“I’m not worried about you.” Probably the greatest lie I told myself about you, worse than convincing myself you were a friend-in-waiting.
“Because I think you’ll find I could be very good for you. If you give me a chance.”
And your smile shone at me again as you moved one hand out across the table in my direction, reminding me of my young self again, that combination of steel and softness.
It’s then I saw it clearly: I could mentor you. We could go through the whole copy-camp charade, but I’d bring you round to my way of doing things, share with you everything I knew. I would mentor you and in return you could teach me the ways of your digital world. We’d be unstoppable. We’d propel the magazine and website into the stratosphere. More readers, more advertisers, more sponsors, more everything. I would initiate our partnership by conceding to your absurd millennial vocabulary.
“Triggers for my illness…Well, I would say it wasn’t just one thing and I’m not sure I wholly believe in triggers, not for me anyway. I’d had hard times before and they hadn’t got me down, not down-down. If anything, the dark days got me up, off my feet. Then when I got ill, it was just…total. I felt flattened; the world didn’t look like the world anymore. It’s hard to explain, but I don’t think it was just a case of, ‘Oh my God, we’re broke,’ or ‘Oh my God, am I really celebrating my fortieth birthday at Leadership?’ or any one thing that pushed me over the edge. It was nothing and everything.” I shrugged, as if I was talking about some mysterious thing that had happened to me a very long time ago. You changed tack.
“Wow. So from the late nineties to now, that’s like, a whole bunch of time. Leadership must be like a home away from home.”
“It is, or it was, before everything changed.”
“Maybe it can be again?” you said softly, and I had to look away so you couldn’t see how much you’d moved me.
“Sometimes I…I feel as if I’ve let Leadership down. I’ve let myself down. I know we’re going to be OK; I know we can survive using a rolling buffet of interns to keep the lights on and sponsored content to pay me.” You visibly bristled at this. I ignored it. “But I can still see it, we’re slipping behind editorially. Readers, they’re so fickle these days. I’ve seen the data. They skip through a story that took a week to put together for the magazine in fifteen fucking seconds on the website and I don’t know why. You know, I did see the digital revolution coming? I thought I could ignore it, but it got bigger and bigger, so much bigger than I thought it ever would, until it changed fucking everything and it feels like I don’t get anything anymore.” I saw some bubbles of spit land on my sleeve on the “m” of “more.” I was literally, as you would say (correctly for once), frothing at the mouth. “Sorry. I—” I began and you rubbed my forearm. “I don’t usually spill my guts like this.”
“Well, get used to it, boss. OK? Shall we get a bottle of something red and warming?”
“Yes! Allow me. Fuck it all, right?”
I noticed you recoiled slightly whenever I swore. I suppose I naturally swear a lot, but I’d always thought most journalists were prone to sweariness, whatever their age. As much as I believe people like you need to toughen up, I didn’t like the faint tell as the skin under your eyes tightened at each curse. Before too long into our night, I stopped the “fucks” and “cunts” and even the “arseholes.” I started to feel less angry in doing so. You helped me soothe myself. Maybe you millennials were actually on to something.
It began to feel, as we sat there in the corner of The George that night, when tourists and beery workmates came and went around us unnoticed, that you and I were really communicating. I felt the warmth of a couple of gins and a bottle of Rioja and the full flush of releasing all the conversation I had pent up in me. And it was thrilling to observe your pristine complexion up close, the swell of your cheeks, the way you tapped the white triangle of skin above your tangerine V-neck from time to time. My skin once glowed like yours.
We both looked at our glasses, only a drip in each of them. You poured the remainder of the bottle into my glass. I sensed our evening drawing to a close. I didn’t want it over yet. “Writing was a real escape for me. Not just journalism, writing my own stuff too. I wrote my first manuscript, just for me, to get my head together about…childhood stuff, I suppose. Does your blog help you get your head straight?”
“I guess. That and my diary. I try to work out my future by processing the past and reporting on the present there.”
“I used to keep my notepad with me at all times in case I ran into a story, but also if I had a thought about something or other I wanted to get down. Iain used to call it my ‘little book of lottery tickets.’ One of them had the winning line on it, the one that would help me write the next manuscript. The One. The one that would save me, get me out of Leadership, and put my life where it deserved to be…”
“Wow. It sounds like, what did you say your husband’s called again, Iain? He sounds super-supportive.”
“Iain. My partner, not my husband.”
You’d invited him into the conversation and then I really let myself go, encouraging you to excavate me, draw things to the surface. Because when I spoke about Iain, it felt so good to share all the gestures, big and small, that made him so wonderful. When our relationship seemed of interest to you, he and I became my proudest achievement. I seemed to be educating you about proper, grown-up partnerships. You asked me more and more questions.
“How did you know Iain was right for you?”
“I suppose I fell for him, hard. I sort of realized when I met him, I thought I’d been walking forward into my life. I mean, I had, but I’d been limping on one leg, because now I felt complete, balanced, a left leg to the right.” And then I started telling you how Iain and I had come to sleep with other people, figuring I could educate you about the world, how things could be. “We were at a party and I had this thought that we shouldn’t deny ourselves, even though we knew we were going to be together for a long time, maybe forever. He knew exactly what I meant. That’s why we work, Lily. We have rules, like I said. We talked about everyone before and after.”
