‘You didn’t fucking hire her?!’

‘Yes! Yes! I did!’

‘Fuck me, Bobby! She’s fucking illiterate. You’ve hired a copywriter that can’t fucking write!’

‘How would you fucking know, Johnny? You write like a bored schoolboy who’s rushing to finish the words bit so he can get on with drawing a picture. That’s why you’re the art supremo, Johnny, and I’m in charge of the copy.’

‘At least I can fucking spell. At least I have a nodding relationship with fucking grammar. Her fucking CV was fucking car crash involving monkeys, typewriters, a 747 and a fucking tornado, yet, still, she couldn’t string a sentence together without a brace of fuck-ups. Dunno why you even fucking interviewed her! Are you trying to make us look like fucking fools, Bobby?’

‘Well, you said it yourself, Johnny. You can spell, your grammar is solid–ish. Yet you’re still incapable of writing anything anyone would want to fucking read. When it comes to writing, you’re a pit lane mechanic, Johnny: a well-tutored spanner monkey. She may be a little shaky on the mechanics of the English language, Johnny, but she’s a Formula One World Champion when it comes to writing. She can push ideas round linguistic corners you’d spin right off with your schoolroom grammar. And for every brilliant driver, there’s a thousand trained mechanics who can tune a fucking engine.’

‘Bobby, Bobby, fucking Bobby! This isn’t fucking Formula One. There’s thousands of fucking copywriters who can write. And I mean persuade, with fucking words, like they’ve swallowed the fucking Blarney Stone. And guess what?! They can spell! And, fuck me, their syntax doesn’t fucking suffer from a fucking prolapse every other fucking sentence!’

‘Well, she’s dyslexic, you fucking fathead!’

‘Dyslexic! Well, there it fucking is! She’s mentally incapable of doing the fucking job! Not a copywriter, Bobby Boy, she’s a copy-fucking-wrong’un. Ha! Yes! A copywrong’un!’

‘Don’t be a fucking asshat, Johnny. Ben Elton’s dyslexic, and he’s a brilliant fucking writer; he’s coined more commonly-used phrases in the English language than anyone other than fucking Shakespeare, who, by the way, wrote before spelling was even a thing.’

‘Yeah, well, welcome to nineteen eighty fucking eight, Bobby. We have clean fucking drinking water, computers, fucking space travel, and writers who can fucking spell!’

‘And you’re wrong about her syntax, Johnny. Her syntax is fucking incredible. She’s an ear for writing. That’s what it is! Her spelling and punctuation are all over the shop, but she’s a musical ear. A supreme sense of rhythm. She writes in fucking earworms. And earworms make great ads.’

‘I’ve worked it out.’

‘What? Worked what out, Johnny?’

‘You want to fucking shag her, don’t you, Bobby!’

‘Don’t be ridiculous! It’s not about that at all.’

‘Ah! But you do! You want to fucking shag her, Bobby! She’s just your type: short, elfin, dark bob, bright blue eyes, pert little tits, curvy little hips, teeny tiny waist. That’s fucking it! It’s the only fucking explanation.’

‘Don’t be a fucking wanker, Johnny. This isn’t one of your gay clubs; not everything is about shagging. She deserves respect. It’s disgusting to hear you talk of her like that. She’s our new colleague!’

‘Methinks the Bobby doth protest too much! Go on, fucking admit it, you want to fuck her, don’t you?’

‘That’s the opposite of the fucking truth, Johnny.’

‘Fuck me, Bobby, I can read you like a fucking billboard. Always could. You. Want. To shag. Her!’

‘Well I already did shag her, Johnny, if you must know. Right there up in that meeting room, just now. Then I pulled out and told her she starts on Monday. There! Satisfied?’

‘Ha! I could almost believe you fucking would, you sex-starved fucking saddo.’

‘Well, you know how it is. She was gushing about the view across the rooftops. Our eyes locked. She opened her folio and blushed, apologising for her dodgy spelling as she ran through her college work. I told her how much I loved her imperfections. It was so hot! Like a Mills & fuckin’ Boon novel, Johnny. Then she touched my knee, eyes watering just a little, telling me all about the years of abuse she’d suffered as a dyslexic kid, thanking me for recognising her talent. Then we hugged. It was like everything fell away, Johnny! It was just her and me up in that garret, Spitalfields spread out below us, then London, then the world. And the world was full of life, yet fresh and clean, full of possibilities, our possibilities. — Is this working for you, Johnny, or should I have brought the sex in a little sooner? Maybe make her a bloke with a barely-formed beard struggling as a colour-blind designer unable to fit into the Pantone Panza divisions of the cruel, cruel world?’

‘Are you fucking finished, Bobby? Believe it or not, some of us have some work to fucking do.’

‘No, Johnny, I’ve barely even started. Where was I? Ah yes! We hugged, swimming in the fresh pools of one another’s eyes. Then, Johnny, she stood on her tippy toes, searching for my mouth. We spoke not in words but in tongues. The tongues of angels, Johnny. A holy choir deep within us found fresh harmonies to serenade our blessed union.’

‘You do talk a load of shit, Bobby.’

‘It’s my job, Johnny, remember? Anyway. I backed off. Told her it wasn’t right, wasn’t ethical. The host of angels screeched into silence so fast that their throats rang sore. She looked deep into me, Johnny, not just into my eyes, but into my pounding fucking heart. Then she said it, Johnny: “But it feels SO right. Nothing the world says is right ever feels like this.” I cracked open the fucking door, Johnny, so we’d hear any footsteps approaching on the stairs. Then I kissed the nervous sweat from her heaving cleavage.’

‘“Heaving cleavage?” That’ll need some fucking work, Bobby, unless we really are selling this shit to Mills & Boon.’

