Zoe Cook - One Day in Cornwall

‘Sure,’ Tom replied. ‘My dad will probably want us to help with something, though. You know what he’s like.’

‘That’s fine,’ Lucy said, perusing the menu on the table, wondering whether to order another coffee. ‘It’s the least we could do, really.’ She didn’t mind helping Sarah and Neil, and in fact she quite enjoyed folding napkins, helping Sarah to design sandwich menus, and deep-cleaning the pristine white coffee cups ahead of the impending summer high-season.

It was hot already in Hideaway, the sea just about managing to take the edge off the midday scorch. Lucy was tanned and happy; this was how she liked it. All of them together, good weather, lots of time and no school. GCSEs were done and she didn’t need to think about her results for a while yet. The summer stretched out ahead of them, full of promise. She looked across at Tom and met his eyes. He smiled and winked at her. Kristian was out of his seat and had moved close to Nina, attempting to cuddle her. Nina almost gave in to him, before standing up and storming off, tears in her eyes.

‘I’d better go and check she’s okay,’ Lucy said to Tom and Kristian. This was a familiar drill.

‘Tell her I’m sorry,’ Kristian called after her. Lucy stopped. ‘What for?’ she asked.

‘Whatever she thinks I’ve done,’ Kristian said, looking wounded. Lucy stepped back to the table and planted a kiss on Kristian’s cheek. ‘She’s being a twat,’ she said to him, quietly. ‘I’ll sort it out.’

London, 2010

Lucy woke to the sound of her alarm. She opened her eyes slowly, in anticipation of pain and suffering. Sitting up, she took in Scott’s meticulous apartment, the crisp, white sheets, which had been ironed and smelled of washing powder; the tasteful, understated mahogany furniture; the delicate scent of vanilla drifting in from the Jo Malone diffuser that his mum had put in the lounge. She switched off the terrible noise bleeping next to her head and held her temples to try and soothe the throbbing. Scott had placed a glass of water by her bed before he’d left for work and her thirst came like a tidal wave at the sight of it. She finished the glass in five clumsy swallows, water trickling down her chin. Lucy glimpsed the mirror to her left and opened her eyes widely in the hope of waking herself up to survey this sight of herself. She was still wearing the lace dress she’d been in last night, and her make-up was smudged into two grey circles around bloodshot eyes. She looked like an extra from a low-budget horror film. She glanced down at her pillow and took in the black streaks and tidemarks of what must be a mixture of sweat, fake tan and foundation, which had seeped up the now-greasy white fabric in a hideous rainbow of dark brown to dirty beige.

Out of the shower, and after three sessions of tooth-brushing, gagging at each stroke to the back of her mouth, Lucy found the outfit she’d folded over the back of Scott’s chair last week. She slipped on the black leggings, grey cashmere jumper and leather biker boots. She considered applying make-up, but her skin felt as though it was coated in some kind of hangover wax that no amount of scrubbing could remove and which make-up would merely sit on top of like scum on pond water. She sprayed herself with perfume from her handbag and looked again in the mirror. It was not a pretty sight, but it was an improvement, and probably passable for a post-awards day.

In the office, the people who had made it in on time were a scale of grey faces. ‘I was sick on the tube,’ Warren announced as he appeared at the top of the stairs, ‘And it was pink.’ Lucy’s stomach lurched at the image.

‘Oh God, Warren. That’s terrible, have some water and eat some food,’ she said. As a runner, the lowliest position at any production company, Jenny had been tasked with the early-morning breakfast run and had returned with a mammoth pile of greasy paper-wrapped baps and sandwiches, smelling of crispy fat and white flour. In a rare act of generosity, Emma paid for this post-awards ceremony tradition from her own wallet as she, like everyone else in the office, was always in need of fried breakfast items and carbs the morning after. Lucy cautiously took a bite from her bacon sandwich – white bread, buttered, brown sauce – offering it up as a gift to her stomach, aware it might be rejected. It tasted good, the salt kissed her cheeks and each chew released more and more smoky juice into her mouth. She could’ve cried at the pleasure of eating.

It was nearly lunchtime before conversations really started in the office. Everyone had made it in to work this year. There was normally one casualty who overslept, couldn’t move or had woken up in another town and couldn’t get in to the office. This was the ultimate crime at Spectrum. It was accepted, encouraged actually, to join in and party after a big event, to ‘let your hair down’ by drinking to excess. The only rule was that you made it in to work the next day. Regardless of what state you arrived in, you had to arrive, you had to be there, and you had to get on with it. Julia, an associate producer on Make My Dinner , Spectrum’s long-running ‘hilarious’ celebrity cooking show, had been sacked last year after calling in sick the morning after the Food and Drink Awards, Lucy remembered. Perhaps that had helped to motivate everyone to get in today.

Stories from the after-show party were beginning to emerge as the communal hangover level was reduced from a solid seven to a more manageable three or four post-feed. It emerged that Charlie had told Emma she loved her, which was mildly amusing but not really news, as she did this each year, as far as Lucy could recall. More interestingly, and depressingly, Teresa, one of the runners who had just been promoted to junior researcher on a baking programme, had been caught kissing a recently engaged production manager and was vehemently denying the incident. Lucy felt sorry for her, as she seemed so desperate to make it not true with her refusals and protests. That guy is a total creep , she thought to herself. Everyone who worked at Spectrum knew what Matt got up to, and he had cheated on his fiancée at least five times that Lucy knew of: once, classily, in the disabled toilet at a wrap party. His post-incident tactic, and perhaps this was what was inspiring Teresa, was to flatly deny every single thing, regardless of who had caught, seen, or heard him and his prey, until eventually everyone pretended to forget.

It annoyed Lucy how it had become something of a joke amongst the team, and how there was now an eye-rolling sense of ‘oh what’s he like’ about the whole thing. A sleazy prick , Lucy always thought, but didn’t ever offer up. He somehow remained a truly popular and powerful member of staff. It was the girls who became the laughing stock each time, and they were bloody stupid to get involved, Lucy thought. She couldn’t figure out how on earth he even managed to do it – what his appeal was. He was a balding, slightly overweight man, the wrong side of forty. She had concluded that it was simply because of the tiny number of men in TV and the huge amount of single girls. Nice odds for a midlife-crisis-wielding sex pest.

‘And what about YOU?’ Laura turned to Lucy with a devilish look of glee pasted across her wide, stupid, pale face. Laura, a researcher who’d really worked there long enough to have been promoted by now, was one of those terrible people who was always there on a night out, wouldn’t miss it for the world, but who, judging by her chronic lack of hangovers, never actually drank along with everyone else, choosing instead to sit back and observe. She collected stories from drunken nights and loved drip-feeding them the next day.