by Luke Tredget
‘Are you all right, love?’
Anna finds her balance and glances at the white-haired woman who is speaking to her, before putting her face to the vestibule window and looking out at her dropped coffee. It is amazing, the mess she has made, the impact she’s had: the contents of that small cup are spread across the entire platform like a brown bed sheet, spawning tributaries that finger along seams in the tarmac and trickle off the opposite edge. A station official in an orange jacket is looking down at it all, as if thinking: what’s happened here then?
‘Have you burnt yourself?’
Anna tells the white-haired woman she is fine and looks down at her hand – there is a pink blotch on the loose flesh between forefinger and thumb, and the sight makes the burn sting for the first time. She looks up and sees the man in the orange jacket, the man who must clear up her mess, and just before the train slides away she sees him shake his head sadly, and then they are in a black tunnel and the glass gives back nothing but the reflection of her own startled face.
*
Twenty minutes later Anna arrives at the lobby of the building, her face partially hidden behind a thick and hasty coating of make-up. All three lifts are up on the top floors, and in a rush of impatience she pushes through to the stairwell. All she wants is to get to her desk and focus on what she needs to do, but on the third-floor landing she is confronted by the small but formidable figure of Paula, waiting for the lift in a long winter coat.
‘Hey!’ says Paula, her face lighting up as if seeing Anna has made her day, her week. ‘How are you?’
Anna says that she’s great, really great, as the lift arrives with a ping.
‘Are you sure?’ says Paula, ignoring the lift. ‘You look a little …’
‘Well,’ says Anna, rolling her eyes and whispering from the side of her mouth, trying to assume the sassy, conspiratorial persona she thinks Paula expects from her, ‘I’m actually hungover. You see, it’s my birthday today.’
Paula’s face opens up again, this time as if she is releasing a silent scream. Then she hugs Anna and spins her around on the spot, while singing a high-pitched and strangely robotic version of the Happy Birthday song.
‘So we need to celebrate,’ says Paula.
‘I’ve got to finish the article first.’
Paula asks what article, and Anna is surprised to have to remind her that the Sahina piece is going live today.
‘Of course it is. In which case, we definitely need to drink later.’
‘I’ve actually got plans already.’
‘Just a quick one,’ says Paula, pressing the lift button again, and this time it is less of a question. Anna says, ‘We’ll see,’ and with a final satisfied giggle Paula pats her backside and she is released.
As she crosses the clearing she is pleased to see Stuart’s desk is empty, and that she probably has time to get organised before meeting him. In fact, the whole office is half empty, this being the day that most people, Ingrid included, invoke the right to work from home. Without taking her coat off she switches on her computer and connects her phone to the charger she keeps here; both screens light up for a moment, acknowledging the life-giving electricity, and then fall black again as they make whatever secret and minute arrangements they need to be ready. Anna becomes settled herself and waits with her hands laid on either side of her keyboard, taking control of her breathing, looking up at the clock on the bottom of the big board: 12.06 p.m. It’s not a disaster. Stuart wanted the copy to go to Romont for 10 a.m.; if she does a rapid edit now it can be sent for 1 p.m., which still gives them time to go live today. Her computer screen lights up with its loading graphic, a wormlike line that rotates clockwise in a visual plea for patience; before it finishes her phone begins vibrating against the desk, the sound running up Anna’s spine. The buzzing continues for what feels like a full minute, the notifications for backed-up texts and missed calls threaded together. Eventually it falls silent and she calmly picks it up. There are many texts and notifications and voicemails, but Anna skims past these to Kismet, which she opens. There are no missed calls, no messages. Nothing.
The absence doesn’t make sense, and she logs out of Kismet and opens it again, thinking it needs to refresh or reboot or whatever. Still no messages. The last activity is the message from Geoff 81 on Wednesday afternoon, telling her to meet him at London Bridge, 6 p.m. She continues looking at these messages – or, rather, looking at the absence of any messages since then – until there is a shuffling in her peripheral vision. Without turning she knows it is Stuart. And, sure enough, he is coming across the clearing, his eyes locked on her, carrying some papers in his hands.
