Page 35 of The Last Kiss

Doctor’s secretaries are never nice. Living on a power trip, their professionalism is almost cutting. She’s just asked how I am.

Which means I’m actually really bad.

9

Reality Wears Dark Clouds

“Darling, I’ve been so worried.” Rebecca ushers me into her office like she’s the queen inviting me into her palace.

“Sorry.”

“Sit, sit.” She motions me down and then pulls her own chair around. Her heels are six inches high and as slender as a matchstick.

Rebecca taught me all about heels seven years ago when I arrived straight from university, optimism painted like a fresh coat of paint on my future. I’d worn ballet flats which she’d looked at with such abhorrence I might as well have turned up in carpet slippers. Darling, heels are your power tool. Your mind might be brilliant, your ambition might be endless, but heels stop everyone in their tracks and give you the chance to speak.

Clearly, I’d tried to explain feminism to her and I’d held off on the heels for the first week. Then I realised that as the only woman on the team my lack of dick shaped appendage and sporting knowledge wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

So, I went and bought a pair of heels that made my eyes water when I wore them.

The office shut the fuck up the next day.

So maybe I won’t get my feminist badge after all, but do you know what? Whatever works. A woman can’t fight everything.

Rebecca has that look on her face. It’s her calm, concerned, tell me everything look.

I slump down lower in the leather seat, skirt sliding. “Don’t look at me like that.”

She nods, head tilted, lips pressed straight. “What look?”

“That one!” I point at her face. “You want me to spill my guts.”

“Spill your guts? Julianna, you’re so vulgar sometimes. You can’t spill your guts in here, you’d ruin my Persian rug.”

I grimace at her and she licks the top of her cherry-red mouth.

In her mid-fifties, Rebecca Livingstone is simply the most put together woman to walk on earth. She arrived once in the middle of a rainstorm and stepped into the office without a single hair out of place, not one drop of water on her coat. I’d asked her how she’d done it. My own hair looked like I’d got out of the shower and I’d already been in the office an hour before her. She looked at me, directly in the eye and said, “Darling, I made them keep the car running out front until the rain stopped.”

It wouldn’t have crossed her mind that a car idling for an hour on a busy London, already congested, street would have burned another little hole in the ozone.

She’s not inherently evil, just… well… from a planet where they don’t worry about the ozone and drive around in cars with drivers at their beck and call.

Rebecca Livingstone is the last in a long line of Livingstone’s on Fleet Street. The family made their money with the railways during the Industrial Revolution. A picture of Great Great Great Great-however-many Livingstone hangs in the dusty boardroom. He’s got a handlebar moustache and looks like he may have had pervert tendencies. I try to keep my back to him at all times just in case he’s looking at my tits.

His son, Rupert Livingstone, was what they would have called a ‘cad’. He cared nothing for the business of trains and industry. He wanted to influence people, ride the shit out of those in charge, and mock his peers. So, he did, pouring all his money into where I now sat.

Satire Weekly. Yep. What he lacked in imagination and brain he made up with in hard cash.

Satire Weekly.

It was literally titled what it was.

It’s enough to make you cringe when asked what you do and where you work, hence my by now well practised ‘A satirical newspaper’ because that’s what it is folks.

Not that any of that matters.

Days are numbered, and not just mine.

“Do you mind if we just leave it?” I try to smile at Rebecca. Despite her lack of concern for the environment, she’s looked after me well, especially the last couple of years.