“Who were the other guys you were with?”
“God, all sorts really. Contacts. Friends. Friends of friends. A good many colleagues. Interns. Lots of interns.” I immediately regretted saying this as your face twitched when I said “interns” and I instantly tried to cover my tracks. In truth, there had been fewer takers over recent years, which couldn’t have helped me much. It suggested either that I wasn’t as attractive as I was when I was younger and/or most of the millennial generation were as ridiculously puritanical about sex in the workplace as I suspected. It’s hard to say which I found intuitively more disappointing. “I mean, yes, interns, but not for a while. Mostly when I was closer to their age. The thing with Asif? We have a bit more of a connection than interns from back in the day. He’s like my work husband. We don’t play that way anymore, by the way. My idea.”
“Sure,” you nodded, giving nothing away. “So, what’s Iain’s type?”
“Well, he doesn’t do wallflowers. He likes the firecrackers. Women who aren’t backward in coming forward, if you know what I mean.”
I liked talking about the women of yesteryear, who I really was, and how I played things before living made me sick. It was all so amazingly sexy then. Until it wasn’t. Until it started to feel like an effort, like every other plate I had to keep spinning in my life. Even before I got properly ill, I’d barely looked at another man for months. Iain had calmed right down too. We’d fallen into a slower rhythm. Gone was the bed-hopping high summer, and in came a calmer September that risked heading to the freezing dead of winter if I wasn’t careful. And I wasn’t careful enough in the end, because of you.
“What about you? Is there anyone special in your life?”
“No, not at the moment. Hey, I’d love to meet Iain one d
ay.”
And I let you leave it there. Because I immediately had an image of the three of us together: sitting around a table, wine and conversation flying between us. We’d laugh; I’d catch Iain’s eye and he’d send me a smile that told me he was glad I’d met you, happy I had someone new to share my thoughts with, enlivened by the idea you’d be good for me, and therefore for both of us.
“What are you doing this weekend? Why don’t the three of us have lunch?”
“Hey, that’d be perfect.”
We swapped numbers.
You made me take a selfie with you. It felt stupid and foreign, holding my phone on high in an unpracticed way. You corrected the angle of my arm at first, your thin fingers grasping the muscles on the inside of my upper arm. I could smell all of you.
“No, higher up. You’ve never done this before?”
“Erm, yeah, not as much as you lot…” Then, in friendly frustration, you took my phone off me before scrunching into my side and miraculously working out how to put on the flash and some kind of flattering filter before handing my phone back. I loved how good we both looked in that picture. How close. In age. In comradery. In friendship. You were giving me a direct line to who I used to be: young and fun, someone you would fight to be friends with, not avoid.
I’ve looked at that picture you took of us a million times. It was far enough away that you can’t see my pissed redness, my dark circles, my desperation. Nor could I see the black energy hiding behind your eyes. Like our selfie, I vowed that at our planned Sunday lunch with Iain you would see the very best of me again.
It got to chucking-out time and you said you needed to get your bike from the yard behind the office. As we started to leave, I was overwhelmed by the idea of hugging you. I felt like we’d breached something, moved somewhere together. I stood up woozily. I remember you holding my forearm to steady me and that somehow becoming a prolonged embrace. I could feel something between us, something powerful. I didn’t want the night to end. We finally pulled away from each other.
“You going to be OK, cycling half-cut? You could leave it overnight; I could pick up a couple of bottles along the way. We could keep talking.”
“Think I’ll sit the next dance out, thanks all the same. I’m not actually that much of a drinker?”
I faltered for a second and clawed back an image of a finger of wine untouched in the bottom of your glass.
I was mortified.
I’d drunk and blathered on about myself and my life, while you’d listened on soberly, watching as I gulped down the booze, telling you another one of my difficult little secrets, throwing in a good amount of intimate and revealing details about Iain for good measure. You’d topped me up again and again, but you hadn’t refilled your own glass once. Was it because you were one of those oh-so-serious twenty-odd-year-olds who barely drinks, needing to wake up with a clear head in order to optimize their days? Or perhaps you felt bad because you hadn’t money to pay for any of the drinks? Or was it more deliberate than this? Paranoid anxiety needled me. But I didn’t know who I should trust less, myself or you. And I desperately didn’t want to take the sheen off those moments where we seemed to connect.
Yet dread still rose to the surface of my uncertainty and embarrassment: the sense of you wanting me malleable, that you set out to expose me and you’d succeeded. I had the idea you somehow knew the ways to see me for what I really was. And once again, I’d spent time alone with you and discovered almost nothing about you in return.
I didn’t say much else before I sloped off into the night, moving with the drinkers spilling out of Borough Market pubs in the direction of London Bridge, pissed and alone. I know you watched me as I walked away, waiting a minute or so before turning in the opposite direction. I felt it.
