‘Oh what the hell is wrong with me?’ I say aloud, starting to get panicky as I fish round the bottom of my handbag for a Kleenex. Can this really be me, Eloise Elliot, acting like such a complete milksop? Time was when I would work this exact same schedule and it barely knocked a feather out of me. Time was if I happened to drive past a woman on her own sobbing her heart out in a parked car at dawn, I’d look at her pityingly and assume she was having some kind of breakdown and clearly needed professional help. Time was when I used to think that I’d somehow been born without tear ducts.
But that girl only existed B.L. – before Lily – and now in her place is a shadow of the old Eloise Elliot, a woman filled with darkness who’s expected to do the work of a dozen people and never ever crack, all the while eaten up with guilt like I’ve never known. And why? Because a little girl who’s nearly three will come home from preschool later on today, full of stories and chat that her mummy will never get to hear.
And now, on top of everything else, I’m nannyless. Yet again.
The six a.m. news comes on the car radio and I know this bout of unforgivable self-indulgence is over and it’s time to go and face into another day. So I make a huge effort to compose myself, knock back a large gulpful of Rescue Remedy (an editor’s best friend), pat a bit of concealer round my puffy, red-raw eyes and with shaking hands, drive on. I’m already a good fifteen minutes behind schedule so I put my foot to the floor to try and make up the time. If I dared to arrive in late, word would spread that something was up and rule one of survival in my job is simple; never let anyone see a chink in the armour for any reason, ever. They’re like a pack of barracudas in my office, I swear they can physically smell the fear.
Calmly as I can, I make a mental note to find another childcare agency and leave a voicemail message for Rachel, my assistant, telling her to start setting up interviews as soon as she gets in. Easier said than done, given that the last agency I went to fired me about two years ago. Which stung more than a bit too. But I managed not to let it show. You just can’t in my game, not for one second.
Anyway, by six fifteen a.m. I’m racing upstairs from the underground car park of the Post’s offices on Tara St., the only bit of exercise I ever seem to have time for these days, what with all the extra work that I’m now expected to do for pretty much the same money I was making three years ago. Which by the way, is a fairly standard change in the newspaper industry now, ever since the recession hit in a big way and our sales took a sharp decline. I.e. yet another stress-inducing source of sleepless nights, if you’re the editor and your contract is up for renewal later on in the financial year.
Particularly if you happen to be answerable to a board of directors who are all male, with a collective average age of about sixty-five. The T. Rexes, I call them; they’re like dinosaurs from a bygone era, representative of a time when all you could hear in the newsroom was the furious clacking sound of clunky metal typewriters. The days when senior editors swaggered in drunk after big, boozy lunches, where they’d all quaff cognac, wining and dining advertisers on fat expense accounts, then roll back to the office late in the afternoon pissed as farts and no one would so much as bat an eyelid.
A whole other age ago, during the glory days of the newspaper industry. And right now, frankly there are times when I feel like all I’m doing is fighting a brave rearguard action trying to sustain what I worry is turning into more and more of a twilight industry, with the internet now leading the field as the gutteriest gutter press out there. More and more each day, I’m starting to feel that my job is like trying to steer an oil tanker through a minefield and that it’s only a matter of time before the whole industry is declared as extinct as the dinosaur.
It’s as though the board of directors feel that survival is a form of success and as far as I’m concerned, that’s just not enough, not in this climate. Their old-fashioned attitude is that the Post is a bastion of tradition that holds up the sky, and while that may have been the case at one time, it sure as hell isn’t now. Times have changed and we either evolve or we die, simple as that.
What’s worse though is that redundancy is now in the air again. I can smell it sharp as you like; it’s hanging round every office corner, it’s in the stale, recycled air we’re breathing. And I know, just know without being told, that it’s only a matter of time before there’s yet another staff culling, another round of people being asked to exactly the same job, except for far less money, on a three-day week.
Oh God, I think, suddenly sickened just by the very thought that I have colleagues I pass on corridors each and every day whose days here are numbered and what’s worse, that I’m the only thing standing between them and a dole queue. Or more precisely, me and the amount of sales volume I can continue to generate for the paper. They may not know it, but they’re dependent on me and me alone for their job survival, and the pressure is at times overwhelming.
I quicken my pace, puffing and panting to make up time, thinking must try harder. Don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I’m just going to have to find more hours in the day, somehow. Because if it kills me, no one is going to lose their job, not on my watch. Not if I can help it.
Oh God, half of me wonders if I’ve got room for another stress ulcer.
My office is all the way up on the fourth floor, a gorgeous, airy, spacious room with floor-to-ceiling windows that look down onto all the briskness and business of Tara St. below me. Not that I’ve ever got a spare second to enjoy the view, that is. Or indeed, to luxuriate in the early-morning stillness, a few precious hours before the phones start hopping and things really get pressurised round here.
And every single morning of my life when I flash my pass at the security doors and stride across the main open-plan office to get to my inner sanctum, there waiting for me on the wall above my desk is a giant portrait of one Douglas Merriman, our founder and first editor. Who by the way, would have sat in the very same office now occupied by me, all of a hundred and fifty years ago. He’s a heavily bearded geezer who looks exactly like Tolstoy, and when I feel those stern Victorian round owl glasses glaring down at me, I look back up at him, thinking the same thought that I do every single day since I took this job.
Bastard. You never had to work in a digital age, with email and mobiles to connect you to the office even on a Sunday at two a.m. did you? You never had to compete with twenty-four hour news channels or try to sell papers in the middle of the worse economic slump since the Great Depression, did you?
I’m just flipping open my briefcase and whipping out my initial draft of notes on today’s edition, always how we kick off the day round here: with a thorough going over of this morning’s early edition; where we scored, where we could have done better, where there’s vast room for improvement, that kind of thing. All department heads are required to be here for this, which means about a dozen people sitting round the conference room in total, ranging from political affairs, to foreign, to sports and culture.
Next thing, without even bothering to knock, Seth Coleman’s lean, slimy, Basil Rathbone-esque form is filling my office door. Looking like he always does, like he was dressed by his mammy. Funny, but for the longest time I assumed he was gay but still in the closet; no straight man would ever wear trousers that sharply ironed, for starters. But then a few years back, he made a bizarre and badly misjudged pass at me at the Christmas party. I remember looking at him in blank astonishment that he’d somehow misread my deep loathing of him for in-your-face lust and it now lives on forevermore in the comedy quadrant of my brain.
‘Morning Eloise. So what’s keeping you? In exactly one minute, you’re going to be late.’
Like this is an episode of 24, and I’m Jack Bauer.
‘Everyone’s already waiting for you in the boardroom, you know,’ he says in his nasal whine, slicking his hair back, even though there must be a half-pound of grease already holding it there. ‘All department heads, present and correct. Hope there’s nothing wrong with you, is there? Not like you to sail this dangerously close to unpunctuality.’
I say nothing, nod curtly