Kerry Barrett - The Forgotten Girl

Vanessa nodded.

‘So what about next issue,’ I said. ‘Any ideas? We need to be quick, because we’re late planning this one.’

Not content with taking half the team with her to her new job, Sophie had apparently stopped planning future issues as soon as she’d handed in her notice, leaving me with barely anything in the bag and very tight deadlines.

No one seemed to share my sense of urgency.

Vanessa shrugged. She really was infuriating. I looked at my own notes.

‘What about Amy Lavender?’ I said. ‘She’s everywhere right now and her agent owes me a favour, which is lucky because our budgets are very small. If we can shoot her and interview her on the same day, we’ll have time to use it next issue. I’ll sort it out.’

‘Great idea,’ said Milly. ‘I love her. She’s hilarious.’

Vanessa looked furious.

‘Fine,’ she said, even though it was clearly anything but.

‘What else?’

‘We’ve got the Jurassic diet plan,’ Vanessa said. ‘It’s the new paleo. Basically you only eat kale and chia seeds, mushed together in a kind of primordial ooze.’

I brightened up. This was more like it.

‘Get someone to do it,’ I said. ‘And write a diary. And find a nutritionist to sing about how fabulous it is, and another one who’ll trash it completely.’

Vanessa sighed, but she didn’t complain. She wrote something on her pad that seemed to be a lot more detailed than what I’d just said. I wondered if she was writing rude things about me. I used to do that when I was an intern and editors were dismissive of me – though I really thought someone of Vanessa’s age and experience should have been past that by now.

I moved on.

‘Fashion?’ I said.

The fashion editor was a woman called Riley who I had worked with briefly years ago. I’d been so grateful to see a familiar face when I’d realised who she was yesterday, that I’d almost hugged her. Thankfully I’d stopped myself just in time.

Now she leaned back in her chair, stretching out her long brown legs – which were bare even though it was January – and smiled at me.

‘I’ve got a dresses shoot that’s in the bag,’ she said. ‘But if we’re doing Amy Lavender, we could hang on to the dresses for next issue and perhaps we could get her to do something instead?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ridiculously pleased that finally someone was using their initiative.

‘She wears lots of vintage stuff, right?’ Riley went on thoughtfully. ‘How about I take her for a trawl round some of the shops near here. We can do a feature on how to wear vintage clothes, ask Amy for her tips, and get her to model what we find.’

I loved that idea. I told her so.

‘We could do a whole vintage issue,’ said Milly, looking excited. ‘Theme the whole magazine.’

‘We could use Vanessa’s feature on Dawn Robin,’ I said wryly. Everyone laughed – except Vanessa. Oops.

‘Seriously, though,’ I said. ‘Theming the issues is a great idea. We could definitely do that. It might give us a bit of an edge – make us different.’

And help us survive, I thought.

A tiny voice spoke from the corner of my office.

I looked round. Our work experience girl, a quiet student whose name I had absolutely no chance of remembering, was there, hunched over a notebook and blushing furiously.

‘Pardon?’ I said.

She blushed even more and cleared her throat.

‘I was just saying, it’s Mode’s fiftieth anniversary,’ she said. ‘In September. So if you wanted to do a vintage theme, that would be a good time to do it.’

I stared at her. She looked down at her notebook.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

‘Emily,’ she said.

‘Emily, you are a genius.’

She beamed at me.

‘Let’s do it,’ I said. ‘Let’s theme every issue. This one could be…’

I thought for a moment. Everyone looked at me expectantly.

‘…back to basics,’ I said. ‘Inspired by Vanessa’s Jurassic diet.’

A ghost of a smile crossed Vanessa’s face. Just a ghost, mind you.

‘I’ll do black and white fashion with Amy, then,’ Riley said. ‘Maybe some denim? And do the vintage stuff too, and hang on to it for a couple of months.’

I nodded.

Slowly, painfully, but finally, everyone started to come up with ideas of themes, of features, of fashion shoots, cover stars – the works. The beauty editor, who was aptly named Pritti, wowed me with her knowledge of different make-up looks that could fit with every theme someone shouted out. Vanessa didn’t offer many ideas, but even she didn’t seem quite as hostile as she had done.

Eventually we had a plan for the back-to-basics issue, and the beginning of a plan for future issues, too. I knew this was going to be hard work. Harder than hard work. But maybe, just maybe, we were going to pull it off.

Chapter 7

I can’t lie, those first few days on Mode were a slog. I started work early and stayed late, going over page proofs, rewriting features to make them fit within our back-to-basics theme, making endless lists – and avoiding Lizzie.

I’d expected to see Damo around but actually I’d not crossed paths with him since that first day. Once, I’d been staring out of my office window and seen him crossing the road outside, and I’d heard his laugh a few times echoing down the open-plan office from Homme, but I’d not actually spoken to him. I couldn’t decide if I was pleased or disappointed about that.

Desperate to get everyone involved in the process of revitalising Mode, I got a big white board put up in the office and urged everyone to write ideas on it.

‘Anything goes,’ I trilled, putting some pens on the shelf next to it. ‘The crazier, the better. Features ideas, cover ideas, events, sponsorship plans – absolutely anything.’

But now, a whole week after it had been put up, the board was still mostly bare. Riley had written up some ideas for future fashion shoots, but I wasn’t sure ‘SOMETHING FUNNY’ was really what Mode readers were after. I did, however, love the idea for a monthly ‘unlikely style crush’. How to recreate outfits worn by cartoon characters, people from books, old ladies… Riley had scrawled on the board.

I picked up a pen and wrote ‘I love this!’ next to her idea, then I stared at the rest of the bare board in despair.

‘Come on,’ I said, under my breath, even though it was barely eight a.m. and I was alone in the office. ‘I can’t do this by myself.’

I’d come in early to wrestle with the budgets for the next few issues, which wasn’t a fun way to start the day. The rest of the office filled up gradually, and by ten a.m. everyone was there. I left my office door open all the time but no one popped their heads round to say hello. I was still very much an outsider.

I sent my budget outline to Lizzie, hoping she’d agree with how I’d moved the money around, and then I sat quietly for a minute, trying to pluck up the courage to go and speak to my team. I didn’t want to – how ridiculous was that?

I picked up my phone to call Jen, then put it down again. She probably wouldn’t answer anyway, and – I thought with uncharacteristic insecurity – I couldn’t say I blamed her.

A knock on my office doorframe made me look up. It was Emily, the intern, wobbling under the weight of a pile of magazines.

‘I’ve been using these for my uni research project,’ she said. ‘Thought they might be useful.’

She lurched over to my desk and dropped the pile in front of me.

‘They’re the first issues of Mode,’ she said. ‘They’re amazing.’

I looked at the issue on the top. It was from the late 1960s and had Twiggy on the cover. I felt a shiver of excitement.