‘Anyway, then I unbuttoned her blouse, Johnny. She was braless, an open fucking page. Her soft, puffy nipples were almost whiter than her fresh, pale skin, Johnny. Until I teased my tongue around them, bringing her little soldiers to attention, now dressed in their smart, scarlet tunics and on parade. That’s when she reached for my cock, wanking my weapon hard through my jeans.’

‘Charming! Right, I’ve heard a-fuckin’-nuff of this shit. Can you fuck off out of my office now? I need some privacy so I can open a fucking vein and die in peace after listening to that fucking bollocks.’

‘I’m going fucking nowhere, Johnny, until I’ve finished my tale. You pushed for it. Now you’re gonna hear it. All of it. The story, the foreword, the afterword, and the fucking blurb on the back cover.’

‘Give me fucking strength!’

‘The angels left us to our rapture, Johnny. We made our own music: a two-part harmony of unique and stupefying beauty. I hitched her short skirt up, Johnny, and she was pantyless.’

‘Classy!’

‘Her little muff looked like it was drawn onto the pale canvas of her skin in fine brushstrokes by Picasso himself. It pointed me, no, compelled me to her perfect little slit below. I lifted her onto the table, Johnny, and her labia parted with the grace of Margot Fonteyn, revealing her stunning pink lips glistening in the godsent sunlight steaming through the garret windows. This wasn’t dark sex, Johnny; it was pure, real. We were moving together towards the light. It was a rebirth where two became one.’

‘Well, that sounds like a fucking recipe for expensive childcare to me. If you could involve some premature ejaculation in this story sometime soon, it would be very much fucking appreciated.’

‘I ate her out, Johnny, right on that meeting room table you insisted on buying at ruinous expense. Her juices flowed like Evian onto the walnut veneer.’

‘If she ruins that table, Bobby, I’ll throw her out of that fucking garret window with my own fucking hands. Did she spill Evian on it? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?’

‘No, she didn’t, you precious fucking prick. That was “like,” a simile. Remember those?’

‘I remember a time when you weren’t doing story hour in my fucking office, Bobby. I remember that very fucking fondly.’

‘Anyway, she slipped off that table and unbuttoned my flies, Johnny, easing my throbbing prick out into the light.’

‘“Then, Bobby, she fainted from the smell of fucking fish! The End.” Right, has she recovered? Shall I call an ambulance? Can you get out of my fucking office now?’

‘It was as though my prick were larger than ever.’

‘Steady, Bobby, I was almost starting to believe this fucking shit. Now you’ve fucking blown it.’

‘I didn’t blow it, Johnny, she did! Or rather, she blew me. She slid her lips over my knob, Johnny, and curled her tongue-tip around my twitching glans, lapping away in circles. Then she rode her lips up and down over my bellend with her tongue projecting down the rigid vein of my shaft. She was on her knees. It was as though she was incanting a prayer of thanks, invoking a sacred blessing.’

‘Fucks’ sake, Bobby. Enough? Please!’

‘Then I pulled her up, Johnny. She wrapped her legs around me and didn’t blink as we slid together, joined at the mind as surely as we were at the hip. At first, we fucked softly, Johnny, thrilling at every move. Then I lowered her onto your precious fucking meeting table, Johnny, and we writhed like fighting tigers, consuming one another with desperation built in the hunger of a long winter.’

‘Long?! Fuck me! Never fucking ending, more like.’

‘I finished her off with my mouth, Johnny. Eating her til my nose ran with her juices, and my hand muffled her wild growls of ecstasy.’

‘Oh, was that it? I thought those mangy cats were fighting on the fucking roof again!’

‘Then, I finished up in her wet, throbbing pussy, shooting my “varnish” across her Picasso pubes, Johnny. She smoothed it into her luminous skin, sighing that she wanted to keep every drop of me. Then she slid off the table and licked my knob clean as she fixed me with her piercing blue eyes before we kissed. We kissed like young lovers reunited after a long war. I told her the job had been hers since I set eyes on her CV, and saw how her words just fizzed off the page. I told her she starts on Monday. She confessed she couldn’t bear to be separated until then, so I’m seeing her for a weekend of divine lovemaking. We joked that we may struggle to find time to eat. We pulled ourselves apart and cleaned up your precious fucking meeting table with paper napkins as we giggled like guilty teenagers. Then we floated back down those stairs like two feathers from an eiderdown bobbing back down to earth on a gentle breeze.’

‘Great, that’s it? Thank fucking Christ! Don’t forget to bung Cupid a fucking fiver. And send a thank-you note to the choir of fucking angels. So, Bobby, back to reality. I was right, you’re fucking desperate to shag her, and she starts on fucking Monday. If she’s just fucking shit, I want her out by the end of the fucking week. We can’t run this business with our fucking dicks. Now, thank you for that. And thank you for fucking off out of my office.’

‘You don’t want to hear about our kiss in the stairwell as I walked her out? How we cried, then laughed, shaking?’

‘Right, if Casanova won’t piss off back to his fucking love nest, I’m going to work in the fucking garret myself. I don’t have time to listen to any more of your shit.’

‘No?! Very well. Since you’ve hardened your heart to romance, Johnny, I shall leave you to your sad little office. I’m returning to the garret to work on some campaign ideas I brainstormed with Ellie.’

‘Ah! Ellie. Yes! That was her fucking name. Ellie, the fucking copywrong’un. I’ll sort out her fucking business cards. Bye-bye, Bobby. Fuck off. And shut the fucking door.’

Returning to the garret meeting room, Bobby winced as he saw the sloppily cleaned smears on Johnny’s precious meeting table. He wiped across the mirror-smooth surface to collect an unwiped pool of their pleasure. He could feel the veneer swelling at one of its seams.

‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’