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Lilies, Irises and Poppies as Rufus’s class at school). Advertising shrew would never have guessed that Lily works on this floor. She wears clothes that are so directional as to have performed a 180-degree turn and become the sort of things that my senile great-aunt would wear on escaping from the care home. There’s no trend too ugly for her to embrace. She even went through a self-harming phase as she’d been told everyone was doing it, though she cheerfully admitted that she hadn’t actually managed to pierce the skin on her arms with a biro, just to make it look like she was trying to do her own tattoos.
    “Do you know what?” I say to her. “Some stupid cow from the advertising agency just assumed I worked on this floor.”
    “Well, you do,” Lily observes, while performing a good-tempered version of the up-and-down look that I got in the lift.
    “True. Good Christmas?” I ask.
    “Eggs-hausting,” she replies in exhausted fashion. I stop myself from telling her she doesn’t know exhausting until she’s had children. Much of my conversation with Lily consists of me trying to stop myself from explaining to her that it won’t necessarily be easy for her to have “twins, a boy one and a girl one” by IVF at a moment convenient to her, once she’s won an Oscar and written a best-selling novel, or “move to a big house in the country and start a really successful Internet business with a really gorgeous husband” at some point in her thirties. She’s always telling me that she doesn’t understand why I work part-time—“Like, why don’t you just get more babysitting?”—which is also her answer to any complaints about not being able to get out much these days.
    When I first met Joel, I was an assistant producer and he was a researcher, having frittered away most of his twenties on his band, or “the band” as it’s always referred to, like it produced a few seminal albums. I had clawed my way to that position by the time-honored, by women at least, route of starting as a secretary at minimum wage, having written to every production company in London with my CV. He got his first position in telly via a phone call from his mother to an old friend who’d done a documentary with her in the seventies. Within six months of him starting, he was a producer too, though I consoled myself that I was still senior to him and whatever happened I’d always have better A-level grades. Soon we were competing to be the first to get a producer-director credit, that sweet mix of the practical and the creative. We spent our days making reality shows and our nights planning the world-changing documentaries we were going to make together.
    And now he’s an executive producer and I’m a… a what? A sort of production managers’ manager? Development slash coordination slash human resources? When we’ve got a program to work on, which we don’t at the moment, hence the tiny corner of sublet office space, I’m the last staging post on a production line of whining—the whinge sponge, if you like. Production managers are kind of like mothers in that they tidy up, budget for and chase after creative, tantrum-throwing types. I’m the person that even the production managers complain to and demand that I find order in their chaos. Professionally speaking, I’m the mother of all mothers.
    I used to be one of the creative ones, I used to have ideas. Now I’m a backroom girl. I’m like one of those women in World War II films who push airplanes around maps, allowing the pilots to soar off on their adventures. Opportunities for part-timers, mothers and over 35s are limited in the Logan’s Run world that is television.
    “Is no one else in today?” I ask Lily.
    “Nah. Do you want to see my new Facebook page?”
    “I thought you did MySpace.”
    “Yu-huh. I’ve got both.” She looks at me like I look at my mother, like my children look at me.
    “Perhaps I’ll get myself one of these Facebook thingies one of