the art desk’, I was a bona fide ‘car crash’ when it came to relationships; another traffic-based pun on my full name, Amber Green. Yes, after ten years in the single wilderness, it felt so good to have someone who would go to the twenty-four-hour garage for a family bag of Maltesers or run me a bath after a shitty day at work; someone who embraced the role of human hot water bottle, taking pleasure in warming my block-of-ice feet when I got into bed. Life was great. But now the thought of Rob taking off for New York was following me around like a shadow.
The walk along Oxford Street from Marble Arch was very different in January compared with before Christmas. The strings of bright lights across the road were gone and, bar a few sad, forgotten decorations in some shops, the festive period had been packed away. The London sky was heavy with big, grey clouds.
Christmas came and went in a bit of a blur, to be honest. Rob went to his mum’s big house in Holland Park and I went to the family pile (read: suburban semi) in deepest North London. As per usual, everything revolved around my sister’s six-year-old daughter, Nora: ‘Nora prepared the Brussels sprouts!’; ‘Nora nearly recited that song from Matilda by heart!’ The ‘Nora Show’ was in full effect. And it was every bit as grating as a pantomime – for three days solid. Urgh, listen to me. My New Year’s resolution is to be nicer to Nora.
After polishing off a couple of morning glasses of dry sherry, moving on to prosecco and red wine with lunch, then on to port, by way of a Baileys, I was feeling very fluffy around the edges by nine o’clock. Instead of watching Big for the trillionth time with my sister and Nora, who was being allowed to stay up as long as she wanted, much to my horror, or allowing my dad to beat me at Trivial Pursuit circa 1990, again, I called it a night. Apart from booze, the only thing keeping me going through the day was texting Rob and later sexting with him until I fell into a port-induced coma in the tiny spare bedroom, because my old bedroom had been commandeered by – you guessed it – Nora. Rob seemed to be having a much more civilised day, his mother having decided to take him and his older brother, Dan, plus Dan’s fiancée, Florence, out for a champagne Christmas lunch in a trendy Notting Hill restaurant, then home for charades and posh liqueur chocolates. Maybe next year I’ll be there too. Please Father Christmas, I promise I’ll be good all year.
There wasn’t even time for a Boxing Day lie-in for me. The only downside to working at Selfridges – although based on my Christmas, it could be classified as a bonus – was that I had to be at work at five in the morning on Boxing Day. Alongside our regular team we had twenty contractors and, behind huge vinyl stickers, we carefully stripped the fairy-tale festive display from the windows, and then the glass was covered with shouty red paper advertising the January sales. As Big Ben chimed nine in the morning, a stampede of hungry customers from all around the world charged through the doors and set to work dismantling the entire store, snapping up the designer bargains of the year. It was the shopping equivalent of the bull-run through Pamplona. As fervent fashionistas turned the shop into a glorified jumble sale, our windows team sloped back to bed. This time I headed to my own bed in Kensal Rise. Work was a distant memory by evening, because Rob came over in a Christmas jumper with a mountain of leftover cheese and we roasted chestnuts and scoffed Quality Street cuddled up on the sofa watching Elf. All I needed was him. We were lost in each other and I had never felt happier.
But now, the heady glow of Christmas had disappeared, along with the shine on my relationship, it seemed.
As I entered my super-cool work place through the staff entrance round the back of Oxford Street at nine thirty, I felt a sense of pride. I’d been working as a window designer at Selfridges for six months now and it was my dream job. Finally, that irritating voice in my head telling me to ‘get a proper career’ could shut up because I finally had a proper career. Instead of dreading the point in conversation with friends of my parents or mates of mates down the pub, that would eventually crawl around to the inevitable, ‘So, what do you do, Amber?’ I could embrace the question, invite it even, because I had a decent response.
‘Oooh, what are you working on now?’ they often asked.
‘It’s all a bit hush-hush,’ I’d tease, though it was actually the truth – pulling back the vinyl to unveil the new Selfridges window display was a big, closely guarded event.
‘Jesus, what happened, babe?’ my boss, Joseph, exclaimed as I entered the studio.
‘Happy Tuesday to you, too,’ I sneered.
‘Sorry, babe, but if you’re sick, perhaps you should go home. Pale and interesting is not this season.’
‘I’m not ill, just tired,’ I muttered, marvelling at how stupid I was not to get a muffin as well as a coffee from Starbucks on the way in. Thankfully, our studio office was at the very top of the shop, and when we weren’t tucked away up here, we were downstairs tweaking the windows. I was rarely required for face time with senior management.
Joseph, the creative director for visual merchandising at Selfridges, never looked sloppy, just like his name was never abbreviated to Joe. Tall, handsome and confident, he was fancied by literally the entire female workforce – despite the fact he was gay. He wasn’t particularly camp, which made a certain portion of his admirers cling on to the fantasy that he could be ‘turned’. And of course all the gay guys – which was most of the male staff – had a deep yearning for him, too. Joseph blatantly knew he was God’s gift, and strutted around the store like Mr Selfridge himself. His hair was wavy and shoulder length and he wore it tightly tucked behind his ears, like ram’s horns. If you didn’t know better, to look at him you’d think he was French – arty, Gauloises-smoking, air of superiority – but when he spoke his dialect was pure Joey Essex. Everyone was a ‘babe’ and life was ‘sweet’.
After working with him for half a year, I was getting to know the real Joseph and, although he genuinely lived the life of a moisturising modern man who adhered to the five:two diet and had been known to get hooked up to a reviving vitamin-packed IV drip during his lunch break, at the end of the day he was a first-class creative director and I loved having him as my boss. As well as my solid experience styling the windows at Smiths boutique, I think he was wowed by my time spent assisting Mona – in our world, it would be hard not to be – as he gave me the job without a second interview. When I started, he took me under his wing as a protégée of sorts and it was a great position to be in. It gave me some protection from the less friendly, uber fashiony senior managers who swanned around our floor in their top-to-toe designer threads, trying to catch a glimpse of Joseph.
Then there was Shauna: white fingernails with gold tips, big gold hoops and curly afro hair, channelling a modern day Diana Ross. Her iPhone clicked in my face and then traced my body. A deeply unflattering video of my stunned mug and greasy-looking hair was now playing live on Snapchat. Shauna loved to share. She worshipped at the altars of Instagram and Snapchat and was dedicated to the daily documentation of selfies, shoefies, Instafood, Instacocktails, Instacats – and fairly often me, with #nofilter.
‘You’re so ’grammable today, babe,’ she said, crouching down to snap my Starbucks cup as I placed it on my desk. Until that moment, I had failed to noticed that the barista had scrawled the word ‘Antler’ on it, instead of my real name. Shauna found it hilarious and shared the image with her 1.4 thousand followers. ‘Big night, deer? Get it – Antler, deer?’
I frowned. ‘So I look like something the cat dragged in, can we all just get over it, please?’
Shauna sucked in her cheeks and waggled her finger at me, intimating that I was not one to talk about anything this morning.
Joseph broke us up. ‘Now, now ladies, there’s no time for bickering today, Jeff wants the final designs for the summer windows by EOP, so I need you to finish the edit. And that’s before we get cracking
