“So, have you been editor for very long?” you asked from nowhere.
“Some might say too long,” I replied before I could stop myself.
“Would they?”
“I’ve been there about twenty years now…I still love my job.” The sound of “twenty years” in my mouth felt like a great stone I wanted to spit out. I thought, for the thousandth time, about how it had got to such a vast amount of time. Thankfully, you seemed to have lost interest before I’d even finished faking the joy of my two decades at the same place.
We crossed the river and pulled up outside the office. I needed to pay by credit card. You sat forward on the edge of the backseat, your legs pointing in the direction of the door.
“You go ahead while I sort this out,” I felt obliged to say, as I tried to add a tip in a way that made mathematical sense and didn’t look tight, but still kept the total south of £60.
“Thank you. Is that OK? You’re sure?”
“Out you go.”
“I’ll be super-quick with Gem.”
“That’s not—” I said, pressing the button that added 15 percent on top of £57.50 in my distraction.
“Thank you, Katherine.”
The first time you said my name.
You gave me a thousand-watt smile, which I returned in a kind of wonder.
“That’s fine,” I said to the air as I watched you skip toward the revolving doors of my office building.
* * *
—
OUT ON THE PAVEMENT, as I stuffed my card back in my purse and tried to regroup before heading in, I felt a tap on my shoulder.
“Thought you could do with this today.” Asif handed me a tall black coffee. He smelled of a recent spritz of his beloved cologne, Fierce by Abercrombie & Fitch, his forehead glistening in the strengthening sunlight, hazel eyes gleaming under dark, soft curls that made all the interns swoon. At least I had him in my corner.
“My God, you fucking star.” I took a sip that burned my tongue. “You been in yet?”
“I have.”
We went through the doors, swiped our passes, and started to mount the marble stairs to our floor side by side. “And?”
“And it was fine, she’s fine. A bit…you’ll see, I don’t know. We should be all right.”
He seemed to be holding back, trying to protect me.
“Emphatic stuff. Have you met the niece yet?”
“Niece? Not another hopeless bloody intern? Not yet. When did you?”
“It’s kind of an unfunny story.”
Asif and I walked in as you emerged from a hug with Gemma, a woman with hen-brown curls pinned into an insubstantial French twist. Like me, she was in her early forties, but with her corporate skirt suit and sensible hairdo, she seemed so much older than me. I’d heard she had built and sold many businesses, and that she’d bought Leadership practically on a whim once she’d identified “the brand’s multiplatform potential,” whatever that meant. She had no kids and a fancy duplex in Marylebone, a house in Norfolk, and some kind of Alpine ski chalet. Imagine.
I watched you and her inside the recently constructed glass office she’d commissioned for herself. They were actually on the verge of building me my own office, just as things started to turn at Leadership. The end-of-year accounts came out and the directors suddenly went from signing off my every request to stalling on my requirements, then actively sidestepping contact with me so they could dodge admitting the perilous state of Leadership’s balance sheet to “their girl,” the junior reporter they’d “groomed for greatness” and then appointed youngest-ever editor nearly twenty years earlier.
In that office, which in a better world would have been mine, Gemma grasped your shoulders with both hands. I could see you were staring at the floor as she tried to force you to look her in the eyes. You wouldn’t meet them. She gave up and scanned the office over your head, drew you close to give you a quick kiss on the head before finally letting you go. You kept gazing down before visibly gathering yourself and flouncing out of her office and into the open floor. It took just a couple of strides to get you to your assigned desk space, diagonally opposite mine. She wanted to keep you close to her, and close to me. And even then the reporter in me was asking why. What are you?
As you moved, I saw Asif take in every centimeter of you and your legs—solid stripes of muscle tense under black opaques, disappearing at the very last moment into a pelmet of leather. Asif, my onetime intern, my protégé who’d even chosen his log-in to please me when he’d first joined (StephenPatrick59, in honor of my love of Morrissey), someone who stood by me during the worst of it. He had seen me at my very best, just before my illness, before anyone understood the old company’s catastrophic finances, when it seemed that my merry band and I could go on writing away, propped up by a semi-loyal base of subscribers and a modest advertising revenue, forever. These were the days before the first “tough conversation” with the old directors on the “hard realities” we couldn’t run away from anymore: The world had moved on and we hadn’t. Shortly after came the first redundancies, when we said goodbye to senior reporters who’d come up the ranks like me and who we couldn’t afford anymore, then the second round, where we lost our grizzled subeditors, the connective tissue that always held the bones of Leadership together.
But even in those changing times, I’d been able to lobby for us to switch off below-the-line comments to encourage an elevated debate at real-life events where we’d document the outcomes. But that period, when people couldn’t hide behind their keyboards and usernames, was gone. Comments were now activated and often spilled over into the at turns banal and cowardly Twittersphere. Integrity and discipline were wholly lost in this modern world where people like you and, worse than that, those my age, feel it’s somehow both appropriate and interesting to share the first thing that comes into their heads. And as I watched Asif drink you in, something else I once understood was altering before my very eyes. I suppose you know, when you walk into a room, something in the air changes. I used to be capable of doing that.
“She’s ready for you,” you said as you passed by me, then, “Just be yourself, Katherine.” I felt your breath on my ear, smelled your clean, warm scalp again. I shuddered.
“Hi, come in, come in. Wonderful to be able to put a face to the name, finally. I’m sorry it’s taken this long to meet—I’ve been neck deep in the strategy, the financials, and so on—but I know all about you.” Gemma gestured toward a swivel chair I knew to be broken, though she didn’t. I nodded and perched on the crap chair without letting my weight bear down.
“Likewise.”
“We’re a bit late, so I’ll cut straight to it.”
My stomach fell. I knew she and her new board had been discussing “my future.”
“Nothing formal or anything. No need to look so worried!”
“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 realized 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 toward the space behind your chair, then placing his hands squarely on the back of it, righ
t 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 was 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 was 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 from 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 around to lean at the same level as your screen. While you spoke, pausing occasionally to gesture toward the images, he nodded in the general direction of your side boob. 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 that 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 toward 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 is 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 checkbook 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 organized 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 I
T intern in the far corner of our bank of desks. I couldn’t let on that 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 prioritize 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 center 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.
Precious You Page 3