LITMIR.BIZ

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thoughts of the bright yellow eyes and narrow vulpine face vanished from Lucy’s mind as Adam presented her with the usual list of crises before her bottom hit her swivelly chair at Tompkins Toy Wholesaler the following morning. There was a product recall for My Pretty Princess vanity cases, as the mermaid blue eyeshadow had caused an allergic reaction in a couple of isolated incidents. Three packs of the Hear Me Growl Tyrannosaurus Rex had been dropped off to an independent toy shop, instead of the three pallets they’d ordered. And fifty-six Water Fun Super Soakers had been delivered to the wrong branch of TopToys.

      Lucy subconsciously fed each of the polished agate stones on her bracelet through her fingers like rosary beads. She so desperately wanted to make her mark at work, but life kept jabbing twigs in the wheels of her bicycle and sending her flying over the handlebars.

      ‘Come on, Lucy, we can do better than this,’ Adam said, resting an overly familiar hand on her shoulder. ‘I need you to be one of Adam’s Little Angels. Drill down and see if you can’t get these problems sorted by ten. You ladies are always so good at dealing with these pesky hiccups. Must say though, I’m surprised you let that dinosaur order slip through. Tut, tut.’

      ‘Sorry,’ mumbled Lucy. ‘I’ll get straight on it.’ She was fairly certain that she’d put through the T-Rex order as pallets but she also knew the guy who picked for that delivery route was in the middle of a vicious divorce and it wouldn’t be the first mistake he’d made in the last few weeks.

      ‘Appreciated and all that. I’m so rushed off my feet at the moment, otherwise I would happily help you out, but I’m sure you understand the pressures I’m under. You can’t have an office of worker bees without a queen.’

      There was a titter from the other side of the partition.

      ‘It’s an analogy, Pat.’ Adam gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘You know we don’t do queer jokes in this office. I’m fully aware that we need to promote a politically correct and professional work environment. I read the memo.’ He rolled his eyes at Lucy. ‘And we don’t do fat jokes out of respect for you, Pat, so let’s leave the gays alone. Eh? Right, I must crack on. Time and tide…’ Adam walked over to his immaculate, empty desk and began colour-coding his paper clips.

      In contrast, Lucy’s desk was a jumble of Post-it Notes, stacks of brochures from manufacturers and scruffy notebooks that she used to record every order she took. It looked a complete dog’s breakfast, dinner and tea, but Lucy could usually locate the things she needed. Eventually.

      She stared absent-mindedly at the floor – a random jumble of carpet tiles in primary colours, as if to remind the staff they worked in an industry geared towards children. The internal line flashed on her phone.

      ‘Don’t let him make you feel like any of those problems are your fault or your responsibility,’ whispered Pat. ‘It’s obviously another warehouse cock-up. Let them take the flak.’

      Pat sat at the desk opposite Lucy, but the partition, painted in what Adam referred to as a Motivational Yellow, meant unless they stood up they might as well have been in separate offices. A large lady who kept her tightly permed auburn head down and barely raised her voice above a whisper, Pat had only ever spoken about three sentences to Lucy’s face, yet conspiratorially contacted her via the internal line on a regular basis.

      ‘It’s not a problem,’ said Lucy. ‘Hopefully I can smooth things over with the customers. I’ll tackle TopToys first.’

      Surveying her muddle of a desk, and accidentally sending a nodding fluorescent orange alien flying, she located her computer mouse under a bundle of Beach Barbie promotional leaflets. She pulled the company details up on her screen and prayed she’d get the friendly older lady and not the ranty man who had a tendency to launch into a tirade listing every error made by Tompkins in the last twenty years whenever something went wrong.

      As she dialled the number, she gazed about the office and let out a slow and deliberate calming breath. It was hard to feel gloomy for long in an office where a one-legged parachuting Action Man dangled from the ceiling over the filing cabinet, and Igglepiggle was rogering Shaun the Sheep on top of the water cooler.

      By lunchtime, Lucy had managed to persuade a driver to return to TopToys to sort out the water pistol crisis, issued a product recall for the faulty vanity cases and arranged for the missing dinosaurs to be couriered out.

      Jess was impressed.

      ‘I bet you didn’t even get a thank you from Adam. Why he couldn’t sort out the problems himself, I don’t know. He’s supposed to be the sales office manager.’

      Jess was upstairs pretending to query an invoice, but in reality wanted to snatch five minutes with her best friend, their fair heads ducked below the partition to avoid detection.

      ‘He’s not so bad,’ said Lucy. After the short-tempered boss at her previous job, who regularly launched his telephone across the room when things got stressful, Adam was a welcome relief.

      ‘Honestly, he can’t even manage his trousers, never mind a sales team.’ Jess glanced across at the two inches of fluorescent socks that highlighted how short his trousers were as he completed another circuit of the office and approached them. Rumbled, Jess stood up and tried to look businesslike, shuffling through the folders she had in her hand and pretending to tick things off.

      ‘Ah, the Terrible Twins…’

      ‘Having the same colour hair hardly makes us the female version of Jedward.’ There was a pause as Jess considered the implications of this. ‘And if you start calling us Juicy, I swear I’ll stamp on each and every one of your newly sharpened pencils.’

      Adam threw an anxious glance at his pencil pot and then pulled his shoulders back. ‘Jessica Ridley. Riddle me this and riddle me that.’ He put his hands on his hips, like an unamused teacher. ‘What exactly are you doing upstairs in sales anyway? Haven’t you got numbers to add up and…divide by four, or something?’ He tried to avert his eyes from Jess’s slender legs, but the short, cotton skirt she was wearing made it difficult. ‘Back to accounts please and save the socialising until after work. My ladies are very busy.’ There was a muffled cough from Connor, often overlooked because his desk was tucked around the corner of the L-shaped office, and a definite squaring of the shoulders from Jess.

      ‘Actually, I was compiling a spreadsheet analysis of our fiscal input and was sent upstairs to access some computerised data from Lucy as she knows our CDAs. But if you’ve got five minutes, perhaps I can run it by you?’

      ‘Well, erm, I’m quite busy and Lucy is probably the best person, as you say. I think she has a handle on the CDAs, but make it quick. With Sonjit off today we are a man down.’

      One of the younger sales girls called Adam over and he immediately lost all interest in nomadic accounting staff.

      ‘So, what exactly are CDAs?’ Lucy queried.

      Jess shrugged. ‘He deserved it for ogling my legs again.’

      ‘I thought the whole point of a short skirt was for men to admire your legs?’ Lucy hadn’t worn anything above the knee since her year eleven gym skirt. ‘I’m not sure you can be picky about who gives you the appreciative glances.’

      ‘It’s part of my arsenal to lure the young, wealthy, single men.’

      ‘Like Dashing Daniel?’

      ‘Just give me a little more time, hon.’ She gathered up her manila folders, tapped the wobbly head of the bright orange alien balanced precariously on the edge of Lucy’s desk and gave her friend a cheeky wink. ‘Definite work in progress.’

       Chapter 4

      ‘Can I help you?’ Lucy asked as she peered around the door.

      It was rather late for house calls, but she answered the knock because a confused Brenda had called very late one

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