a while, she gave up and shoved the almost untouched plate away from her. If she wasn’t hungry, it was her body’s way of telling her she didn’t need any more food. Anyway, after two days with Hope shovelling down Sally Lunns, she could hardly expect to be hungry.
On Monday before lunch, Steve held a top level meeting where the subject was company cutbacks. Ten senior executives sat around the glossy boardroom table and focussed on their departments. All present looked outwardly unconcerned but quivered inside their designer jeans and hoped they personally weren’t for the high jump. All except Sam. She was fed up with quivering at things Steve Parris or anybody else said. She’d had a hellish morning and didn’t care a fiddler’s toss if she was fired at that precise moment, not least because she’d just signed a three-year contract. She’d spent the entire morning on the phone to Density’s manager who was explaining all the things that his charges wouldn’t do to promote their album. So far, the ‘wouldn’t do’ list included talking to any interviewer who hadn’t been at one of their live gigs and doing any breakfast television or any other media the band described as ‘…facile and cretinous…’. They didn’t want to pose for any photos on the basis that they liked the publicity ones and couldn’t go through all that hassle again of having make-up applied and having to look moody for hours. And they were not, absolutely not, letting any tabloid journalist near them.
Sam had tried pointing out that this little list would make the record company’s job extremely difficult but the manager was having none of it.
‘Steve Parris said we could have what we wanted,’ he hissed down the phone. ‘This is what we want.’ With that, he hung up.
Because she didn’t want any blood spilled just yet in relation to Density, Sam hadn’t rung him back and threatened the manager with a do-it-yourself vasectomy. But she was tempted to. Now she sat at the meeting and caught a sympathetic glance from the publicity director, who had heard all about Density’s can’t-do list. In Sam’s first weeks at Titus, the LGBK publicity director, a tall black American woman named Karen Storin, had been the friendliest of all her new colleagues.
‘Welcome to Steve’s elite club,’ Karen had joked quietly the first time they’d met.
‘Elite club?’ inquired Sam.
‘The women execs club,’ Karen explained. ‘Steve’s not big on female empowerment.’
‘You mean I’m here because I’m a woman and you’re here because you’re a black woman?’ Sam joked.
Karen grinned. ‘We’re here in spite of those facts – and because we’re damn good.’
Sam knew there was another reason she was there: because the European President had put his foot down.
‘OK?’ Sam asked Karen now, hiding a smile because they’d just had a variation of this conversation minutes before on the way to the meeting, safe in the knowledge that they could talk freely before they reached the boardroom where Steve’s earwigging second-in-command would be listening. Karen was handling Density’s publicity schedule and was encountering the same problems Sam had.
‘Everything’s under control. The schedule for Density is working out just fine,’ Karen said gravely, which was a million miles away from what she’d said originally.
Then, she’d been in a rage. ‘I’ve just been on the phone to their manager and I have never dealt with anyone like him in my life. If I didn’t know he was working with them, I’d swear he was trying to sabotage them. They refuse to do anything I ask. Do they want the album to flop?’ she’d hissed at Sam.
‘How about you?’ she said now to Sam across the board room table.
Sam smiled: ‘Utterly under control too,’ she said deadpan, as if moments before she hadn’t told Karen that the Density manager was ruining her entire week. Maintaining the façade that everything in your label was hunky dory was vitally important when you worked under Steve Parris.
The great man himself arrived bringing with him the noxious smell of a cigar. Sam quite liked cigar smoke, having once been a twenty-Dunhills-a-day woman, but she objected to the fact that Steve ignored all the office signs and smoked anywhere he liked. Everyone else who smoked had to rush downstairs to the street so that at coffee break time, the pavement outside the Titus office was jam packed with hollow-cheeked people inhaling furiously to make up for the previous, stressful, nicotine-free hours.
Steve threw himself into a leather chair, shoved it back from the table and put his leather-booted feet on the blotter his assistant had neatly laid out in front of him. ‘So what’s happenin’, gang?’ he asked.
Sam could hear a growl deep inside her body. Where did he think he was? A biker’s club with a bottle of beer in front of him? He was such a weedy little shit. She hated him.
‘Great, just great, Steve,’ said Zak, the Titus A & R director, who probably did think they were in a biker club with beer in front of them. Too much cocaine in the eighties, Sam had been told. If he hadn’t been one of Steve’s personal pals, he wouldn’t have been in the job.
‘Cutbacks and reorganization,’ Steve intoned gravely. ‘We have to lose at least ten senior people to go along with the global restructuring.’ Everyone stared at him, stricken. Ten jobs. Ten senior level jobs. That meant ten people in their building, people who worked for them, people they liked. People they would have to sack. Sam felt the by-now familiar clenching sensation deep in her insides, a painful knotting spasm that she’d half-diagnosed as irritable bowel syndrome. What else could it be? And she felt nauseous too. She still wasn’t over her flu, that had to be it. She hadn’t been able to touch her wholemeal toast this morning and she’d felt so exhausted, it had taken three strong mugs of coffee to get her out the front door.
‘The staffing levels in Europe are way too high and we’ve got to cut back,’ Steve said. ‘The international office say we’re top heavy with staff and this is the only way. Making our powerbase smaller is going to streamline the whole organisation, stop us getting lazy.’
‘Have you identified any particular departments or is it going to be across the board?’ Sam was amazed to discover that she’d spoken.
Steve cleared his throat. ‘Your label is going to be badly hit,’ he said. ‘The ratio is way off compared to the American offices. You need to cut four people.’
Sam felt sicker.
‘We’ve got four hundred people working for us in this country, so it’s not that big a percentage,’ cut in Steve’s favourite yes-man, a smooth guy from finance.
‘But it’s a big deal,’ snapped the company’s head of legal, a dynamic dark-haired man named Curtis. ‘We’re talking about your colleagues, not worker ants. What about my department?’ he asked Steve.
Steve was nervous of Curtis, Sam had noticed. Probably afraid to browbeat a man who knew employment law backwards and could draw up a constructive dismissal suit in ten minutes on the back of an envelope. ‘You’re fine, nobody from your department,’ he said now.
The meeting lasted another twenty-five minutes with Steve giving them the party line on how this was to be dealt with, both within the company and publicly. The trade papers would have a field day speculating on the company’s bottom line if the cutbacks were explained incorrectly. Personnel had already identified the people who were first on the list: they’d inform each department
