The Not-So-Secret Diary of a City Girl
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Synopsis
Can Laura prevent the bank (and her love life) from crashing and burning? Banking analyst Laura McGregor's electronic diary is full of things which definitely shouldn't be made public: musings on her lacklustre relationship with trader boyfriend Tom, disturbing irregularities in new boss Will's trading accounts, and the small matter of her attraction to gorgeous journalist Alex. So when the diary is accidentally uploaded on to the internet in blog form by clueless younger sister Mel, suddenly not only Laura, but her bank too, is facing meltdown and, even worse, Laura suspects Alex of using it as a scoop. Fighting to convince the world's media to believe her over Alex is one thing, but can Laura win the battle with her heart?
Release date: December 6, 2012
Publisher: Headline
Print pages: 324
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The Not-So-Secret Diary of a City Girl
Allie Spencer
I am sitting in the saloon bar of the Rose and Crown in my home town of Bournebridge, Wiltshire.
Well, that’s not strictly accurate.
When I say ‘town’, I mean ‘sleepy village halfway up the back-arse of nowhere’; and when I say ‘saloon bar’, I’m talking about the half of the pub that doesn’t have sawdust strewn underneath the bar to catch the broken glass on a Saturday night. There is another pub a short jaunt along the high street, but as the drinks are twice the price and the landlord knows my parents, I’m better off roughing it down at the Rosie.
Besides, it’s not just me who drinks here.
Right now it’s half past four on a Friday afternoon in April and the place is heaving. There are a couple of old geezers in cloth caps over in the public bar nursing halves of stout and arguing over the odds for the four forty-five at Sandown, but the rest of the demographic is quite clearly on the younger side.
In fact, most of it is quite clearly on the younger side of eighteen – but as long as you’re not actually wearing a school uniform and you don’t try to pay for your drinks with Monopoly money, the staff here don’t seem to mind. So, casting my eye around the room, I can see my mate Caroline and her boyfriend Robbie (both Lower Sixth like me), plus there’s quite a few in from the boys’ grammar in the next village, drinking halves of sweet cider and trying to pretend they don’t give a monkey’s about their upcoming exams.
I, however, do.
I care very much.
In fact, I am so desperate to conjure up some good exam grades and use them to grapple my way out of rural Wiltshire and away from my family that right now I’m drinking Diet Coke and doing my best to learn my French vocabulary, despite being deafened by the mating cries of the lesser-spotted English adolescent.
Or greater-spotted, if you’re talking about Robbie’s mate Kev.
No, I’m here because my mum and dad have just had another almighty row about Dad’s business – their third this week. I’d just come in from school and walked into the kitchen to see my mother in a state that could only be described as ‘core meltdown’ over my father’s failure to chase up an invoice for ten thousand pounds. My father protested that the cheque was on its way, while my mothered countered forcefully that she’d believe it when she saw it.
They didn’t even realise I was there.
So, needing to get away and with my escape routes limited to the Rose and Crown or hiding out upstairs (where my sister Mel was testing the strength of the floor joists with her deafening music), I picked up my purse and went straight back out again, leaving the parentals to slug it out amongst the windowsill-top pots of herbs and the Le Creuset.
I look up as the door to the pub creaks open and spews another gobbet of grammar-school boys out into the room. You can always tell the St Peter’s crowd – they slap on far too much aftershave, wear a lot of black leather and stare at girls in a slightly scary way. There’s one in particular, with deep brown eyes and a gob permanently on fast-forward, who seems fixated with me. Sometimes I can feel his eyes burning through my mad curly dark hair right into the back of my neck and – oh yes, there we go! Even though I’m looking in the opposite direction, I know that he’s right behind me, and I can feel his gaze like a shaft of sunlight focusing through a magnifying glass as it bores its way in between my shoulder blades.
But I’m not interested.
Right now I’m on a mission with my French vocab and so, even though he is on the hotter side of cute, I do what I always do: ignore him and go back to my books.
Until—
‘Oi,’ I say. ‘Watch what you’re doing!’
Strange Staring Man has bumped into my table sending a good half of my Diet Coke flowing freely across my French exercise book.
‘Sorry,’ he mutters (ironically, for the first time in his life unable to make proper eye contact with me). ‘I wanted to give you this.’
And he drops a small, neatly folded square of paper down on to the table before walking quickly over to the other side of the bar and disappearing into the fold of a dozen more or less identical gangly teenage boys.
