by Luke Tredget
‘No. I mean yes, I have, but maybe I missed something.’
‘Right,’ he says, sighing, and a more familiar expression crosses his face; it is the same resigned look she detects whenever he appears behind her desk and catches her adjusting a Spotify playlist or searching for cheap flights, as if a pessimistic theory has once again been proved correct. ‘If you had read your emails, you’d have seen a message from Romont, approving the Women at the Top series.’
He spins his laptop around on the table and Anna reads for herself the email from the marketing team at Romont, saying they would love to sponsor the Women at the Top series, and describing in gushing terms how excited they all are about it. It is surprising to read this from a woman that Anna had thought hated the idea during the pitch; she sat there with an askew look on her face while Paula and Stuart explained why a ten-article series on powerful women would be ideal to promote Romont’s latest range of watches, as if she was contending with a bad smell.
‘This is amazing,’ says Anna, and her response appears to amuse Stuart.
‘Don’t sound too surprised.’
‘No, I’m not. I’m … impressed. Well done. Good job.’
‘It’s Paula’s baby, really. And it was a team effort. Yourself included.’
‘Please. I barely said a word between hello and goodbye.’
‘But you brought a certain energy. Paula thought so too. And we’ve had a little chat. We think this could be good for you, if you’re ready. As lead writer.’
The atmosphere changes, as if all the air has been sucked from the room.
‘Me?’
‘If you’re ready.’
‘But I thought Ingrid—’
‘Ingrid is tied up with the Hyundai series. And this will be exciting. Paula has had Clem pull some strings. We’ve got Sahina Bhutto lined up for the first interview. Gwyneth Paltrow for the second.’
‘Sahina Bhutto?’ says Anna. The name sounds almost too big to get her lips around.
Some concern must pass across her face, because Stuart explains in soothing tones that he’s sure she isn’t so fierce in real life, and that they have until Friday to agree on the questions, which in any case will be pegged to Romont’s brand values of power, ambition and sophistication.
‘There’ll also be more money, naturally. Just a little sweetener, four or five K.’
‘Right,’ says Anna, feeling slightly dazed. ‘Great.’
‘You don’t seem too pleased.’
‘No, I am,’ she says, stretching her smile into a full nodding grin. ‘Uh-huh.’
‘Because I need you to be up for this. Ready for this.’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re ready?’
‘I’m ready.’
There is a slight pause as he stares into her eyes, then he smiles again, the same creepy warm smile that he gave when she first sat down.
‘Great,’ he says, clapping as if to punctuate the air. ‘It’s great to have you on board. So about the launch: I just had a three-way with Paula and Romont, and we want to hang it off something newsy. Perhaps a list of the world’s most powerful women, with a little bio of each. What do you think?’
‘Sure,’ she says, still somewhat light-headed. ‘Sounds great.’
‘Excellent. Get the copy done by … what are we on? Eleven thirty? I’ll tell Romont to expect the copy for sign-off by … 5 p.m.’
‘Oh. You mean today?’
‘Of course. We’ll have the guys in Charlotte work up the design overnight, publish tomorrow morning. Clear your diary, this is big.’
‘The world’s most powerful women,’ she says, standing up. She looks through the glass wall at Ingrid and the big board and the TV screens and all her other colleagues criss-crossing on the clearing – the office appears a tangle of distractions, interruptions, eavesdroppers. She asks Stuart if it’s okay to take the pool laptop to a cafe, so she can really concentrate, and he just shrugs and shakes his head, as if he couldn’t begin to muster an opinion on such a trivial issue.
‘But one more thing,’ he says, pointing his finger at her as she goes to leave. ‘Do it by continent. You know, the most powerful women in Asia, Africa, Europe. So it’s not just a list of Americans.’
‘By continent,’ she says, nodding. ‘Also, by the way … what do we mean by power?’
He looks at her in confusion.
‘You know. Power. Money. Wealth. Influence. Just … work it out.’
‘Right,’ she says, nodding vigorously, as if everything is now clear, lest he ask her if she is ready again. ‘Power. Got it.’
