by James Flint
Up the main staircase they rumbled, slaloming around Margaret (now on her way down), then through the divider door onto the old servants’ landing and down the backstairs in a potentially expensive tumble of tail, haunch, fang and paw.
‘The dogs have gone mad!’ Emily yelled.
‘For goodness’ sake let them out into the garden before they break something,’ Margaret called.
Emily headed for the breakfast-room door. ‘Are the front gates shut?’ she shouted.
Caitlin, keen to make amends for the chaos she’d caused, went over to the window to check. It was dark outside, but there was light enough from the house and the moon to make out their shapes.
‘Yes! They are.’
On the affirmative Emily flung open the door. The dogs rushed into the driveway and chased each other around to the front of the house, where they tore to and fro beneath the boughs of the cedar, kicking up rusty gouts of earth from its dead needle bed as they went.
Caitlin watched them from the window while her shout faded slowly back into the silence. It had hung in the air longer than she would have expected, caught somehow by the geometry of the wall, the angles of the room, the glass of the windows and mirrors.
I can see you.
I know what you did.
Wink, wink.
—————
When Emily went to take the rubbish out to the bins round the side of the house a little while later, she found Caitlin out there, smoking.
‘Hello.’
‘Hey.’
‘You okay?’
‘Yes. Just thinking. Want one?’ Caitlin offered her the pack.
‘No thanks.’
Caitlin leant forwards to stub what was left of her cigarette against the brickwork, her eyes curtained by a falling loop of hair.
‘When will your brothers get here?’
‘Matthew’s coming on the train in the morning, but Alex should arrive tonight. He said he’d drive up as soon as Rufus had been put to bed.’
‘Rufus?’
‘Their son. His and Mia’s.’
‘Oh yeah. I forgot.’
‘I thought you were kind of friendly with Mia?’
‘I guess we lost touch.’ Caitlin shrugged. ‘It happens when people have kids.’
‘Hmm,’ said Emily, knowing just what she meant. ‘It does.’
Caitlin nodded. ‘What about Matthew?’
‘Not much change there,’ Emily laughed. ‘Not on his income.’
‘Where does he live, these days?’
‘In Oxford, though he travels a lot. He helps organise these long-term environmental projects. If it paid better it would be an awesome job.’
‘Oh Matty. He always was a bleeding heart.’ Caitlin lit a second cigarette and blew a concentrated jet of smoke into the frigid air. ‘And what about you?’
It was a question Emily dreaded because the only truly appropriate response would be to curl up on the floor and wail. She wasn’t doing anything, but the reasons she wasn’t doing anything – well, where did they begin? In her childhood, in her relationship with her mother, in her genetic code? In her fear of maths, in the crush she had on her fifth-form English teacher? In her subsequent decision to study English at Southampton? How many layers should she peel back? How far down should she go? Which, if any, counted as primary cause? Which, if any, could really be isolated from the continuum of lived experience? What about her decision to even go to university in the first place, instead of dropping out and going travelling and writing a novel about her experiences, like she’d really wanted to? Maybe her idea to do the journalism conversion course at London City after she had graduated and then, during that, the choice she’d made – for no better reason than her feeling haunted, possessed even, by the ghosts of the authors of all the books she’d read – to take the print journalism module rather than the television one, even though the latter, given the age she lived in, would surely have been the more rational option.
At first print hadn’t seemed such a bad call. She’d emerged from City into the maelstrom of mid-1990s London, all Britpop and Blairism, when the fashion, music and art scenes were exploding, the Internet was arriving, and magazines and websites mushroomed out of any crevice large enough for three or more arts graduates to cram in some desks built out of crates and plug in their Macs.
Emily had dug out her trashiest jeans, combed charity shops for old band T-shirts, worn her hair in a side pony and started knocking out freelance pieces for anyone who would take them. And there were plenty of takers. It was a fairly straightforward matter to meet or phone or email the various commissioning editors, even the ones on the broadsheets, and place a review of a fashion show, a gig, a gadget or a new exhibition and get paid a couple of hundred pounds in return. Soon she was doing interviews with minor pop stars, up-and-coming artists and designers, self-styled dotcom entrepreneurs and newly minted celebrity chefs – interviews that were not only easier to write than reviews but also commanded higher rates.
Her contact book grew and she was out every night, which was just as well, as the room she rented in a shared house in Holloway was not a place she ever felt overjoyed to come back to. She had a series of flings, first with a fellow journalist, then with a DJ, then with a photographer, none of them serious but each upping the ante in terms of her levels of access to scenes and events not just in London but in glamorous cultural destinations: Paris, Venice, Barcelona, São Paulo, New York. By the time the Millennium turned she felt as much at the centre of everything as she’d ever expected to be.
And yet at the same time she felt more and more dissatisfied. She couldn’t say her life was empty – it wasn’t at all. Plenty of people would have killed to be in her position. But at the same it did feel a bit pointless. She’d gone into journalism to make a difference like the writers she idolised, not to cover celebrities and trends with a half-life of less than a season. It had been okay as a way to learn the ropes and to get to know London, but she was beginning to feel mired in ephemera, as if she was slowly sinking into a kind of media quicksand from which, if she didn’t extricate herself soon, she would never escape.
