Midland

by James Flint

  Unable to get any sense out of her in the panopticon of the open-plan, Emily steered her into an empty meeting room, in whose relative privacy she managed to extract Laetitia’s latest tale of woe.

  ‘Carter’s left me,’ she said eventually, once she’d stopped gasping long enough to catch a proper breath. ‘We had a massive row last night, and about two o’clock this morning he just packed his bags and walked out.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Emily, wondering how she was going to cope given that it was press week and Laetitia was now no doubt going to be no help at all. ‘That’s terrible,’ she added. ‘You poor thing.’ And she stopped there, the despair that she felt rendering her incapable of expressing further sympathy. It was all she could do to feign sufficient interest to ask Laetitia what the argument had been about.

  ‘Oh I don’t know! Nothing! That’s the stupid thing! Nothing at all! You know what these things are like.’ Emily didn’t, but knowing what Laetitia was like she could imagine the rest. ‘You start out bickering because you’ve run out of milk and the next thing you know you’re screaming at each other and throwing things. The fact is he’s not been happy since I took you to that Tom Waits gig instead of him. He’s been on and on about it, and it came up again last night. He thinks I betrayed him.’

  ‘Over tickets for a concert?’

  ‘You don’t understand. Tom Waits is like Carter’s total idol. He’s obsessed.’

  ‘So why didn’t you take him? Why take me?’

  ‘Oh but I’d had such a bad appraisal and I just wanted to make things better.’

  Emily couldn’t help it. She could actually feel the carotid artery bulging in her neck. If she didn’t say something it was going to burst. Either that or the backpressure was going to give her a cerebral haemorrhage.

  ‘Well that was your choice. If you recall I did point out at the time that all you needed to do was show up on time and do your fucking work.’ She shouldn’t have said fucking. She knew she shouldn’t have said fucking. But it just squirted out like the plug of pus at the core of a particularly deep and angry zit, and when it did the release of pressure felt just so fucking good.

  ‘But I have been, I have been! I’ve been trying so hard.’

  ‘Yes,’ Emily sighed, ‘yes you have.’

  ‘So why are you swearing at me? Why are you swearing? This isn’t my fault!’

  If the heads turning on the main floor were any indication, Laetitia’s voice had reached a pitch capable of penetrating the meeting room’s thick glass wall. In an attempt at damage limitation Emily jumped up and fiddled with the Perspex control rods that rotated the internal blinds. Two of them functioned correctly but the third had developed some kind of fault, a jammed pinion or cracked cog, and its slats remained stubbornly horizontal. She yanked at it in frustration and there was a soft crack as the rod snapped from its fixing and came off in her hand.

  Gripping it like a whip, she turned back to face her assistant. ‘But it’s never your fault, is it Laetitia? When are you going to start to take some responsibility, huh? When?!’

  Laetitia looked from Emily to the plastic rod and back again. Then, her face absolutely rigid, she retreated slowly backwards. When she reached the door she grabbed the handle, slipped from the room and fled down the other side of the glass partition in the direction of the lifts.

  Emily was still standing holding the rod and trying to digest what had just happened when Miranda Walton stuck her head in through the open doorway.

  ‘Is everything okay?’ she asked, through a smile of precisely calculated benignity.

  ‘Laetitia’s in a bit of a state,’ Emily flailed. ‘Boyfriend issues.’ She lowered the rod, glanced around for a bin to put it in, anything. ‘And I broke this.’

  ‘Well, if you need any help …’

  ‘No, thanks. It’ll be fine, I think. She probably just needs some time. I think I can cope.’

  But Emily couldn’t cope. Not with the way things progressed.

  —————

  Laetitia didn’t reappear that day, but she did turn up the next, arriving on time and getting on with her work. She was pale though, and almost completely silent. When she did speak she took care to keep the subject matter strictly limited to the task in hand and used a low, tremulous voice clearly and somewhat pathetically intended to evoke sympathy. Unfortunately for Laetitia, Emily rather liked this new assistant who kept her mouth shut and got on with her job, and she was able to avoid rising to the bait until the edition was put to bed at the end of the week.