I dab at the Coke spillage with a beer mat (not very effective) and then do the same with the corner of a nearby curtain (rather more effective but it gets me a dirty look from the barmaid). Then, crisis averted, I put my soggy book back in my bag and pick up Mr Starey’s piece of paper.
For a moment I consider not opening it; but then I think, what the hell, and peel back the corners to reveal, in all its spidery glory, the handwritten invitation: Will you go for a drink with me?
Er, no. I don’t think so. Even though my stomach does a secret little flip at the thought.
I roll my eyes in exasperation (just in case he’s looking – which he probably is, given the way the hairs on the back of my neck are standing on end) and then crumple the note up in my hand. I’m about to chuck it on the floor but the barmaid glowers at me again, so I shove it inside the little diary I always carry in my bag, stand up and make my way through the throng to the door of the pub.
I’m just about to step out into the spring sunshine when I feel the weight of his stare yet again and turn round. He gives me a smile so dazzling they could probably use it to illuminate Wembley Stadium – but for a million bazillion reasons I’m simply not in the mood. Returning his grin with a Grade 1 thermonuclear scowl, I lift the latch on the door and make my way home to see if peace has broken out in the old family homestead, tossing his screwed-up note into the kichen bin when I arrive.
And that is the last I see of him, and his scribbled invitation for drinkies à deux.
Or so I think . . .
But fate, as usual, has other ideas. Including the less-than-brilliant one that the best time to reintroduce us will be ten years later, in the middle of one of the biggest financial scandals the City has ever seen, just when my sister Mel is about to pitch up on my doorstep on the run from her home in Bristol with a bunch of West Country heavies hot on her trail.
All that, however, is in the future. First I need to go to uni, get a dullsville job as an analyst with the Chiltern Bank, buy a hideously overpriced two-bedroomed flat in Hammersmith, and hook up with Tom, a hotshot trader who possesses a body your average Greek god would kill for, but who doesn’t realise that the phrase ‘going out with’ refers to me, his girlfriend, and not getting beered up with the rest of the lads at work. Finally, I have to get fantastically drunk at an impromptu birthday party and wake up at stupid o’clock on a Thursday morning in dire need of a vat of black coffee with a large helping of Alka-seltzers on the side.
So let’s fast-forward a decade to half past five in the middle of March – and if I’m not much mistaken, the alarm is about to go off . . .
A sound like an incoming missile alert sliced through the air and threw me into a state of confusion. Up until then I’d been asleep and dreaming about a man hitting me on the back of the head with a sledgehammer; now, however, even though I was awake, my dream not only seemed to be carrying on but the pain was also getting worse.
I groaned.
Loudly.
What was going on?
‘For God’s sake turn the bloody alarm clock off!’ muttered a voice next to me, half muffled by the duvet.
I reached an arm out from under the covers and smacked the clock hard. So hard, in fact, that it shot off my bedside table and into the outer darkness over by the wardrobe.
I groaned again and tried to open my eyes, only to find that they were glued shut by a combination of excess alcohol consumption, extreme sleep deprivation and Lash-a-bility – the mascara that keeps on working while you party!
‘If you don’t turn the alarm clock off,’ the voice next to me said, ‘I shall do it myself. And after that, I shall be forced to execute you for crimes against humanity.’
Frankly, death seemed pretty appealing right then (as opposed to the ‘death warmed up’ option, which I was currently experiencing). However, I was never one to shirk my duty, so I threw back the covers, crawled on my hands and knees towards the noise (which now seemed to have an added pneumatic drill-like quality to it), picked up my hairdryer and aimed it at the offending timepiece. There was an almighty crack – one that felt as though it had sliced the top of my skull open – and then peace, blessed peace, reigned supreme.
Exhausted, I lay down with my head on the carpet and the throbbing in my temples subsided slightly.
‘What time is it?’ muttered the occupant of my bed.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I can’t actually open my eyes.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘So long as I lie down flat it’s okay,’ I said. ‘If I try to stand up, I feel as though I’m going to slide off the floor. How about you?’
I prised one eyelid open with my fingers and was rewarded by the sight of Polly, my friend and work colleague, draped over the edge of the bed with her normally sleek black hair standing up on end.
‘I was well and truly mugged by the beer gorilla last night,’ she whispered.
‘You mean the Long Island Iced Tea gorilla,’ I reminded her, rolling on to my back to see if that helped at all, ‘who was accompanied by his cousins the Chardonnay chimpanzee and the Tequila Slammer orangutan.’
