by Rock, Vivie
I knew, as it plopped into the water, that somehow, the magic had already begun.
*
I’ll spare you the details of my goodbyes at The Chronicle. Let’s just say that Christina was shocked, pissed, suspicious, all the stuff I’d been dreading. She told me if it all went wrong then I could forget my old job at The Chronicle. Anyone who only stayed three weeks, and didn’t even serve out their probationary period, ‘didnae deserve a place on the team’. But she ended the meeting with a surprise wink, adding, ‘I dinnae blame you, hen. I’d have done the same thing myself, given the opportunity.’
With that, I closed the door of her dusty office for the last time, and went back to my old desk to pack up. I told Patrick about Jen, that Redmond Cooper had had her fired. Patrick took it better than I’d been expecting. He laughed about the fact that two days after winning an award he was the only one left on the team, so full rights of the trophy went to him now. But he did seem disappointed to see me going.
‘We’ll keep in touch,’ I said. ‘I’ll still be in the same city.’
‘I’ll hold you to that,’ Patrick said, with a smile. ‘In fact, why don’t we meet for drinks after your first week at work? Friday night? You can tell me all about it?’
I shrugged and nodded. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘You can pick me up outside Global. We’ll explore the bars in Midtown.’
‘Very fancy,’ said Patrick, and he gave me a hug. I once read that hugs should last approximately three seconds. Any less and it looks like your humoring the other person, any more and you’re either after something, or unaware of social conventions. This hug lasted for about ten seconds. And as far as I’d gathered in the three weeks I’d known him, Patrick was an aficionado of social convention.
I took in the extra seconds of the hug to smell his aftershave. Calvin Klein, I thought. It was quite pleasant.
Eventually, Patrick pulled away from me, and I picked up my box of stationery and left the office.
That night at home, telling my parents the news wasn’t so easy.
‘You did what?!’ shouted my dad. ‘I used my connections to get you that job, and you stuck it out three weeks! Any idea how that’ll look on your resume? You’ve got to stick with a job like that for at least a year!’
‘Have you thought about how Global Media’s going to look on my resume?’ I asked moodily. ‘That’s better than ten years at The Chronicle!’
My dad was hurt. He’d tried hard to get me that job. I needed to back down. ‘Look, Dad, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It was a difficult decision.’ (That part was a lie, of course.) ‘But this is a big deal for me. I really feel like the course of my whole life is about to change.’
Dad appreciated my apology. ‘Just be careful, okay kiddo?’ he said, taking my mom’s hand. ‘We both care about you a lot.’
‘We know what these big corporations can be like,’ chipped in Mom. ‘How they can take advantage of you.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I told them both. ‘I won’t let anyone take advantage of me.’
I gave them both a hug, and then walked up to my room, sensing that maybe, finally, their little girl was about to become a woman.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Glamorous World Of International News
‘I’m Tegan,’ she said, coming to meet me at reception. ‘Welcome to Global.’
Tegan shook my hand, and we began walking to the elevator. ‘You’ll be shadowing me for the next few weeks,’ she explained. ‘Redmond only told me about it this morning. So I apologize for not having, like, an action plan for you or anything.’
It seemed jarring that Tegan had called Mr. Cooper Redmond. Should I call him that too, now that I worked here? He’d asked me to call him ‘sir’…
Tegan took me into the elevator, and I snuck a look at her as we traveled up to the second floor. She was another catwalk-esque employee. Global Media had them in abundance. Tegan was different though. She had short, cropped red hair. Not a pixie cut – her hair was almost shaved. She wore a sleeveless, royal blue shirt, and thick black tattoos licked and curled around her arms. She looked incredibly striking. Like the kind of person you probably wanted to stay on your side. You didn’t want to be enemies with a woman with a shaved head and tattoos, that’s for sure.
