Chapter 8 Toby only knows what you tell him, Fuko
Toby only knows what you tell him, Fuko
The filming with CM Shot will resume after the client, a new skin care company, reviews the comms plan and signs off on the delivery plan.
Their entire legal team is on holiday, so Steven let the PR team borrow his officers for a social media refurb—that’s what Fawzia calls it when an important celebrity makes a big oopsie and needs to fix their image.
Fawzia, the PR and crisis manager, is the coolest person in the entire office.
She styles her hijab in such intricate ways that it looks more like buttercream than fabric.
Her clothes are modest but tailored, making it feel as if Miranda Priestly gave her a silent nod of approval.
The accessories go with the shoes, and the bag is covered with pins: a Somali flag, a popular K-pop band’s logo, and a sliced watermelon.
‘Love your pins,’ I say on the first day.
‘Thank you.’ She nods in understanding and acknowledgement. ‘Fukoh, is it?’
‘Fuko, actually.’
‘Oh sorry, Steven said... Ah. Tall-man Steven.’ She sighs in realisation. ‘You should correct him. He used to call me Fawn-zia. Like Dawn.’
‘I could, but then I’d have no leverage when I need something from him.’
‘You need something from me? You know you only need to ask.’ Toby saunters in and stands right behind me.
His cologne embraces the air around me, gently caressing my skin, and suddenly that’s all I can think about.
Move away. Please.
‘We are talking about tall-man-Steven,’ Fawzia whispers to him. ‘Bad with names.’
‘Steven, what a typical man.’ Toby jokingly rolls his eyes at his own sex.
Wait, maybe I am just overthinking it. All those podcasts and magazines say that men don’t think in the same way women do. Maybe flirty is normal for him, and I am the weird one. Yes. This is fine. We have seen each other naked; we have a lot in common, but a boy and a girl can be friends.
Toby realises he is standing way too close for comfort and moves away.
See? Nothing weird, Fuko.
‘Right, thank you for joining our team. One member is on hospital leave with shingles.’ Bad luck. ‘Another is on annual leave in the Bahamas.’ Good luck.
We are given NDAs to sign, which would matter to anyone but me, as I genuinely do not know who that woman is or what she does. But Toby gasps with a shocked, ‘No way!’
Apparently, an actress and a comedian, whose name I’m not allowed to reveal, had posted a homophobic poem on her socials that she thought was about London’s traffic. Sure. Easy mistake to make.
‘We’ve all been there.’ Toby also saw the humour in the complete improbability and ridiculousness of the situation.
Fawzia snorts a laugh. ‘The comms plan has already been drafted, but the client wishes to throw a big motive,’—or an event, to the less hip of us—‘to highlight how unhomophobic they are. We need people liaising with the events team and keeping track of mentions to make sure the public’s perception is shifting.
I have a hundred other things I need to work on, so I will send you a list of actions that need to happen over the next month, and a log of everything that has already been done. ’
Straightforward and organised. She is so cool. I need to find a natural way to become her best friend.
‘The events team is... slightly behind on trends. So please try to talk them out of the rainbow theme for the I don’t hate gay people party.’
‘Oh no.’ I grimace.
‘Blimey,’ Toby concludes.
‘Right, I will leave you to it. E-mail or call if you have questions.’
‘Is there a list of contacts?’ Toby asks.
‘It’s in the folders.’ She smiles.
It wasn’t even a question in my mind. Of course she has everything. Even her font choice is unexpected but so appropriate. Abadi Extra Light, who would have thought? I am learning so much. Maybe I can ask her to be my mentor. Maybe I can become her.
‘You are staring.’ Toby waves a hand in front of my face.
‘I am in love,’ I say without missing a beat. ‘It’s nice to work with someone who takes me seriously.’
It startles him; a strange expression flies across his face, somewhere between when the bus driver keeps driving after you’ve waved him down, and smelling mildew but having no clue where it’s coming from. I just can’t place it.
‘Right, well, shall we get to work?’ He types something on his laptop, jaw clenched.
Am I imagining it, or has his mood shifted?
I will not ask. Not my chickens, not my eggs. It’s an improvement from the last few weeks of constant second-guessing the meaning behind his every word.
