it was fine, she’s fine. A bit … you’ll see, I don’t know. We should be alright.’
He seemed to be holding back, trying to protect me.
‘Emphatic stuff. Have you met the niece yet?’
‘Niece? Not another hopeless bloody intern? Not yet. When did you?’
‘It’s kind of an unfunny story.’
Asif and I walked in as you emerged from a hug with Gemma, a woman with hen-brown curls pinned into an insubstantial French twist. Like me, she was in her early forties, but with her corporate skirt suit and sensible hairdo, she seemed so much older than me. I’d heard she had built and sold many businesses, and that she’d bought Leadership practically on a whim once she’d identified ‘the brand’s multi-platform potential,’ whatever that meant. She had no kids and a fancy duplex in Marylebone, a house in Norfolk and some kind of Alpine ski chalet. Imagine.
I watched you and her inside the recently-constructed glass office she’d commissioned for herself. They were actually on the verge of building me my own office, just as things started to turn at Leadership. The end of year accounts came out and the directors suddenly went from signing off my every request to stalling on my requirements, then actively sidestepping contact with me so they could dodge admitting the perilous state of Leadership’s balance sheet to ‘their girl’, the junior reporter they’d ‘groomed for greatness’ and then appointed youngest-ever editor nearly twenty years earlier.
In that office, which in a better world would have been mine, Gemma grasped your shoulders with both hands. I could see you were staring at the floor as she tried to force you to look her in the eyes. You wouldn’t meet them. She gave up and scanned the office over your head, drew you close to give you a quick kiss on the head before finally letting you go. You kept gazing down before visibly gathering yourself and flouncing out of her office and into the open floor. It took just a couple of strides to get you to your assigned desk space, diagonally opposite mine. She wanted to keep you close to her, and close to me. And even then the reporter in me was asking why. What are you?
As you moved, I saw Asif take in every centimetre of you and your legs – solid stripes of muscle tense under black opaques, disappearing at the very last moment into a pelmet of leather. Asif, my one-time intern, my protégé who’d even chosen his login to please me when he’d first joined (StephenPatrick59, in honour of my love of Morrissey), someone who stood by me during the worst of it. He had seen me at my very best, just before my illness, before anyone understood the old company’s catastrophic finances, when it seemed me and my merry band could go on writing away, propped up by a semi-loyal base of subscribers and a modest advertising revenue, forever. These were the days before the first ‘tough conversation’ with the old directors on the ‘hard realities’ we couldn’t run away from anymore: the world had moved on and we hadn’t. Shortly after came the first redundancies, when we said goodbye to senior reporters who’d come up the ranks like me and who we couldn’t afford anymore, then the second round, where we lost our grizzled sub-editors, the connective tissue that always held the bones of Leadership together.
But even in those changing times, I’d been able to lobby for us to switch off below-the-line comments to encourage an elevated debate at real-life events where we’d document the outcomes. But that period, when people couldn’t hide behind their keyboards and usernames, was gone. Comments were now activated and often spilled over into the, at turns banal and cowardly, Twittersphere. Integrity and discipline were wholly lost in this modern world where people like you and, worse than that, those my age, feel it’s somehow both appropriate and interesting to share the first thing that comes into their heads. And as I watched Asif drink you in, something else I once understood was altering before my very eyes. I suppose you know, when you walk into a room, something in the air changes. I used to be capable of doing that.
‘She’s ready for you,’ you said as you passed by me, then, ‘Just be yourself, Katherine.’ I felt your breath on my ear, smelt your clean, warm scalp again. I shuddered.
‘Hi, come in, come in. Wonderful to be able to put a face to the name, finally. I’m sorry it’s taken this long to meet, I’ve been neck deep in the strategy, the financials and so on, but I know all about you.’ Gemma gestured towards a swivel chair I knew to be broken, though she didn’t. I nodded and perched on the crap chair without letting my weight bear down.
‘Likewise.’
‘We’re a bit late, so I’ll cut straight to it.’
My stomach fell. I knew she and her new board had been discussing ‘my future’.
‘Nothing formal or anything. No need to look so worried!’
‘I’m not, I’m just … Sorry, I had a bit of a nightmare this morning. I hate it when one of my team shows up late and goes on about the failures of the Jubilee Line, or whatever,’ I tried to smile over the familiar thrust of cortisol in my veins.
‘Lily explained. Did she tell you much about her background on the way in?’
‘That she’s your niece?’ And as I thought about it, I realised we’d been together in that taxi for almost an hour and all I knew was that you blogged. (Who doesn’t? Besides me, of course.) I should have asked you a million questions, but there I was, armed only with a scrap of information on your relationship with Gemma.
‘That’s right. She’s also very bright and very young, but I wonder, could I ask you, in confidence, to keep an eye on her? Asif says you’re much stronger than you seem on paper.’
I was confused. Damning me with such faint praise didn’t sound like the Asif I knew. I looked over at him, walking towards the space behind your chair, then placing his hands squarely on the back of it, right above your shoulders.
‘Right. Thanks. I am really strong,’ I flustered.
‘You probably understand it was a bit of a tussle with the new board to keep you on, but I won and I’m really glad I did.’
‘No. No, I don’t, exactly. A tussle? Could you … what does that mean?’
‘Oh, Lord, I assumed they’d kept you quite close to the process … Well, it was the board’s preferred option that we maybe start afresh. New look, new management, new editor. But I thought it right and proper you got to be part of the new now, so here we are.’ She smiled, as if she expected me to thank her for letting me keep my post at a magazine I’d lived and breathed since I was almost a girl, a title I’d shaped. I had no choice but to play along. I needed my job, my second home in the world, so I couldn’t get as angry as I was entitled to.
‘OK, well, thank you, Gemma. You can count on me to … I’ll always keep going,’ I garbled. My once-familiar territory as unstable as the broken chair trembling beneath me. Gemma began speaking again, talking at me like she’d made index cards beforehand. I knew if I could muster the energy, I’d already despise her.
‘They tell me you’ve put a huge amount of effort into the first new-look issue. I can’t wait to read it all tomorrow, I’m so glad to hear you’ve committed so much to what I really hope is going to be an exciting new chapter for all of us.’
I was glad she’d noticed. I’d gathered enough resolve to make sure we’d come out of the blocks under the new owners with a strong issue, getting the interns to set up most of the interviews, do the background research and fact-checks, but writing the lion’s share of the features and profiles myself.