We were only going up one floor, so the elevator doors opened after mere seconds, and we walked out. Being on the second storeys, this was the second largest of the building’s floor’s, and it was really something. At The Chronicle, there’d been three small rooms, one for each department. Here – I had no idea how many different departments there were, but I’m guessing way more than three…
‘You get used to it,’ said Tegan, realizing that I was pretty overwhelmed. ‘Eighteen thousand employees,’ she said. ‘Not quite as big as Twenty-first Century Fox, but you know… not far off.’
Eighteen thousand employees? How will I fit in here?
‘They’re not all in this building, of course,’ said Tegan, seeing my eyes boggling at the figures. ‘But a lot of them are.’
We began walking across the enormous floor, past row upon row of reporters, advertisers, whatever they all were… It sounded as though every single phone in the building was ringing at once, and the noise of people talking was incredible. It was as if every single person in the room was dealing with a breaking news story, as if there’d just been some kind of front-page natural disaster, or international terrorist act… There hadn’t, as far as I knew. I guessed it was even worse at those times.
‘This is it,’ said Tegan, finally leading us to a slightly cramped desk. ‘Home sweet home.’ The desk was taken up largely by a sleek, ultra-modern computer monitor. It had to be at least twenty-eight inches wide. Every single person in the office had one. I wondered how much Redmond Cooper must have invested in the company to be able to afford to give his each of his employees one of these.
‘You’ll take the desk next to me,’ she said, pointing to an empty desk with a similarly colossal monitor, but nothing else on it. ‘If it’s okay with you, I’ve got an assignment I need to finish up, so you just get yourself logged onto the system, pick a password, make sure your emails are working okay. And then I’ll start showing you the ropes in half an hour.’
Before waiting for my response, Tegan put on her headset, and sat at her desk, typing away. I looked at the notepad she occasionally glanced down at, and was horrified to see a page full of symbols. Short-hand. It was like looking at hieroglyphics. Does everyone presume I know shorthand?
I sat down at my desk, putting my handbag at my feet, hoping the turkey salad I had in my lunchbox wouldn’t go bad if I didn’t put it in the refrigerator. Tegan didn’t seem in the mood for questions right now, though, so I left her to it. I located the small round button on the computer under the desk, and switched it on.
The monitor made a quick crackling noise, and then came to life. Two words flashed on to the screen. Create password.
I thought about it for a moment, and then typed: ‘peace’.
This password is not deemed secure enough, it said. You must use at least one number and one capital letter.
So I typed ‘P3ac3’. It looked silly, but it did the trick, and logged me on to the system.
This computer started up so much quicker than the one I’d been using at The Chronicle. I bet it would be great for playing video games on, I thought, and then kicked myself. You’re not a goofy uni student any more, Rose. You’re a woman. A trainee journalist.
The word ‘journalist’ sounded so exotic to me. I’d taken an etymology module as part of my Language Degree. The root of the word ‘journalism’ comes from the French ‘journal’, which in turn comes from the Latin ‘diurnal’, meaning ‘daily’. The world’s first newspaper was called the Acta Diurna (acta meaning proceedings) and it was a handwritten bulletin, which was put up daily in the Forum – the main public square in ancient Rome. I liked that. The idea that people would walk across the city to read the daily news. It conjured up a
real sense of community. I wonder how far people used to travel, in order to get the news. It seemed amazing that these days you could get it at the press of a button. Your phone could even ping it to you without being asked.
Microsoft Outlook opened up now, and asked me again to create a password, so I picked the same thing. P3ac3. Even though it wasn’t exactly the word ‘peace’ any more, typing it gave me some sense of satisfaction. It would become my daily mantra, typing that in to access my work files. Might even help keep me calm in what appeared to me, so far, like it was probably one of the most stressful jobs in America.
I saw that I had three new emails, so I clicked on my inbox. The first was welcoming me to Microsoft Office, pointing me towards the help pages, should I need them. The second was welcoming me to Global Media, giving me information about my telephone number, who I should contact to get my contract sorted, and that sort of thing. The third email, I saw, with a sudden jolt in my stomach, was from Redmond Cooper.
Rose,
As I said in our meeting on Friday, I will be taking an interest in your career from now on. Come to my office in a day or two, and let me know how you’re getting on. I want to be involved.
