False Advertising (10 page)

Gemma took a breath. ‘He said his dad had been run over by a bus.'

Helen's expression didn't change, nor did she offer any kind of explanation.

‘Why would he say something like that?' Gemma persisted.

‘Because that's what happened,' Helen said coolly.

Gemma stared at her. ‘You don't mean . . .'

‘Noah's father, my husband, was run over by a bus on his way to work three months ago. He died instantly.'

Gemma couldn't speak.

‘So now you know, not that it's any of your business,' said Helen. ‘I would prefer it if you didn't grill Noah about it, if you don't mind. We may be sharing a house, but I fully intend to respect your privacy, and I hope you'll pay us the same courtesy.'

When Gemma arrived at the reception desk on the ground floor, the daytime security guard remembered her immediately. Well, it had only been around eight months since she left, but he would have been unlikely to forget her anyway. Gemma was not someone easily forgotten.

‘Ms Atkinson,' he beamed. Eddie had been with Bailey's for years and was approaching retirement. It was nice to know that he hadn't been given the chop under Attila the MD.

‘Eddie,' Gemma purred, ‘it's so good to see you.'

‘It's better from where I'm looking, love.'

Gemma had rather enjoyed dressing for the part again. She'd swiped a couple of Phoebe's suits to get her through the first few weeks; they probably wouldn't fit her after that anyway. And though she hadn't got around to having her hair cut, she'd discovered it was long enough to sweep up into a French roll. She felt quite the corporate PA.

‘I believe my heart missed a beat when I saw your name on the list this morning,' Eddie was saying. ‘Are you back for good?'

The ‘for good' part was perhaps a bit hazy, but . . .

‘I'm back,' Gemma confirmed.

‘Then it is my great pleasure to present you with your security pass, and to escort you to the elevators.'

‘Thank you, Eddie,' she said and, taking the arm he offered her, she walked with him across to the lifts. He swiped the card through the slot and handed it to Gemma.

‘Welcome back, Ms Atkinson.'

Gemma stepped into the lift, turning to smile at him. ‘Thanks, Eddie, I'll see you around.'

‘I'll look forward to that.'

As the doors closed Gemma felt a slight sense of trepidation. She was excited to see everyone, but she was not so sure that everyone was going to be all that excited to see her, or be as charming as Eddie had just been. She knew she'd done the wrong thing; not only had she left without a word, but she'd also left them in the lurch on a major account close to a deadline. It was not the way to go if you ever intended coming back. But she had never intended coming back. And surely it was not unforgivable?

Gemma supposed she was about to find out.

She stepped out of the elevator at the twelfth floor. She would be working another three floors up but she wanted to visit her old team first. See what she was up against. Gemma approached the wall of glass separating the lift bay from the office. There they all were, sitting around the long communal desk that was a Bailey's innovation to keep the team cohesive and break down the hierarchy. But there was still a hierarchy; no amount of communal furniture could take that away.

Justin was the team leader and no one disputed it. He did not possess enough talent or commitment to specialise in one particular area, but he certainly possessed the requisite amount of arrogance to feel comfortable telling others what to do. He proved the maxim – those who can't, boss everyone around to do it for them.

Marcus could give Justin a run for his money in the arrogance stakes, but he had a specialty. He costed the campaigns and controlled the purse strings, so even Justin had to defer to him at times. Mel coordinated production, and Gemma had been her assistant, so she assumed the little blonde sitting beside her was her replacement. Everyone else, Tom, Jen, Brooke and Nathan, were subsidiaries in one way or another to the big three.

Charlie would be upstairs. He was a creative; the creatives
were not attached to any particular account team. They had a floor of their own, and minds of their own. While everyone else was suited up, slick and professional, the creatives wandered around like aging uni students in beards, khakis and grotty Dunlops, wearing T-shirts with subversive, witty or just plain mystifying slogans, or else wildly patterned Hawaiian-style shirts. They sat in front of humungous, gleaming Apple Mac computers and were surrounded by every dazzling new piece of CGI wizardry thus far known to man.

