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permed secretaries from the solicitor’s firm on the seventh floor, who, as soon as they saw Frankie and her cardboard box, stopped gossiping about the rumoured redundancies at Lifestyle magazine and fell into an embarrassed silence. The atmosphere was a killer. Trying to avoid their pitying stares, Frankie stared fixedly at the stained nylon carpet, wishing the lift would get a bloody move on. It didn’t. Instead it took it upon itself to stop at every floor and wait for a few minutes, opening and closing its doors for no apparent reason.
    It was at the third floor when, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the edge of a photograph poking out from underneath the files in her box. Pulling it out, she saw it was a photo of her and Hugh, who was looking sexy in a dinner jacket, his bow tie hanging loosely around his neck. It had been taken last year at his work’s Christmas party and they had their arms around each other, smiling drunkenly into the lens. God, what on earth was she wearing? It was a ruffled, purple satin Gone With the Wind number from Laura Ashley – a desperate I’ve-got-nothing-to-wear panic buy that she’d regretted before the ink had even dried on the three-hundred-quid cheque. In her frenzied delirium, the shop assistant had managed to persuade her she looked like a seductive Scarlett O’Hara, but in the full-length mirror at home she’d discovered the awful truth: she looked like someone’s bridesmaid. Luckily Hugh had come to the rescue by saying he’d always had a thing about bridesmaids and kissed her reassuringly.
    Smiling as she remembered, Frankie suddenly felt a wave of relief. Thank God she had Hugh. Losing her job was a shock, but Hugh would soften the blow. He was someone she could rely on, someone whose shoulder she could cry on, someone who would put his arms around her and tell her how much he loved her – P45 or not.
    The lift finally reached the ground floor and, with a ping, the sliding doors opened. Without a backwards glance, Frankie strode across the carpeted lobby, past the uniformed porters and out through the revolving doors. She suddenly found herself outside in the cold, not sure which direction to take. She paused, and it was only then that she realised that the knot she’d had in her stomach had unravelled and disappeared. A sharp gust of wind tugged impatiently at her coat and, wrapping it tightly around her, she set off through the crowded streets of Soho. She didn’t have a job, but she had Hugh and everything would be OK.

4
    Frankie turned on the hot tap and emptied into the bath a mixture of all the fiddly trial-size Body Shop bottles of raspberry jam gel, white musk lotion and spearmint goo she’d amassed over the last ten years and kept in a dusty wicker basket on top of the bathroom cabinet. She’d once read that hot baths were a beauty no-no, something about how they gave you cellulite, broken veins and sluggish circulation – but what didn’t? Coffee was enemy number one, alcohol was just as bad, and as for sunbathing and smoking . . . they were beauty suicide. Easing herself into the bathtub, she watched her legs turning a steamy scarlet and took a sip from her glass of ice-cold Chardonnay. Following all that health and beauty advice meant drinking gallons of water, slapping on SPF50 and being wrapped in cold, slimy seaweed twice a week. She knew which she preferred. Taking another mouthful of wine, Frankie lay her head back on a pillow of wet froth and poached herself in a medley of scented bubbles.
     
    She’d been unemployed for four days, one of which she’d spent in the Benefits office filling in dozens of colour-coded forms and waiting in a maze of queues, before being told by Brenda in Claims that it would take at least six weeks before she received her ‘jobseekers’ allowance’ which would just about cover a Friday night out. Depressed, she’d gone home and spent the rest of the week outrageously embellishing her CV, floundering