Have a good day.
Mr. Cooper
CEO at Global Media Inc.
P.S. Tegan will give you a large file today. Make sure you start working on it. You will be given your first shorthand test in two weeks’ time.
I re-read the email in amazement. A shorthand test in two weeks? How was I ever going to stand a chance of passing that?
Why on earth was this guy so interested in me, and in my career? I’d only ever written two pieces of copy in my life. One for a greengrocer’s company, and the other for a second-hand furniture store. He couldn’t have seen a spark of genius in me just from that… Could he? Of course not.
I closed the email, getting the strange feeling that maybe Tegan ought not to see a message like that. And then, for the next half hour, I sat biting my nails, stomach churning.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Good Conscience vs. Bad Conscience
The next few days passed by in a blur. Tegan introduced me to about fifty people, showed me the three photocopier rooms, the correct printer station (out of a possible sixty-two stations, apparently), the four cafés, the meditation room, and the gym. This place was as much a leisure complex as it was a workplace! And yet I’d never been in such an industrious place. People had their coffee breaks at their desk. They scheduled their meetings over lunch. They arrived half an hour early and left two hours late.
By Friday afternoon, after a whirlwind of introductions, I was exhausted. It wasn’t just work that was tiring me out. Mr. Cooper had given me so much work to do at home, too. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, training up to be a journalist, but this was crazy. I had to do two hours of shorthand, and another two of touch-typing each night. He’d given me precise instructions, with the areas that I had to complete every evening marked in red. Essentially, I was having to revise for a seventy-five-hour course, as well as working in a full-time job, in just two weeks. I knew that if I failed he’d be more than just disappointed in me. I might even lose my job. And I really wanted this now. Although it was intimidating, I found the buzz of the office exciting.
At 4.30pm on Friday though, in the middle of typing up some notes for Tegan (which thankfully weren’t in shorthand), I was seriously flagging. I was relieved Tegan was going home at five, which meant that I could leave then too, but I was dreading the fact that I’d fallen behind on my revision by half an hour last night, having fallen asleep over a pile of notes on my bed, and so I had four and a half hours work to do when I got home tonight. Mr. Cooper had given me even more work to do over the weekend. It was as if he was trying to take away my social life, to stop me from doing anything in my free time, in my private life, other than work for him. Not that I had much of a social life anyway…
At that moment, my cell buzzed in my pocket. It was a text message from Patrick.
Still on for drinks after work? I’m finishing up here now, can be at Global for 5 p.m. x
Oh god. Patrick! I’d forgotten. I’d agreed to meet him. I was desperate for a drink, too. Hadn’t had a chance to celebrate my new job all week, and I really, really wanted a little time to unwind. My mind began to race.
Good conscience: I can’t go out! I have four and a half hours’ work to do tonight.
Bad conscience: Unless I can fit it all in at the weekend somehow? I’ll be refreshed and can work better at the weekend.
Good conscience: Patrick might want this to be a date. I don’t know if I want that. It’s really much more sensible to stay home and do my work.
Bad conscience: He is kind of cute. I really need to learn to let my hair down. It’s just one night. I’ve got the rest of my life to be sensible.
In the end, guess which voice in my head won? The good conscience…? Yeah, right!
As soon as the clock hit five, and Tegan told me she was heading off to the hills, for a weekend of white-water rafting with her girlfriend, Anya, (WTF, Tegan? Seriously?) I grabbed my belongings and raced down to reception to meet Patrick.
I saw him standing outside, in a tight, white T-shirt, with his sunglasses on, running his hand through his thick blond hair. We’d had a bit of a heatwave this week, and Patrick looked like he was one of those people whose skin instantly tanned, their hair bleached, and they looked like they’d been at the beach all their lives. In other words, he looked great. Really great.
I, on the other hand, had been stuck indoors working all day and night. My skin was so pale it was almost translucent. I’d still barely been finding the time to eat, and my clothes were hanging off me at awkward, unflattering angles. Today I was wearing a stroppy denim dress, which was really too hot in this kind of weather, and I could have used a deodorant before hugging Patrick, if I’m being honest with you.
