‘I’m not, I’m just … Sorry, I had a bit of a nightmare this morning. I hate it when one of my team shows up late and goes on about the failures of the Jubilee Line, or whatever,’ I tried to smile over the familiar thrust of cortisol in my veins.
‘Lily explained. Did she tell you much about her background on the way in?’
‘That she’s your niece?’ And as I thought about it, I realised we’d been together in that taxi for almost an hour and all I knew was that you blogged. (Who doesn’t? Besides me, of course.) I should have asked you a million questions, but there I was, armed only with a scrap of information on your relationship with Gemma.
‘That’s right. She’s also very bright and very young, but I wonder, could I ask you, in confidence, to keep an eye on her? Asif says you’re much stronger than you seem on paper.’
I was confused. Damning me with such faint praise didn’t sound like the Asif I knew. I looked over at him, walking towards the space behind your chair, then placing his hands squarely on the back of it, right above your shoulders.
‘Right. Thanks. I am really strong,’ I flustered.
‘You probably understand it was a bit of a tussle with the new board to keep you on, but I won and I’m really glad I did.’
‘No. No, I don’t, exactly. A tussle? Could you … what does that mean?’
‘Oh, Lord, I assumed they’d kept you quite close to the process … Well, it was the board’s preferred option that we maybe start afresh. New look, new management, new editor. But I thought it right and proper you got to be part of the new now, so here we are.’ She smiled, as if she expected me to thank her for letting me keep my post at a magazine I’d lived and breathed since I was almost a girl, a title I’d shaped. I had no choice but to play along. I needed my job, my second home in the world, so I couldn’t get as angry as I was entitled to.
‘OK, well, thank you, Gemma. You can count on me to … I’ll always keep going,’ I garbled. My once-familiar territory as unstable as the broken chair trembling beneath me. Gemma began speaking again, talking at me like she’d made index cards beforehand. I knew if I could muster the energy, I’d already despise her.
‘They tell me you’ve put a huge amount of effort into the first new-look issue. I can’t wait to read it all tomorrow, I’m so glad to hear you’ve committed so much to what I really hope is going to be an exciting new chapter for all of us.’
I was glad she’d noticed. I’d gathered enough resolve to make sure we’d come out of the blocks under the new owners with a strong issue, getting the interns to set up most of the interviews, do the background research and fact-checks, but writing the lion’s share of the features and profiles myself. My picture byline would be all over the magazine and website by the following day. I can’t say my heart and soul went into those pieces, but sweat and elbow grease certainly had. I am a fighter by nature, Lily. As soon as I feel my back on the wall, my fists go up. My primal instinct.
‘Thank you, Gemma.’
‘Now, was there anything you wanted to discuss?’
‘No, not really,’ I said, but then you waltzed by outside the glass and I swear you winked at me. Behind you, Asif’s eyes followed your arse until it disappeared into the kitchen area. ‘But I suppose it’d be good to know if there’s anything else I should know about Lily?’ My opening move.
‘Well now, perhaps there is. It’s actually down to Lily we’re here. When she read Leadership was in trouble, she thought it had huge potential. She was excited. It was wonderful to see. I was looking for a new project, she was living with me at the time – I’m really her second mum, if you must know – she could see what it could be and brought me right into her vision. So there you are.’ Gemma beamed at the memory, and I imagined the two of you holed-up together in some palatial slice of prime central London real estate, plotting how to give old lady Leadership some commercial CPR, rescuing her from the demise of which I was the figurehead.
‘So your buyout, it was all her idea. That’s quite a vision for someone so young. Young people are so different now to how I was, how things used to be.’ I was unsettled, almost sure you’d given no indication whatsoever that you were in the driving seat of the buyout. And wouldn’t this mean you’d have known who I was when you muscled your way into my cab? Because for more than twenty years, up until that day, I was Leadership. Perhaps you were embarrassed, too modest to draw attention to your ability to see the latent opportunities in my ailing empire.
But then I watched you again through the glass.
You’d returned to your seat and Asif had come round to lean at the same level as your screen. While you spoke, pausing occasionally to gesture towards the images, he nodded in the general direction of your sideboob. You clocked him doing so and flicked your fingernails to your throat to maintain his attention.
