Chapter 26
The website for Stop the Press makes for particularly depressing reading. More depressing even than any of the increasingly deranged comments that get posted under Nina’s articles on The Morning’s website.
She revisits Rose’s not-so-little venture on the train back from Brighton, all the while chomping down on a bag of Percy Pigs – the lure had simply become too much as she passed through the station on her return journey.
Stop the Press is committed to creating a media landscape that is truly free.
Currently, our national newspapers are a disgrace to journalism …
and most importantly, to democracy. They are funded by the few, for the few – and the dwindling numbers reading them are a reflection of this.
We want to provide a viable alternative to the mainstream media, one that exists without misinformation or bias and which truly serves the people, instead of lying to them.
Olivia bites off an ear, reads on.
To do this, we have made it our mission to expose the harmful practices of many of the so-called journalists who work for national newspapers, and other sections of the legacy media.
We achieve this through rigorous research and our own investigative journalism.
It is our hope that through shining a light on the darker parts of the national press, we will both detoxify it and force it to cover subjects that truly matter: subjects such as the climate crisis, war, famine, and the oppression of displaced people.
Olivia imagines what the likes of Stephen, Hugo and Andrew make of Stop the Press’s mission statement, their cynical, poisoned minds no doubt reading it as virtue-signalling wokery.
But what, exactly, were they doing with journalism, other than using it as a way to feel powerful and important?
Weren’t they being every bit as virtue signalling and self-righteous, just in a way that only benefited themselves?
Olivia reckons that the story about Rose’s poor mum was probably the last time Stephen actually did any reporting, and what was the noble goal of that particular news item, exactly?
Olivia googles the banker, finds the old reports on the websites of various tabloids, the tenor of each story being that without the ‘pernicious influence’ of Rose’s mum, her married lover might not have played so fast and loose with British taxpayers’ money.
Words like ‘harlot’ and ‘seductress’ jump out at Olivia, and she wants to cry for the woman, for Rose, their lives irrevocably shattered for the sake of a cheap red-top thrill.
But she also wants to cry for herself, for the twenty-something version of her who had felt that the only way to survive was to deny all her feelings, to double down on her shame and be belittled by someone who had actively hurt her.
Everything in her told her the world would side with Stephen; she couldn’t even see a glimpse of a place that would believe and accept her version of events.
Now, for the first time in her life, she has encountered the smallest of outposts where she has felt strong enough – safe enough – to reveal her truth.
And in that space, all the hurt and anger she’s had to tamp down over the years has begun to bubble up.
She puts an entire Percy in her mouth, chews.
She is going to sink that motherfucker like the Titanic.
She is the iceberg that is going to bring him down.
She doesn’t know how she’s going to do it, but she knows she is going to enjoy watching him disappear beneath the waves, taking everything he stands for with him.
Olivia looks out at the tracks, as the train seems to have ground to a halt.
She stares at the blocks of new-build flats that back on to the railway, the windows into other people’s neat and ordered lives.
She sees the back of a baby, bouncing in a Jumperoo, the infuriatingly jolly music of which Olivia can still recall now, a whole decade on from her last experience of new motherhood.
As she watches a mother beaming down at her gurgling baby in its bouncer, she feels bile rise in her throat.
She feels a sort of rage at herself, for not being able to understand that time as magic, for giving so much of her energy to her overlords in the office, the ones who had stay-at-home wives and nannies and cleaners and who didn’t have to worry about getting their figures back, or their careers back, or anything back, actually – for it was all there waiting for them obediently, never daring to go anywhere, because it belonged to them and always had done.
Her phone buzzes with a notification. She ignores it, puts it away in her tote bag.
The conversation with Rose has dislodged things that she’d never properly allowed herself to admit before …
things she had kept hidden neatly inside her, so neatly that even Nick was not privy to them.
What is she doing with her life? How has she got to this point, a woman-child who is terrified of speaking up for herself, or expressing even the most basic of needs and truths?
When Olivia thinks about this now, she can see with absolute clarity what it has been about.
She has had no sense of self. She has never learned to trust her own thoughts and feelings.
