2. Olivia
FOUR DAYS BEFORE THE OPENING CEREMONY
“Can you tell me about a challenge you’ve experienced and how you overcame it?” asked the man on the other side of the video interview.
Olivia Nkomo was perfectly composed as she maintained eye contact through the screen. She looked up for a second as if she was deep in thought. But the reality was that she’d rehearsed her answer to this question a hundred times before. She had a more successful interview-to-coveted-internship record than anybody she knew. So, she was an expert at delivering exactly what the person on the other side of the table wanted to hear. And if she was honest, the question was easy to answer, because Olivia Nkomo had experienced more than her fair share of challenging moments at work.
She’d spent her time at university trying to add as many things to her CV as she possibly could. Even if it was uncomfortable sometimes. Like when she’d found her investment banking supervisor sniffing a line on the sink of the ladies’ bathroom less than ten minutes into the company-sponsored welcome drinks. Or the strange summer she’d spent working at a crisis PR agency for musicians whose problems ranged from leaked private photos to criminal court cases. In the second week, she’d been asked to drive her manager’s incredibly expensive Mercedes across London to hand-deliver a parcel to the home of a celebrity who’d just narrowly avoided a prison sentence for third-degree murder.
“Innocent until proven guilty,” her manager reminded her.
“But the only reason the evidence got dismissed was because—” Olivia started.
“Innocent. Until. Proven. Guilty,” her manager said.
Olivia tried not to think about which cover-up had paid for their Michelin-starred ￡200-per-person team dinners. She’d quietly sent in her resignation and donated a small chunk of her savings to charity. But all the donations and long hot showers in the world couldn’t cleanse her from the dark whispers she’d heard while waiting for the office kettle to boil.
Then, in the summer of her second year of university, Olivia interned at a major tech company. Yes, that tech company. They’d given the interns free catered breakfasts to distract them from the fact that it was four weeks of unpaid work. And reminded them that the prestige the month would add to their CVs far outweighed the toxic culture they’d have to experience while they were there. When the date of their “not mandatory” but definitely mandatory office summer party came around, Olivia found an excuse to leave her team so she could go and play snooker with the other interns. She’d admitted that she didn’t know the rules of the game, but instead of one of the other interns giving her tips, she’d felt the presence of a man who worked in accounts hovering over her. He was taller than her, older too. Maybe in his forties. He’d slowly put his hand on her shoulder and muttered that he would “teach her how to play.”
Before she could politely say no, he’d placed the snooker stick between her finger and thumb. Her whole body had frozen as he’d covered her fingers with his sweaty hands. She’d glanced around the room for an escape route, for an excuse to leave. But instead found reasons to maintain her composure. There were way too many important people in the room to risk drawing attention to herself. The head of her department was a couple of steps away, talking to the company’s bigwigs. The other interns just watched, taking in her discomfort and standing in it like it was their own. The man from accounts pressed his whole body up against hers, squeezed her fingers with his clammy hands, and leaned closer. His vodka-and-lime-scented breath condensing on her shoulder.
But Olivia couldn’t make a scene.
So, she’d just stiffened up, counted to ten, and then said that she needed to go to the bathroom. At which point he’d finally let her go.
As she stood in the toilet cubicle, she told herself that if she’d been out in the real world, she would have said something. She would have done something. If a creepy older man had pressed his body against hers at a bar, she would have shaken him off, shouted at him, and left. But in a room full of people who could give her a glowing recommendation or a prestigious job after she graduated, she knew she would gain nothing from causing a scene. Instead, she’d splashed some water on her face, pretended it had never happened, and moved on.
Because unusual, expensive, and sometimes uncomfortable experiences were just the price you paid to work at prestigious companies when you were a couple of months away from graduating into a recession. So, when the interviewer asked her, “Can you tell me about a challenge you’ve experienced and how you overcame it?” she gave her most polished answer, talked up an internship she’d done last summer at an NGO, and dropped an obscure sports reference that made him sit up and smile. Olivia left the call knowing she’d done pretty well, but even she was surprised when she saw an email with the subject line “Congratulations!” in her inbox. She’d spent hours in the library, interned during every university break, and meticulously plotted out her career in the hope that it would lead to what she’d been dreaming of her whole life. And now she’d finally done it: Olivia had landed her dream job at the Olympics. A dream she’d been working toward since she was eight years old.
It had all begun during the summer of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Her parents had made three big bowls of popcorn, turned the television on, and joined millions of people around the world to watch the opening ceremony. Olivia had a vague memory of a teacher telling her class about the Olympics, but it wasn’t until her eight-year-old self sat on the sofa in front of the TV and watched it for the first time that she began to understand why her parents were so excited for it. She’d watched the opening ceremony performers fill the stage and tell a story through song and dance, completely mesmerized by what was unfolding before her eyes. She’d tuned in the next day to watch the synchronized swimmers and stared at the TV in awe as she realized how much discipline and practice it had taken them to get there. She’d watched a documentary about one of the cyclists who’d gone from growing up in a slum to winning gold, and marveled at how sports could change somebody’s life. That summer, Olivia spent hours in front of the TV watching different competitions every day, going to the library to read up on the sports, and then trawling the TV guide to find documentaries and films about the most legendary athletes. By the time she and her parents gathered back around the TV to watch the closing ceremony fireworks, Olivia had become so swept up by the magnitude of it all that her vision for what she wanted to do—or more specifically, where she wanted to work—had become crystal clear.