Lily, I knew somewhere you were no good for me, that I was unraveling again and you were tugging hard at the threads. But whatever your interest in me, you were interested.
I had been seen.
I wasn’t invisible.
I had someone new to talk to, someone I could see on the weekend, someone who had some insight into my most ancient pains. So if it seemed to me you’d barged your way into my life and under my skin, I was ready to plow right back into yours. You can’t unlearn how to fight.
And there was something else. Somewhere, I had the idea that you liked me even though you didn’t want to.
MARCH 6—TIME FOR A DRINK?
Down with the brown. Down. With. The. Brown. Seriously? This woman gets more and more clueless. She’s talking about “coded language” when we know this is code for, “I’m not being racist but…” or worse, that jokey kind of racism people her age are prone to, which they think is funny and ironic but everyone with half a soul knows is just good old-fashioned racism.
But I can’t stop looking at her, into those bright blue eyes. She can tell. She likes how it feels.
I ask her to come for a drink with me and, my God, she can unload: on the partner, on her career, her depression, the lot. This crazy monologue she has to get out with only the smallest little nudge from me to keep it coming. Gotta admit, it’s pretty fascinating, being this close to those eyes as they dance around her memories while she sweeps her fingers through that extreme black wave of hair over and over. She doesn’t know she’s still beautiful.
I liked listening to her, even with all the appalling things she said, the most disgustingly least self-aware ideas she thinks are absolutely fine: a rolling buffet of interns to keep the lights on and sponsored content to pay me. She thinks she’s doing us some kind of favor. Offensive in the extreme but because she’s so completely othered young adults, in her eyes it doesn’t matter what she does or takes from us.
But still, sometimes her words fall out of her studded with tiny gems of something that feels like truth, like little pomegranate pips in a bowl of bitter leaves.
I needed to keep my usual guard up, but it was hard. I haven’t found it this difficult since Ruth. That was the first, and until now, the last time I let myself open up. I wanted to be honest with Ruth about what Mum and Gem did to me and what I’ve done to other people. Ruth wanted to hear me and I wanted to tell her about everything that’s inside me.
With KR, I feel like I wanted to tell her things about me too. Real things. And I find myself wanting to learn more about her. That’s when I pour her another drink.
It was the plan to see her inebriated, get a view of what’s behind the leather armor. I make sure she’s fully drunk, so much so that when we leave the pub, she’s all over the show. I actually have to stop her from hitting the deck. I grab her before she drops to the cobbles. I could have let her fall, I should have let her fall, but I can’t believe it was actually my first instinct to save her.
I rescue her, despite all the times I’ve been allowed to fall and break into pieces by people like her, despite how many injustices and abuses people like me suffer at the hands of people on her level, casually using young people in their workplaces and their beds. Her bed. But even after she admits that’s exactly what she thinks is her right, to have sex with unpaid graduates in a clear abuse of power that she can’t see, I still want to help her. It’s weird.
Eventually, she’s off home, but not before she’s tried to extend the night. Way too soon for that. She’s stomping off to the bus stop in that way that’s so her. I wait and watch and I’m thinking how KR always strides or stomps everywhere when she should be treading carefully.
I never bothered being quiet on the rare occasions I came home late, usually after a work do. Iain was generally unconscious by 10:30. When I got back from The George that night, I was desperate to talk about you, sound Iain out on the night and what I thought may have happened, but he was gone on the sofa and, as usual, I tried and failed to wake him.
I went to the bathroom, put my fingers in my throat, and got rid of the booze you’d put in me. The
n I went to bed and sleep arrived quickly.
I had the dream about the burned ground on the way to the far paddock gate, my mother watching it all, unseen. I wanted to wake up before I had to watch myself falter toward the gate. But I was still too drunk to rouse myself. I had to watch my child feet not reach where they needed to be.
In the morning, dehydration woke me early, but it had woken Iain earlier. He was already in the kitchen fixing breakfast.
“Morning, gorgeous. Sorry, didn’t hear you come in last night.”
“Just as well probably.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Last night with Snowflake, it was a bit intense. And worse, I have to go on some kind of ‘copy camp’ with her.”
“What?”
“I need to ‘reboot my writing’ and she’s the one to help.”
“Fucking hell.”
“I know. A new low. It’s got to be all part of the plan to get rid of me, right? Set me up to fail, generate some kind of paper trail to show they did everything they could to help me before booting out the last bastion of the old world.”
“You think?”
“I honestly don’t know anymore…Snowflake, Lily, she only lives over on Woodberry Downs. I said maybe we’d see if we couldn’t get together with her for lunch on Sunday at The Brownswood. Keep your friends close, enemies closer and all that.”
I hoped the fact I’d arranged something that meant he could start on the Bloody Marys, with “cheeky” straight chasers, from eleven papered over the potential oddness of me inviting a brand-new intern into our weekend. I couldn’t bear to admit to Iain how desperate I was to bring my new friend into our life, and I certainly couldn’t tell him I wasn’t at all sure if you were friend or foe yet.
“Sorry if I seemed a bit paranoid the other day, about work and about Lily. I’m trying to be strong.”
Precious You Page 7