BooksBarbecue
Back Careering Save as PDF
Chapters (64)
  1. Cover
  2. About the Author
  3. Dedication
  4. Chapter One
  5. Chapter Two
  6. Chapter Three
  7. Chapter Four
  8. Chapter Five
  9. Chapter Six
  10. Chapter Seven
  11. Chapter Eight
  12. Chapter Nine
  13. Chapter Ten
  14. Chapter Eleven
  15. Chapter Twelve
  16. Chapter Thirteen
  17. Chapter Fourteen
  18. Chapter Fifteen
  19. Chapter Sixteen
  20. Chapter Seventeen
  21. Chapter Eighteen
  22. Chapter Nineteen
  23. Chapter Twenty
  24. Chapter Twenty-One
  25. Chapter Twenty-Two
  26. Chapter Twenty-Three
  27. Chapter Twenty-Four
  28. Chapter Twenty-Five
  29. Chapter Twenty-Six
  30. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  31. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  32. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  33. Chapter Thirty
  34. Chapter Thirty-One
  35. Chapter Thirty-Two
  36. Chapter Thirty-Three
  37. Chapter Thirty-Four
  38. Chapter Thirty-Five
  39. Chapter Thirty-Six
  40. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  41. Chapter Thirty-Eight
  42. Chapter Thirty-Nine
  43. Chapter Forty
  44. Chapter Forty-One
  45. Chapter Forty-Two
  46. Chapter Forty-Three
  47. Chapter Forty-Four
  48. Chapter Forty-Five
  49. Chapter Forty-Six
  50. Chapter Forty-Seven
  51. Chapter Forty-Eight
  52. Chapter Forty-Nine
  53. Chapter Fifty
  54. Chapter Fifty-One
  55. Chapter Fifty-Two
  56. Chapter Fifty-Three
  57. Chapter Fifty-Four
  58. Chapter Fifty-Five
  59. Chapter Fifty-Six
  60. Chapter Fifty-Seven
  61. Chapter Fifty-Eight
  62. Chapter Fifty-Nine
  63. Epilogue
  64. Acknowledgements

When Andy arrived, Harri was in no fit spiritual condition for anything. It had taken her several long, bleak weeks to get over The Bad Man. And that’s using ‘over’ in its most generous sense.

TBM was very much her type, at the time. He was six and a half feet tall, eyes like the centre of the molten chocolate lava cake in Scott’s, shoulders you could take a camping trip on. He was the epitome of gracious living. He looked and talked as though he had fallen out of a catalogue. (One of those smart interiors catalogues that Harri sometimes still gets sent by mistake. Not the Argos catalogue.) TBM did not have a car stereo, he had a Blaupunkt. He did not make coffee in the morning, he fired up his Keurig. And when she spilled it on his sheets, he’d whimper ‘My Pratesi!’ as opposed to saying ‘Hey, don’t worry about it!’ Well-meaning friends kept asking Harri if she’d read American Psycho. Of course she had. She was trying very hard not to think about it.

The trouble was—one of the troubles, it was a troubling time—the awful love affair? Dalliance? Ruinous and soul crushing obsession?—coincided with the Year Of Anal. Every single women’s magazine was claiming, audaciously, that today’s cool, confident woman loved it up the ass. If you did not do butt stuff, you were a pussy, in every sense. Harri has since spoken to the people who would have been responsible for this. They deny it emphatically, but she would swear on a stack of bibles that Glossy ran, as a coverline, ‘First date anal: It’s the new shaking hands.’

Harri was secretly convinced that TBM was constantly on the brink of leaving her for a yachtful of supermodels, and that the way to keep him in her life was to keep letting him go around the back. No, not letting him. Begging him. Telling him it was her absolute all-time favourite thing. Her head kept telling her that TBM’s perfect magazine lifestyle was based on bollocks. She knew this, because she made the magazines. But in her heart, she believed that only TBM’s endorsement could make her life truly magazine worthy.