Midland

by James Flint

  It was all so damn silly and she didn’t understand.

  Emily’s footsteps behind her. ‘Oh Mum. Let me help.’

  ‘No, no, it’s all right. I’m just a clumsy thing.’

  She’d cut herself on one of the potsherds, she now saw.

  ‘You’re bleeding, Mum. It’s not all right. Come on.’

  Emily knelt and started gathering the fragments and placing them into a bucket.

  ‘Careful of the roots.’

  ‘I am being careful. We’ll find a nice new container for it. I’m sure it’ll survive, if it hasn’t been killed by the shock of the fall.’

  Margaret stood and watched her daughter. She was a good girl, Emily. A strong back and good hips. And her hair. She’d often wondered from where she had got such beautiful hair. It wasn’t from her or from Miles, that was for certain. Most likely was Miles’s aunt Abigail, who had been something of a sensation at Emily’s age. She’d died of TB at thirty-five, and all that was left of her now was the little sepia photograph that hung in the dining room, framed in an oval of inky black card, and the crocheted bedspread she’d once made that they kept in the oak chest on the landing, folded into a plastic bag to keep out the moths. One day, perhaps not very long from now, those too would be gone, and there would be no trace of Aunt Abigail left on the face of the Earth.

  Already Emily had things tidied up nicely, had even managed to get the Clivia back in a pot. A plastic pot that was too cramped for it, yes, but it would serve for the moment. Margaret felt the clamp on her chest start to ease, and taking the plant from her daughter she returned it to its place on one of the wooden display stands, where she brushed off its leaves and pressed her thumbs reassuringly into the dark crumbles of soil round its stem.

  Minerals flowed up her fingers; air tumbled into her lungs.

  ‘You don’t need to go to the funeral on Friday,’ Margaret said, ‘but I think you should go to the vigil. I think Sheila and Caitlin would like it if you dropped by. Caitlin works in television, you know. She’s a producer.’

  ‘Does she?’ Emily’s surprise was genuine. She never ceased to be confounded by the reach of the Warwickshire gossip network. Despite not knowing how to use the Internet and being incapable of operating a mobile phone, her mother managed to keep tabs on an extraordinary range of people and their various activities. ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘You could drop in tomorrow and say hello.’

  ‘Yes, okay Mum. I get the hint. I’ll go and do my civic duty.’

  ‘You might enjoy it.’

  ‘It’s a vigil, Mum. Not a drinks party.’

  ‘What I meant was, you might enjoy seeing Caitlin. You’ll probably find you’ve got plenty in common.’

  —————

  So it was that after lunch the next day Emily put on the dress and jacket that she kept dry-cleaned for interviews and drove over to Shelfield. She knew what her mother had been getting at by encouraging her to see Caitlin: because Caitlin worked in media, the thought process would have gone, chatting with Caitlin might help Emily find a new job. But Margaret had no comprehension of the cultural gap that separated the worlds of TV and print. It was a bit like suggesting that Wayne Rooney have a chat with the England rugby coach about the possibility of doing a stint as a prop forward. Just because football and rugby were both ball games, and Rooney looked a bit like a prop forward, it didn’t mean his skills would transfer across.

  The world had simply grown more specialised since her mother’s generation had been in the jobs market, which had been buoyed for decades by the bottomless pit of baby-boomer demand and the consequent efflorescence of global trade. Things weren’t like that now. Somehow careers had become codified into weird abstruse specialities that often seemed to defy any basic economic sense. Work was now a world of doubt that demanded that everyone buy into it with absolute unwavering conviction while simultaneously pretending that none of it mattered a jot, and Emily couldn’t begin to claim that she understood the logic behind its most basic topologies. But one thing was for sure: it was no longer so easy to endlessly reinvent yourself with nothing in your back pocket but a liberal arts degree and an appetite for adventure. Not even if you worked in marketing.