‘And Anna,’ he says, making her pause with the door held open. ‘Congratulations.’
The word rings in her ears as she crosses the clearing to her desk, where she stands absently for a moment, her hands resting on the back of her chair. Then she goes to sign out the pool laptop from where it lives in the cabinet, and is informed by Jessica, office assistant, that the rules have changed and she isn’t allowed to take it off site unless it’s an ‘emergency’. Anna thinks she has a miniature battle on her hands, but at that moment Paula appears and grabs her arm.
‘I’m so proud of you,’ she says, beaming up at her. Paula is tiny – her cornrows are only level with Anna’s shoulder – but it is nevertheless overwhelming to be manhandled by her boss’s boss in front of the whole office. ‘You’re going to nail it, I just know it.’ Paula says more things like this, and Anna feels alarmed by the intimacy they imply – their only real interaction until now was at last year’s summer party, where they were placed together at the dinner table, and due to some physiological fluke Anna found herself in a charming and boisterous and flirtatious mood. But before she has a chance to say something self-deprecating and witty, or even to thank her, Paula says she has to rush off – she is forever in the process of heading somewhere else – and stomps away towards the lifts. She returns her attention to Jessica, who doesn’t raise another word of resistance concerning the laptop.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ says Ingrid, when Anna returns to her desk. While putting on her coat, she tells her about the Women at the Top series and the list she has been asked to do. Without delay Ingrid swivels her chair around to face Anna and asks who the interviews are with.
‘The first is Sahina Bhutto,’ says Anna, trying to sound casual. ‘And then Gwyneth Paltrow.’
Ingrid’s eyes open wide.
‘That’s … amazing, Anna.’ She smiles as she says this, but there is an unmistakable confused tightness around her eyes, as if the natural order of things has been messed with. Ingrid then stands to hug Anna, who maintains her stiff smile and wonders if she should feel offended by the younger woman’s reaction, and the surprise it contains. Though maybe she will have to get used to people reacting like this. From now on, whenever she tells people she’s a journalist, and they ask what sort of thing, she will mention Gwyneth Paltrow or Sahina Bhutto and it will knock their heads back slightly, as if she has suddenly expanded in front of them and they have to adjust their eyes to keep her in focus.
‘Thanks, Ing,’ she says, before taking her bag and walking across the clearing. There are yet more colleagues waiting by the lifts, and it is not until she pushes through to the bland stairwell that the smile drops from her face. By the time she is thirty, she will have interviewed Sahina Bhutto, she tells herself, as she swings on the railing from one flight to the next, the sound of her footsteps clattering around the bare cinderblock walls. In fact, no: by the time she is thirty her article on Sahina Bhutto will have been published. She tells herself that this is amazing, fantastic – uses all the same terms as Paula and Ingrid – but this does not dislodge the feeling that something is wrong, badly wrong. The reverberation in her stomach that began when she anticipated bad news is still there following the good news, only stronger now. For this is a mistake, surely, based on a misapprehension that will soon become clear to everyone. She doesn’t feel ready, not even slightly.
On the ground f
loor she pushes through the double doors into the lobby, and the glinting surfaces of marble and tempered glass, and past the long sofas where she sat three years ago, awaiting an interview for an unpaid internship. She imagines what that younger Anna would think if she were somehow gifted a snapshot of herself today, having been made lead writer, and for the first time she gains a sense of perspective, and a dose of pride. Of course she feels unready, and undeserving. Just as she did three years ago, when Malcolm, Stuart’s predecessor, asked her to take minutes in a meeting, and she didn’t capture everyone’s name or understand the acronyms or write fast enough, and spent the following days in a quiet panic as she tried, like some kind of archaeologist, to piece together her scribbled fragments into a coherent record of what had been discussed and decided. This memory makes her smile and realise there is nothing wrong or unexpected about being scared. How is anyone supposed to become successful, anyway, without having to undergo a series of leaps forwards that at first appear impossible, but which quickly become as mundane as everything else? As it was with taking minutes, so it will be with interviewing celebrities.
