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drank rum and lemonade and talked so much that I never even noticed what color the sea was. Whenever I need to stop and remind myself how much I once loved Andrew, I only need to think about this. That the ocean covers seven tenths of the earth’s surface, and yet my husband could make me not notice it. That is how big he was for me. When we got back to our new married house in Kingston, I asked Andrew about the color of that honeymoon sea. He said,
Yeah, was it blue?
I said, come on Andrew, you’re a pro, you can do better than that. And Andrew said,
Okay then, the awesome ocean fastness was a splendor of ultramarine crested with crimson and gold where the burnished sun blazed on the wave tops and sent them crashing into the gloomy troughs deepening to a dark malevolent indigo.
    He hung on the penultimate syllable, deepening his voice in comic pomposity even as he raised his eyebrows. INN-digo, he boomed.
    Of course you know why I didn’t notice the sea? It was because I spent two weeks with my head—
    Well, where my husband’s head was is between me and him.
    We both giggled helplessly and rolled around on the bed and Charlie, dear Charlie, was conceived.
    I pushed open the street door and stepped up into the lobby of the magazine. The black Italian marble floor was the only gracenote that had survived our tenancy of the offices. The rest of the lobby was pure us. Boxes of sample frocks from wannabe fashion houses were stacked up along one wall. Some intern had triaged them with a chunky blue marker: YES KEEP FOR SHOOT , or OH I THINK NOT , or the triumphantly absolutist THIS IS NOT FASHION . A dead Japanese juniper tree stood in a cracked gold Otagiri vase. Three glittering Christmas baubles still hung from it. The walls were done up in fuchsia and fairy lights, and even in the dim sunshine from the tinted windows that gave onto Commercial Street, the paintwork looked marked and tatty. I cultivated this unkempt look.
Nixie
wasn’t supposed to be like the other women’s magazines. Let them keep their spotless lobbies and their smug Eames chairs. When it comes right down to editorial choices, I would rather have a bright staff and a dim lobby.
    Clarissa, my features editor, came through the doors just after me. We kissed once, twice, three times—we’d been friends since school—and she hooked her arm around mine as we took the stairs together. The editorial floor was right at the top of the building. We were halfway up before I realized what was wrong with Clarissa.
    “Clarissa, you’re wearing yesterday’s clothes.”
    She smirked.
    “So would you be, if you’d met yesterday’s man.”
    “Oh Clarissa. What am I going to do with you?”
    “Pay rise, strong coffee, paracetamol.”
    She beamed as she ticked off the points on her fingers. I reminded myself that Clarissa did not have some of the wonderful things I had in my life, such as my beautiful son Batman, and that she was therefore almost certainly less fulfilled than I was.
    It was a 10:30 A.M. start for my junior staff, bless them, and none of them were in yet. Up on the editorial floor, the cleaners were still in. They were hoovering, and dusting desktops, and turning upside down all the framed photos of my staff’s awful boyfriends, to prove they’d dusted under them. This was the grin-and-bear-it part of editing
Nixie.
At
Vogue
or
Marie Claire,
one’s editorial staffwould be at their desks by eight, dressed in Chloé and sipping green tea. On the other hand, they wouldn’t still be there at midnight scrawling CECI N’EST PAS PRÊT-À-PORTER on a sample box they were returning to a venerable Paris fashion house.
    Clarissa sat on the corner of my desk and I sat behind it, and we looked out over the open plan at the gang of black faces spiriting away yesterday’s fabric swatches and Starbucks cups.
    We talked about the issue we were closing. The ad-sales people had done unusually well that month—perhaps the spiraling cost of street drugs had