  ‘So, how are things?’ Emily asked casually, as they were packing up for the day.

  Laetitia shrugged as if the desperate need to emote was the last thing on her mind.

  ‘Oh, you know,’ she squeaked. ‘Not great.’

  ‘Did you patch things up with Carter?’

  ‘Nope. He came back and took the rest of his stuff while I was at work on Tuesday.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘It was his flat and he’s given notice to the landlord. I can’t afford to take it on, not on what they pay us here, so next month I’m homeless unless I can find somewhere else to live.’

  Emily’s next ‘Oh’ was different. Things were clearly a bit more serious than she’d realised – perhaps Laetitia was genuinely in trouble.

  ‘I don’t know how I’m going to find a room in, like, three weeks. You know what it’s like trying to get a place.’ It was true. Getting a half-decent rental in London that was clean, convenient and secure and not hopelessly overpriced could take months of footwork. All the agencies had horrific waiting lists and anything good that was advertised in Loot or on Craigslist got snapped up within the space of a few minutes. ‘You live in a shared house, right?’ she continued. ‘I don’t know, maybe one of your roommates is moving out or something? If you hear of anything will you let me know?’

  Emily gulped. ‘Yes, of course.’ In fact someone in her house had only recently announced their intention to leave, but the thought of living with Laetitia as well as working with her was more than she could stomach.

  She might have dodged this particular bullet, but Emily would nonetheless find her life dominated by Laetitia’s flat-search for the next several months. She was not spared the details of each of the twists in the saga, nor the rollercoaster of emotions that accompanied them, nor the resumption of the random absences that inevitably ensued. And of course every time Emily dared to complain about the effect all this was having on her assistant’s ability to do her job there came the immediate rejoinder that none of it would be happening if it hadn’t been for Emily’s taking up that ticket to go to Tom Waits.

  The situation was added extra piquancy by Emily’s growing suspicion, weird though it admittedly was, that Carter didn’t actually exist. For no reason other than the idle curiosity to discover what kind of person would have thought it was a good idea to ever have moved in with Laetitia, she Googled him one day and drew a complete blank, something which by that point in the history of the Internet was highly unusual. Her investigative appetite whetted, she hunted through some of the new social networking sites and found nothing on them either.

  After that she began to make some subtle enquiries at work under the pretext of wanting to know more about this arsehole that had left her assistant homeless. But no one other than her had ever heard of him, or for that matter had even heard of Laetitia having a boyfriend. Not that this was grounds for anything – her colleagues’ private lives were their own affair, and people didn’t exactly bring their partners into the office to say hi. But it did seem odd that her voluble, neurotic and relationship-obsessed assistant, who spent so much of her time examining and discussing the minutiae of the lives of everyone around her, should not have mentioned the man with whom she had been living to anyone but Emily.

  Whether or not Carter was real, the notion that he wasn’t and had been invented by Laetitia – to make her seem more normal perhaps? More loved? – lodged itself in Emily’s brain. If there
had been no Carter, then there presumably had been no flat and no sudden crisis of homelessness. Had the whole split-up been an elaborate ruse to get Emily to feel partly responsible for Laetitia’s domestic situation and generate an inexhaustible source of excuses for being late to work? It surely couldn’t be possible. And yet it felt like it was. In order to further test her theory she wanted to probe Laetitia for more information about the mysterious Carter, but she couldn’t think of a way to do it without appearing overtly suspicious, which perhaps confirmed that it was in fact pretty odd of her to be entertaining such a theory in the first place. People didn’t go around inventing other people, did they? And people didn’t go around imagining that other people invented other people.