Charlie did not wear a beard or a loud shirt; he was more modest and unassuming, in every way. And he was patient and sweet and a little shy, despite being far and away the smartest guy in the place. If you wanted a group of twelve to become a crowd of twelve hundred, he could do it; if you wanted a scarf to turn into a snake and slither down from the neck of a model, he could do that too, without her ever having to come into contact with the reptile. He could remove somebody from a scene, or add someone in, make animals speak, change the entire colour palette, turn day into night, a half-moon into a full moon. There was nothing Charlie Lambert couldn't do.

And there was nothing he wouldn't do for Gemma. Everyone knew Charlie had a crush on her, Gemma best of all, and she had used that knowledge to her own advantage, a little shamelessly at times. But she couldn't help it. She was fascinated by the workings of the creative department even though she didn't have a hope of joining the inner sanctum; she did not even approach their level of computer skill and it would take too long to play catch-up at this stage. At the same time she had discovered an innate talent for storyboarding; while everyone else was throwing around ideas and concepts, Gemma was already seeing them in pictures and narrative. And not only that: it appeared she had a knack for communicating this with the creatives. She didn't know how they did what they did, but she knew what they needed to know to be able to do it. She had become the team's unofficial creative liaison, spending long hours perched at Charlie's side, talking him through as he moulded and crafted ideas into images on the screen. They became like a team unto themselves, excluding and largely ignoring anyone else's input,
bouncing only off each other, pulling regular all-nighters, finishing each other's sentences.

That was until Luke came onto the scene. Charlie closed off after that; he became stilted and curt with Gemma, and they couldn't work effectively together any more. By that stage she hadn't really cared – she already had one foot out the door. She'd stopped feeling part of the place for that last month or so. But standing here now, she was hard-pressed to understand how Luke had had such a hold over her. Why had she let this all go so easily, treated it with contempt when she had loved every minute of it?

Gemma suddenly became aware that all eyes were upon her. She smiled her most dazzling smile at them as she swiped her card in the slot and pushed through the door.

‘Well, lookie here,' Justin drawled. He swivelled his chair around to face her and reclined back, one leg slung casually across the other. ‘If it isn't the prodigal daughter returned.'

‘Jesus, Justin, your originality is truly breathtaking,' said Mel. Mel said whatever she liked whenever she liked to whomever she liked. That's how she'd got to where she was, she used to tell Gemma, there was no point pussy-footing around. Gemma had liked working with her – you always knew where you stood with Mel. She called a spade a great big tool for shovelling dirt and she didn't take shit from anyone.

‘So, Gem, what brings you here?' she was asking.

Gemma took a deep breath. ‘Well, I'm back on the payroll.'

Marcus's eyes narrowed. ‘I thought there was a moratorium on staff; the teams aren't supposed to be hiring.'

‘I won't be on a team,' said Gemma. ‘I'm replacing Joanne Dwyer.'

‘You're going to be PA to the MD?' Justin remarked, lifting an eyebrow. ‘Ha, that should be fun to watch. What's that line about an immovable object meeting an unstoppable force?'

‘Have you been reading the cliché handbook again, Justin?' said Mel. ‘The MD's not so bad, Gem. You'll get on fine.'

‘Yeah, if you're into tyrannical control freaks, he's a real doll,' said Justin. ‘So what happened to your Prince Charming?'

Gemma decided to put an end to the gossip before it started
by giving them nowhere to go. ‘He dumped me,' she said simply. ‘Obviously I wasn't good enough for him.'

Mel laughed. She got it.

‘Hey, does Charlie know you're back?' asked Justin. ‘Somebody buzz Charlie.'

‘I already have,' came a voice from further down the table, either Nathan or Tom.

As if on cue, a pair of well-worn sneakers appeared at the top of the spiral staircase that unravelled its way from the floor above into a corner of the room. As the shoes descended, the rest of the body duly followed until his face came into view, and his eyes landed on Gemma with a thud.

‘Hey Charlie, how are you going?' she asked, trying to be chirpy and warm and sorry all at once.

Gemma hadn't thought too much at the time about the effect her leaving might have had on Charlie; she had been too caught up with her own issues, namely Luke. Now the brittle expression on his face was giving her a fair idea of how he must have felt. She'd never meant to hurt him.

‘It's really good to see you, Charlie,' she said sincerely.

He swallowed. ‘When did you get back?' he managed to say, though his voice didn't venture far from his lips.