This brave thought follows her through the revolving doors and onto the street, the sudden daylight making her eyes throb. As always, the narrow pavement is crammed with dithering tourists and a much faster stream of professional types, and today Anna tells herself to walk amongst them with her head held high. She zigzags through the current of people with their expensive coats and haircuts, each one coming into focus for a fraction of a second before blurring past, and up ahead she catches sight of a young blond guy in a mustard wax jacket. His face is a mere pink smudge from her distance, but something about his shape or gait speaks to her. As he nears, a rather severe but striking face comes into view, and their eyes click as they pass, making sparks fly within her. In one fluid motion, Anna stops, turns on her heel and like a gunslinger pulls her phone from her pocket, hoping and half expecting to see him do the same. But she watches his back proceed along the pavement towards Regent Street, and when she opens Kismet the map shows nothing but the usual empty network of beige buildings and grey streets.
*
Five hours later, Anna is sitting in a cafe on Poland Street, wondering if Mexico is in South America or North America, or if Central America is a continent in its own right. She sits back and sucks on her pen and looks around the cafe, where five other people are sitting at individual tables behind Mac-Books of their own, and tries to subdue the familiar rising feeling of a project going wrong.
In front of her, on her screen, are the fifteen most powerful and influential women in the world, arranged neatly in a spreadsheet with a short bio and header and link to an open source and credited image. All this supposed hard work of researching and writing was complete by 3 p.m., slowed down only by the pool laptop’s inability to stay connected to the internet, but the simple task of splitting them into continents has proved impossible. It hasn’t just been the Mexican pharmaceutical heiress: the Russian cellist and Turkish prime minister have been equally hard to place, and the more she searches online, the more she realises that continents – those supposed building blocks of the world – are actually wispish, changeable things, about which there is no consensus whatsoever.
A bell rings as the cafe door opens, and a tall, bearded man with long hair tied into a bun takes a table by the glass shopfront, becoming customer number six. She watches him unfurl a scarf from his neck and is tempted to sneak a look at her phone, but then sees the clock above the window and that it is 4.40 p.m., and she is twenty minutes from missing her first deadline as lead writer. She tries to call Stuart again but gets his voicemail, and on the swell of panic wonders why this always seems to happen: while Ingrid and everyone else in the office gracefully rise to whatever challenge befalls them, she always buckles and becomes paralysed at the crucial moment. Telling herself to stay calm, she texts Zahra the Mexico question and then opens the Wikipedia page again. This time her eyes snag on the term Latin America, and a possible solution occurs to her: it could be done by region, not continent. Yes, of course. She looks at each woman and this option clears a path through all her niggling doubts: Mexico is in Latin America. Saudi Arabia is in the Middle East. Pakistan is in South Asia. Stuart won’t mind, it’s probably what he meant anyway. She gets back to work on the spreadsheet, and it is just a matter of relabelling the columns, copy-and-pasting five of her powerful women, and then the finished document is sitting in front of her, and still with ten minutes to spare.
Anna slumps down in her chair and sighs, relief coursing through her like a tonic. She texts Zahra not to worry about the Mexico question, and then, without willing it, opens Kismet. As expected, she sees the solitary dot at the centre of the map, but this time something is different: it is blue rather than red. She zooms in and sees there are in fact two small circles – a blue dot is almost entirely eclipsing her red one, leaving only a thin crescent visible. She taps the blue dot and the number 72 appears. Anna gasps and her eyes shoot around the cafe, landing on the broad back of the long-haired man by the window, customer number six. She zooms in on the map, until her screen is filled entirely with the floor plan of the coffee shop, and sees that yes, it must be him.