  It struck Emily, as she lay awake one morning with all this swirling around in her head, that the stress of working with Laetitia was getting to her. She was in the office longer hours now than she had been before her assistant was hired, as the job of managing Laetitia took up more time than Emily was saved by the younger woman’s efforts, such as they were. And when she left in the evening the Tube journey home wasn’t long enough to allow her to decompress from the stress of the day: that required at least two large glasses of the crappy wine she’d started buying in boxes from Tesco’s and which she stored on a shelf in her room. She’d have preferred to drink in company but her social life had completely unravelled; she hadn’t seen her friends for months and had fallen out of so many loops – most of which now featured babies – that the whole social structure she’d spent so much of her late twenties earnestly piecing together seemed damaged beyond repair.

  On top of all that, or more likely because of it, she wasn’t sleeping properly, nodding off whenever she took a moment to sit and read or watch TV, only then to wake several times during the night. Most mornings she snapped awake some time between five and six a.m. as exhausted as if she’d not slept at all and nursing a ball of acid foam deep in her belly. She then lay in bed stressing about the possible curve balls Laetitia was going to throw her that day, until the maddening circularity of her thoughts finally drove her out from under the duvet and forced her to find the willpower to assemble the cup of tea and piece of toast that served her for breakfast.

  And then came the moment that she finally snapped. The trigger was something quite trivial: Laetitia’s failure to put through the payments for yet another contributor. The journalist in question had rung up and given Emily a hard time down the phone. When she’d finished the call, despite knowing absolutely that she shouldn’t, Emily swivelled round in her chair until she faced her assistant.

  ‘Did you hear that? Did you? That is what happens when you fail to make sure people get paid. She says that’s the fourth time you’ve forgotten her. But I’m the one that gets it in the neck.’

  Laetitia continued typing whatever she was typing for a few long seconds.

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Martha Samuelson. Couldn’t you tell?’

  ‘Oh, her! She is such a pain. I can’t believe you even put up with that kind of crap from her. If it was me I’d just tell her to go screw herself. I mean let’s face it, she can’t write for shit.’

  Emily actually felt her jaw go slack at this. ‘I cannot believe you said that,’ she spluttered. ‘The quality of her writing is not the issue here. She at least files on time. It’s your repeated failure to actually keep up with the most basic paperwork that’s caused this situation.’

  ‘I can’t help that. I do words, not numbers. I shouldn’t have to handle that kind of stuff. That’s Payroll’s job.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ Emily had raised her voice, she realised.

  ‘Yes I’m serious. You’re always complaining about our workload, but it’s that kind of bullshit that wastes our time. If you stood up for us like an editor should and got the people who were supposed to be doing that kind of thing to do it instead of bouncing it down the line onto me, then we wouldn’t have a problem.’

  Emily didn’t know how to respond to this. Like so much of what Laetitia said the notion contained a quantum of truth, but it was being used as a spice to disguise the rotten nature of the major ingredients: her own work ethic and attitude.

  ‘I cannot deal with this,’ she said, far too loudly. ‘I cannot deal with you right now. I need to, I just need to … I just need to take a break.’

  Before she really knew what she was doing, Emily found herself doing a Laetitia: heading down in the lifts, out the building and across the street to the little park for want of anywhere else to go. She’d never really smoked, but now she bummed a Silk Cut off a man sitting on one of the benches and stood at the base of a large London plane tree, whose leaves she hoped would hide her from anyone looking down into the square from the office, and puffed away in the mistaken belief that a hit of nicotine would help calm her down. The cigarette, however, only succeeded in making her feel sick and light-headed and in need of something to remove the foul taste in her mouth. Leaving the square, she cut through to Buckingham Palace Road and strode past the souvenir shops and restaurants until she found a café capable of serving a reasonable cup of coffee. She briefly considered going into a pub and having a brandy but decided against it. It wasn’t even lunchtime, and she was at some point going to have to go back into work. She allowed herself a mocha and a slab of rocky road instead and returned to the park to consume them before tackling the re-ascent to her desk.

  Miranda intercepted her before she got past the door of the kitchenette.

  ‘Ah, Emily. There you are. Can I have a word?’

  ‘Um, sure.’

  ‘Bronwyn’s out today. We can use her room.’