But the more she struggled against it the more the tide of banality sucked its way up her legs. She tried repeatedly to get commissions for weightier pieces about the exploitation of immigrant garment workers, or the impact of climate change on cotton harvests, or the use of child labour by major brands, but despite positive initial comments from the editors to whom she pitched her ideas, when she tried to follow up they’d all suggest she did something else instead, or would somehow always be in a meeting whenever she called, or would just stop answering her emails and voicemails altogether.
She spent the final night of 1999 hopscotching her way across London via a series of parties held by her art and fashion world connections, starting out in the east on the top floor of a semi-derelict 1960s factory block wedged between Regent’s Canal and the Hackney bus depot, whose machine rooms and lathes had long since been displaced by artists’ studios. Long external walkways ran the length of the building, connecting the different apartments and affording a view of the city that was neatly framed by the decorative iron filigree of the two Victorian gasometers situated on the other side of the waterway.
Standing in the cold, Emily sipped a vodka cranberry cocktail from a plastic cup and gazed out at the blaze of lights, trying to work out how she actually felt about living in the midst of this vast agglomeration, so different from the landscape she’d grown up in. She couldn’t decide, but then she’d have plenty more opportunity that evening to ponder the answer.
As soon as she’d finished her drink it was time to move on, and as if on a walking tour of the compacted layers of London’s industrial history, she and her friends left the studios and made their way past the City Farm and the abandoned Children’s Hospital and through the Boundary Estate, Britain’s first-ever council-housing development, built exactly a century earlier. At length they arrived in Shoreditch, th
eir destination a seven-storey building that between the two world wars had been a distribution centre for Lipton’s tea, then had been pressed into service as a vast bacon smokery, and now was in the throes of an architectural makeover that would transform it into a suitable home for advertising agencies, games companies and an exclusive private members’ club.
On this particular evening the gutted first and second floors had been tricked out with pop-up bars and art installations and crammed with revellers. There were more cocktails here – this time in a higher class of plastic cup – and then they were on the move again: off to Old Street station to get the Underground to Charing Cross and walk from there down to the Embankment.
They arrived way too late, the crowds so dense already that however much they ducked and threaded there was no hope of getting down by the river. The best they could manage was to squeeze far enough down a rammed side street to get a partial view of the Millennium Wheel. Even so, when the fireworks began – the much-vaunted ‘river of fire’ – they were so bright that they entirely filled what Emily could see of the sky, maxing out the CCDs of the handheld video cameras that people all around them were using to capture the moment, flooding the little LED screens with washes of undifferentiated light.
The year 2000. It had finally arrived. It was both extraordinary to be alive at such a moment, to be officially living in what for so long had been thought of as ‘the future’, and at the same utterly banal. However far out Emily and her friends pushed the celebrations – and they pushed them a fairly long way, on from the Embankment to a party in the premises of an indie record label in Borough, then south to New Cross for a warehouse rave, then back to Somerset House for a posh New Year’s breakfast laid on by some fashionistas, then to a house party in Highgate that rolled on for the rest of the day – at some point the New Year had to begin much like any New Year always did in the capital: with a hangover and the prospect of grinding a path through the slow months of bleak and enervating weather that, new epoch or not, lay ahead.
Within a few weeks Emily found herself really quite depressed. The millennial mood had carried her most of the way through January before it completely wore off, but in mid-February she went down with a stinking cold, and even when her system began to shift it she found it really hard to see the point in getting out of bed, let alone in trying to chase down any freelance work. It felt like the end of an era, not the beginning of one. Change was required but the Lemsips weren’t cutting it and she had no better ideas about how to make something happen.
But then, at 10.43 on a morning when the sky seemed even lower and the drizzle more relentless and penetrating than usual, an email popped into her inbox. It was from someone called Heather Monk whose name was appended, by means of an @, to the domain address of a large, well-known, American-owned magazine publisher.
The email itself was quite formal and began with an apology for any unsolicited intrusion. It went on to say, in fairly short order, that Heather Monk was the publishing director of a new magazine for women, still in the planning stage but due to launch in September, and she’d been given Emily’s name in connection with a vacancy she was looking to fill on the features desk. Might she be interested in coming in for a chat about the possibility of taking up a full-time editorial position on Hudson, as the new magazine was to be called?
Emily would have fallen out of her chair had she been sitting in one. As it was she was propped up on cushions on the futon in her bedsit, still in her pyjamas and dressing gown, her laptop gently warming her knees. Her hands were shaking so much she accidentally deleted the email while trying to hit ‘reply’. Once she’d calmed down and retrieved it from the trash she spent two hours drafting and redrafting what eventually, by the time she’d stripped it down to something she was satisfied had been completely cleansed of even the faintest scent of desperation, amounted to a three-line reply. Then she got up, showered, got dressed and ate a sandwich before forcing herself to read it through once again. She added a missing conjunction, corrected a typo, told herself it was now in the hands of the gods, and pressed ‘send’.
