Chapter 12
Which is in itself kind of confusing. She feels like some sort of contemporary midlife Jekyll and Hyde, fighting with two extreme versions of herself.
She orders the second coffee and a cinnamon bun on the side, reasoning that the sugar and carbohydrate content of the latter might at least create a pleasant bed for the caffeine to nestle in.
Olivia slips off her shoes and puts her feet on the seat in front of her – another highly improper action she wouldn’t have dared to carry out a few days ago, especially not with feet as blistered as hers – before biting into the cinnamon bun, allowing its sugary flakes to drop everywhere: all over her top, down her jeans, and on to the seat around her.
‘Yes, your youthful ebullience is what we need to get us through this next challenge that journalism faces,’ he continued, hitting his stride after his momentary lapse.
Olivia had felt so proud that she had earned a place in this room, being addressed by a national newspaper editor, a job she was told so many others wanted but only a precious few ever managed to secure.
Proving to herself she could get the job had been as important as the job itself.
She pictures it now and cringes. All that endless harping on from management about how many people were waiting behind her to step into her role – the pressure of it had kept her in the job long after most sane people would have walked out (during that first, drunken, rambling rant from Henry Wellington, perhaps).
‘But if we can keep the printers rolling while the Nazis were bombing the shit out of us during the Second World War, then I damn well think we can keep them rolling as things like web pages and emails and search engines try to steal a march on us! Honestly. What a load of crap!’ He shook his head sadly and wandered over to the corner of the room that contained a cabinet full of whisky decanters and cut-glass tumblers.
The trainees watched mutely as he poured himself a drink and then raised it, like a drunk uncle performing an impromptu toast at a wedding.
‘To manning the helm, and to the future!’ he slurred.
The trainees picked up their mugs of tea and bottles of water and made feeble attempts at returning the gesture.
The message was loud and clear: the elder statesmen of the paper (there were no stateswomen, other than Selina, who had last come into the office in 1998) were allowed to live it up.
They had earned the right to, after all!
But the young whippersnappers were to be at their desks at all times, coming up with ways to stave off the threat of the internet, just in case it did happen to take off and become a permanent thing.
Had Olivia known then what she knew now, would she have stayed?
Probably. After all, it wasn’t as if she had possessed the balls to do anything daring until about forty-eight hours ago.
Olivia was one of the few trainees to have taken the editor’s little speech seriously.
She had her routine, which involved Coronation Street and ready meals and staying up only as late as Newsnight, at which point she went to bed and hoped the programme’s major talking points would percolate in her head overnight, becoming fully formed ideas that she could sprinkle into any conversations she had the next morning with her superiors – and everyone was her superior, including the bloke behind the till in the office canteen.
Olivia drifts back to the soft memory of those early days of her relationship with Nick.
That Sunday he had been able to convince her to go on the pub crawl, saying that he was in PR and they had met through work, so technically hanging out with him was all part of the job (even if that involved nothing more laborious than drinking vats of red wine, eating Yorkshire puddings, and later, snogging each other’s face off in a cocktail bar on Clapham High Street).
It was mid-Happy Hour that Nick announced he wasn’t actually working the next day, and that Olivia should bunk off and spend her Monday in bed with him instead.
She had whipped out her BlackBerry and emailed her boss saying that she had come down with food poisoning and wouldn’t be in.
Olivia winces now, at this willingness to drop all her boundaries the moment a nice man asked her to.
But as she sat there on that barstool, with Nick’s hands on her thighs, his feet touching hers, their noses grazing each other as they giggled and kissed and giggled and kissed, this email felt like the best idea she’d ever had.
It felt liberating. It felt, now Olivia came to think about it, similar to the sensation she got when she stormed out of Stephen’s office earlier.
But when she woke up the next morning in Nick’s fusty-smelling sheets, the eighties-style radio-alarm clock on his bedside table telling her it was 9.
57 a.m., she thought she was going to expire from shock.
She was going to be late for work! No, she wasn’t, because she had sent an email to her boss telling him she wouldn’t be coming in!
Which was worse, almost, because it meant she had lied to her boss!
Surely that was a sackable offence? Olivia needed to check the email!
To make sure that it didn’t contain spelling mistakes or grammatical errors that would give away the fact she had been drunk and making shit up!
But where was her BlackBerry? And how was she going to find it without waking Nick, who was sleeping soundly, and who she didn’t want to annoy because annoying him would also be unthinkable, worse almost than the fact her mouth felt like an animal had curled up and died in it and her breath probably smelt similar and ohmygoodness what if she’d farted or snored in the night?
She couldn’t know until he woke up and looked at her adoringly, but she didn’t want to wake him up in case it pissed him off.
She rummaged on the floor until she felt the BlackBerry’s keyboard, picked it up, and then, with dawning horror, saw its battery had run out and she was nowhere near a charger (Nick had a Motorola flip phone, RIP).
So she crept out of the bed, got dressed in the manner of Marcel Marceau, then exited Nick’s flat and fled for her own, where she spent the day in fevered terror that someone might have seen her on either the fifty-minute Tube journey, or the twenty-minute bus journey from the Tube to her shitty little shared flat in the most far-flung corner of north London.
Was she going to be sacked? Dumped? Both?
She had collapsed into bed that night in utter panicked exhaustion.
She’d have been better off dragging herself into work where she would have at least been paid to have a hangover, and she vowed to never bunk off ever, ever again.
How would she react if she were sacked now?
As she begins licking her fingers so she can dab up the remaining flakes of the cinnamon bun from the table, she fantasizes about an imaginary universe where she doesn’t have to work or pay bills or parent both her children and her husband and her own dad and rely on her stoned little sister for childcare.
A world where she could do whatever she wanted, where people bent themselves into pretzel shapes to meet her needs.
A world where she, like Nick, had the guts to quit her stupid, mainstream semi-corporate job and live by her principles.
But what are those principles? And what does she really want? If someone was bending over backwards to meet her needs, what would she even be asking of them? The questions opened up gaping big spaces, and she didn’t know how to fill them.
She wishes she could say that she would set about changing the world, engaging in activism and making things better for the next generation – the kind of things that would make her look like a good person, an unselfish one.
She briefly wonders why she isn’t a better person, and then stops herself.
Would a man ever beat himself up for not having an earnest-enough fantasy?
Or for staying in a shit job to support his partner as they pursued their own dream?
Olivia is dabbing another flake into her mouth when she is rudely interrupted by a bloke plonking himself down in the seat next to her.
She is completely flummoxed by his presence.
The train is almost empty and there are about seven hundred other places he could sit.
She shifts in her seat, closer to the window, and he shifts in turn, spreading his legs and moving into this blessed bit of personal space she has managed to carve out for herself.
She doesn’t want to look at him, because that might signal something she isn’t supposed to signal, but from the corner of her eye she can see that he is smartly dressed in corduroy trousers and a dark green wool jumper.
She angles her entire body so that she is facing the window, her back turned to him.
‘Enjoying that bun, are we?’ He speaks in what Olivia can only describe as a guffaw, in the kind of accent that she has got used to, having worked most of her adult life at a newspaper staffed almost entirely by men who left Eton, went straight to Oxford, and then into The Morning newsroom, on some sort of Fuckwit FastTrack. ‘Or what remains of it, har har har!’
Olivia takes a deep inhale, rolls her shoulders, and continues to stare out of the window.
‘You sure do have an appetite,’ he continues saucily, nudging her in the ribs.