  On some level Emily was sure that property prices took some share of the blame. Finding a place to live was now a vertiginous activity fraught with risk, as ever-higher rents sucked up an ever-larger proportion of your income and the scale of the mortgage required to secure even a modest flat in a crappy area had grown dizzyingly large. Getting a foot on the housing ladder, they called it, and Emily supposed the theory was that this ladder would take you up. But whenever she heard the term she thought, not of sturdy wooden struts giving you access to higher things, but of ladders in her tights, unstoppable rips in the fine fabric of being that pulled you only downwards.

  Part of Emily’s own little rebellion against her parents had been to resist their mantra of bricks and mortar as the only sure core for a life and turn down their repeated offers throughout her early twenties of helping her to buy a small flat in London. And now – as her estate-agent father took every opportunity to remind her – the cost of even entry-level studios was so high, and her salary as a journalist – when she’d still had it – by comparison so paltry that she’d effectively missed her chance. She could have got a loan, that wasn’t the problem: banks had been falling over themselves to lend to her while she’d been at Hudson. But the sheer amount of money she’d needed to borrow, not to mention the size of the monthly repayments she’d have to provide for, had been more than she’d been able to contemplate. Her only realistic option now was to let her parents buy her a property outright by selling something else in Miles’s portfolio so that she could in effect live rent-free at her family’s expense. They’d made it clear that this offer was available, but despite losing her job and moving back in with them while she looked for new employment, Emily had not yet been able to swallow her pride and take them up on it.

  This was partly, she knew, because of what had happened with Laetitia. The whole episode had left her incapable of making anything that approached a life decision. She no longer knew what she wanted to do, or where she wanted to do it. All she did know was that she never wanted to deal with anyone like Laetitia ever again.

  It had all started so well. Too well even – and perhaps that, in retrospect, had been the warning sign. Most people, in Emily’s limited experience, began a new job with a certain amount of reticence and deference towards their new colleagues, at least until they’d learned the ropes and got a sufficient handle on things to be sure that their ideas and contributions were genuinely valid.

  Not Laetitia. She’d had strong opinions on everything from the office decor to the magazine’s design from the moment she’d got her knees under her new desk – and strong opinions about everyone around her, as well. She’d straight away placed Emily in the role of confidante and couldn’t make a trip to the toilet without having some kind of encounter that she felt the immediate need to analyse in a stagey low voice across their desks or, if that was too undiplomatic even for her, via email or instant messenger.

  ‘Oh my God, I just ran into so-and-so – you should have seen the way she looked at me! It’s because of that comment you made in the meeting the other day about the beauty page. They just hate us, you know. They’re so spoiled with all their free spa days and complimentary sample boxes, they don’t know they’re born …’

  In the beginning this sort of thing was quite amusing. Her assistant’s frequent cigarette breaks were an inexhaustible font of gossip of all kinds, and Laetitia’s observations, while cutting, also seemed light-hearted and insightful. She had a satirist’s eye for weakness and vanity, and after so long chafing under the features yoke in what practically amounted to solitary confinement Emily found Laetitia’s Puckish willingness to say the things that she’d often privately thought about her workmates or the models and celebrities who danced their way across the pages of Hudson quite
refreshing.

  Part of Laetitia’s confidence clearly stemmed from having worked directly with Heather Monk on another title, giving her a clearer view than Emily had of the corporate structure of which Hudson formed just one column. Indeed, it was merely one of a collection of titles that made up the women’s ‘vertical’, as the various subcomponents of the small publishing empire were called, other verticals being cars, travel, design, technology and so on – a list that more or less corresponded to Emily’s feature sections, but had entire buildings and the output of multiple editorial staffs devoted solely to them.

  Two things about this made Emily uneasy. The first was that her job, indeed her entire creative output as a journalist and her romantic raison d’être for as long as she could remember, had turned out to amount to little more than a tiny market-tuned line item on some colossal financial spreadsheet. That all her hopes and dreams should have been so casually anticipated and captured in this way, Emily found depressing and somewhat demeaning. The second was the nonchalance with which Laetitia not only accepted this facet of reality without any hint of angst, but negotiated its geography as pragmatically as a parrot fish cruising around a reef in search of tasty bits of coral to nibble. Though she was only three years her assistant’s senior, this made Emily feel almost geriatric by comparison. Here she was, a member of an older generation still riling against the inevitability of the capitalist status quo, her attitudes about as useful as a Zimmer frame in a marathon.