‘Now, I’m glad you’ve mentioned how things used to be, Katherine.’
‘Yes,’ I said, without really listening, as I watched you call my picture research intern over to you. She obeyed and was soon nodding along with you and Asif.
‘I’ve had a bit of feedback from your team. There’s clearly a lot of admiration there for you.’
‘OK.’ I finally had to look away from you as you corralled my team around you, doing what, I didn’t know yet, but I had a feeling I wouldn’t like it.
‘An appreciation you come from a tradition of journalism that has some really excellent traits, one of those being a certain resilience. But certain elements, it might be that some of them are a bit of a hangover, you might say.’
‘A hangover from what?’
‘From maybe the atmosphere of an old-school newsroom. A bit of banter with the interns? Fine, of course, but it may be we need to think about …toning it down a bit.’
‘Toning down what?’
‘I think it’s probably a vocabulary issue as much as anything. One of your team said you’d called them “soft” when they’d been nervous about calling a consultant who’d just lost their business; another individual said you liked nothing more than to refer to them as precious “Snowflakes”?’
‘Who said that?’ Really, it could have been any one of the current crop of interns and I wasn’t surprised they’d swooped on the opportunity to plead their case to Gemma. I was more alarmed the Snowflakes had found such a ready advocate in a woman of my generation. But of course, this conversation, all of it, was about you, not them. Gemma wanted to arrange the world so it worked better for you, matched more closely with your lofty expectations, where any challenge to your status quo was banned. Five minutes in and you were already well into the process of reshaping my office into something closer to your liking. I looked over again to see the picture researcher offer you a palm to high five. You slapped it meekly, smiling at your feet.
‘I’m not going to get into who said what, but let’s take this as an opportunity to think again about the kind of place we all want to work. It should feel inclusive. It should feel safe. I know you’ll want to get on board with that.’
‘Of course, yes.’ I was hobbled, but I needed to keep fighting somehow. ‘Is there anything else I should know? Anything more on what the interns fed back?’ I paused. ‘Or anything else about Lily?’
The corner of Gemma’s lip twitched. ‘No. Nothing else that springs to mind.’
‘Well, OK then.’ I didn’t move towards the door yet. I wanted her to know I didn’t feel this conversation was really over. You see, I could tell your aunt was hiding something. People like you and me, Lily, we’re excellent liars, aren’t we? People like Gemma? Not so convincing.
‘Oh, one more thing, Katherine. Sorry, I forgot to ask … How are you? Would you say you’re feeling well?’
‘I’d say I was stronger than ever.’
‘Great, well, just to let you know, I’m going to have to keep asking you. It’s part of our new Wellness Policy.’
‘Good to know the new team are committed to caring.’
She nodded and gave me a squishy smile. She believed me. Excellent liar, see?
I got back to my desk, avoiding the eyes of my team, and you. But as I booted up my machine, I heard you say, ‘How did that go, then?’ Casually, as if you’d known me for years; more than that, as if you were my peer. You didn’t even look away from your screen, which you already seemed to be filling with prodigious amounts of copy. Who did you think you were? You thought you’d saved my sorry arse from unemployment. You thought my world was your empire because you were the niece of a chequebook publisher. Lily, there are some postcodes you can’t just buy into.
‘You didn’t say how lovely your aunt is,’ I said loudly enough for the other interns to hear. ‘Let me get organised and we’ll talk about some background research you can help Asif with.’
You moved your hair behind your ears with your fingers.
‘Oh. Should I clear this first?’
I thought I heard a stifled snort from the IT intern in the far corner of our bank of desks. I couldn’t let on I didn’t know what ‘this’ was.
‘Go for it.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yep.’
‘I mean, Gemma wanted me to focus on writing this curtain-raising piece for the awards, but I can prioritise your work if you’d rather—’
A request for consent twice. Signature play. Inserting yourself into the most visible and important areas of my work, also what I’d soon identify as a classic move.
The Leadership awards were the biggest night of our year, our shop window and a rallying cry for readers and advertisers to stick with us for another twelve months. You were already worming your way to the front and centre of it. As I hadn’t been well enough to attend, let alone lead on last year’s awards, this year’s would be my chance to reassert my authority, reinstating my reputation by showing everyone I was alive and kicking, on the outside at least.
