Chapter 9
Olivia has taken a later-than-usual train to work – not out of any fear, or to put off the inevitable, but because she is still quite tired from Friday’s escapades and wants to take a service where she might actually get a seat.
She’s embarrassed by the thought of the fawning version of herself who would always arrive half an hour before anyone else.
Nobody was paying her for that extra time – extra time that could have been spent in bed.
Hours and hours, entire days, she had wasted sitting at her desk, hoping someone would notice and give her a big shiny medal.
As she plonks herself down next to a suited man in his sixties, she feels remarkably …
relaxed. She knows that she should be anxious about going to work.
That she should be ruminating wildly over what she will face when she gets there: the judgement from Stephen about the message she sent him on Saturday morning, the embarrassment of having taken drugs with a new colleague who is, after all, young enough to be her daughter, and the shit new role that she’s supposed to be grateful for.
She knows that she should be bargaining with some punishing higher power in the sky, promising that if she can just get through this day without getting sacked, then she will devote her life to prayer and service and good deeds.
But she’s starting to realize that life could be a bit different. That the things she spends her time on could be about what she wants.
Like eating pickled onion Monster Munch in bed, for example.
Day drinking in the garden to let off steam.
Giving yourself multiple orgasms, the type that can go on and on until you get bored, or tired, and decide you need to have a little nap.
She’d forgotten that this was a thing she could do to herself, and now she didn’t want to stop.
Just as she had forgotten that she could wear comfortable clothes to work: jeans, and trainers that don’t hurt her blistered feet.
She has never allowed herself to dress in anything like this for the office, but she figures that in her new role as a glorified party planner, she can be a bit more casual.
As the train passes East Croydon, Olivia decides that there are so many things she could be doing with her one precious life other than worrying.
It’s truly bizarre how absolutely clear she feels on this: que sera sera, whatever will be will be.
She plugs in her AirPods and turns up the volume on a ‘Celine Dion Classics’ playlist she found this morning on Spotify.
She feels a tap on her shoulder, and turns to the man sitting next to her, removing an AirPod as she does so. ‘Excuse me,’ he says, spittle flying everywhere, ‘but will you turn that racket down? Some of us are trying to think.’
Olivia sighs deeply and screws up her face. ‘Not again,’ she says, putting the AirPod back in. ‘This is no racket. It’s CELINE FUCKING DION.’
Then she turns the volume up so high that she gets an alert on her phone, telling her that she is in danger of damaging her ears. She waves the screen in the man’s face while cackling wildly. He gets up and moves to another part of the train, and Olivia spreads her tote bag over the vacated seat.
At work, she realizes she hasn’t got her pass – most unlike Olivia, given that in 2019, the security team for the building handed her the title of ‘Employee Least Likely to Annoy the Front Desk by Forgetting Their Lanyard’, the small plastic trophy still somewhere on her desk – but is saved by Joe who signs her in.
‘You’re in late,’ he says, surveying her outfit with a barely concealed sneer on his face.
‘And you’re rather rudely looking me up and down as if I’m auditioning for The Morning’s Next Top Model,’ snaps Olivia. ‘Which is not OK, in this day and age. So could you stop?’
‘Wow, Olivia!’ He pretends to lick his finger, and makes a sizzling sound to dampen down an imaginary fire. ‘What a zinger, I love it. Fair enough. So can I say that you’re looking fresh today. No make-up?’
As they step on to the escalator up to their floor, Olivia tries to remember putting on foundation, blusher, mascara, brow gel. She can’t. But she has no interest in discussing her beauty routine – or lack of one – with Joe; she is far more eager to mine him for information.
‘Hey, you know everyone round these parts,’ she says, changing the subject. ‘Have you met one of the new assistants, a girl called Rose?’
‘Hmmm?’ says Joe, looking up at her.
‘Rose?’ Suddenly, as if from nowhere, she feels pressure building in her stomach. She lets out a loud trumpet of a fart to relieve it.
‘What the hell!’ Joe tries not to fall backwards down the escalator. ‘Are you OK, Liv? You are not your usual suburban self today.’
‘Why are you always so rude?’ asks Olivia, her face entirely straight.
‘You think you’re being funny, or arch, but really you’re just a bit disrespectful.