She couldn’t help but be pulled in by the magic of it all and covered her walls with posters displaying the official artwork for every Summer Games in the last fifty years. Her parents trawled vintage shops and online auctions to buy her Olympic memorabilia for her birthday. And ever since that first Olympic opening ceremony, she had dreamed of a life spent traveling around the world to follow those five intersecting rings. She wasn’t an idealist in her normal life, but something about the way the Games crossed borders, languages, and political lines gave her something to believe in. A belief strong enough to plan her life around. And now, she was finally about to see it come true. Because she’d landed an internship at the Games, and in just a couple of days she’d be heading off to Athens to watch her dream come to life. She just needed the perfect outfit for it.
“Olivia, baby girl, you look incredible,” her mum, Mai Nkomo, said, gently wiping her eyes with a tissue from her seat outside the changing rooms. Olivia could’ve come out wearing a dress made of rags, and her parents would still have said she looked like a supermodel.
But as she looked at herself in the mirror, she realized that she did look really good. She was wearing a majestic emerald-green suit, tailored to perfection. She’d seen the price tag while she was getting dressed and had grimaced at the total. She knew her parents couldn’t afford it. She’d planned to take it off and lie to them, saying that it didn’t fit right to give herself a chance to grab something cheaper, but they’d called her out before she could come up with a reasonable excuse.
“My beautiful, intelligent, successful girl. Give us a twirl!” her dad, Baba Nkomo, said.
Olivia did a little twirl and tried not to feel too embarrassed as she watched the shop assistants on the other side of the changing rooms smile. She was twenty-three years old.
“I can already see it,” her mum said, standing up in excitement. “You walking into those offices, looking like a smart, sophisticated professional and wowing them all.”
“Shaking hands with highfliers, impressing them with your brilliance… my daughter the Olympic lawyer.”
“Dad, I’m not a lawyer yet.” Olivia had done a three-year law degree and a master’s, but she hadn’t started her legal practice course yet. “And it’s not a job, it’s just an internship,” she said, trying to manage the narrative before she became the number-one topic of the WhatsApp groups her parents and their friends filled with messages about how well their kids were doing.
“But I can already see the finish line,” her mum said, walking over to hug her as they looked in the mirror together. Olivia hugged her back, smiling at their reflection.
She tried to convince her parents out of buying the suit; said that she already had the perfect outfit at home. But they were stubborn. She knew they were too proud to admit they couldn’t afford it and would be deeply offended if she offered to pay for it. So, she hugged her mum again and resolved to pay them back by buying their groceries for the month. They would never accept money from her, but they wouldn’t say no to a kitchen full of food.
Olivia’s parents had taken her to buy a new school uniform for the first day of school every single year since she was four years old. Even when money was tight and they would have been better off buying something secondhand. When she’d started getting internships and new jobs, they’d continued the tradition, taking her to department store clearance racks and high street sale days instead of school-mandated uniform shops. Her dad always reminded her to dress the part, and her mum told her that the right outfit was the key to walking into any room feeling like she belonged there. So, when she’d seen the gorgeous emerald-green suit displayed in the shop window, she’d immediately known that she’d found the perfect outfit to kick-start the most important job of her life. And to achieve the goals her parents had been working toward for most of their lives too.
When Olivia’s parents had left Zimbabwe for the UK in the ’90s, they’d been young, hopeful twenty-somethings. Following the dream that so many before and after them had spent their lives chasing: a better life in the UK. They’d met at law school in Harare, got married less than a year later, and arrived in England fresh-faced and ready to make a life for themselves.
But they’d quickly become disillusioned. First-class degrees from third-world countries didn’t mean anything in their cold, gray new home. The years they’d spent studying had come to nothing. Fancy law firms didn’t want to hire an immigrant with a thick accent from a country they only knew about in terms of dictators and poverty. So, they’d both retrained, promising themselves they’d find their way back to becoming lawyers one day. But that day had never come. Her mum had become a law teacher. The secondary school students she taught made fun of her accent and pretended not to understand what she was saying. But she stayed up late to make wellness checks and ran a summer lunch club for kids who likely wouldn’t get a good hot meal if they weren’t at school. And her dad had got a job as a social worker—he spent his days and nights trying to help vulnerable adults in the face of a council whose budget shrank every week.
The better life they’d dreamed of amounted to working long hours to barely make ends meet, and living on the other side of the world in a city that would never feel like home. But then they looked at her, and Olivia knew that, in their eyes, all their hard work had been worth it. She would be the one to achieve everything they hadn’t been able to. Their daughter, their only child, was a product of their wildest dreams.