You turned back to your screen and started typing again without waiting to hear my mumbled, No.
‘Oh, I should probably also flag, I was just introducing myself to the team and got brought into a little pow-wow about the cover for the reprint of the mag for awards night? I have a couple of ideas on tightening up the cover lines, maybe going for a sharper image. I mean, it’s practically the same, just a teensy bit more contemporary. I’m sure you’re going to love it, but they’re only ideas. Feel free to push back.’
Those dark eyes danced below raised eyebrows, a certain mischief on that smooth pale forehead, your orange lips, perfectly arranged into the faintest of smiles. Well, what have you got for me?
‘I’m sure I don’t have a choice,’ I said quietly to the air.
‘Katherine. You’re so funny,’ you said without a hint of laughter.
That afternoon, when Gemma headed to a board meeting, I watched you brazenly go into her office, close the door behind you and start rifling through her in-tray. You opened a stiff brown envelope, removed what looked distinctively like a corporate credit card, and slipped it into your pocket. I was outraged, not just because of the lunacy of giving an intern her own card on account of being the pretend daughter of the boss, but because I’d been waiting weeks for the replacement one I’d been promised by the new owners.
When you walked out you went directly to Asif’s desk. Whatever you said made him jump out of his seat, pull on his corduroy blazer and accompany you towards the double doors out of the office. It was nearly 3 p.m., the time I’d normally go for a coffee with him. It seemed we wouldn’t be heading out together that day. Neither would I go for coffee with him the next day, nor the day after that.
After watching you disappear with my only remaining ally at work, I dialled a department recently created under the new management.
‘Is this Talent and People? Katherine Ross here. I’ve got a new intern, started today. Trying to work out how best to use her, could you ping over her CV?’
If I was going to get one step ahead of you, I needed to get to know you better.
Lily
5th March – The First Day
I so love the ritual of writing this at the end of my day. The stiff cover, the rustle of real paper, a safe space for me to unload and observe, and so much more intimate than my MacBook. Vintage, like a proper diary, one I can’t delete or undo. This notebook is perfect.
I should have been long gone by the time Katherine Ross showed up at the bus stop. It was so weird. She kept turning around, blatantly staring, which got me thinking. Why don’t I blag my way into the woman’s cab? So I do. Easily done.
At first, all I get from her is the generalisable hate she has for people my age. It was radiating off her, the way she looked at everyone at the bus stop. Total disdain. But then she lets herself talk and the hate starts to lift. She likes chatting to me, I can tell. What’s more surprising is how much I enjoy talking to her, watching her speak. It’s like there’s a whisper of something warm, and I get the feeling she’s throwing me a rope she wants me to grab onto. I’ve only felt it once before in my life. When I realise it’s happening again, and with KR of all people, I have to stop myself from massively over-sharing.
Don’t ask me how, but at one point she ends up stroking my face. Now that, I was not expecting! It feels pretty intense when I have to keep my head straight. I also need to make my life easy wherever I can, so I decide to pick up Mum’s gift for Gem as I’d promised. I have it that we swing by one of the offices she cleans on Mondays. God knows how many fat cats’ bins she had to empty to pay for that pen, but Gem will, and I guess that’s the point – to make Gem feel crappy on a day she should be feeling good, guilting her out about how much Mum would have toiled to buy something Gemma could pick up with the change in her Smythson purse.
When I get back to the cab, I can tell KR had been looking at my MacBook. For about a second, I brick it, but she looks so guilty, I know she’d not got very far. I kind of feel sorry for her.
Gem gives me The Talk the second I walk in. I make all the right noises, of course. When it comes to telling people what they want to hear, I am, of course, something of an expert.
KR is scared of Gem. When it’s her turn to go into Gem’s office for the first time, she looks petrified, so I see an opportunity. I do what any supportive subordinate would when their boss has an important meeting, I give her a bit of friendly encouragement that might help keep her on her toes. Isn’t that what ‘normal’ female friendships are all about? Show me even the best of friends who don’t have to watch what they say, bend over backwards to keep everything on an even keel, all the while trying to make the whole thing look like it’s not really hard work.