‘I’ve been calling you all morning,’ he says, without introduction. ‘What the hell happened?’ He is managing to keep his voice down, but is clearly furious.
‘Sorry, Stuart. I’m so sorry. I’m having a crazy time at the moment, and last night—’
‘Whoa, whoa, whoa,’ he says quickly, cutting her off. He sits down on Ingrid’s empty chair and rolls it towards Anna, well within range of the sickly smell – her hangover is radiating from her as a form of energy. ‘I don’t give a shit how busy you are. We had an agreement that you would come in early. And now we have a problem. A big fucking problem.’ He drops the stapled handful of paper onto the desk and her eyes trace the familiar opening sentence of her article. ‘What the fuck is this?’
‘It needs more work, I know,’ she says, feeling nauseous again. ‘The typos and grammar are all over the place, but I can fix it, just give me—’
‘It’s not the typos,’ he says. ‘It’s the whole thing. All this flitting back and forth between the past and present, long descriptions of her office. And this crap about her being nice, and attacking corporations. It goes completely against the brand values. What the fuck were you thinking?’ He is trying to lower his voice, but its full volume keeps escaping like trapped gas; she senses others in the office watching them, wondering what is going on.
‘I was trying something new,’ she says, meekly, looking down. ‘I wanted to juxtapose the public image of her, the terrifying persona, with the real person. The fact that she’s actually quite nice …’
‘So you were experimenting. Good stuff. Well done.’ He sighs and shakes his head. ‘Well, we can’t send this to Romont. We’re going to have to call Paula, tell her we need to postpone.’
‘Don’t do that,’ says Anna. ‘I have more stuff. I can fix it.’
He looks up to the high ceiling as if requesting from a higher power the patience and goodwill to have any more hope in her. Then he checks his watch.
‘Show me the transcript,’ he says.
‘The transcript?’
‘Yes, the transcript! Bring it up. Let me see it.’
She hesitates, her tired and strained mind struggling to unpick the implications of showing him the full unedited record of the interview. She says that it’s a mess, that she needs to fix it up, that he should just give her twenty minutes. His eyes become wide, as if in disbelief that she is still trying to bargain for time.
‘No, Anna,’ he says, smiling. He looks almost happy, and Anna thinks that maybe this is what he’s wanted all along, that her promotion was just an elaborate means of getting her into this position. ‘No more chances. We’re going to fix this now, together. Please, bring up the transcript.’
There is nothing for her to do but take her mouse, open the ‘Sahina’ folder on the desktop, and open the file marked ‘transcript’. Then she slides her chair backwards to make way for Stuart, who rolls Ingrid’s chair behind her desk. She watches over his shoulder as he reads through the unedited transcript, feeling that he is staring directly into the private and shameful contents of her head. Also palpable is the attention of others – Jessica the office assistant, and Ben from the sports desk – who cast curious eyes towards Anna as they cross the clearing, obviously surprised by this unusual break with protocol.
‘Jesus Christ,’ says Stuart. ‘You call this bein
g nice?’
She peers over his shoulder and sees he is looking at the bit where Sahina accused her of being a representative of Romont.
‘It reads worse than it was. You had to be there.’
‘She implied that you’re not a real journalist.’
‘Well … maybe there were a few bad moments.’
‘Not bad, good. This is the best bit so far. You should start with this.’
‘Start with it? But she was so—’
‘And this bit, about the governments. “Big business is just about flattery.” She said you could use this?’
‘Um. Well, she said it.’
‘She didn’t say you couldn’t?’
‘No. She didn’t say that.’
‘All right,’ says Stuart. ‘We’ll use this too. This could be the headline. Right. This is what we’ll do.’