‘Just in the last month,' Gemma replied. He looked so guarded, so wary of her. She wanted to give him a big, reassuring hug, except he'd die if she did anything so demonstrative in front of everyone. But he was the best friend she'd had at Bailey's, and she could certainly use an ally at the moment. ‘We should do lunch one day . . .'

Now he just looked embarrassed. Gemma turned around. ‘Everyone, we should get together for lunch, soon.'

There was a lukewarm murmur around the table. Mel had replaced her glasses and was already focused again on the screen in front of her. ‘Email me,' she said without looking up. ‘We'll make a date. I'll bring you up to speed on what's been going on around here.'

‘Okay, that'd be great.' Gemma looked at her watch. ‘Well, I'd best go on up. I don't want to be late on my first day.'

A mumbled, automatic chorus of ‘see you around' and ‘good
luck' followed her to the door. She turned to look at Charlie, but he was already halfway back up the stairs.

All in all, that hadn't been so bad. Charlie was going to need some work, but the others appeared more or less disinterested. Her dramatic departure had not had such a dramatic impact, apparently. Gemma supposed that was a good thing.

She took the lift up to the fifteenth, floor from where upper management surveyed their domain. They got to have their own offices up here, communal desks and disbanded hierarchies were not for them. They were all very aware of everyone's position on the totem pole; how else could they know who to step on as they climbed their way up?

Gemma walked along the corridor past the strip of executive assistants, like battery hens in their little cubicles. She almost had to do a full circuit of the floor to get to the office of the MD, flanked on one side by the assistant's workstation. It was an open area, which didn't allow for much privacy, but on the other hand she wouldn't have to feel cooped up like a chook either. A tired, dark-haired woman glanced up from the computer screen in front of her as Gemma approached the desk.

‘Hello. Joanne?'

‘Gemma?

‘That's me. Good to meet you,' she added, putting out her hand.

Joanne heaved herself onto her feet, and Gemma was confronted with the full horror of late-term pregnancy. The woman resembled an over-inflated balloon with legs. And it wasn't only her stomach: her face and hands looked like they'd been inflated beyond the recommended capacity as well.

‘Please, don't get up,' Gemma insisted.

Joanne dropped heavily back into her chair with a weary sigh. ‘Thanks.'

‘Are you okay?'

‘Oh sure, I'm just so exhausted these days. It's getting harder to sleep with this.' She patted the ominous bulge. ‘I don't know how I'm going to make it through till the end of the week.'

‘Look,' said Gemma, grabbing a chair and dragging it over to
the side of the desk, ‘I'm here now, and I'm a fast learner. Give me a day or two and I can take over if you like.'

Joanne eyed her dubiously. ‘I think it's going to take more than a day or two to show you the ropes. The MD has a certain, very precise way of doing things. I'm not even sure I've got it all down pat yet. But he said it was my responsibility to make sure you know what you're doing, seeing as I'm the one who made it necessary.' Joanne sighed. ‘Anyway, he doesn't want to have to waste any time – he said the changeover has to happen without missing a beat.'

What had Justin called him? Tyrant was putting it mildly.

‘Well, at least don't go getting up and down so much,' said Gemma. ‘I can be your gofer this week, make things a little easier for you.'

She smiled. ‘Thanks. I just can't seem to get comfortable whatever I do. My feet swell if I sit for too long, but if I put them up I get really bad pains in my groin. And walking, or should I say waddling, is a whole other thing . . .'

Gemma grimaced. ‘So this is what I have to look forward to . . .'

Alison looked at her, frowning. ‘Pardon?'

‘Um, you know,' said Gemma, flustered. ‘One day, that is.'

‘If you have twins.'

‘Oh, you're having
twins
,' Gemma exclaimed, unable to disguise her relief.

Joanne was still frowning at her, not surprisingly. ‘Okay, well,' she said, ‘maybe we should get started?'

‘Absolutely.' Gemma pulled her chair in closer.

‘First up, the MD holds a lot of meetings, and I mean a lot. That seems to be where he spends almost the entire business day, and then he catches up on paperwork in the evenings.'

‘So what are all these meetings about?' Gemma asked. ‘Drumming up new business?'

Joanne shook her head. ‘A little, but mostly they're with staff. He meets with each team at least once a week.'

‘What for?'

‘He likes to keep his finger on everybody's pulse, if you know what I mean.'

‘You mean he's a control freak.'