23 Attempts at Love

Chapter 15: The Boss

I'd had jobs before, but this was a proper job. This was a real, adult job in the heart of London in a gorgeous, modern building with big, wide building which looked out over the roads just off Trafalgar Square. I was met at the door by the receptionist, Ellie.

"You must be Lucy, the new girl?" She asked, smiling and showing me to the sofa. "Someone will be out to start orientation in a second. Would you like some water?"

Ellie, I soon learned, was the beating heart of this building: she knew when you were late, when you were early, when your assistant was searching for new jobs and when your manager was having an affair with someone from a rival company. She knew where everyone kept everything, and I was in awe of her within a week. Visitors to the company wrote her off as a receptionist, but her role in the company extended far beyond answering phones and letting people in the building.

The company was huge and I worked in a small section of it, heading by a lady named Janine, supported by two subordinates named John and Amanda, who in turn then managed my immediate manager: Ed. Ed was the kind of big-city big-shot you'd imagine from the first impression works as an investment banker or a stock-broker. He wore expensive suits, polished his shoes every morning and spent hours slicking his hair back into the perfect quiff. He was the company's up-and-coming contract negotiator, with a talent for winning people – literary agents, authors, illustrators and printing companies alike – over and persuading them that his opinion was right. He was a bulldozer in contract negotiations, a wheeler-dealer from a car salesroom and a charmer in every aspect of the word. He knew what gift to buy every CEO of any company we dealt with, as well as their secretaries:

"The secretaries are where the power often lies," he told me on my first day. "They decide whose call gets answered first, whose appointment gets prioritised. Plus, they're often great eye candy." He scrolled through a selection of Instagram profiles of apparent secretaries he knew as proof.

This chapter isn't a love story with a man: it's a love story between me and my new job. I fell in love with the world of publishing and literature before I even signed the contract to join this strange, changing and creative world. I started off as a junior assistant to Ed: I read through manuscripts and stamped them with a "yes" or "no" and fielded questions from literary agents and authors alike about what I did or didn't like.

Early on into my career Ed came to my desk.

"You said no to a manuscript by Joseph King," he said blankly. "You didn't think to send that one straight to me?" I flipped through my notes: Joseph King? The author's name didn't ring a bell. I found the manuscript he was talking about: Joseph King was the name of the agent.

"I still have the copy of it, if you'd like to read through it," I replied. I was two weeks in, still had no idea what I was doing and felt very out-of-place.

"Why did you turn it down?" He asked.

Joseph King, as it turns out, was a high-flying and very particular literary agent who was especially selective in who he represented, and who sent us his manuscripts before anyone else as part of a deal he'd brokered with Ed. I'd already sent the automatic rejection by the time Ed questioned me on it, after an angry phone call from Joseph King himself. I nervously summarised my notes on the manuscript for Ed.

"It was very similar to a book Penguin released last summer: Days of the Wild. It centred around a tribe in Africa and a kid breaking free from the tribe, training to be a lawyer and then defending his tribe in court when the Government tried to sell their land to a mining company. This book," I said, pointing to the manuscript with a big red rejection stamp plastered across it, "is basically the same. It's a tribe in Africa, a kid who trains to be a lawyer who fights for the tribe in court... It's the same, but worse. Days of the Wild was a huge success for Penguin. I figured we'd want to differentiate ourselves from the competition, not copy them." I took a breath. I couldn't read Ed's face.