I also make a point of showing KR I’m onto way better things than the grunt work she’d inevitably give me, the freshest of the fresh interns, the lowest of the low. I get a couple of pieces published, make them change the front cover of the awards reprint.
I invite the right-hand man Asif out for coffee. He jumps at the chance. Too easy.
She’s made sure everyone knows I’m there because I’m The Niece. She didn’t tell them I wasn’t being paid though did she. Gem tells me I need to be seen to ‘earn my stripes’ first and wait for an opening. The ground is already shifting, even if she, and KR, can’t feel it yet.
Chapter 2
Katherine
When I got home from the gym that night I looked at my flat again with new eyes: your eyes. Every inch of our 730 square feet had been maximised. When we planned to sell up, I’d encouraged an old mate to do a piece on the place for ‘Homes & Property’ in the Evening Standard. The headline: ‘The next big thing’, the sell: ‘How one budding novelist styled the life into her conversion in up-and-coming N4’. The piece detailed how I’d turned walls into bookcases, high ceilings into display mezzanines, bedroom stairs into storage, with feature walls created not by wallpaper but oversized Damien Hirst prints. With that article, I felt like I’d really done it. I’d left the old me at my mother’s farm where she belonged. I was no longer insignificant, no longer provincial. I was urbane. Successful. Someone you wanted to be. Someone you wanted to know. Now I barely remember being that person.
We paid for doing up the place with the rent from Iain’s flat in Holloway, which he owned outright, having the foresight to buy it practically on his credit card back in 1990. My friend had written that I was a journalist and ‘writer-in-waiting’ and it was almost true. Two literary agents had asked for the rest of my latest manuscript and only one had passed by the time of the interview. Iain, meanwhile, was still flying high as a senior copywriter for ad agencies and was about to land a gig on the writing team of a sitcom pilot. It seemed we were approaching some terrific threshold: the tantalising possibility of unqualified London success, so close we could taste it in the air and on each other. Our many and varied friends pumped us up.
We’d sell my place, use the equity to shoot for a four-bed fixer-upper on the edges of Highbury and use the Holloway rent to help pay for the works. Iain was in his mid-thirties by then, I was about twenty-six. Life was so good, we just didn’t realise it yet.
‘So, how was it, then? I’ve been waiting for the call all day!’ Iain shouted at me from the kitchen. It was just Iain and me, as you know. We were getting on for twenty years together when I met you. Those years, all the times we’d relished together, all those we’d survived as a couple, had stitched us into each other. That’s how it felt. Not every woman would let Iain be who he was, live the life he enjoyed, and not every man would fit to me. For one thing, I had always been adamant that I never wanted children. I suppose you could say I was a victim of neglect as a child. Iain was the first person I wanted to tell. I also told him I couldn’t risk putting someone else through anything like the experiences I’d gone through. It was too terrifying and, anyway, Iain knew we didn’t want sober lives where we’d have to lock down at six o’clock. Us with kids, who would we be? Not us at all. We agreed early on to leave the breeding to people less interesting than us and focus instead on having a fantastic life together, one that would allow our creative selves to thrive. I believed the narrative was holding.
‘Hello, gorgeous.’ I kissed Iain’s cheek, damp with steam from the pan he was hanging over.
‘Hello, you.’
He and I still looked broadly the same as we did in the pictures for the Evening Standard spread. I’ve always looked after myself. I run. I go to the gym. I run to the gym. I don’t wear leggings unless I’m at the gym. And it is only relatively recently I seem to have found myself in that specific category of invisible I didn’t really understand existed until, one day just before I got ill, I realised I hadn’t told a single slowing van driver to fuck off when I ran to the gym. I could now run all the way down Green Lanes wholly untroubled. Not a single beep. At first it felt liberating, this mid-life cloak of invisibility, for that purpose at least. But I suppose I never thought it would sweep over people like me, and so emphatically, especially when I wasn’t even old yet. Or perhaps I was.
A couple of weeks before I met you, I’d pulled out some short shorts I’d not worn since I was thirty-odd. I ran and waited for the cat calls, but nothing. It seemed white van men were able to age a woman by her calves and thighs alone, but what exactly was old about mine? I hated that I cared. Women like me were supposed to be better than this.