Polly groaned and put a pillow over her head.
‘I hate you,’ she said. ‘It’s all your fault; it was your birthday.’
‘It couldn’t have been,’ I said, wondering who’d turned up the wattage on the street light outside my window and wishing I could reach my sunglasses. ‘My birthday’s on a Wednesday this year. We would never have got this drunk on a week night.’
‘But it was your birthday.’ Polly struggled up briefly on to her elbows before collapsing back on to the mattress. ‘I know that because we all went to the pub after work and then you invited everyone back here after last orders.’
Vague, swimmy recollections of catching the tube to Hammersmith with fifteen of my closest friends and co-workers swam into my addled brain.
‘Oh God,’ I mumbled. ‘Are they all still here?’
‘No, you sent them home.’
‘So why are you here?’
‘Because I spilled tequila on my shoes and put them under the shower for half an hour to clean them off. They were wringing.’
‘And why are you in my bed?’
‘You said I wasn’t allowed to sleep in the spare room because I had to stop you calling Tom in the middle of the night and yelling at him.’
‘Why, what had he done?’ Yelling at anyone was certainly not my usual MO; I must have been pretty far gone even to have contemplated it.
‘He’d—Oh, fuckadoodle, Laura! Have you seen the time – we are so dead!’
I peeled open my other eyelid just in time to see Polly drop my mobile phone on to the bedside table as though it had scalded her and sprint into the bathroom.
‘It’s Thursday!’ she yelled, her words cutting through me like the blade on a scythe, ‘Thursday the tenth of March, and we’re late for work.’
‘Shit!’ I murmured and staggered after her, pausing only briefly to throw a couple of Nurofens and half a pint of water down my gullet.
Thursday the tenth of March was not the day to be late. Thursday the tenth of March was not the day to be turning up at work with a raging hangover. Thursday the tenth of March was the day they were announcing redundancies in the analysis department of the Chiltern Bank, and the last thing either of us wanted to do was give the powers-that-be any encouragement to send the Curse of the Job Centre in our direction.
Three quarters of an hour later, with our arms linked together to keep us vertical and each clutching a bottle of mineral water, Polly and I lurched up Cornhill in the City of London, before hanging a right into St Andrewgate, where the Chiltern’s head office was situated. Five years ago, this street had contained nothing to mark it out from any other City thoroughfare (some low-rise, low-grade office buildings; a white, slightly scary Hawkswood church at one end and a couple of take-away sandwich shops); but now, thanks to the profits made by our bank (the bank that wants to make you smile!) during the boom years, it was home to the Screwdriver – the newest and biggest super-skyscraper in town. We rounded a corner and found ourselves squinting as the spring sunlight bounced energetically off its glass and chrome structure. Considerably fatter at the base, its angular sides tapered thirty-five floors later to a rounded point that would have had Sigmund Freud rubbing his hands together in glee, it was so striking and cutting-edge that it made every other building around look as though it needn’t have bothered turning up.
I always felt a little thrill of excitement as I trotted up the four pale Yorkstone steps that flowed out from the base of the building like ripples on a pond. I might not earn as much as Tom on his trading desk; I might secretly think that churning out endless reports on company performances and share movements was not the most exciting job in the world; sometimes I might even dream of doing something really off the wall like being a big-game warden or monitoring dolphin numbers in the Bahamas – but I totally loved the fact that I got to work in the hottest building in town.
No, scratch that.
The hottest building in the world.
People applied for transfers from our New York offices just so that they could work at the Screwdriver. The guys in the Paris office said mais non to the Left Bank and begged to be allowed to work amongst les rosbifs here in London. Applications were also up from Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong, the kudos of the Screwdriver outweighing the charms of life in the Far East; and even the Aussies were queuing up in droves to leave sunny Sydney so that they could work in the British rain at the ‘Screwy’.
As for me, a country girl from a no-mark village in darkest Wiltshire, it was so awesome I felt as though I was doing something vaguely illegal sneaking in here every day.
‘Morning, Dennis,’ I croaked to the man in a deep claret-red morning suit and top hat who was standing at the top of the steps next to the automatic door.
‘Morning, Laura!’ Our doorman deftly tipped his hat a quarter of an inch in our direction. ‘Morning, Polly. Passes?’
