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forty-two, single, no prospect of moving on anywhere, and nothing but a future of a basement flat shared with Badass the cat, had winced with her.
    At 11:00 a.m. Tania had gone for a fag round the back of the offices. Kate had followed, eager for some passive smoking. There were more than just a few things that were troubling her. It hadn’t escaped Kate’s notice that, Trisha Hillmory aside, she had never written a word about beauty in her life, something she would have thought was a necessary requirement for her new job. She suspected the editor, Alexis De Vere, was either some lazy American who hadn’t done her research properly or, and this increasingly seemed to be the more likely possibility, she was looking for a change of direction; something that would wake up those beauty-jaded girls of New York and give them something to get their thongs in a twist about.
    “You know, what I don’t understand is how they heard about me in the first place,” said Kate. “I’m not being funny, but do you really think Maidstone Bazaar has a following in New York?”
    "The Internet. Or our subscriptions department,” said Tania. “You know, they get all sorts of incentives for boosting our circulation. Kimmy, my friend who works there, only needs another thousand and she qualifies for a microwave!”
    “Can’t you buy them for a tenner down the market?”
    “Ooh, really? Maybe I should buy her one, save her doing all those extra hours.” Tania stubbed her cigarette on the ground. “She works ever so hard, nearly split up with her boyfriend over it.” Kate waited a respectful second or so, then picked up the butt to put in the bin later. Cigarettes took years to decompose naturally and ever since she’d given them up a few weeks ago (bar the recent relapse), she was at pains to remind the nicotine-dependent of the ills they inflicted on society.
    “You can’t take away her motivation,” said Kate. “You know what else? If we could just talk a little bit more about me now that we’ve solved Kimmy’s microwave dilemma . . . I don’t know the first thing about beauty.”
    “Yes . . . well.” Tania lit up another cigarette thoughtfully, casting her eyes over Kate’s disheveled hair.
    Over the wall Kate could see the buses queuing to get into the depot round the back of the shopping center. A group of hooded youths sat on the stone bollards by the entrance. They looked bored.
    “Can there really be that much to know?”
    For the following three weeks Kate went religiously round to Lise’s flat every evening, where Lise’s friend Yolanda, who was a beauty therapist at the gym and therefore did know about beauty (although admittedly she had only done six weeks of a course and had only covered waxing and massage, but as Lise pointed out she loved makeup, didn’t she, and how hard could it be?) taught her about manicures, pedicures, hair removal, and how to blow-dry hair and cleanse skin.
    “Groomed,” pronounced Yolanda. “You need to look groomed.” And she and Lise had frog-marched Kate to the local branch of Topshop to stock up on acres of polyester-mix wrap dresses with added Lycra. She had to accessorize, too, Yolanda warned, with handbags, bangles, and earrings, and get highlights, because everyone in New York had highlights. Yolanda, it transpired, was learning how to do these this very week at college, and, if she wanted to, Kate could come along to a model night, where she could have her hair done for free.
    “Will I have to do a catwalk show or something?”
    Lise and Yolanda looked at each other, exasperated. As her New York salary hadn’t yet kicked in, discounted highlights were her only option. That evening, third in a row of ten rather unwashed-looking sixteen-year-olds, Kate took her place before a mirror and submitted to the lure of the silver foil, only to emerge four hours later looking like a ginger racoon. This was all the rage, Yolanda assured her, she looked just like that TV presenter