‘How was it?’ I repeated Iain’s question back to him. I’d been wondering what to tell him. I wanted to talk about you, but I also knew if I said what was really on my mind, I’d sound completely neurotic. But I did need to confide in him. Because he and I were best friends. Each other’s only friends.
We’d had many lives together. The one shortly after the Evening Standard spread is where our luck started to turn. London itself seemed to move against us. Iain’s pilot got pushed to midnight, the series dying quietly at birth. My latest manuscript, my final attempt at writing sustained prose in my own voice, was rejected by the second agent and then it seemed like I’d run out of things to say.
‘I’m wai-ting,’ Iain sang, his fingers squeezing the black plastic valve of boxed red he would have started on a couple of hours earlier, sending a drink for me gushing loudly into an expectant tumbler.
Soon after the sitcom was canned, he was made redundant. There was no justice in it, but as he passed forty, Iain was ageing into a professional leprosy. He could only get bits and bobs of freelance work. We started to lose a bit of confidence. By the time I’d been at Leadership for the best part of ten years, I was being paid an editor’s salary, but the fixer-upper crept up to £400,000, then £450,000, then suddenly £700,000 and after that, we stopped looking. We upped the rent on Iain’s place and decided to stay put at mine until the bubble burst. That first day I met you, we were still waiting for the pop.
‘Well, I’d say today certainly feels like the start of “An Exciting New Chapter”.’ I repeated the subject line of Gemma’s first all-staff email (and in gauche title case too) as I hung my jacket up. My eyes caught the poster that darkened my hall, hovering over our lives for the last five years. It was the real reason why I still lived in what should have been my bachelorette flat.
It was a one-off poster of The Film. The Film was supposed to be the start of An Exciting New Chapter for me and Iain. Perhaps Iain would tell you one version of the story, but let me tell you mine from where I think it starts.
As my father had the temerity to die on my mother when I was nine, it had been instilled in me at an early age that no one can save you from yourself, especially not a man. My mother spoke to me only when she sought to remind me that we are all truly alone and no white knight will come to your rescue. This is the one thing my mother and I agreed on. I had looked to my writing to save me, but as I got past thirty, something changed. I lost the will to write for myself. I thought about writing all the time, but the memory of my second manuscript being rejected for the final time, when I felt I’d so nearly become published, hurt too much to put myself through the process again.
The ideas didn’t come. I started a couple of drafts, but somewhere I’d lost whatever it is you inherently have, what I had for a short window in my twenties: the innate belief in what you say and the expectation your words will always find a willing audience. Because that’s how people like you carry yourself about the world, isn’t it? You think someone should always be primed, waiting to listen to you. Maybe not being able to write for myself was the very earliest sign of the beige clouds swirling. While my creative life was in stasis, Iain was still trying to make his happen. Then a way for me to ride his wave came along; a chance for him to save me from myself.
He invited me and most of our old mates to go in on a film he would write and produce. It didn’t take much for us to put our money in; we were all going to be Executive Producers. It proved irresistible to me and everyone else whose dreams had faltered as their fortieth years approached. We put our faith in Iain’s ability, some of us, admittedly, with fingers crossed behind our backs. Because it wasn’t necessarily that we believed Iain was a born auteur. Ultimately, the film fulfilled the belief there had to be something that would provide a final chance to make good on our lives, to snatch victory from the jaws of middle-aged defeatism.
All my savings for the fixer-upper went into the film, and when more money was needed, I wanted to believe remortgaging my Manor House flat to the hilt and adding Iain to the deeds to extract even more from the lender would be the penultimate paragraph on a story that ended marvellously, historically, for him and for me. But no matter what you said about the film, it was not good. It was appalling. It did not rescue us. It died a death and killed our friendships with all those who’d let themselves believe Iain would produce a work of excellence that would generate life-changing money for all investors. Iain said sorry over and over, but there was nothing to say sorry for, not really. He’d made no promises, but he had tried, hadn’t he? We had tried. The one thing your generation excels at is making stuff with your iPhones, pouring your innermost thoughts into your tweets and your blogs until you get better at it and/or something finally sticks. For people like us, things aren’t so easy; and they certainly didn’t come as cheap.