He picks up the paper version of her article and begins scribbling on it, narrating his edits as he makes them, starting with the need to get rid of the stuff about walking through the desert, about the layout of her office, about her childhood in Pakistan, and especially the stuff critiquing Kismet and the other corporations. He tells her to keep the mentions of those famous stories but to take away the ironic gloss, to present them as fact. Then he makes two big scrawls at the top of the page, telling her to start with Sahina accusing her of not being a journalist, followed by the bit about government officials having no taste; he even writes out a suggested first sentence – ‘Sahina Bhutto has a reputation for being hostile to journalists, but perhaps it was a first when …’ He tells her to deliver the copy to him in an hour, polished and ready to go, and that he will brief Romont for a quick turnaround at 3 p.m. Then he is standing up and walking away, without so much as a pleasantry to seal off the conversation, without even looking at her, and shaking his head as he does so.
Anna picks up the paper, and feels she is being watched by others from around the office. She glances up, and the proof of their attention isn’t that she catches them looking, but in the way they all spring into action, a sudden simultaneous jerk as they hurry to prove that they weren’t.
There isn’t time to feel sorry for herself. Or to dwell on what Stuart has said. There’s no time for anything, in fact; she only has fifty minutes, and it isn’t nearly long enough to make all these edits. But the sight of her expensive new boots glows up at her as an emblem of financial responsibility, of financial exposure, and of the fact that her only option is to make a start. All those meandering, multi-clause sentences that dip and loop around and were honed through dozens of edits are now deleted in a half-second, and it is as if they never existed. What is left in their place is empty white space on the page, and in order to thread together the remaining islands of text she comes up with the only things that the time constraint and her addled mind can generate – short, stumpy, workmanlike sentences and unavoidable cliché. She writes that Sahina has ‘never been one to suffer fools gladly’ or ‘take prisoners’, and that she is prone to ‘throwing cats amongst the pigeons’. These words pour out of her without any shame, without any feeling at all, just an abstract compulsion to get the job done. She only breaks once, to get a glass of water, and walks to the kitchenette and back without making eye contact with anyone, in a tunnel of her own concentration.
After fifty minutes she has made all the changes, and as a final gesture she adds the piece at the start deriding the government officials – careful to remove specific mention of China – and then the para about how rude Sahina was to her, starting with Stuart’s suggested sentence. With two minutes to spare, she attaches it to an email and presses send. The little piece of paper folds itself into an aeroplane and flies away into the distance. She looks towards the Quiet Room and imagines Stuart slamming out of the glass door and coming towards her, this time not even trying to contain his fury. He doesn’t appear; she isn’t even sure if he is in there. In need of distraction, she gazes up at the big board, and sees a report on the guy suing Kismet to release his profile; the case is going to be heard by the European Court of Justice. While she is looking at this her phone buzzes against the desk, making the abbreviated tone of a Kismet message. It occurs to her that he has finally messaged her, that he decided to let last night slide – to allow whatever extreme emotions inspired her absence to pass – and is only now trying to find out what happened. She picks it up and finds it is a regular message from her mother. She hopes she is having a lovely day, and that she is happy. Have a great birthday, darling. Lots of Love. Mum x.
The earnest sentiment makes her think she might cry. Then she is alarmed to discover that she really is, right there at her desk. The words of the message blur behind water, and she gets up and walks quickly across the clearing, holding her breath to keep in a sob. Not until she is inside the toilet cubicle does she breathe again. She sits on the toilet and bends over double and cries, the tears coming without thoughts attached, and her body vibrating and twitching, as if from a gentle fit of retching. Then she blows her nose and wipes her eyes with a tissue – her make-up all gone to shit – and goes downstairs and through the lobby and into the street, on the lookout for pain relief.
