The Men in her Life

and had a husband who hit her. In the promoter’s office where she’d had her first typing job, it was the Australian girl who answered the phone and had bonked most of the roadies. A best friend at work was a safety-valve. She was the person whom you went to when something made you so angry you wanted to cry, or something was so funny you had to share it. She hadn’t found one at Louis Gold Ltd until Robert turned up. He had seemed the most unlikely candidate when he arrived, being rather snooty and effete, and she was sure that if she had still been a secretary he wouldn’t have given her the time of day. But after exchanging exasperated looks at a couple of the interminably dull agency meetings that took place in the boardroom every Tuesday morning, she realized that at last she had found a kindred spirit. They took to sitting next to one another passing notes like naughty children at the back of the class with Louis Gold giving them stern looks, but unable quite to bring himself to tell them off since he was always banging on about encouraging youth and freedom of expression in his company. Robert worked on the book side of the agency, representing novelists. His clients were mostly beautiful young gay men like himself. They lolled about in reception and in Robert’s office, distracting the secretaries and giving rise to mutterings by the older staff about the office becoming a cappuccino bar.
    If only it were, Holly thought, pouring herself some of the bitter brown liquid that boiled away all day on the hotplate. There was a cleaning rota pinned above the machine with people’s names with dates and boxes to indicate when descaling duty had been completed, but there hadn’t been any ticks since the New Year, Holly noticed. She took a sip and wondered how many million micro-organisms had just entered her mouth.
    ‘Fancy a fag?’ Robert asked her.
    ‘You should be so lucky,’ Holly responded as she always did. Some of their jokes were really childish but they still laughed. Robert was a giggler. Sometimes he came into her office with a pained expression on his face and Holly would just be about to ask him what the matter was when he would bang the door shut and bend in half as the laughter gurgled out of his body.
    ‘Oh, go on.’ Robert’s voice was wheedling.
    ‘I’ve got a meeting in five minutes,’ Holly replied.
    The office had recently instituted a no-smoking policy which meant that having a cigarette entailed getting the lift to the ground floor and standing outside in the street to display your vice like a criminal in the stocks.
    ‘Smoker?’ Robert asked. The no-smoking policy was only relaxed when clients who smoked were in.
    ‘Yup!’ Holly said, triumphantly.
    ‘He’s not thinking of writing a novel?’
    ‘Sorry.’
    Sometimes Robert would get Holly into his office on the pretext of talking about film possibilities when one of his smoking novelists was in, but talking to screenwriters about the possibility of writing novels just didn’t work in the same way.
    ‘Bitch,’ Robert said, amiably enough, and started on the long walk towards the lifts.

    The view from Holly’s fifth-floor office was a horrible abstract of brick and pipes encrusted with stalactites of city grime, but if she craned her neck she could see a triangle of blue sky at the top of the ventilation shaft. Holly opened the window. In between the fatty blasts wafting up from the fast-food outlet below the air felt summery for the first time that year.
    ‘I’ve got another one I’d like to run past you, only an idea at the moment, but I like it... it’s a kind of Men Behaving Badly meets Mars Attacks ,’ Jeff was telling her.
    Ever since some clever git had pitched Alien as ‘Jaws in Outer Space’, no proposal for film or television could be described except in terms of something else. Holly and Robert had a competition for the most ridiculous pitch each week and whoever won had to Pick up the bill for their regular Friday drink. The Previous week Holly had won with a script whose author had described it as ‘Godzilla holidays in Howard’s End’.
    Jeff was one of her least favourite clients. He was perfectly competent at trotting out episodes for various long-running drama serials, but his ideas for original screenplays always struck her as slightly less than original.
    ‘Go on...’ she said, cautiously, and pushed an ashtray across the desk, hoping it would encourage him. She had already let him