaneously, you experience an endorphin rush.' No wonder she was feeling so bloody sorry for herself lately. Not only had she not had great sex - she hadn't had any sex for months. And she couldn't remember the last time she'd laughed spontaneously.
The coffee was done. She poured herself a mug, wandered back out into the reception area of the recording studio where she worked, and tossed the magazine onto the table. The calendar needed changing. She hadn't done it for ages. Now here was an ideal opportunity to experiment with endorphins! There were at least five Gary Larson cartoons waiting to be torn off. She studied the first one. Nul points for endorphins. It was the same with the second. And the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. Either the meister cartoonist had lost his touch, or she had become terminally challenged in the humour department. What scared her most was that she was starting to feel an increasing empathy with Larson's losers. One of her recent favourites showed a bunch of sad individuals mooching around in a hell so hellish the demons even served up cold coffee. It was strange. On last year's calendar she'd identified herself more readily with his smiley, doolally cartoon characters.
She dumped the cartoons in the wastepaper basket, and was just about to pick up the phone to confirm the availability of a voice-over artist for later that afternoon, when it rang.
'Nesbit & Noonan, good morning!' she said in her best receptionist's voice. She actually wasn't a receptionist, she was a sound engineer, but since Hattie the real receptionist had run off with a Scottish radio producer, she'd been roped in to man the desk. She hated it, but she hadn't much choice. Her Uncle Patrick - who was the Nesbit part of Nesbit & Noonan - had taken a trainee sound engineer on board a couple of months ago, and he was running a tight ship. Until Patrick could afford to fork out a salary for a new receptionist, Ella was doing him a favour by standing in. And she owed him more than just one favour. Her uncle was her mentor, her friend, her port in a storm. For most of her life he had acted in loco parentis when one or both of Ella's parents were in globe-trotting mode - which was more often than not. The walls of the spare bedroom in the house he shared with his two teenage sons and his wife Claudia were still covered in her embarrassing Bros posters, and she sometimes found herself automatically scribbling in her uncle's address instead of her own on any forms she had to fill in. She loved him fiercely, and Patrick in turn doted on her, treating her like the daughter he'd never had. Patrick had booked conjurers for her birthday parties when she was little, he had bawled out Ms Ní Bhriain, her Irish language teacher, for undermining Ella's confidence at school, and he had organized orthodontia when her teeth started to grow skew-whiff. He had picked her up from teenage discos, assessed her boyfriends with a hypercritical eye, steered her ever so subtly away from the jail-bait look that some of her schoolfriends adopted, and nursed her through her first head-exploding, gut-heaving, I-will-never-drink-again-as-long-as-I-live-hangover. Ella suspected that he had done the Daddy stuff miles better than Declan, her own father, ever could have. Declan would have let her kick up her heels and run wild - in fact, the more sand she sent flying in the face of convention, the more he would have sat back and looked on admiringly.
It was Patrick's voice now on the other end of the phone.
'Hi, toots. How's the day shaping up?'
'Busy. The Complete Works have cancelled, but Reflex and PBCF&C have booked sessions.'
'Can we fit them both in?'
'Just about. It's going to be a tight squeeze.'
'I'll pick up extra Danish on the way. I'd have been there earlier, but the traffic on the canal is--'
'Bumper to bumper.'
'Got it in one. Is Julian there yet?' Julian Bollard was the new trainee.
'No. He's late. Again.' She couldn't resist the dig, but her uncle didn't seem to notice.
'Put him on the PBCF&C gig, will you? I want to see how he copes under pressure. That gobshite of a client's going to be there today. This will be Julian's litmus test in the diplomacy department.'
Hah! Ella wanted to laugh. If she was currently challenged in the humour department, then Julian bloody Bollard was most definitely challenged in the diplomacy department - at least when it came to her. From the moment they first met they just hadn't hit it off - and when Ella tried to analyse the reasons why they hadn't hit it off, she didn't much like what she learned about herself. Because deep down she suspected that her mistrust of the new trainee was motivated by nothing more complicated than professional jealousy. Julian was gaining a bit of a reputation as an engineering wizard, and she was fed up with people finishing off their phone calls to the studio with the words: 'By the way - will you make sure Julian's on the session?' Ella was feeling very scared that she might find herself behind the reception desk for longer than she liked.
'OK. Will do. By the way, Patrick, both studios are booked over lunchtime. I'll be running out for sandwiches again.'
'Can't you send out for them?'
'No. That delivery service is crap. They keep getting the orders wrong.'
'Hell. I'm sorry about all this gofering lark, toots. I know you're fed up with it.'
Ella picked up a pen and started doodling on the desk diary. 'When am I going to be allowed back on the technical side of things, Patrick? People treat me with more respect when I'm wearing my engineer's cap. I'm just not receptionist material.'
'I've had no complaints. And you know what a huge favour you're doing by saving me a salary. When the new studio's up and running and we've all that new hi-tech equipment installed you'll have a ball, but until then I just have to keep costs to a minimum. And think what's down the line in just a few more months. Three studios, four sound engineers, and a brand new receptionist. I promise.'