  But if age was the issue Laetitia didn’t seem to notice. She was evidently thrilled by all things Emily; a bit too thrilled, if anything. She was always a little bit too personal with her questions about Emily’s background, thoughts, life; a little bit too ready to assume a bond between the two of them that didn’t yet exist. And what started out as professional courtesy on Emily’s part, making the newcomer feel welcome with a couple of trips to the nearest Prêt-à-Manger to grab some lunch and a couple of post-work drinks in the wine bar near the station, seemed to be interpreted by her assistant as a signal that they should always eat together, should always consult over social plans. It quickly added up to an overfamiliarity that, while it had been touching to begin with, was soon putting Emily on edge.

  Worse, though, was the turn Laetitia’s gossip began to take after her first few months in the job: a slow but definite drift from the volleys of acerbic but randomly targeted bons mots to more focused patterns of fire that were clearly designed to delineate ‘us’ – ‘us’ being Laetitia and Emily – from ‘them’ – ‘them’ being everyone else, grouped according to various sub-labels that Laetitia had already dreamed up.

  Emily didn’t like this at all. She was, she told herself, happy enough not to pull rank on her one and only team member. Flat working hierarchies were cool – ‘Hot or Not’ had said so only two months before. But she was not a stirrer by nature, she got on well with most of her colleagues whatever their various shortcomings, and she had no desire to see tensions introduced into office relationships that she found it hard enough to manage as it was.

  It didn’t help that the quality of Laetitia’s work was not exactly stellar. She’d come through her probation period well enough – the period in which, Emily now observed with hindsight, her charm offensive had been launched. But six months in and Emily was still pulling her up on operational basics regarding the software they used and the workflows they were supposed to adhere to, as well as chasing her continually to complete tasks – handling the contributors’ invoices for example – that had been firmly defined as her remit.

  It wasn’t that Laetitia did nothing; it was rather that she saw her responsibilities as a kind of smorgasbord of options from which she could pick and choose at will, rather than a set menu that she was in fact supposed to be delivering to order. On top of that her timekeeping was terrible – she was late almost every day and pulled continual sickies. When she was in work and not on one of her many breaks, she was constantly checking various social media sites or making personal calls on her phone. And worst of all she’d managed to upset at least three of their best writers, creating rifts that required a great deal of soft-soaping on Emily’s part to resolve.

  In an attempt not to become a dictatorial boss, Emily dropped repeated hints designed to help Laetitia appreciate the fact that her behaviour was deeply problematic. Initially the assistant seemed to take these suggestions seriously, saying how horrified she was that she should have given such an impression and assuring Emily that things would get better. When they didn’t, and Emily had to reiterate her guidance rather more assertively in their quarterly 360-degree review meeting, there was a scene.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re saying that about me!’ Laetitia spluttered when Emily directly criticised her for leaving the office at whim and spending working hours dealing with her personal issues. ‘I thought we were friends.’

  ‘We are friends, but I also have to be your boss and make sure we get our jobs done.’

  ‘Well there’s way too much to do, even for two people. I don’t know how you ever coped on your own. They’re exploiting us, you know.’

  ‘That’s not really the issue here.’ And we’d cope fine if you would just pull your fucking weight, Emily thought. ‘Look, maybe it would be better if I didn’t come to that Tom Waits gig with you on Thursday.’

  Laetitia looked at Emily with an expression that could not have been more stunned if she had taken the fire extinguisher from the corner of the room and dropped it on her foot.

  ‘You can’t, you can’t do that!’

