Chapter 18
Olivia comes to the next morning and all is quiet. Her husband is still asleep, the children are not arguing, but most of all – she suddenly realizes – her brain is not a seething cauldron of resentment and rage.
What the fuck?
Alone. In peace. Her head a serene stream as opposed to the constantly whirring washing machine it has been for … ooh, forty-odd years?
She reads back her message to her mum and instead of fury feels a strange sense of pity for her.
She realizes that ever since she became an adult, she has been a willing participant in the drama dynamic that exists between them, and that she can just as willingly change it – just as Tina decided to do with Peter.
And speaking of her dad, if even he can have the self-reflection he did the other night, then surely Olivia can too?
The last few days, she has been getting all the pent-up rage out of her system, and now she knows it is time to really put FRANK, FEARLESS Olivia Greenwood into action. No more whingeing and messing around.
At work, she shuts herself off from the bullying and bitchiness of Joe and Stephen by taking herself to her safe space, a dreamland of beauty and lust where anything feels possible. Her Net-a-Porter wish list.
This wish list has always been a place where she has quietly squirrelled away all the things she has most coveted, but has never had the confidence or money to buy.
Today she zeroes in on a skin-tight leopard-print minidress that costs the grand sum of ￡585.
This is a sum she does not have in her personal current account.
Her joint account with Nick, however? Well, that’s another story altogether, it being the place where they put their monthly bill and mortgage payments, but also, crucially, their monthly savings, so that over the years they have accumulated a small but not insignificant amount that they like to have as a cushion should anything go wrong.
As she watches Joe tapping away at his keyboard, Olivia decides that, technically, something has gone wrong.
Not the potential criminal conviction, nor the derailing of her career.
No. The thing that has gone wrong, Olivia realizes, is that she has spent so much of her life making herself smaller, smoother, less Olivia, essentially, in case she were to offend or upset a load of people who have never had her best interests at heart.
Or any of her interests at heart, for that matter.
It is that she has spent so much time actively displeasing herself, in the hope of pleasing others.
It is that she has gone out of her way to turn herself into a sort of human chaise longue for strangers and acquaintances and, urgggh, Stephen to get comfortable on, without once considering the fact that her back hurts, and her feet are starting to get really fucking sore.
Her need to be likeable, to always be good-natured and amenable, this is the great thing that has gone wrong in Olivia’s life.
So she checks that the skin-tight leopard-print minidress is still in stock, allows herself to feel sad about the fact she has never worn leopard print, or a minidress, not even in her twenties, let alone now she is staring down the barrel of the menopause, presses ‘add to cart’, rummages around in her tote bag for her wallet, finds the joint account card, types it into the website, adds the magic three-digit code that unlocks all the money, presses ‘place order’, feels a delicious thrill as the webpage reloads and doesn’t ask her to answer any extra security questions from her bank, then, joyously, announces that her order has been processed and is on the way.
She feels good. She feels like … the kind of woman who wears skin-tight leopard-print minidresses. What other kind of woman is she?
Olivia checks that nobody is looking at her screen.
She searches for the vibrator she’d once read about, the one that actually sucks on your clitoris as well as pulsating on it.
She has thought about this invention at least five times a day since she first heard about it, wondering at the type of woman who would have the chutzpah to order it, let alone use it.
Well, she is that type of woman. She is!
She may not have been a week ago, but now she is, and she doesn’t intend to waste a moment more of her life denying herself the orgasms that are so rightfully hers.
She clicks on a website (thankfully no alarm is set off by her searching ‘clitoral stimulator’ on her office computer) and sees there is a special discount for new customers.
She hits ‘add to cart’ on the ‘sonic sucker’, which looks much less frightening than it sounds.
Out comes the joint account card again – Olivia knows Nick won’t object to this purchase – and in go the digits, though this time their bank does want to carry out an extra security step before allowing the purchase to go through.
Of course it would be tricksy on this, thinks Olivia, who now has to go into an app on her phone and approve an alert.
IS THE PURCHASE FROM ORGASMS INC. YOURS?
screams a notification on her screen. She clicks ‘yes’, imagines herself as Meg Ryan during that scene in When Harry Met Sally, chuckles to herself, then becomes aware that Nina is standing next to her, staring at her monitor.
‘Working hard, I see?’
‘I can share the link with you if you want?’ smiles Olivia mischievously.
‘That would be great,’ sighs Nina, flopping down in the chair at her now-empty, former desk. ‘I’m going to need to let my work rage out in some way when the day ends and I finally get home.’