—————
Hudson’s offices were in an unpretentious but well-appointed building a short walk north of Victoria Station, on a quiet square in the triangle formed by Victoria Street, Buckingham Gate and the grounds of the Palace itself. It shared the address with several of its stable mates from the mini-empire, with one of which Emily had placed several pieces over the previous couple of years – the source of the recommendation to Heather Monk.
Ms Monk was a half-Jamaican Mancunian who had spent the last decade working for Harper’s Bazaar in New York and had returned to London in order to take up the position at Hudson. A willowy 52-year-old with rosewood skin and a headful of ringlets so evenly curled they looked as if they’d been planed off her scalp, she clearly spent enough time in the gym to imagine (correctly) that she could get away with wearing pink hot pants to work. That surprised Emily, as did her broad and readily summoned smile. She found Monk compelling, impressive and terrifying in more or less equal measure – a good combination in a boss. Just as well, because after a second interview with the magazine’s editor, Bronwyn Durrant, Emily was offered the job.
She signed the contract on March 10th, the day the NASDAQ closed above 5100 for the first time. Suddenly her depressive New Year hiatus was over and the new millennium was kicking back in on a positive note. As Emily walked back to the Tube through Victoria Station, she couldn’t think of anything she’d ever been more grateful for than the stapled sheaf of paper in her bag. Flushed with relief more than any sense of self-congratulation, she went out that night with a couple of girlfriends and got impressively drunk.
She started at Hudson the following week. The magazine’s demographic was 25–35-year-old educated urban women, adventurous and self-determined in their approach to career, sex and relationships, and Monk had made no secret of the fact that Emily had been approached because she fitted slap bang in the centre of that category. She was, in other words, the reader, and in that capacity she was encouraged in the many planning meetings she attended over the next few months to shoot from the hip about what she thought was cool, what she thought was next, what other magazines were missing.
She took the opportunity to repackage many of her previously rejected feature ideas and found them a useful currency, received for the most part positively by her new colleagues, of whom there were rather fewer than she’d imagined there would be. Apart from Bronwyn and her deputy, Miranda Walton, who confusingly shared a first name with the Picture Editor, Miranda Reid, there was the Managing Editor, Joss Williams, the Production Editor, Cathy Schwab, the Sales Executive Katharine Cosgrave, and the only man in senior editorial, Art Editor Elliot Sawyer. Next in the pecking order came the fashion desk, which comprised the Fashion and Beauty Editor, Becca Smedley, the Senior Fashion Editor, Andrea Glass, the Fashion Editor-at-Large, Ellen Moore – a formidable figure in the industry whose path Emily had crossed before – and the Executive Fashion and Beauty Director, Tina Childs (whatever she did). Then, as far as she could tell, came Features Editor Emily Wold, and after her the two men whose job it was to wrangle and corral the collective output of all of these women: Sub-Editor Christian Timmer and the Designer, Ed Williams (no relation to Joss).
Around this core hung a mist of creative consultants, contributing editors, assistants and interns. Up at the top of the building, positioned literally and metaphorically above them all, was Group Editor Brendan Mallory and the executive team that oversaw the operations of the various magazines on the various floors. Numbered among these minor deities was Heather Monk.
Of all these people the only one directly affiliated with Emily seemed to be a woman in her early forties called Marie-Louise Johnson, whose job description was Features Associate. Emily wasn’t sure whether or not this was a salaried position, but either way Marie-Louise didn’t seem to be in the office very much. Rather like Ellen Moore – though lacking the fashion
maven’s panache – Marie-Louise flitted in and out more or less at random, dropping idea bombs on Emily’s desk. When she actually produced a piece it was little more than a set of semi-evolved ideas, notes and musings, often without structure or even punctuation. Nevertheless she seemed to consider these offerings outputs of such genius that Emily should be actively grateful for the chance to pull them together and finish them off on her behalf.
Emily had imagined when she’d taken the job that the Features Editor would be running a Features department, and that her time would be more or less equally divided between attending cherry-picked events and sitting at her desk making decisions on the work her minions should do. But it turned out that this was Bronwyn Durrant’s role. Emily’s lot, as Features Editor, wasn’t to run a department; it was to be a department – and to do all of the work of that department more or less single-handed, including most of the subbing. Christian helped out when he could, but he was always being pulled in seven directions himself, and he worked so hard and seemed so permanently exhausted and put-upon that Emily felt guilty chasing him to do work she could spend yet another of her evenings in the office doing just as well herself.
As a result, despite her initial high hopes of finally getting to write the social-impact features she’d long been dreaming of, once September rolled around and Hudson hit the shelves Emily just never had the time to do them. The longer articles tended to come in courtesy of Marie-Louise or one or other of the contributing editors, and when Emily did float an idea of her own at an editorial meeting she usually found that it raised the hackles of the stone-hearted Katharine Cosgrave, whose mission in life seemed to be to nix anything that might in any way jeopardise the closing of an adjacent ad sale.