At home, any expression of emotion that didn’t involve being good or happy was translated by her mother as attention-seeking and unwanted.
Olivia wonders now what is so wrong about a child seeking attention – perhaps, if they are doing that, you ought to damn well give it to them.
But she’d never been able to apply that empathy to herself.
She had hung on to her childhood belief about being an attention-seeker with all the devoted fervour of a cult member.
To let it go would be to cease to exist in any meaningful way whatsoever.
And yet, like it or not, that encounter with Rose has shifted something inside her.
Somehow a space has opened up, a place in which she can begin to build a structure that safely houses the courage of her convictions.
And now that space exists, she has to start putting things right.
She has to begin living her life in a way that suits this new, adult version of herself, rather than the terrified little girl cowering inside her who has been running the show up until that fateful Friday she met Rose.
She needs to run with her new-found control.
She needs to get shit done. And she needs to start with Nick.
Olivia cooked the idea up as she lay in bed that night, wide awake, ruminating over all the memories of her early career that had started flooding her head.
It was as if they had been unleashed by the younger woman’s terrible story, set free by Rose’s trademark tone, so familiar despite the fact the two of them had only actually met twice.
How could that be possible? How could one night out have managed to upend her whole life?
As Nick snored merrily beside Olivia, his sleep disturbed by nothing more pressing than the contents of the next morning’s CrossFit workout, she was hit again and again by memories of incidents that involved rampant sexism, wild misogyny, barely concealed bigotry.
Was this perimenopause? Was some strange hormonal fluctuation responsible for the veil dropping away to reveal the truth about all the grubby, grotesque details she’d somehow managed to blank out for a good couple of decades?
She’d read about women her age becoming fully fledged insomniacs, and she wondered if it was because deep in the dead of night, their bodies were finally giving up all the terrible misogynistic shit they’d hidden inside them in a simple effort to carry on.
But her brain had been waiting for the moment when she was finally ready to face the reality of herself.
She hadn’t been altered by the Erling Haaland …
she had merely been given permission to be herself, without any filters.
And she wasn’t going to throw that away now. She could never unhear it, or unsee it.
She began to hatch her plan, finally falling asleep at some point after 4 a.m. It started to slot into place the next day, when Jack received an invitation to a sleepover the next weekend, from Jonathan, of all people, the head of the football boys.
The WhatsApp had come through unexpectedly, given that Olivia had managed to exit every school group in existence, but Jonathan’s mother was obviously a better woman than her, and had managed to track down her number.
Jack’s excitement had been instant, replacing any of the remaining collective horror about what had taken place at Lily’s fortieth, and it allowed her father a chance to start making up for his behaviour.
Sheepishly, Peter had suggested that she and Nick go out for dinner that Saturday, with him watching over Saskia.
‘You mean Saskia watching over you?’ Olivia had shot back, nobody bothering to argue with her.
Olivia had decided that what she needed to tell Nick required more than a dinner.
It required privacy, and time, and space.
So she had expedited the night away, moving it from after the centenary party to the very next weekend.
She had sold it to Nick as an opportunity for them to spend twenty-four hours in bed, with the vibrator that had just arrived, and he had agreed that this was a very good idea indeed.
Saskia had initially moaned at the prospect of being left with her fuckwit of a grandfather, but had quickly relaxed her resistance when she realized it meant she could essentially be alone in the house, without her annoying brother or parents there to bother her, or eat any of her protein bagels.
Olivia had chosen a hotel not too far away, a place that had a last-minute offer on, including dinner and a half-bottle of champagne and box of chocolates in the room upon arrival.
She thought it was going to take more than a half-bottle of champagne to let Nick know what she needed him to, but it was at least a start, and after her gleeful shopping spree she didn’t feel she could afford anything better.
Once they were there, with their tiny chocolates and thimble of champagne, Olivia was going to tell Nick everything.
About Rose, about what happened all those years ago with Stephen, and about her other intention, the one she’s not yet fully formed herself.
She’s going to get it out in the open so she can come up with some sort of solution, like the grown-up she is.
Like the adult she has only very recently become.