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 toward 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 dialed 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.
MARCH 5—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 generalizable 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 with 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 on to. I’ve only felt it once before in my life. When I realize it’s happening again, and with KR of all people, I have to stop myself from massively oversharing.
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 backward 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 on to 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.
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 maximized. 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 tantalizing 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 realize 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 realized 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 midlife 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 catcalls, 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 aging 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 that 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 that 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 marvelously, 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.
But I admit, I made a mistake. I looked outside of myself for salvation.
It got so that our friends stopped calling us. Part of me was relieved because whenever I saw them, at some point the conversation always turned to The Film. What might have been. What was lost. We had to find new bodies to come back to ours, buying the last round and plenty of coke for those who would venture to Manor House. But soon enough, we found ourselves going home alone together, and at some point a couple of years ago or so, we stopped going out much at all. Then, when we weren’t really looking, we became truly middle-aged.
You don’t need a specific reason to suffer from a mental malaise but I know your lot, always seeking a “trigger” to understand my illness, so, take your pick for mine: the fact I could no longer deny the London life I’d built wasn’t strong enough to save me. It would not put a clear blue ocean of money and creative success between me and the desperate child on a farm in Derbyshire. Nor would it solve the problem of the management consultants circling the magazine, or the failure to move house, or my body starting to do dreadful middle-aged things; chronically dry skin on my shins no moisturizer could address, robust whiskers on my chin I had to pluck away every single day, the first gray pube, then another, and another. I felt so let down by my body, but more by my pathetic attitude to it.
Altogether, things big and small made me feel as if I was breaking down until eventually I was a broken thing. And let me tell you something, Lily, you really learn who your friends are when you become needy and unglamorous. It turns out none of my old girlfriends wanted to know the ill version of me when I tentatively reached out to them again. On a good day, I told myself it might have been different if they hadn’t invested in the film, or if the film had provided them with the stellar returns we’d all hoped were possible. On a bad day, I knew they only loved me when I was flying high. How could I find fault with them when I felt broadly the same?
Iain always smiled as he stirred whatever he was cooking for me. When I was ill, he’d cooked me back to life. It wasn’t that nothing tasted good, it was that everything tasted of nothing: no texture or depth. Iain had to keep me alive like the pathetic rejected lambs my mother forced me to bottle-feed as a child. He couldn’t get out of the habit of hand-rearing me; cooking elaborate, time-consuming, fattening meals; boiling vats of bones all day long, as if he could borrow the distilled marrow of dead animals to give the essence of life back to me in a bowl. That’s what you think we do to your generation, isn’t it, Lily? Steal your young lives for our own self-serving ends?
Iain stirred his stew so vigorously, I noticed while his arms were getting thinner, his stomach trembled above his belt. Mouse-colored hair, now silvering. But he was still attractive, with well-set gray eyes, a wide symmetrical smile, and a liking for looking at me a little longer than he needed to; he made me feel truly seen. Did you feel that way too when you first met him? What did you really think of him, of us, in those early days?
“I know what’ll cheer you up,�
�� my Iain said.
“Who says I need cheering up?”
“Some Hungarian New Wave. There’s nothing a little Béla Tarr can’t solve. A spot of Damnation will put it all in perspective.” He squeezed the last drops of the wine out, having liberated the silver bag from its box, holding it between his torso and underarm like a bagpipe. My partner was what your lot might call “an alcoholic,” but you figured that out soon enough, didn’t you? What you’ll never understand is how this wasn’t an issue before you. Perhaps one day your generation will grow to see how life doesn’t cleave along binary lines: hopeless addict/functioning citizen; mentally well/mentally ill; good person/bad person.
“Well, why ever not?” I looked into my glass.
“What’s Gemma really like then?”
I turned on my stool, my back to Iain and the breakfast bar that divided the tiny open kitchen from the living space in my flat. Some instinct made me think twice about introducing you to the conversation, to say your name in my home, to let you invade my domestic space, but still, I felt compelled to speak of you.
“Oh, she’s all right. Earnest, in an HR-sanctioned way…But she’s landed me with her jumped-up niece.”
“Another intern is it? How many’s that now?”
“Six? Seven? I can’t keep track anymore. Anyway, she flounced into my cab this morning. The 141 decided to take the day off and I managed to flag a cab and this millennial jumps in and eventually tells me she happens to be the boss’s niece. What she doesn’t tell me is that she’s the one who gave Gemma Lunt the bright idea of buying out Leadership. She definitely would have known all about me, but played dumb and let me rabbit on about my job before the big reveal. Creepy or what?”
Precious You Page 4