We waved our laminated security passes in his general direction and he pushed the revolving door open, allowing us to glide into the cool (and mercifully shady) marbled expanse of the foyer. We gingerly click-clacked our way across the polished floor, past a desk so huge it had to be staffed by three receptionists, and into one of the glass-and-chrome lifts that shuttled up and down the see-through frontage of the first twenty-five floors of the building.
I leaned my still-pounding head against one of the cool steel ribs that encased the elevator pod and closed my eyes.
‘Remind me why I’m here,’ I muttered, ‘and not at home sleeping it off.’
Polly mumbled, ‘Floor twenty,’ into the lift’s voice-activated control panel, before trotting out our departmental mission statement: ‘Because we not only deliver the best – we are the best.’
‘Bollocks,’ I said, clutching my temples as the lift rocketed upwards, leaving my stomach behind somewhere between floors ten and eleven.
‘Okay,’ she conceded, ‘we’re actually here because if we call in sick we’ll get redundancy for sure; and if that happens we’ll never get another job ever again because everyone now thinks that bankers are the Antichrist and we’ll be forced to move back in with our parents until we finally die in our old pink bedrooms with peeling posters of Robbie Williams and Damon Albarn on the walls. That’s why.’
I shivered. The idea of going home to the bosom of my family (or my mother, anyway; my parents had divorced not long after my dad’s business had disappeared down the U-bend) was enough to convince me of the importance of dragging myself into work come hell or a hangover. In fact, I would even have been willing to wear the bilious lime-green Chiltern baseball cap and T-shirt to client meetings around town if it gained me any Brownie points with the HR department.
‘You’re all right,’ I said mournfully. ‘You could always shack up with Archie. If I lose my job and I can’t pay the mortgage I’ll have to move home.’
The sound of Polly choking came from somewhere over by the lift door.
‘Oh God,’ she said in a strangled voice. ‘Ohgodohgodohgod. Are you serious? Me? With Archie?’
I opened one eye and saw her having some sort of seizure. Archie was a tall, thin chap in our department who had had a thing for Polly since the moment he’d first walked through the doors of our office and seen her lovely face illuminated by the light of the photocopier.
‘After you put your shoes in the shower, you spent the rest of the evening playing tonsil tennis with Archie in the kitchen,’ I informed her.
‘Floor twenty,’ announced the lift in a voice that sounded almost like Professor Stephen Hawking, and we crawled out of our glass pod.
We found ourselves on a carpeted corridor bounded on one side by huge glass panels held together by a spiderwebbed network of chrome frames and on the other by a seemingly endless curving white wall containing a number of identical doors. Polly leaned against the latter and put her head in her hands.
‘Oh God,’ she breathed again. ‘That’s why there were ten messages from him on my voicemail this morning.’
She looked up at me, obviously expecting the worst.
‘I didn’t – tell me I didn’t – with him – with Archie?’
‘After I’d turned off the shower and put your shoes in the airing cupboard, I found you asleep in the hall under the coat rack fully clothed,’ I reassured her. ‘Your virtue remains intact.’
Polly closed her eyes with relief.
‘But you still haven’t told me why I wanted to yell at Tom,’ I added, thinking that yelling at anyone right now would have serious consequences for my headache.
‘Because he—Oh, shit, Laura, it’s gone eight o’clock. Get moving.’
Ignoring the impressive cityscape pooling out below me through the glass panels, I scurried off along the corridor behind Polly, feeling like a twenty-first-century Alice in Wonderland heading down the rabbit hole. We passed door after door after door, some with brass nameplates announcing the occupants to be ‘Smithers and Company, Insurance Brokers’, or ‘Carridan and Lacey, Solicitors’, until we stopped at one with the Chiltern’s logo on it, swiped our passes through an electronic card-reader and walked into a large office area. Croaking hello to various colleagues, we made our way through rows of desks topped with computer monitors, in-trays and telephones, hung a left down a wide corridor lined with photocopiers and then turned right through a pair of double doors. This was our patch, our home territory. It consisted of a small open-plan room containing fifteen identical workstations separated by brown desk dividers a foot or so in height, a small kitchen area and, on the far wall, two very large flat-screen televisions respectively blasting out Bloomberg and the less well-known, but eerily prescient, Financial News Today. The latter broadcast from a small set of studios two streets away from the Screwdriver but were often in there with the breaking stuff before the big boys at the BBC or Sky had time to reshuffle their scripts.