‘Want to talk about it?’
‘Not really, but I suppose that as my mentor and the head of the Women Rising programme, I should probably put it on record to you that our editor is a complete and utter cockwomble.’
‘Oh yes?’ Olivia looks at Nina.
‘He asked me to write a “quick, pithy on-the-day piece”,’ Nina does quote marks in the air, ‘about the pop star in the bikini. And after the scene in conference the other day, I wrote what I thought he would like as opposed to what I actually believe, which will teach me to be a disingenuous prick because he totally bawled me out for it. Said it was way too bitchy, which is a bit rich coming from a man who’s spent much of his life putting ticks and crosses next to pictures of famous women in frocks.
’ Nina lowers her voice. ‘He told me that I needed to write for the female reader, and not the trolls who comment, and that if I couldn’t hack the deranged witterings of people below the line, then maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a columnist. Then he stood over my shoulder as I rewrote it to his liking, which was my original liking. I fucking hate him.’
‘I hope you told him you fucking hate him. He’d probably get off on it.’ Olivia finds herself oddly relieved that she is only having to deal with the bullshit of being Anniversary Architect.
‘I was sad you weren’t there to say it to him for me. I would have loved to see how you would have brought your People Displeaser energy to proceedings. How’s that going for you?’
‘Well, Nina, I’m finding it oddly liberating.
’ Olivia spins in her chair. ‘I feel like if you’d thrown the level of drama I’m experiencing in my life right now into my life a week ago, I would have gone into an obsessive spiral.
I was only OK if everyone else was OK. But now I couldn’t give a fuck. ’
‘So I can see.’
‘It was like when Joe accused me of trolling you the other day. That would have mortified me before. I couldn’t cope with anything other than accusations that I was spreading joy.
Like, there was this time at secondary school when the headmistress stood up in assembly and announced that someone’s Game Boy had been stolen from their locker.
I hadn’t taken it, but that didn’t stop me from obsessing over the possibility that the head might think I had.
I went out of my way to appear dutiful and good, volunteering to help whenever a teacher asked.
I spent an evening consulting my timetable and making a list of all the places I had been, just in case I was asked for an alibi.
It turned out the Game Boy had been lost, and later found down the back of a sofa by an embarrassed parent, but I still spent the rest of the academic year worrying about all the ways I could accidentally find myself in trouble. ’
‘Christ, that sounds exhausting.’
‘It was,’ nods Olivia. ‘It is. But this feature, it’s freed me from that.
I’m not going to bankrupt myself emotionally in order to make Joe or Stephen happy, and neither should you.
We can’t spend our lives moulding ourselves into the kind of people who endlessly help others but always abandon themselves. ’
‘I’m glad I came for this chat,’ nods Nina.
‘I’m glad you did too.’ She notices Joe walking over to his desk, raises her voice. ‘Us women need to stick together, especially in this nest of vipers.’
‘Amen, sister.’ Nina notices Joe, high-fives Olivia, and then returns to her office as he slithers uncomfortably into his seat.
Olivia ignores him, returns to her Net-a-Porter wish list. She had long marvelled at people who had the ability to have an argument with someone and then move on without first resolving it – they had always seemed to Olivia like exotic creatures – but now she realizes she is one of those people.
She decides to do what most humans do when a massive fucking elephant walks into the room – she ignores it, instead of cosseting it and pampering it and attending to its every need.
Olivia is shocked at all the energy she has wasted, trying to make everyone happy.
She is horrified by it. Of course she was never going to rise to the top at work, when so much of her time has been taken up trying to be everything to everyone.
Like so many other women of her generation, she has been told time and time again that she can have it all, as if it was somehow a good thing.
It was a gift that her mother and grandmother had never been allowed, so she better bloody take advantage of it to avoid seeming ungrateful, or spoilt.
But she realizes now that even this notion of ‘having it all’ is a poisoned chalice, an image of perfection that no man had to ever bother even trying to aim for.
And it had removed any chance of a level playing field.
Every morning of her teens, Olivia and all her friends had woken up knowing they needed to be a wife, a mother, a captain of fucking industry, whereas all the boys had to do was finger someone and vaguely think about their GCSE coursework.
It was exhausting. It was endless. It was incredible that any of them had got to their forties without committing mass murder.
And as Olivia sits at her computer, thinking about how hot she’s going to look in that leopard-print dress, it dawns on her that she doesn’t want to be a superwoman any more.
Astonishing as it may sound, she just wants to be herself.