Chapter 2 #2
High on hope, Olivia rummages for her AirPods, pops them in her ears, and indulges in her favourite form of disassociation: listening to a playlist of nineties power ballads and fantasizing about a life where she is universally loved and admired, and not a grown adult who feels constantly sick with worry that people are cross with her.
This thrumming bassline of anxiety was so familiar to her that she had ceased to notice it any more – she simply accepted that it was the necessary soundtrack to her life, a kind of payment she had to make each day in order to inch closer to success.
‘You can achieve all your dreams,’ her mother had told her throughout her childhood.
‘A girl as dynamic as you will have no problem smashing the glass ceiling, but you’ll want to tone it down around men so they don’t get too intimidated by you.
You don’t want anyone to think you’re too much, Olivia. ’
Olivia had arrived on the graduate scheme at The Morning all those years ago ready to take over the world, to become a daring war reporter or a fearless political commentator, a woman to be taken seriously in the media.
Instead, she had quickly been siloed to the features department with every other woman who had arrived at the newspaper, where their journalistic remit encompassed diets, clothes and spurious celebrity trends.
The male news reporters called it ‘The Cotswolds’, a place where nothing particularly interesting ever happened but everything looked very nice.
Meanwhile, they rather grandly referred to their own department as ‘Baghdad’, which amused Olivia, not just because it dated so many of the reporters to the year 2003 where they firmly belonged, but also because the furthest most of them ventured was the bar of the Red Lion.
The women in the Cotswolds took their work seriously, even if the men in Baghdad didn’t.
They knew that a good news organization required light as well as shade, that the pages they dealt with were every bit as important as the commentary on the Middle East. Olivia believed this with all her soul, even if some of her female colleagues were less generous in their assessments of the work they had to do.
It was what made her the perfect person to head up Women Rising, a cheery, positive presence who could rally the more cynical colleagues, such as Nina.
‘You’re delulu if you think any of the blokes who run this paper actually care about our careers,’ Olivia’s young protégée had once complained, during one of the compulsory mentoring sessions that always seemed to have been scheduled by HR at the busiest point of the day.
But Olivia had genuinely seen it as an honour and a privilege when she was asked to head the group up five years ago. In her mind, it showed how central she was to the organization’s success. Now, she was sure all those extra hours of work that Nick had baulked at were finally going to pay off.
The editor, Stephen, was at the top of the patriarchal pile, a man Olivia had long tolerated for her own professional gain.
She allows herself a small moment of pride, that she has taken all that unfortunate business from the beginning of her career, and somehow managed to nurture it so that it’s now going to work to her advantage.
She imagines the look on Nina’s face when the younger woman learns of her promotion – the excitement and respect that she will express when she sees what is possible if you doggedly stick at it, as Olivia has done.
Lured back into her imagination, Olivia goes to her phone and selects Celine Dion’s ‘It’s All Coming Back to Me Now’.
Olivia likes to see these little fantasy sessions as more of a premonition, an opportunity to manifest, allow in abundance, et cetera, et cetera.
In today’s fantasy – sorry, premonition – she is at her desk, writing a banal story about a 55-year-old actress deciding to cut her hair short, when an email arrives from the editor’s PA asking her to come to his office immediately.
‘I, I …’ She shakes her head at her screen. ‘Guys, I’ve been called to see Stephen.’
Her colleagues all stop what they are doing.
‘Hope I’m not in any trouble,’ she whispers to Joe, who has been her desk mate since they started together on the graduate programme all those years ago, the only man ever placed in the Cotswolds, on account of the fact he is gay.
‘You, Olivia Greenwood, in trouble?’ he says, with a roll of his bright blue eyes. ‘There’s more chance of the comment desk writing a balanced editorial about immigration.’
As Celine begins to sing about the nights when the wind was so cold, Olivia stands up and makes her way towards Stephen’s glass office.
One by one, journalists turn their heads as she passes to her destiny.
The office falls silent as people put everything on pause to witness this era-defining moment in The Morning’s history.
Stephen stands at his door, awaiting Olivia.
She turns round and gives her colleagues one last nervous smile before she walks into the next, long-deserved phase of her career: she is the new Selina Martin, the legendary Fleet Street columnist who has recently retired (translation: been sacked because she kept refusing to get a social media account, of any description, or file her copy on a laptop, via email, instead of dictating it drunk at 5 p.m. down the phone to whichever junior had drawn the short straw).
After weeks of speculation, the shocked smile on our heroine’s face confirms what everyone has long suspected: that after years of loyalty to both Stephen and The Morning, having turned down numerous exciting opportunities from other media outlets because in a world of flighty, fickle journalists who are only really interested in where their next pay cheque comes from, our heroine has principles …
Olivia Greenwood is to be rewarded with the biggest newspaper-column slot in Britain.
Which, given that nobody really reads newspapers any more, isn’t really saying anything.
But come on, this is Olivia’s fantasy. The whole point is to depart from reality.
Olivia thanks Stephen profusely for the privilege of making her a columnist during The Morning’s centenary year.
The editor opens his office door, and beckons her out to the editorial floor, which has risen to its feet as one, everyone applauding as our heroine bashfully shakes her head and pretends to be embarrassed by the attention.
Nina rushes past desks to embrace her friend, Joe not far behind.
‘I’m so proud of you,’ Nina whispers in Olivia’s ear. ‘You’re going to be great!’
Just as Celine Dion reaches her crescendo … Olivia realizes she is still on the 8.27 to Victoria being hollered at by a woman in her seventies who looks a bit like Paddington Bear, if Paddington Bear shopped at Phase Eight.
‘Will you turn that down!’ cries the woman, hitting Olivia on the shoulder.
Olivia removes her AirPods, startled. Somehow they have disconnected from her phone, which is now playing the climax of the seven-minute-forty-second Celine Dion track across the whole carriage.
Olivia scrambles to press ‘stop’ as the men at the tables begin to snicker.
‘Your music was loud enough even before you took the headphones out. I’d be surprised if they couldn’t hear it all the way down the line in Victoria. ’
‘I’m so sorry,’ says Olivia, breathlessly.
‘I do apologize.’ Her face turns red, as she feels the oh-so-familiar burn of shame that comes from upsetting someone without meaning to.
If she can just be smaller, quieter, nicer, just make herself more poised, polite, pliable, just until she’s seen Stephen … everything will be OK.