All I did was let out a bit of hot air from my, frankly, hot arse.
It’s better it comes out that way than on to the page, as is so often the case in this place. ’
‘Oooh, Olivia,’ Joe shivers, looking excited. ‘I am here for this mood on a Monday morning.’
‘Right, so can you answer my question. Do you know anyone called Rose?’
‘No idea who you’re talking about.’ Joe shakes his head and follows her off the top of the escalator into the canteen at the entrance of the office.
‘Fat fucking lot of use you are to me,’ sighs Olivia, storming off to the bathroom.
To Olivia’s immense surprise, she doesn’t head immediately to the cubicle furthest away from the door, where she has always gone, fearful of anyone hearing her urinate or – even worse – defecate.
Instead, she locks herself inside the nearest available cubicle, pulls down the toilet seat, and relieves her pickled onion Monster Munch bowels with a loud sigh of relief.
As she wipes her behind, she is suddenly plunged back to Friday night, going to a grotty loo with Rose and singing the Haaland song to her as she peed, the one Jack insists on playing over Alexa at every given opportunity.
‘Haaland, Haaland/Yorkshire born, Norwegian lad/Roy Keane tried to kill his dad.’ She had hollered this at Rose, as her young colleague kindly used the sole of her Air Force 1 to hold shut the broken door in the ladies’ loos of … a nightclub?
When did she last go to one of those?
Olivia finds herself singing it now as she sits on the toilet seat. She is interrupted by a cough from outside.
‘Olivia?’ comes the unmistakable voice of Nina from the other side of the door. ‘Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine, thanks,’ she says with absolutely zero shame, another stunning revelation. ‘Just had a bit of bowel trouble after a heavy weekend of Monster Munch.’
‘I’ve been sent in here to check on you. Joe said you were …’ Nina pauses, and Olivia hopes this is because she is giving up and going away. ‘He said you weren’t yourself.’
‘Is that because I wasn’t wearing make-up?
’ Olivia pulls up her trousers and flushes the loo, then goes to exit the cubicle.
Nina moves out of her way as she washes her hands and admires the surprising clarity of her foundation-free skin, given the amount of ultra-processed food she’s consumed over the weekend.
‘I think he was just maybe concerned that you were, err …’ Nina starts nervously doing her hair in the mirror. ‘That maybe you were, I dunno, struggling with the changes?’
Olivia turns and looks at Nina, her young, immaculately put-together protégée who has made senior columnist at The Morning before she’s even hit thirty-two. She smiles at her, and lets out a small, impressed laugh.
‘Oh my love, I’m not struggling with the changes. If anything, they seem to have woken me out of a sort of stupor. The only thing I’m struggling with is the realization of what an absolute doormat I’ve allowed myself to be for the last, oooh, four decades or so.’
Nina begins squirming. ‘I think it’s really important to say that Stephen only told me on Friday morning, and I never meant to treat you like a doorma—’
‘Not you, you pillock. All you did was ask my advice and then, thankfully, ignore it. I mean what the fuck did I know? I should have been listening to you all along. All those hours I spent patronizing you by telling you to be humble and grateful for the opportunities afforded to you, all those fucking Women Rising sessions where I was essentially a woman falling into the cliché that is female martyrdom.’ She breaks into a childish, squeaky voice.
‘Oh if I just do everything everyone asks of me and never put a foot wrong, then surely I’ll be rewarded for being a good girl!
Give me a lollipop, someone, for being nice!
’ Olivia shakes her head, notes the look of alarm on Nina’s face.
‘Whereas you, Nina, knew to do the right thing. You knew that simpering to cockwombles was a terrible abandonment of yourself. And well done you, for standing by your morals and values. I’m just disappointed that I didn’t have the guts to do it sooner. ’
‘Well, I was not expecting that,’ says Nina, unsure what to do with herself.
‘To tell you the truth, because it’s all I seem to be able to tell anyone at the moment, neither was I. But here we are. Anyway, I’m fine thanks, especially now I’ve got that out of my system.’ Olivia pauses, realizes what she has said. ‘The rant, that is, not the pickled onion Monster Munch.’
‘Yeah, I got that.’ Nina shuffles towards the door.
‘OK, so I’m going to freshen up and see you back out there. Toodle-pip!’