Chapter 3
Aida
“Awake, arise, or be forever fallen!”
—Milton, Paradise Lost
Sometimes they call me brave.
Or plucky.
What the actual fuck? Am I a Dickens heroine? Who even says that?
Last month, after I stood on the steps of the courthouse in head-to-toe Stella McCartney as my attorney announced what I would call a major fucking win in my divorce from John, they called me triumphant.
Damn right I was triumphant. I liked that headline.
More recently, though, they called me gaunt and drawn.
That’s right.
Aida makes a gaunt, drawn appearance post court case win.
Once again, I ask you: What the actual fuck?
Are you telling me there’s not a single person on the editorial team of a national newspaper who studied English long enough at school to know tautology when they see it?
Also: I had just been for a five-mile jog. Damn right I was gaunt.
And drawn.
I hate it.
I hate when the tabloids pretend to champion you when, really, they’re waiting for you to stumble. Waiting for you to show that chink in your armour. They’re all the same, and it fucking sucks. Even if I’m used to it after seventeen years in this country.
I’m not usually fodder for these guys. They’re too busy with Love Island alums and the royal family.
But when they get the scoop that your husband, who’s a member of the British aristocracy, has been fucking his secretary and his intern and God knows who else, you can bet your life they’ll be all over you both.
They may paint him as the fuckboy and me as the wronged wife, but it’s never that simple.
Because he’s one of them, and I’ll always be an outsider, an American who doesn’t really get how things work here.
The left-wing papers have annihilated him, but the right-wing ones have been slower to condemn.
I hate that they’re so toxic, and I hate even more that I care. But it hurts, because I was always John’s young, hot, glamorous, successful wife as well as being a power player in the TV industry in my own right. And now I’m the spurned wife. You know, the one who’s gaunt and drawn, right?
I’m forty-six. I refuse to be portrayed as some cast-off reject who’s past her prime while my fifty-nine-year-old ex-husband fucks his way around the Houses of Parliament.
I refuse to accept that my fate is single-parenting two boys while bemoaning the fact that guys my age all have their Tinder matches set to women of thirty-five and under. I’m a smart, attractive, successful woman in my sexual prime.
There’s only one solution, and that’s changing the narrative.
Unfortunately for John, that’s where I’m a fucking pro.
I have a plan so audacious it’ll make Tinder look like LinkedIn.
* * *
The audacious plan? A documentary comprising two sixty-minute episodes that lend themselves to leisurely storytelling, entitled Aida Russell: Searching for Paradise.
Of all the things I have straight in my head about this concept, the clearest is that I want this show to be elevated.
Inspiring. There’s no place here for content that feels tawdry or shameful or ignoble.
And what could be more exalted than using Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, as the framework? Hopefully not much. I envision the first episode as framing the facts. The societal and biological and psychological challenges facing women like me. Paradise Lost: the story of my journey to Alchemy.
Then, Paradise Found: the story of my journey at Alchemy.
I loved this poem when I minored in English Literature. It may be a cornerstone of British literary history, but it’s a lot of fun. Adam, Eve, temptation and Satan?
Come on. It’s ripe for plundering. For modern, sexy reinterpretation.
It was Milton himself who mused: What hath night to do with sleep?
He sounds like he’s earned a place in my narrative.
Because women my age are fabulous. So let’s go celebrate them. Let’s go exalt them in all their glory.
Having an audacious plan is one thing.
Acting on it—sigh—is quite another.
Since I last caught up with Gen a couple months ago, I’ve secured backing for this documentary. The streaming platform Azure will produce it as an Azure exclusive, and I can’t deny I’m pumped. Channel 4 would have been a coup, but these folks have a higher risk tolerance.
With them at the helm, we can really turn up the heat on this thing. Take it from audacious to seriously boundary-testing.
Which is precisely why my stomach is in my mouth.
Because I’ve got the studio in the bag.
Now I need to come up with the goods. I need to actually fuck someone, someone I’ve never even met, and talk about it.
On television.
Excellent.
What seemed like a hot-as-hell concept when I hatched it alone in the bathtub with a glass of excellent Chardonnay now seems literally unhinged. I don’t know what I was thinking.
Except I know that, whatever the optics, this isn’t some cute little rebound stunt. This is about showing women my age that they can still own it when it comes to sex.
That they’ve still got it.
And if one woman gets that message, it will have been worth my while humiliating myself.
Maybe.
That’s what I tell myself, anyway, as I walk up to the glossy black door of the exclusive Mayfair sex club.
The club that’ll host my reawakening. I’ve interviewed no fewer than three British Prime Ministers in my time, but the fear I had walking up the steps of Ten Downing Street has nothing on the sheer terror this place is prompting.
Alchemy.
The fabulous Georgian town house behind whose tasteful doors magic supposedly happens.
It’s broad daylight, and I know—I know—I’m just here for a meeting. For a follow-up meeting with Gen and the opportunity to meet her business partner, Callum, who’ll supposedly be my… mentor. My co-star.
If we hit it off.
Somehow, though, the stakes feel sky fucking high.
I’ve always gotten a rush of adrenalin ahead of a big interview. When you know you’re up against someone as articulate—and slippery—as Boris Johnson, that chemical boost helps me to bring my A-game.
But right now?
How I feel doesn’t even compare.
Because not one time when I’ve gone up against the biggest power players on our planet have I had to persuade them to fuck me.
I ring the doorbell.