by Holly Bourne
I knew I should message her. Get it all out. Make it better. But I was too exhausted. The day’s activities – the adrenalin, the week I’d had – it just sort of piled on top of me, making me too weak for any kind of conflict. Even healthy let’s-get-it-out-in-the-open conflict.
I walked with my arms crossed – keeping my eyes down to avoid any sexism I might inadvertently see. No energy for that either.
Mum and Dad weren’t in when I got home. A scribbled note from Mum told me she was at the centre and Dad was at the pub with friends. It was only early evening but it felt later. The night was already black, everyone’s curtains closed.
I had so much coursework to do, but I didn’t do any of it.
I really should’ve sent Amber a message but I didn’t.
I fired one off to Megan.
Hey, you were so much help today, thank you! Hope your head is all right tomorrow x
A gloom seeped through me – one I wasn’t used to. I’m not a sad person. I’m usually upbeat and perky. But this new gloom found me and infiltrated its way through my nervous system, shutting everything down.
Was today worth it? Would it make a difference? Why didn’t I have any energy to mend things with Amber? And, at the back of everything, the biggest nagging gloom. Was I choosing The Project over the rest of my life? And if so, what did that mean? Cambridge and getting into it felt so far away in that moment – like a tiny speck on a horizon filled with this project and what it meant and how much energy it was taking from me. Energy that I knew, ideally, I should be saving for Cambridge, saving for my future, giving myself a chance to get into a position where I could really change things.
When my phone buzzed, I jumped on it. Hoping it was Amber – hoping she was making the first move, hoping she had the energy to do what I didn’t.
It wasn’t Amber.
It was Will.
The footage from today is incredible!
And a tiny speck of gold sparked in amongst the gloom.
I grinned before hitting reply.
WEEK TWO
twenty-five
The local news reporter wasn’t how I expected him to be at all.
I’m not sure what I was expecting – but when this young guy, with Prince Charming hair and a cheap shiny suit turned up – I was suitably surprised.
“Hi, Charlie, is it?” He shook my hand aggressively, squeezing so tight the veins bulged out a little.
“Umm, Lottie.”
“Oh yeah, of course.” He made no eye-contact, giving me no confidence that he’d heard my correction. He looked over my head at Will. “And this must be your partner in crime, am I right?”
Will reached out and shook his hand. “Will,” he introduced himself. “Thanks for coming.”
We beckoned him over to the tables we’d set up in the library. I’d agreed it with Mr Packson. The interview would take place at college, as that would be the best place for photos. Also, it gave “Dan, I’m Dan, great to meet you” a chance to get some quotes from the college too. The library was empty, college hours over. A hard day at college over. Megan was pretending nothing had ever happened involving wine or crying. Whenever I tried to bring it up she lurched into an unrelated conversation, or pulled out a new design idea. Amber was still frosty as hell with me, and it made me frosty in return. Why was she choosing the hardest month of my life to suddenly make some kind of point about my personality? Evie – stuck in the middle – had spent the day navigating between us both. Keeping up a hubbub of pointless conversation, making us sit with Jane and Joel, so the extra company could defuse the crackling atmosphere. It was useful. But all I really secretly wanted was for her to whisper over to me, “Amber’s being an unreasonable cow, don’t worry, you’re my favourite.”
But she didn’t.
It hadn’t helped my mood that Teddy and his mates had come in wearing matching T-shirts with MENIMIST emblazoned across them. Or how loudly some girls in the canteen had laughed at them, giving me horrible looks when I honked my horn, and muttering loudly, “She’s pathetic.”
So that had been today. Now the journalist was settling himself down across the table. I could smell soured coffee on his breath. He pulled out an old-skool ringbound notebook, flipped it open, took the biro out from behind his ear and levelled me with a smile with underhints of lots of things…
“So, Charlie.”
“Lottie.”
“Yes, of course, sorry. So, Lottie, what gave you the idea to start such an…interesting campaign?”
I suddenly felt nervous. Everything I said was going to be recorded and used, and surrounded by text I didn’t write and couldn’t control. I had to make every word count.
I ran my hands through my hair, levelled him with my best Lottie stare – the one I knew had people eating out of my hands – and said, “Because I couldn’t take it any more.”
His pen started moving across his notebook. “Take what?”
“Any of it. All of it.”
“I see… All of what?”
I took a deep breath and I began to tell him everything. Right from the beginning. But not the van men beginning – the real beginning. I told him about how my auntie on Dad’s side always bought me dresses for my birthday – when I hated wearing them as a kid. How I was told I had to wear them, to be polite, and I wasn’t allowed to run around and play football with my cousins. How my dad’s family still can’t get over the horror that Mum and I don’t have his surname – thinking Mum somehow tricked him into this, rather than it being their joint decision. I told him how, before I’d even left primary school, I’d get vans honking me when I walked the short journey home because I got boobs early. I told him how ashamed I felt when my body hair appeared – how I knew, without even discussing it, that I needed to get rid of it. I told him how, literally every summer, I feel sick about showing off my body, as it will never be good enough. I told him about how, at my old school, one lunchtime when it was raining, all the boys lined all the girls up in order of who had the nicest arse and none of us even thought to complain about it. That everyone is surprised that I’m smart, because I’m pretty, and you can’t be both without people distrusting you. I told him how I’m regularly called a slut and a whore because I’ve had more than one boyfriend – while, if I was a guy, I’d be a legend or a pro. I told him how I never feel safe walking alone. How at least once a day, I have a conversation where a guy’s eyes wander to my chest and it makes me feel dirty. I talked and talked and talked and he scribbled and scribbled and scribbled.