‘Rose,’ he said, holding me tight as we hugged. When I pulled away, he was beaming. ‘Check you out! Miss Global! I can’t believe you work here!’ Patrick seemed genuinely pleased for me, which was nice. It felt like a real relief, actually, to meet an old friend after a week of new faces – even if I’d only known that ‘old friend’ for the last month.
‘I’m so pleased to see you, Patrick,’ I said. ‘Now let’s go and get ourselves an enormous drink.’
We linked arms, and, like a pair of giggling schoolgirls in search of our first cigarette, we stalked the streets looking for a bar that was a) not too busy, and b) affordable. The latter of those requirements wasn’t too easy downtown. Eventually, we settled on a rather out-of-place-looking tiki bar, which was advertising its happy hour from five until seven. It was relatively quiet inside in spite of that. Presumably, I thought, as we walked towards the giant menu hanging over the bar, high-powered business types prefer going for a flute of champagne over a ‘scorpion bowl’ or flaming rum.
Sometimes you can go into a tiki bar and the décor is relatively subtle. In this case, it wasn’t. This was like a Polynesian theme park. On the walls hung various ‘tiki god’ masks and carvings, alongside tropical murals and decorations. The female staff wore grass hula skirts over their jeans, and the male staff wore garish shirts with palm trees on them.
It wasn’t exactly a ‘classy joint’, but Patrick seemed happy enough, and got himself a Red Stripe. I went for a Mai Tai. The waiter told us he’d bring it over to us.
‘So,’ Patrick said, as we sat at a table by the window. ‘How was your first week? Did you miss The Chronicle?’ he gave me a cheeky wink, to show he was joking.
‘It’s very different to The Chronicle,’ I told him. ‘It’s different to any place I’ve ever worked. It’s so big. And the boss–’
‘Redmond?’ Patrick asked.
‘Yeah. He’s something else.’
‘He hasn’t given you any, uh, inappropriate requests, has he?’ Patrick scowled.
‘He’s given me a load of work to do,’ I replied. (Did
Patrick look relieved?) I’m meant to be doing it now, actually. You should see how much I’ve got to learn for my shorthand test in a couple of weeks. It’s like this.’ I pulled my hands apart, showing him how thick the file I’d been given was.
The waiter arrived at our table. Patrick’s beer looked like a regular glass of beer, but my cocktail looked bizarre. It was a lurid orange, served inside half a coconut, with an array of flowers scattered on the saucer it precariously rested upon, a pink cocktail umbrella beside three colored straws, and, perhaps weirdest of all, a small plastic horse straddling a glacé cherry, floating in the drink.
‘Well,’ Patrick said, laughing, and raising his glass to my coconut. ‘Cheers, Rose. Congrats on the new job, and it’s lovely to see you again.’
‘It’s lovely to see you too, Patrick,’ I said. And I meant it.
My fingers brushed against Patrick’s as I pressed the coconut against his glass. I felt the tingle of warmth from his fingertips travel along my arm, up to my chest, and then down into the pit of my stomach. I had the strange feeling that something exciting was going to happen tonight.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
An Unfortunate Encounter
Three Mai Tais later, and I’d collected two plastic horses, a plastic fish, and a bit of a rum-induced slur in my voice. Patrick was on his fourth Red Stripe, and we were feeling rather merry. We’d been laughing pretty much all evening actually, and not even talking about work stuff. We’d just been fooling around, joking like a couple of teenagers. It felt like absolute heaven after working so hard all week, trying to appear like a serious news reporter among all my new colleagues. With Patrick, I could relax. There was no pretence.
The more I drank, the more I was convincing myself that there was definitely a spark between Patrick and I. A romantic spark, I mean. He definitely wasn’t anything like Jacob. I wasn’t going down that road again. But he was a good guy. Nice. Funny. Down to earth. Exactly what I needed.