In the corner shop she buys paracetamol and also a can of Red Bull, which she has never liked but whose brash promises offer some hope, at least. She is embarrassed by the idea of drinking the can in the office, so instead stands tucked into a little recess between shops, hoping none of her colleagues see her. She sips the Red Bull – which has a strange, electrically charged flavour that is surely found nowhere in nature – and looks at the people walking past on the street, looks at the sky above, where the clouds are beginning to dissolve away. Her birthday street. Her birthday sky. The sight of the attractive fashionable people has an unpleasant effect on her, she feels the equal of none of them – they are all moving so effortlessly, not just along the pavement, but through space–time itself, through the continuum of their existence. They all have £60,000 jobs. £700 coats. £200 haircuts. More important than having these things is the belief that they deserve to have them, without which they would be worthless. But have they had an 81, thinks Anna. Probably not. That’s one thing she can say she had, even for a short period – the highest score she’s had at anything, ever. Her 81. She can see him standing beneath the information board and wonders how long he waited for. Twenty minutes? Thirty? And then he … what? Perhaps he knows her so well, the connection between them is so strong and clear, that on some level he knew why she hadn’t come, that this wasn’t a casual thing for her, that some major life event prevented her. Or maybe he was furious and is still smarting now, and is waiting for her to have the decency to apologise. Or, likeliest of all, he probably just shrugged his shoulders and walked away, already checking his phone for alternatives – Anne-Marie 67, Jess 74. This makes most sense, she supposes, given his lack of contact, and the fact that he never seemed too fussed about the whole thing. This conclusion causes an immoderate sadness to come over her, like a whole dark storm cloud of melancholy, until she literally shakes herself in an effort to shuck this off. She takes a final sip of Red Bull and crosses the road, deciding to block any thought of Geoff and Kismet from her mind, and to focus solely on it being her birthday and Pete and her imminent party; she resolves not to check her phone for the rest of the day.
Back at her desk two emails are waiting from Stuart. One is short and curt, telling her she is lucky to get away it. The other email is to Romont, with Paula in CC, in an entirely different tone; he writes that they had an amazing interview with Sahina and that Anna did a superb job with the write-up, which is attached for their approval. She opens it and reads through. Stuart has made a few more changes, mainly adding and emphasising the brand values, making sure ambition, sophistication and power appear all over the place. He has allowed her clichés to stand, and has added some more of his own. It is just a cheaper, nastier version of the articles she read in Time and Vogue and the others, and less well written. But it is done now. This is her ent
ry to the world. She feels the heavy sadness again, and even as she tells herself not to, she reaches out and picks up her phone: there are no new messages.
Two p.m. becomes 3 p.m. becomes 4 p.m. There is nothing to do but wait. She considers eating something but the remnants of nausea still forbid it, and instead she finally sifts through her backlog of texts. She sends Pete a message thanking him for the breakfast and apologising that she didn’t have time to eat it; he writes back almost immediately, saying he doesn’t mind at all, that he hopes she had a good time with her mum and that she is ‘feeling good about everything’. A text then arrives from Caz, saying she can’t come tonight because she has to work; Anna tells her not to worry, that it’s not a big deal. There are also messages from Zahra, Hamza, her aunt Ruth, and Dianne, her dad’s third and final wife. She makes a point of replying to each, adding a little personalised flourish and this reminds her that she hasn’t checked her suitcase project since yesterday afternoon. There are several new followers and messages, and the first one she reads makes her heart leap. It is from @DeepBlue1977 – one of her most enthusiastic collaborators – and says that he has managed to track down through a friend of a friend someone that works in BAA HQ! Anna gets a burst of hope and excitement, and this lasts for as long as it takes to scroll up to the next message from @DeepBlue1977 saying that he spoke to the BAA man, who confirmed that all passenger list data is deleted after two years. You’re too late, he says. She scans through more recent comments, hoping that someone might have contradicted him, but it is just consolation messages from her other faithful supporters. A lump expands in her throat. She thinks of her man at the carousel, now permanently out of reach, and the vision of him fades to nothing. The final message, from only twenty minutes ago, is @DeepBlue1977 saying he hates to be the bearer of bad news and that he hopes she isn’t too disappointed! It is clear that a response is required from her; the lack of any reaction is conspicuous, given the frequency and sassiness of her earlier posts – her silence suggests she is too stunned or confused to contribute, or that maybe something bad has happened to her. This thought makes her wonder if Geoff has looked at her profile in search of clues to her absence last night; maybe, since he claimed to be such a big fan. She opens her list of followers – now 564 strong – and begins scrolling through them, clicking on anyone that could conceivably be Geoff. She does this for a time before realising she is being crazed; even if he is following her, what difference does it make? She swears at herself for letting this thought creep into her mind, and returns to the task of responding to her real followers.