Eventually I ran out, and I said, “And I’ve been lucky, I live in this country. I’ve had a relatively undramatic upbringing. Think how much worse it is for other girls… So, one day, I just knew I couldn’t take any more. I had to do…something. And making all this stuff just…more visible, so everyone who tries to ignore it can’t ignore it any more, is doing something.”
There was a pause while he caught up his shorthand – weird symbols appearing over his notepad.
“Yes, right…wonderful…” he murmured, noting it all down. Then he looked up and grinned. “That was all brilliant, Charlie…”
“Lottie,” Will corrected him this time.
“Yes…brilliant… I mean, I only have three hundred and fifty words to play with, but that was very…colourful.”
I could feel that he didn’t get it then and panic set in. He was a journalist, and he didn’t get it. I had to make him understand… I had to get through somehow.
“What’s it like, being a journalist?” I asked him and he looked up, surprised.
“Aren’t I the one who’s supposed to be asking the questions?” His grin was quite smarmy.
“I guess. I just wondered. It sounds like such a cool job…”
Will made eyebrows at me, obviously thinking I was off topic. But I wasn’t. I was winning him over – I was good at winning people over. And I needed this disinterested man to be on my side.
“It can be cool. It can be a lot of hard work.”
“What’s your career aim?” I crossed and uncrossed my legs – leaning forward with apparent interest. “Like, do you always want to work at the Gazette?” I wrinkled my nose to show how distasteful I thought the whole thing was – though, secretly, I’ve always loved our local paper. There’s such a charm to it. I always skim through it over breakfast when Mum and Dad leave it out – laughing at the crappy stories like cats being rescued from burning fish and chip shops, residents posing with their arms out in anguish at all the potholes. I felt a mixture of relief that we lived somewhere so safe and undramatic, and yet also stifled and stale that we lived somewhere where literally nothing happened.
“Umm, no. Not for ever,” Dan admitted, mirroring my body language, which everyone knows means you’re winning. “I want to work on the nationals.”
An ambition. I could work with this.
I shrugged. “So why don’t you?”
He laughed then. “It’s not that easy, is it?”
“Why not?”
He leaned back in his chair, stretching his arms up to reveal small sweat patches. He’d apparently forgotten quite quickly it was supposed to be him interviewing me. It must get boring though, always being the one asking the questions, never the one answering them.
“Well, it’s very competitive,” he said. “They want you to do shift work. But the pay’s terrible, and they start you on nights. But, like, the only way to get up to London is by train and, of course, they don’t run through the night. So you have to live in London really.” He sniffed hard. “And, yeah, well, I can’t afford to live in London on the terrible pay… I did a few shifts for a national the other month. I slept on a mate’s floor, under the dining table. Used my annual leave from the paper as well. Caned it hard… When a job came up I was certain it was mine but…”
“But…” I leaned forward and opened my mouth just a little, ignoring Will who seemed bewildered and annoyed.
“But, well it went to this guy whose uncle worked there. Can you believe it? Of course I could. It’s very elitist you see, journalism. Everyone helping the same people up, you know? The person who got it had been working there for free for seven months. Seven months! He could afford to work for free that long. He stayed in his uncle’s house, rent free of course.”
I blew up my fringe. “That’s so unfair.” I sounded suitably outraged. To be fair, I was suitably outraged. Though I couldn’t help but bitterly think, I bet it’s even harder to get a job in the nationals if you’re a woman.
“Yes. Totally unfair. But what can you do?” He looked less smarmy and more sad by the second. This was my moment…to make him realize we were the same really… just with different aims.
“You can fight,” I said. “You can stand up to it, call it out. Say it’s wrong.”
Dan looked genuinely confused by the notion. “What? I couldn’t. I’d never work again. I’d screw up my future.”
I moved my own body away now – playing the space between us. I looked out the window, stuck out my bottom lip. “I’m worried I’m already screwing up my future by doing this project. I don’t have time for coursework. My grades are suffering.” They were…they really, really were…I couldn’t even think about it, it made me feel so ill. I’d got another B that morning. It was one mark off an A but still… “Lots of people at college are taking the piss out of me. I’m supposed to be preparing for my Cambridge interview but I don’t have any time for that either… But if there’s something not right in the world, you have to fight. Otherwise, what? You’re just saying it’s okay that this happens…” I looked back at him, right into his tired-looking watery eyes. “It’s really wrong what happened to you,” I said, so sincerely, so heartfelt. “I’m so sorry.”
twenty-six
“Jeez, Lottie. You had that man literally eating out the palm of your hand,” Will said. “Well, not literally, but still.”
