where do you want me to go?’ This had been Magenta’s office since—well, she could hardly remember; it had been hers for so long now.
‘You work in the typing pool, remember?’ Nancy told her urgently, poking her head out of the door to check the coast was clear.
‘The typing pool? ‘ Magenta laughed. ‘Is this some joke of Quinn’s to get us all in the right mood for the sixties campaign?’
Nancy gave her a funny look.
‘To be more accurate, you used to work in the typing pool,’ she finally replied, nudging Magenta towards the door. ‘The guy who ran the place before hotshot Quinn arrived from the States took his office manager with him, so Quinn promoted you.’
‘Why didn’t Quinn text me? And what’s this?’ Magenta demanded as Nancy bundled her towards a mean little desk set to one side of her office door—a door she now noticed with outrage that already bore the legend, ‘Gray Quinn’.
‘This is your desk now, Magenta,’ Nancy explained. ‘It’s a great improvement to the typing pool, don’t you think?’
‘Do you want to hear what I think? No. I didn’t think so,’ Magenta agreed as Nancy shook her head. ‘I don’t know what’s happening around here, but this isn’t my desk—and Quinn definitely can’t take over my office.’
‘But, Magenta, you used to work in the typing pool—you’ve never had your own office,’ Nancy insisted, looking increasingly concerned about Magenta’s state of mind. ‘Don’t you remember anything? ‘
Magenta swept a hand across her eyes as if hoping everything would change back again by the time she opened them again. But, to make things worse, people she didn’t even know were staring at her as if she was the one who was mad.
But how could this have happened? She gazed around and felt her anger rising. Quinn had to be some sort of monumental chauvinist; men occupied all the private offices while the women had been relegated to old-fashioned typewriters—either in the typing pool, where they sat in rows behind a partition as if they were at school, or at similar desks to this one outside the office doors. Ready to do their master’s bidding, Magenta presumed angrily. She remembered her father telling her how it used to be for the majority of female office workers in the sixties. ‘Why are all the girls typing?’ she asked Nancy in a heated whisper.
‘It’s their job!’ Nancy said, frowning.
‘But why aren’t they working on the campaign? ‘ Magenta noticed now that many of the women, some of whose faces were adorned with heavy-framed, upswept spectacles, were pretending not to look at her.
‘What campaign?’ Nancy queried, stepping back as a keen teen brushed passed her.
‘Wow, Magenta, you look really choice!’
‘I do? ‘ Magenta spun on her heels as the young man she had never seen before gave her a rather too comprehensive once-over. ‘Why, thank you…?’
‘Jackson,’ Nancy supplied, having cottoned on to the fact that Magenta needed all the help she could get.
‘Jackson.’ Magenta raised a brow. ‘Stop staring at your Auntie Magenta and go find yourself a girlfriend.’
Jackson laughed as if Magenta could always be relied upon to say something funny. ‘You’re a gas, baby.’
Had Quinn changed all the personnel? Of course, he was perfectly entitled to, Magenta reasoned. Quinn ran the show now. But what had happened to her friends? And what had happened to their working environment?
So many questions stacked up in her mind, with not a single answer to one of them that made sense.
‘LOOK, Magenta, I don’t want to rush you,’ Nancy said in a way that clearly said that was exactly what she wanted to do. ‘But Quinn’s only slipped out for an eleven o’clock appointment.’
‘So what?’ Magenta said impatiently. ‘He’s got a damn nerve.’ She was still looking round, trying to take everything in. She could understand Quinn wanting to live the sixties in order to give the campaign that final fizz of authenticity—hadn’t she done the same thing herself? But didn’t he know there was such a thing as going too far? ‘Nancy, what’s been going on here?’
‘The usual?’ Following her glance, Nancy gazed around the office.
‘The usual,’ Magenta repeated grimly. ‘Is it usual to remove the computers?’
‘The what?’
‘Okay, so Quinn’s got you playing his game,’ Magenta said. ‘I can understand that you don’t want to lose your job—I’m just thinking of all the expense involved in putting this right again—’ She had already reasoned that the reorganisation of the office would have been fairly easy if Quinn had copied the layout from the old photographs on the wall, but there were other things she couldn’t account for. There was a different feel to the place, never mind the look, which was dated, a little drab and definitely not the right environment to encourage cutting-edge design work. She thought it boring, not to mention inhospitable. There were different phones too, but it was the ergonomically unhelpful furniture that really concerned her—and single glazing? Had Quinn gone mad? Never mind the expense, what about condensation? Cold? If people were uncomfortable at work, productivity would suffer. Didn’t Quinn know anything?
And there was a different smell too…
Cigarette smoke?
‘Nancy!’ Magenta exclaimed with increased urgency.
‘Are you all right, Magenta?’ Glancing round, Nancy grabbed a chair and tried to press Magenta into it.
‘I’m fine.’ She was anything but fine. What had happened here? Had Quinn got people in to dress the offices like a sixties stage-set? And how was it possible she had slept through those changes? But it wasn’t just the noise element that concerned her; these changes were too thorough, too perfect, too convincing.
Magenta’s throat dried. This wasn’t some office teambuilding exercise. This was reality. This was reality for Nancy and for all the people here. It was Magenta who was out of sync. She must have fallen down the rabbit hole, like Alice, while she’d been asleep and landed in the sixties. And now the shock of being trapped inside a dream was only exceeded by her dread of meeting Quinn. From what she’d gathered, he was just the sort of man who would slot right into the sixties, where men ruled. Quinn obviously thought they did.
Magenta took a few steadying breaths while Nancy looked on anxiously. Magenta’s heart was pounding uncontrollably, but whatever had happened she would have to manage it.
She looked as much a part of the sixties as everyone else in the office, Magenta reassured herself, with her carefully made-up face, perfect hair and vintage cream wool dress. Though you could have bounced bullets off her underwear, it did outline her shape to the point where her breasts were outrageously prominent. That, believe it or not, was the fashion. It could best be described as ‘sex in your face’. No wonder Jackson had commented; she should have known better than to dress
