still hovered around nine stone and ideally wanted to be eight, like Liz Hurley, but there were some things you just had to live with.
If only she were more like Robbie. Her brother had an innate capacity for getting on with life. He never worried too much about anything and, as a result, he seemed to love exercise purely for the uncomplicated physical motion, as if the pump and pound of each straining muscle could push out extraneous thought. He’d done the London Marathon last year in under five hours without even trying. She’d been there to cheer him on past the finish line and he’d given her a huge, sweaty hug from underneath a crinkly silver blanket that was meant to help his muscles relax.
She hates running. The walking though … the walking was a good thing. Esme liked the routine of it. She liked putting on her trainers (last worn when she tried out – unsuccessfully – for the university hockey team) and packing her smart shoes in a bag to change into later because it prolonged the morning, delaying the inevitability of work just that little bit longer.
The trainers make her feel she is bouncing along the pavement. Today, the bounce is accentuated by her good mood. She’d had a page lead-in on Sunday about the power of optimism that was followed up by most of the dailies including the Mail, which carried a substantial op-ed piece by a ‘self-confessed Victor Meldrew’ headlined: ‘Optimism? Bah humbug!’ For the Mail to follow you up was a considerable feather in your cap. Dave, the news editor, would be pleased.
She reaches a stretch of Holland Park Road lined by upmarket shops. There is a butcher’s here that is rumoured to be patronised by the Queen. Esme once bought a chicken from them in an emergency (she’d forgotten the main part of a roast she was meant to be cooking) and was charged £16 because it had been ‘corn-fed’. At £16, she would have preferred it to have been fed the sacrificial entrails of small human babies, but she didn’t complain out loud. Most of her fury was internal. She was that kind of person.
She crosses the road at the traffic lights, upping her pace to fit in with the rhythm of a new boy-band hit that is storming the charts. It is a saccharine number about finding teen love and although Esme knows she should hate it, knows that any journalist worth their salt would pour cynical bile over the lyrics and the sentiment, secretly she loves it. At work, Esme tries to keep her naïve idealism under wraps, but it’s not easy. When they’d covered the Royal Wedding last year, she’d cried a little watching the service on the big screens in the office – just at the bit where William saw Kate in that amazing dress for the first time – and Dave had caught her.
‘Time of the month?’ he said, patting her on the shoulder. And then, condescendingly, ‘Don’t worry, Es. Harry’s still on the market.’
Her prolonged single status was a source of much office merriment. Well, she thinks, as she powers on up towards Notting Hill, she’d rather be on her own than in a marriage like Dave’s. He’d been with his wife since time began but was known as a shagger – it was all those long office hours and willing student journalists, desperate for a job on a national straight out of the City postgrad course. Shame, really, as his wife was lovely and normal: she’d been to a couple of the office Christmas parties and was a petite, surprisingly pretty blonde woman who worked as a supply teacher and – shockingly – didn’t drink much. They had four photogenic children at various schools and universities which meant Dave had no hope of quitting any time soon, unless an exceptionally generous voluntary redundancy package came his way.
‘You want my advice?’ he’d said to Esme at a recent leaving party, slurring his words and bending his head in too close to hers so that she could smell the brackishness of hours-old white wine on his breath. ‘Get out while you can. Go and make some money. Wish I’d done that. Wish I’d gone into fucking PR like my mate Rupert …’
She didn’t like it when Dave got drunk. It demeaned him, she thought, made him like all the others. Sober, he was a brilliant news editor: dogged but instinctive and blessed with a peculiar ability to inspire loyalty despite his personal failings. You genuinely wanted Dave to say something you did was good. In his day, he’d been a solid but unexceptional reporter on the Express and covered the first Iraq War. But it was editing that brought the best out of him, that played to his sense of mischief and his mistrust of authority.
Esme sighs. She has a bit of a crush on Dave, actually, which is odd considering he isn’t what you might describe as a looker. He is half an inch shorter than her for a start, with boxer’s shoulders and a chunky, muscular frame: not the type she’d normally go for at all. But there’s something about him. She’s always been a sucker for men in power, for a start, and he’s funny too, in a quiet, lethal way. She catches him sometimes, just after he’s issued one of his sarcastic put-downs to an unsuspecting reporter, and his face looks like a small boy’s: cheeky eyes and a lopsided grin that almost makes you forget the bad teeth and the irritating habit he has of practising his golf swings when you’re trying to talk to him.
She’s not stupid though. Esme won’t let anything happen. It’s hard enough being a woman in a newsroom without the whispers behind your back that you’re only getting the good jobs because you’re sleeping with the boss. Besides, she flatters herself that he respects her too much to try it on.
She turns right down Kensington Church Street, looking in the windows of all the lovely antique shops as she passes, filled with beautiful trinkets she would never be able to buy. The blossom is out on the trees: big pink clouds that she wants to squeeze, like a baby’s legs. Esme feels a surge of happiness that spring is here. The evenings are lighter and longer, sunlit by the yellow-green London glow. Ever since she moved here from her family home in Herefordshire, the excitement of the city has pulsated through her veins: a buzzing, booming sensation of being at the centre of things, of believing anything could happen.
Her pleasant mood is accompanied by a feel-good soul number, courtesy of Radio 1, so that, for a few moments, she feels as though she is the star of a beautifully shot indie film with an interesting soundtrack.
Then she remembers that morning conference is less than an hour away and a panic rises in her gullet. Stories, she thinks. I need stories.
The Sunday Tribune was one of the only nationals that still insisted its reporters must gather at 10.30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning in the offices of the overall editor and pitch two news stories for the weekend’s edition. When Esme first started there a little over eighteen months ago, fresh out of the Hunter Media trainee programme (flagship publication: Trucking Today), she had been desperate to impress. She’d brought in a bona fide scoop in her second week, involving the discovery of a protected bird species on land that had been earmarked for a controversial detention centre for asylum seekers. It ran on page five (right-hand pages were always the best) alongside a picture of an owl and some sad-looking Africans. The RSPB had called her story ‘game-changing’. The detention centre had to be shelved. A local MP had written to Esme to thank her in person. Dave hadn’t publicly acknowledged her success, but she had detected a slight thawing in his attitude towards her. She’d been thrilled.
But now, after a year and a half of Freedom of Information requests on how many chocolate HobNobs Cabinet ministers bought for hospitality purposes and Googling consumer-friendly research studies from American universities, Esme was starting to tire of it all. She had one half-baked notion for this morning’s conference about the rise in popularity of semi-naked charity calendars. They were everywhere, she’d noticed of late: middle-aged women with their baps out hiding their private parts behind a giant milk urn to raise money for some worthy cause. Esme had a hunch that the National Association of Nudists, a humourless organisation she’d dealt with in the past, would be unhappy about this. They’d probably think it wasn’t taking nudism seriously enough. She was sure she could whip them up into some kind of newsworthy frenzy.
Other than that, the story cupboard is bare and she’s almost at work. She alights onto High Street Kensington and