  ‘I just think …’

  ‘Are you completely crazy? He hasn’t played here for seventeen years! I told Carter’ – Carter was Laetitia’s boyfriend, whom Emily had never met but about whom she had heard a great deal – ‘I told Carter he couldn’t go because I’d promised I’d take you. Have you even seen what those tickets are trading for on eBay? They’re going for like £400!’

  Emily had no idea why Laetitia slipped into a mid-Atlantic drawl when she was stressed or excited. Carter’s influence, perhaps (he was Canadian). But she didn’t like it and it made her even less inclined to spend another evening in her company. On the other hand, given the tension that was now in the air, maybe it didn’t make much sense to ratchet things up any further. And she did rather want to go to Tom Waits …

  ‘Okay. I’ll come. I would like to. But you have to understand that I need you to take these issues seriously. I’m always here if you want to discuss anything, or if you’ve got problems and need to book some time off. But you must, must, must talk to me about things first instead of just disappearing whenever you feel like it. Otherwise it just makes it impossible for me to plan anything.’

  Laetitia jumped up, came round the meeting table, and enveloped Emily in a hug.

  ‘I do, I will, I understand. Things will be better, I promise. I’m going to take on board what you’ve said, I really am. I know how hard it must have been for you to say it, and how patient you’ve been with me. Things are going to change!’ She disengaged and sniffed up a smile, then clapped her hands together like a little girl. ‘Oh I’m so glad you’re coming on Thursday! I really am! My friend Honor who got us the tickets says she can get us into the after-party. And some amazing people are going to be there. Thom Yorke and Jerry Hall, apparently … It’s going to be awesome!’

  —————

  The concert was indeed awesome, as well as awesomely loud, the singer’s voice making Emily’s brain vibrate as he ground his way through the set like some kind of giant industrial machine in urgent need of lubrication. Thom Yorke and Jerry Hall were indeed there – Emily saw them both – and so Honor clearly had the inside track, which wasn’t surprising, since she turned out to be the tour’s publicist.

  ‘Thanks so much for the preview,’ she beamed to Emily when Laetitia introduced them at the after-party, held in a little basement nightclub about five minutes’ walk from the Hammersmith Apollo that had been booked for the occasion.

>   ‘Oh right,’ Emily said, as the glow from the gig was extinguished by the sticky realisation that the tickets must have been a payoff for the preview piece Laetitia had written for the music section in Hudson’s latest issue. It wasn’t a mortal sin, and most journalists in London wouldn’t have given a second thought to accepting a freebie for an event they’d written up – this kind of perk was generally regarded as appropriate compensation for the low rates they were paid. But Hudson’s owners were American, and the Americans took a dimmer view of that kind of thing than the Brits did. Tickets for shows were supposed to be expensed and thus rendered visible to Accounts as a legitimised editorial cost, just as flights were. Books had to be returned to publishers, gadgets to PRs. Beauty products and booze were allowed to slip under the radar, as these couldn’t really be tested without simultaneously being consumed. But tickets weren’t in this category, although sometimes you could half convince yourself that they should be. Laetitia had clearly done just that, though Emily knew exactly what Bronwyn would say if she found out.

  But Bronwyn didn’t mention the tickets and nor did anyone else, and for the next few weeks things with Laetitia seemed to settle into a happier rhythm. She came into work more or less on time, did more or less what she was asked, and remained on more or less good terms with her colleagues. Emily took care not to overload her or push her too hard on minor infringements, figuring that in this particular circumstance less was most certainly more. But it was to prove a mere lull in the escalation of hostilities, and the last such one before outright war broke out.

  The final act began one Monday morning, when Laetitia just didn’t show up. Ten a.m. came and went without any sign of her. Ten-thirty, eleven, and still no Laetitia, not even a text to say she’d be late. By eleven-thirty Emily had called her three times and emailed her twice with no response on either channel. She was beginning to wonder if something genuinely catastrophic had befallen her assistant – she’d been stricken by a freak case of Ebola, or knocked down by a bus – when shortly after lunch in she wafted looking as battered and beaten down as a discarded fast-food carton blowing down a windswept street, and apparently as incapable of speech.