We were walking towards town in a triumphant splendour of adrenalin. The rest of the interview had been a breeze. And when Will said our first video had over two thousand views already, Dan practically exploded.
“Wow, this is a real story,” he said, scrolling through Will’s laptop.
“You sound surprised.” I laughed. He didn’t need to know most of the hits probably came from people at college watching it to take the piss out of me or leave hilarious comments. I’d had to report one already.
Lottie takes it up the arse. A rumour that Teddy had started last year that refused to die. Or maybe he was the one who posted it.
“It was great to meet you, Lottie. Really great.” Dan had shaken my hand and got my name right and actually seemed genuinely keyed up by the story.
I didn’t think I would be called Charlie again…
“How did you do it?” Will said, still in awe of me. I think he was starting to realize he’d underestimated me…
I shrugged, like it was nothing, even though my insides were doing the funky chicken.
“With activism you’ve got to connect with people on an emotional level – make them feel like we’re all in this together. I just got him to realize he feels like I feel, just maybe about a different thing…”
I looked up at Will, who was still staring at me all agog. So much so that he stumbled over a small fallen branch.
I grinned. “This is why I can’t win you over,” I said. “You’re too logical and scientific in how you think. You don’t have any emotional level for me to connect with.”
“Hey!”
“It’s true! The only way I could convince someone like you that feminism is important and you should believe in it, is if I made a completely watertight logical argument…and even then…you’d find some minor issues with the method in which the data was collected or something and jump on that so you could feel all superior criticizing my efforts rather than focusing on the feelings – the desperation, the violence, the helplessness, the just…wrongness of it all.”
Will went quiet, kicking some leaves up, not looking at me any more. He muttered something.
“What’s that? The rest of the class can’t hear you.”
Despite himself, he smiled, though he still didn’t look at me.
“I said,” he said louder, “there’s nothing wrong with being logical.”
“No, not always.” I paused. “But I don’t think you realize how upsetting it is when you feel someone’s devaluing your experience. Look how angry me, Evie and Amber get at you. Do you ever think why? Do you ever think how it must feel to have horrible things you’ve seen or experienced judged and questioned by someone? Like it’s our responsibility to convince you we’re not lying, rather than yours just to believe us? Also” – I paused for breath – “logic is shit for social change. Look at climate change, for example. There’s so much scientific evidence that we’re destroying the planet – but nobody gives a damn until you shove a sad-looking polar bear on a tiny sheet of ice with a text-in number in front of them. Or imagine if Martin Luther King had stood up and started a speech with, ‘I have a…really good piece of data here that proves racism is A Thing.’”
Will stayed quiet, and I let the triumph of the interview spill over into triumph that his silence might mean that I’d got through to him… God, I was smart sometimes. I know you’re not supposed to say that about yourself, but I really am freaking superbly smart a lot of the time.
“I don’t mean to upset you with all my questions,” Will said, after a moment or two, his chin tucked down in what I was choosing to see as defeat. “I’ve told you, I’m a documentary maker. Do you not sometimes consider that it’s my job to poke the nest? To get the best reaction out of you?”
“But you do it so gleefully!”
And he laughed. “I can’t deny that’s true.”
“Where we headed anyway?” I asked, realizing I hadn’t really been noticing our route.
Will gave me another reluctant grin. “I was going to take us out for dinner. To celebrate. But now you’re being so difficult, I’m no
t sure if I will.”
“You’re taking me out for dinner?”
“Relax. It’s just Pizza Express.”
“I can’t relax when I know dough balls are a possibility.”
He kept smiling. “You like dough balls?”
“If that’s an innuendo, it’s a very bad and cringe one.”
“It was a simple question, Lottie. Not everything has to be dirty.”
We’d arrived outside the town’s Pizza Express now, the basily aroma of pizza wafting out to us whenever the door opened to let stressed-looking families out. Our eyes met each other and we laughed. Him playing me, me playing him… Just like that he’d got our power dynamic back onto an even keel. I resentfully respected him for it.
“I can’t let you pay for dinner,” I said. “The project…”
“Lottie, this isn’t a date.” He said it simply, but it still felt harsh.
Why wasn’t it a date? I instantly thought. Don’t you want it to be a date? I gently stamped on one of my feet to jolt myself out of my pathetic girl spiral.
“It’s two colleagues celebrating a good day at work,” he explained. “If it was a date, no, you couldn’t let me pay by the way. I find that such bullshit! The amount of times I’ve gone out with girls to eat, and they just stare at me vacantly when the bill comes.”
I nodded. I agreed. It was inexcusable, really. You can’t go around expecting gender equality one minute and then expect boys to pay for everything. My go-to rule on dates was always, always, to offer, then negotiate it between you. You buy this one, I’ll buy the next one. Even when I was dating Posh Tim last year, who was infinitely richer than me.
“Fine then,” I said, “if it’s not a date, you can SO pay. I’m getting double dough balls.”
Will bit his lip, resisting the urge to make another crap joke.
“I could never date anyone who gets double dough balls.”
“Well. I’d never date anyone who is so insecure about their own balls that they can’t handle being around double helpings of the dough variety.”