  Emily followed the deputy editor as she threaded her way across the production floor, reddening as she went – it all smacked of being sent to see the headmistress, and the fact that no one dared lift their eyes to look at her made it that much worse. Laetitia, she noted, was not at her computer, and she hoped to God that she wasn’t already in Bronwyn’s office waiting for Miranda to adjudicate their row. But the room was empty, and when they entered Miranda went and sat behind Bronwyn’s desk in Bronwyn’s chair and waved Emily onto the low two-seater sofa pushed against one of the walls opposite a giant framed print of the cover of the inaugural issue of Hudson.

  The cushions were soft and Emily sank into them as she sat. She couldn’t very well lean backwards and it wasn’t possible to lean forwards either, so she was forced to sit bolt upright on the very lip of the seat, her body angled so that she could face the deputy editor, her legs folded so that her knees were above the height of her hips. It wasn’t a position of strength.

  ‘I’m sorry about earlier, Miranda,’ Emily began. ‘Maybe you were right to ask me if I could cope. Things have been very difficult with Laetitia. Actually I’m quite glad of a chance to discuss—’

  Miranda cut her off. ‘Emily, before you go any further I think you should know that Laetitia has made a formal complaint against you.’

  Emily forced a smile. ‘What, already? And then gone off home I expect. This is part of the issue—’

  ‘Not today. After your last appraisal meeting. It’s very serious. She says you’ve been subjecting her to an on-going campaign of bullying and victimisation. She says you threatened her with a plastic rod.’

  Unable to process the whole of this statement, Emily made the mistake of reacting to the last thing Miranda had said.

  ‘What? The thing you use to twist the blinds? That broke off in my hand when I was trying to give us some privacy. I mean, you came in and saw me holding it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Miranda. ‘I did. Right after Laetitia had run out of the room very clearly upset.’

  ‘And she’s saying I threatened her with it? But that’s ridiculous.’

  ‘She says that she felt physically intimidated.’

  ‘Well it amounts to the same thing.’

  ‘Does it?’

  Emily swallowed, acutely conscious now of her disadvantageous posture. She wanted
more than anything to stand up, but knew that would be a very bad idea.

  ‘You must realise that these are very serious accusations, and that we have to take them very seriously.’

  ‘But all I’ve done, ever since she started, is try to help her out!’ Emily protested, her voice uncontrollably shrill.

  ‘I’m afraid she doesn’t see it that way.’

  ‘I don’t believe this. It’s just beyond belief that she would do this. After all the slack I’ve cut her …’

  ‘She also says that you’ve committed several breaches of our editorial code.’

  ‘Like what?’

  Miranda peered down at a piece of paper that was lying in front of her on Bronwyn’s desk.

  ‘Well, one of them was apparently to do with accepting some tickets for a Tom Waits gig.’

  That was it. Emily could no longer restrain herself. She jumped up and strode across the room.

  ‘That is a bare-faced fucking lie! She wrote that piece and got those tickets.’

  ‘Apparently she claims you authorised it. That you knew the PR personally.’

  ‘Only because she introduced me to her. Christ! What a total fucking bitch.’

  ‘So you did know about it then? Look, you can say what you like in front of me, Emily, but I think you need to consider your position very carefully before you discuss it with Brendan and Heather.’

  ‘You’re not serious?’

  ‘I’m afraid I am. Something like this … I’m not authorised to deal with it. I have no choice but to take it upstairs.’

  ‘What about Bronwyn?’

  ‘Bronwyn would say the same thing.’

  ‘Oh please don’t, Miranda. At least let me give you my side of the story.’

  ‘It’s too late for that, I’m afraid. They’ve already been informed. And it wouldn’t make any difference anyway. Like I say, it’s out of my hands. They’ll be in touch with you about next steps within a day or two. In the meantime, you’re going to have to take a paid leave of absence from work. It’s the same for Laetitia. I’ll pick up your duties in the interim. You can take me through everything today before you go home.’