Anna sits up in her chair and puts down her phone and takes conscious control of her breathing. It is going to happen; he is bound to see any minute, if he hasn’t already. There is turmoil in her stomach, and a powerful urge to flee. But this is a 72, and a handsome one at that, and she resolves to see it through. She moves things around on her table and fusses with her fringe and wraps her chewing gum in an old receipt that she hides in her bag. It occurs to her that she has time to check her appearance in the toilet mirror, but she decides there is no need: she is wearing her favourite charcoal woollen jumper, black jeans and her hair tied up – she knows she looks alright. The only regrettable items are her scuffed and tired boots, which will remain under the table. She places her hands on either side of her laptop and wills herself to be calm, to be cool. After a few moments there is a shuffling in her peripheral vision, and when she looks across he has turned in his seat, his eyes waiting for hers. She smiles, he stands. She looks back at her laptop, and the key stats and life stories of billionaires and politicians and scientists swim in front of her.
‘Hello,’ he says, standing beside her table.
‘Hi.’
‘I’m Thomas.’
‘Anna.’
For a moment they just look at each other. He is really quite handsome. His olive skin and long hair and slightly hooked nose make him look like a pirate, but not in a bad way. And even more striking are his green eyes, which are so large and wide that it almost feels like he is glaring at her.
‘You have time?’ he says, and she notices an accent.
‘Of course,’ she says, gesturing to the seat opposite. Then, remembering the powerful women, she adds: ‘I just have to send an email.’
He pauses mid-crouch, frowning.
‘I go and come back?’
‘No, sit! It will take literally one minute. It will be like we’re having a little break. Just at the start.’ She laughs nervously. ‘We’ll be starting with a break.’
Thomas nods slowly, then sits and hails the barista to inform him of his changed location. Anna swears inwardly, and then, in a single stream of thought, she drafts an email to Stella and Carl at Romont, copies in Stuart and Paula, attaches the Power Women spreadsheet and presses send. A picture of a small piece of paper appears on her screen, which folds itself into an aeroplane before pinging off into the distance. This animation loops three times before it says that the message has not been sent because she is not connected to the internet.
‘Fucking pool laptop,’ she says, and Thomas asks what is the matter. She tells him about her day-long battle to keep online, and how she has to send the email by 5 p.m., and he asks to have a look. He spins the computer so they can both see the screen, and after bringing up the control panel and network settings he says, ‘Ah.’
Then he explains, his accent now unmistakably French, that there is something wrong with the configuration, and that he can fix it.
‘Yes, please do.’
‘I will have to restart it.’
‘That’s fine. Just do it, please.’
He unticks a box, ticks another, and they watch in silence as the screen shuts down to black before gradually bringing itself to life again. When the desktop finally lights up, not only is the internet displaying full bars, but the email she had tried to send is sitting in her outbox. It is simply a matter of pressing one button, and then the paper aeroplane flies off into the distance and is replaced by a ‘message sent’ sign.
‘Thanks so much,’ she says, slapping the laptop shut. ‘I owe you a massive favour already.’
‘It was nothing. I only unticked a box. I’m not even good with computers.’
‘Well … I owe you an apology, then. That was a bad start.’
He wafts this away as well and says that these meetings always catch people unawares, and that it could have been a lot worse – they could have been jogging, or at the gym, or in a dental surgery, or on a plane, or at a packed concert.
‘Sounds like you’ve had some colourful situations,’ she says.
‘Mais non. Just examples! I have had hardly any situations at all. This is just my … fifth meeting.’
‘In how long?’
‘Six months.’
‘Six months?’ The admission is so surprising that Anna can’t contain her incredulity, and she laughs out loud until she catches herself and bites her lip in contrition. But he doesn’t seem fazed by her reaction, or when she has him confirm and double-confirm that it’s really been that long. She sees that his eyes are always very wide, even when relaxed; the full circle of each green iris floats freely in white.
‘I suppose that is not many matches,’ he says, with a shrug.
‘Not many, no.’
‘Well … I take it as a compliment.’
‘So you should.’
‘And the good thing is,’ he says, leaning forwards and crossing his meaty forearms on the table, ‘that when you do make a match, you know it is for a reason.’ He gazes into her eyes directly, then sits back and sips his coffee and adds casually: ‘Plus, you save time.’