I found my desk, dumped my bag and coat, then shoved off to the kitchen to concoct the super-strength, forty-thousand-volt espresso that was needed if I was going to manage anything more productive than lying with my head on the desk, drooling out of the corner of my mouth.
A phone started to ring.
My temples throbbed.
Nobody picked the phone up, so it carried on ringing.
My headache got a hundred times worse.
It didn’t stop.
I began to hate the person who owned the phone.
Still it continued.
I put my hands over my ears.
Another phone joined in.
I screwed my face up to try and block out the sound and . . .
. . . realised that my jacket pocket was vibrating.
Sheepishly I put my hand into my pocket and pulled out both the mobile I used for personal calls and the BlackBerry I had for work.
The screens told me that both callers were Tom.
The fuddled state of my brain found this difficult to understand, but nevertheless I gamely pressed a phone to each ear.
‘Tom?’ I said. ‘What are you doing ringing me twice? In fact, how are you ringing me twice?’
‘I rang your mobile with my mobile but you weren’t answering so I called your BlackBerry with my BlackBerry and waited to see which one you picked up first.’
I realised that I could only hear his voice in my left ear so I switched my mobile off and stuffed it back into my pocket.
‘Okay,’ I said, having very little idea of what he’d just said but being profoundly greateful that the ringing noise had abated. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I wondered whether you liked it?’
Oh shit: my birthday present.
It all came flooding back to me: that was why I’d wanted to ring him at one o’clock in the morning.
‘It was a man’s watch, Tom,’ I said with remarkable composure.
‘No it wasn’t; it just had a few gadgety bits on it. It’s the last word in Swiss design and it cost me an arm and a bloody leg.’
‘Tom, listen to me: it was a man’s underwater watch capable of telling me the depth of dive, water pressure per square metre and temperature, and it came with an optional shark-proof reading light attachment. When, exactly, in my hectic life of spreadsheets and City finance did you think I was going to use it?’
‘I don’t know – couldn’t you use it to start conversations with important clients at drinks parties?’
I took a very deep breath.
‘The strap is so big the whole thing keeps sliding off my wrist, and anyway you know perfectly well analysts don’t get invited to any client drinks parties.’
‘Okay, fine,’ replied Tom wearily. ‘I was in such a rush when I picked it out I must have gone for the wrong thing. Sorry.’
Last year my present had been a ticket for a World Cup rugby match at Twickenham – in the stands; none of your corporate-hospitality-with-free-champagne-and-a-three-course-lunch malarkey. At least with jewellery he was heading in the right general direction, even if he couldn’t quite manage the gender specifics.
‘Go on then,’ he continued, as though he was doing me an enormous favour. ‘Keep the refund and get yourself something else.’
I bit my lip. Choosing my own present with a refund from a useless watch wasn’t as romantic as having my boyfriend lovingly select the perfect gift to celebrate my twenty-seventh birthday – but it was probably the best I was going to get.
‘All right. I’ll meet you after work and you can give me the receipt. Then you can buy me a belated birthday drink to make up for not coming out with us last night – and what about a belated birthday candlelit dinner for two whilst you’re about it?’ I suggested hopefully.
Tom had texted yesterday to say he had to pass on my party because of an emergency team meeting at work. A journalist at Financial News Today had broken a story about the investment bank Tom worked for, Davis Butler, having massive undeclared losses. Their share price had fallen like a stone and it was currently touch and go as to whether they would survive.
From the other end of the phone came a silence so uncomfortable it might have been wearing jeans three sizes too small.
‘The thing is, Laura, I’m going to be a bit busy.’
‘Yeeees?’ He’d better have a bloody good excuse . . .
‘It’s England versus South Africa tonight, so me and a few of the lads were going to catch it on the big screen at the Lamb and Flag,’ he concluded sheepishly.
‘But you missed my birthday party!’ I protested. ‘You owe me a night out.’
‘I know and I’m really sorry about it. How about tomorrow? Seven-thirty at—Oh, shit! Laura, I’ve got to go; the boss wants to see me. Later!’
And he rang off.
I shoved my BlackBerry back into my pocket and turned to see Polly leaning against the fridge.
‘What?’ I barked, busying myself with the coffee machine.
Polly raised her hands in submission. ‘Hey, I didn’t say a word.’
‘He said he was sorry about blowing me out last night,’ I said, slamming cups around and then cringing as the noise reignited my thumping headache. ‘And you know things are difficult for him at the moment after that news story broke: they’re still talk. . .
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