The online meeting with the events team pops on our screens with Engel, a man with a hint of a German accent; Seana, a lovely lady with a knitted colourful cardigan; two Dans. The meeting began with a five-minute apology from Seana about almost killing me.
‘You didn’t know. I am okay, I promise.’ I try to reassure her, but tears are forming in the corners of her eyes.
‘Hey, if anything, I was the one who fed it to her, so she is angrier with me than she is with you.’ Toby interferes.
‘Honestly, Seana, if I had died, you wouldn’t even have been considered an accessory to murder. It would just be him,’ I say, and Toby raises his eyebrow at me off-screen but nods at his camera.
The events team is much more lacklustre with their filing and organisation, and in a sense, I would say events is the only thing they organise.
No suppliers, no event staff contacts. Who is putting up decorations?
Where are they ordering them from? Who is taking them down?
Are you absolutely sure you want it to be rainbow themed?
My asking questions made me the lead on raising the purchase orders, which needed to be done three days ago.
Dan and Dan eventually caved, and the theme was changed to Interview with the Vampire.
Not the film but the general atmosphere.
I had to find data to prove that Goth is very in, which was surprisingly easy to do.
People yearn for dreary castles and lacy dresses.
Plus, the decorations would be easier to find than Toby’s suggestion of Dadaism and Absurdity because Père Ubu was a gay icon at Oxford.
‘No one knows what Ubu Roi is,’ I cut him off after the meeting.
He wants some credit for his idea, and I am not willing to give it.
‘But you know!’ He pouts.
‘Because I studied absurdism in cinema as a module. That makes two people who are aware of a weird French play from the 1900s.’
He grumbles, ‘1896.’
‘And you have the audacity not to be into opera.’
He plummets down into his seat and runs his fingers through his hair. ‘Did Alexandra say anything, by the way?’
That she will marry you tomorrow. ‘I am not telling you.’
‘Why not?’
‘You are my supervisor, and she is my best friend,’ I say without looking up from my laptop, concentrating on the PO at hand.
I do not understand this finance system at all. The online guide is not helping.
‘You know that I’m your supervisor only in name, right?
Steven made it up for my personal development.
I think it’s going well. Dating, I mean.
Your advice not to be a dick helps.’ He laughs, but his gaze goes somewhere else.
Somewhere distant. As if he is talking to himself, not to me. ‘She is lovely.’
‘You don’t have to tell me that.’ I really wish you didn’t, as I cannot find the requisitioning codes.
‘No, I guess not.’ He flashes an empty smile and then slaps his knees.
Something happens to my laptop when he does that. The screen goes blue, then, black, then flashes green. ‘What just happened?’ I try to switch the laptop back on again. ‘Did you kick something?’
‘No?’
‘The screen’s gone.’
‘Let me see.’ He comes behind me and wiggles my mouse, locking me in the cage of his arms.
The screen remains unresponsive to the restart button or Ctrl+Alt+Delete.
I try to make myself smaller, squeezing my shoulders in to avoid my body touching his.
His lips part slightly as he tries to press more and more buttons.
I stare up at his eyes in the flashing lights of the screen.
Why can’t I look away? And every breath sounds too loud, telling me to stop inhaling instead of not scaring him.
That’s not what my thoughts should be.
‘Ta-da! Works again.’
‘Thanks,’ I whisper, looking anywhere but at him. Then I see it. ‘Did you press something?’
‘Well, yeah, many things to make it work.’
I turn his face to the window on the finance system—an order for 1500 units of... everything. It went down the list, selected the maximum quantity we have set, and placed an order for everything.
‘Fukoh!’ Steven shouts from his side of the office, not with a reprimanding tone but with a concerned one.
Toby gapes at the numbers, eyebrows rising in confusion.
‘If this was filmed, it would’ve been huge for the Specsavers campaign.’ My deadpan facial expression sets Toby off in hysterical laughter as he walks with me to explain the situation.
It takes us about two hours to manually delete all the POs that have been sent out.
After, the IT department looks at my laptop with absolute fascination, like doctors seeing something they’ve only read in textbooks.
I’m in no trouble at all, because just like the doctors, they have never seen a bug like this before.
This situation raises the question—is there something out there that’s making my luck worse?
And why do I have a feeling it might wear tweed and glasses?