But in the bathroom, as she squeaked her toothpaste-covered finger around her teeth, she came across something she hadn’t noticed the night before. Mascara and eyebrow pencil. Yuk. She’d thought his eyelashes were suspiciously spiky. And she was prepared to bet that his hair was probably dyed too, from some nondescript brown to its current ebony. Suddenly she went right off him.

Wayne, however, was rather taken with Lisa. She was inventive in bed and she wasn’t mad about him.

‘Will I see you again?’ he asked, as she slipped her white dress on. ‘I’m in Dublin regularly.’

‘Where did I leave my bag?’

‘Over there. Will I see you again?’

‘Sure.’ Lisa tipped a shower cap, four soaps, two little bottles of shower gel and three of body lotion into her bag.

‘When?’

‘End of August. My photo will be above the editor’s letter in Colleen.’

Holding the sheet modestly to his chest, Wayne looked so vulnerable and confused that Lisa relented. ‘I’ll call you.’

‘Will you?’ he asked hopefully.

‘The cheque is in the post. I’ll respect you in the morning,’ Lisa grinned, running a comb through her hair and checking her reflection. ‘No, of course I won’t call you.’

‘But… but why did you say you would if you didn’t mean it?’

‘How do I know?’ Lisa gleefully rolled her eyes. ‘You’re a man, you lot invented the rule. Bye!’

Swinging down the steps and out on to the street, her elbows and knees pleasantly raw with carpet-burn, Lisa hailed a taxi. Just enough time to run home and change her clothes before going to work.

She felt great. Glowing! Anyone who said that a one-night stand with a complete stranger left you feeling cheap and shitty was wrong. She hadn’t felt so good in ages!

36

Lisa swung into the office after her night of sex in a dynamic mood.

‘Morning Jack,’ she said brightly.

‘Morning Lisa.’

She gazed into his face. Eyes still opaque, expression no different from usual. No obvious signs that he’d minded her going off with Wayne Baker, but she’d seen his face at the time. He’d looked miffed. She knew.

So, to work! Fired up, Lisa went into overdrive and decided that she wanted all the nuts and bolts of the magazine in place now. Talking about something called a ‘dummy copy’. It was shaping up to be a rough week.

‘All regular features – film, video, horoscope, health, columns – to be inputted. Then we’ll take a look at what we still need.’

Proof copies of books that were due for September publication were flooding in for review, as were videos and CDs. In theory, free stuff sounded exciting, but it was no use if it wasn’t the kind of thing you’d normally like. There was a brief but ugly three-way scuffle over an AfroCelt CD, but no one was interested in any of the others.

‘Gary Barlow, I don’t think so,’ Trix sniffed, clattering it back on the pile. ‘Enya, not in this lifetime.’ Another clatter. ‘David Bowie, nah.’ Clatter. ‘And who the hell are “Woebegone”? You know, they look all right, your man’s good-looking. I’M TAKING THIS ONE,’ she yelled to the rest of the office.

‘Does anyone mind if I take this?’ Ashling held up a clogs-and-shawl blockbuster.

‘Hardly,’ Lisa hiccuped with scornful laughter.

But it wasn’t for Ashling, it was for Boo, who was so bored that he’d read anything.

The great typeface wars raged all week. Lisa and Gerry were locked in an angry stand-off over the appearance of the books page.

‘It’s all typeface and no content,’ Gerry said heatedly.

‘No one reads fucking books,’ Lisa screamed at Gerry. ‘That’s why we’ve got to make the page look sexy!’

Things kept going wrong. Lisa hated the illustration commissioned for Trix’s ordinary-girl column. Allegedly it wasn’t ‘sexy’ enough. Gerry crashed a file and lost an entire morning’s work. And a piece Mercedes wrote about a beautician got suddenly binned when they over-plucked Lisa’s eyebrows on Wednesday lunch-time.

‘But I’ve worked really hard on it,’ Mercedes complained. ‘You can’t drop it.’

‘I’m not dropping it,’ Lisa snapped. ‘I’m killing it. If you’re going to work in a magazine, can’t you at least learn the jargon?’

The atmosphere was fraught and the work kept coming. No one had less than three projects awaiting attention at any one time.

Ashling was keying in the New-Age horoscopes when Lisa dumped an armful of hair-care stuff on her desk and said, ‘A thousand words. Make it –’

‘I know, sexy.’

Looking for a theme for her page, Ashling surveyed the products piled on her desk. There was a volumizing mousse, a hair-spray that promised to ‘lift’ the roots, and a ‘bodifying’ shampoo – all paraphernalia for women wanting big hair. But then there was also anti-frizz masque, smoothing complex, and leave-in conditioner. All for those women who liked their hair flattened against their heads. How could she reconcile the two? How could her piece have any consistency? Back and forth she agonized. Was it possible to have big hair and flat hair? Or could she try to pretend that your hair needed to be flat before it could be big, thereby inventing a whole new set of worries for big-haired women? But no, that would be too cruel: having this kind of power brought responsibility. She sighed and broke off another piece of her white-chocolate muffin. Then – perhaps it was the sugar rush – she had a brainwave that, after the deadlock, took on the momentousness of the discovery of the law of gravity. Her piece would start off, ‘No matter what you want from your hair…’

‘Eureka!’ she declared, giddy with relief.

‘What’s that then?’ Jack called from the photocopier.

‘I’ve been so worried!’ Ashling waved a hand over the tubes and cans. ‘All this stuff, there was no pattern to it. But everything fell into place once I realized that different women want different things for their hair.’

‘Different women want different things for their hair,’ Jack repeated good-humouredly. ‘Profound. That’s got to be up there with Einstein’s theory of relativity… Time is not an absolute,’ he scoffed, ‘but depends on the shininess of the observer’s hair in space. And space is not an absolute, but depends on the shininess of the observer’s hair in time. What a worthwhile job we do here!’