Ella sighed. A few more months . . . If she didn't love her uncle so much she'd be hurling abuse at him. But he was right. Although the studio he was having built in the disused garage at the rear of the building was costing him a fortune, it promised to be a technological dream, and she was dying to play with all the latest state-of-the-art toys.
'Patience is a virtue,' Patrick reminded her.
'"And virtue has its own reward but no sale at the box office,"' she trotted out automatically.
'Where did I hear that before?'
'Francesca used to say it all the time. It's a quote from Mae West.'
'God, yes! How could I forget?' She could hear the smile in Patrick's voice. 'What was that other Mae West gem she used to chant like a mantra?'
'Um. Let me think . . . Oh yes - "Living well is the best revenge." Except I think that's Scott Fitzgerald.' One of Ella's earliest childhood memories had been of Francesca, her mother, confiding in her girlfriends at some bohemian soirée shortly after her less than amicable split from Ella's father. She'd had a spliff in her elegant right hand, a champagne flute in her elegant left, her Pre-Raphaelite hair had been floating around her like a cloud, and her smoky, kohl-rimmed eyes had flashed fire as she spat the word 'revenge' over and over again. 'I got a postcard from her the other day, by the way. From Gstaad.'
'I didn't know Francesca was into skiing?'
'She's not. But Giorgio is. She's just gone along for the off-piste stuff.'
'There's a bad joke there somewhere,' remarked Patrick. 'But it's too early in the day for my grey cells to figure it out.' An electronic bleep sounded. 'Ah. Incoming call, sweetheart. I'd better take it. See you later.'
'Later.' Ella put down the phone and picked up her coffee. It was cold.
A thud on the floor of the lobby off the reception area announced the arrival of the mail. She wandered through, scooped up the pile of envelopes and sat down at the desk to sort through it. Bills, mostly, and invoices. There was a boring-looking manila envelope marked for the attention of her uncle: a Jiffy bag for Jack, his partner. A trade magazine. A postcard from Hattie in Scotland with one sentence on the back: 'Sorry to leave you in the lurch.' Hah! thought Ella. A circular. A letter for - hey! A letter for her! She hardly ever got letters at work.
'NOTIFICATION: TO CERTIFIED BENEFICIARY!' yelled the highlighted copy on the vibrant orange envelope. 'You have in your hands the chance of winning £250,000! Open immediately to find out how!' There was more. Through the cellophane window on the envelope she could make out the words: '. . . procedures are in place to declare Miss Ellen Nesbitt of 14 Lower Winston Street, Dublin 2, Rep of Ireland, the winner of £250,000. Please reply promptly for full prize chances.'
They couldn't even get her name right! She curled her lip at the envelope and dropped it into the wastepaper basket alongside the Larson cartoons. You have in your hands the chance of winning £250,000! What kind of a sucker did they take her for?
'Morning.' Jack Noonan came through the door, swinging his motorbike helmet.
'Oh - hi, Jack.'
'Coffee made?' he asked.
'Mm-hm. Help yourself.' She smiled at him as he hung his helmet on the hat stand. You couldn't not smile at Jack. He was a ringer for Pierce Brosnan, and had an identical glint in his eye. He'd been her uncle's right-hand man for the past ten years, and he'd been responsible for her technical training. She'd always secretly fancied him, but she knew it wasn't reciprocated. She just wasn't his type - he was into high-achieving, ball-breaking, post-feminist-type dames (you should have seen them when he was finished with them - you couldn't help but feel sorry for them), and she also knew that Jack would never, ever dream of laying a hand on his partner's niece. He poured himself a cup of coffee and looked over her shoulder at the desk diary. She felt the hair on the back of her neck stand to attention. 'What time's the first session?'
'Nine-thirty. There are two gigs booked.'
'Who's in the main studio?'
'Reflex.'
'Oh, good. I'll do that one. That Angie's a foxy bitch.' Jack smiled at her raised eyebrow. 'Gotta allow us boys a little political incorrectness from time to time.'
Ella shrugged. 'I wouldn't have thought she was your type.'
'Oh? What is my type, Ella?'
Not me, anyway, she thought, but: 'I dunno,' she said. 'It's just that Angie's a bit ditzy, if you know what I mean?' Oh, God - was she sounding petulant here? 'Don't get me wrong, I don't mean that in a bitchy way - it's just that she's more . . . well . . .' she realized just in time that she was just about to say 'fun', and stopped herself. 'More - frivolous than the kind of woman you usually have strung on your arm, anyway.'
'I'm maturing, Ella. I've got to that enlightened stage in life where a man suddenly realizes he'd much rather talk dirty than talk sense.'
'Oh! Maybe there's hope for me after all!' Ella sent him a ravishing smile.
'You talk dirty, little El? I don't think so. I've known you since the rudest word you knew was "bum", remember.'
'I've learned a lot ruder words since then, Jack.'
'No! What bounder was responsible for your miseducation, Ms Nesbit?'
'You.'
'Touché. Don't let on to your uncle. He'd have my guts for garters.'
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
© Transworld Publishers |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
More Information
Publication Date: 19/02/2001 • 480 pages • 178 x 106 mm
• ISBN: 0553812998
Territory: UK C/Wealth + EU ex Can |
|
|
|
home
about Transworld
how to buy
news by e-mail
