‘You want my advice?’ he’d said to Esme at a recent leaving party, slurring his words and bending his head in too close to hers so that she could smell the brackishness of hours-old white wine on his breath. ‘Get out while you can. Go and make some money. Wish I’d done that. Wish I’d gone into fucking PR like my mate Rupert …’
She didn’t like it when Dave got drunk. It demeaned him, she thought, made him like all the others. Sober, he was a brilliant news editor: dogged but instinctive and blessed with a peculiar ability to inspire loyalty despite his personal failings. You genuinely wanted Dave to say something you did was good. In his day, he’d been a solid but unexceptional reporter on the Express and covered the first Iraq War. But it was editing that brought the best out of him, that played to his sense of mischief and his mistrust of authority.
Esme sighs. She has a bit of a crush on Dave, actually, which is odd considering he isn’t what you might describe as a looker. He is half an inch shorter than her for a start, with boxer’s shoulders and a chunky, muscular frame: not the type she’d normally go for at all. But there’s something about him. She’s always been a sucker for men in power, for a start, and he’s funny too, in a quiet, lethal way. She catches him sometimes, just after he’s issued one of his sarcastic put-downs to an unsuspecting reporter, and his face looks like a small boy’s: cheeky eyes and a lopsided grin that almost makes you forget the bad teeth and the irritating habit he has of practising his golf swings when you’re trying to talk to him.
She’s not stupid though. Esme won’t let anything happen. It’s hard enough being a woman in a newsroom without the whispers behind your back that you’re only getting the good jobs because you’re sleeping with the boss. Besides, she flatters herself that he respects her too much to try it on.
She turns right down Kensington Church Street, looking in the windows of all the lovely antique shops as she passes, filled with beautiful trinkets she would never be able to buy. The blossom is out on the trees: big pink clouds that she wants to squeeze, like a baby’s legs. Esme feels a surge of happiness that spring is here. The evenings are lighter and longer, sunlit by the yellow-green London glow. Ever since she moved here from her family home in Herefordshire, the excitement of the city has pulsated through her veins: a buzzing, booming sensation of being at the centre of things, of believing anything could happen.
Her pleasant mood is accompanied by a feel-good soul number, courtesy of Radio 1, so that, for a few moments, she feels as though she is the star of a beautifully shot indie film with an interesting soundtrack.
Then she remembers that morning conference is less than an hour away and a panic rises in her gullet. Stories, she thinks. I need stories.
The Sunday Tribune was one of the only nationals that still insisted its reporters must gather at 10.30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning in the offices of the overall editor and pitch two news stories for the weekend’s edition. When Esme first started there a little over eighteen months ago, fresh out of the Hunter Media trainee programme (flagship publication: Trucking Today), she had been desperate to impress. She’d brought in a bona fide scoop in her second week, involving the discovery of a protected bird species on land that had been earmarked for a controversial detention centre for asylum seekers. It ran on page five (right-hand pages were always the best) alongside a picture of an owl and some sad-looking Africans. The RSPB had called her story ‘game-changing’. The detention centre had to be shelved. A local MP had written to Esme to thank her in person. Dave hadn’t publicly acknowledged her success, but she had detected a slight thawing in his attitude towards her. She’d been thrilled.
But now, after a year and a half of Freedom of Information requests on how many chocolate HobNobs Cabinet ministers bought for hospitality purposes and Googling consumer-friendly research studies from American universities, Esme was starting to tire of it all. She had one half-baked notion for this morning’s conference about the rise in popularity of semi-naked charity calendars. They were everywhere, she’d noticed of late: middle-aged women with their baps out hiding their private parts behind a giant milk urn to raise money for some worthy cause. Esme had a hunch that the National Association of Nudists, a humourless organisation she’d dealt with in the past, would be unhappy about this. They’d probably think it wasn’t taking nudism seriously enough. She was sure she could whip them up into some kind of newsworthy frenzy.
Other than that, the story cupboard is bare and she’s almost at work. She alights onto High Street Kensington and looks up at the art deco Barker’s department store building, squinting as she always does to see if she can find her desk through the narrow, slatted windows. She waves at the security guard because she never remembers his name, then swipes her pass over the electronic entry gates and takes the escalator to the first floor.
Looking down, she realises she’s forgotten to take her trainers off.
‘Shit.’ Esme hates the thought of anyone seeing her like this: half-formed and unprofessional, like a mismatched extra out of Working Girl (perhaps her favourite 1980s film, in a closely fought contest with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). She struggles to get her heels from her canvas bag before the final step of the escalator. At the top, she changes shoes quickly, slipping her stockinged feet into a pair of mildly uncomfortable patent-leather courts from Marks & Spencer and putting her dirty white trainers back into her bag. She hopes no one notices. But then, glancing up at the mezzanine balcony where everyone goes for their fag breaks, she sees someone staring at her. It’s Dave, shaking his head at her through a fug of cigarette smoke. The management had tried to move the smokers outside after the ban but no one had taken any notice and, in the end, they’d admitted defeat and built partitions on the balcony to pen everyone in. You could always tell what time of day it was according to how much smoke the enclosed balcony was holding. In the morning, it was a gentle mist of grey. By lunchtime, the smoke would have acquired its own twisting logic, pressing against the glass like freshly shorn strands of sheep’s wool. By evening, the balcony was a choking-hole filled with toxic dry ice.
Esme gets to her desk and logs on. Sanjay is already at his seat, directly opposite her, his face half obscured by the large Mac screen.
‘Morning, sunshine,’ he says, without taking his eyes from the computer. ‘Nice weekend?’
‘Yeah, thanks, um … what did I do?’ Esme puts her jacket on the back of her ergonomic chair, adjusted by Occupational Health to precisely the right height in order to avoid repetitive strain injury. ‘Can’t remember. But it was nice, whatever it was. You?’
Sanjay nodded.
‘The boyfriend was over from Rome,’ he said. ‘We stayed in and watched Breaking Bad because we’re exciting like that.’ He sipped from a giant Starbucks cup. Esme knew it would be a Green Tea. Sanjay had given up caffeine for a new year’s resolution and was still sticking to it with all the puritanical zeal of a Mayflower pilgrim.
‘Have you got stories?’ he asked.
She shook her head.
‘Me neither.’
There was a special rhythm to Sunday newspapers. Tuesday mornings were tense and mildly fractious as everyone tried to cobble together something for conference. By lunchtime, a relaxed bonhomie had set in. When Esme had first started at the Tribune, most of the newsroom then disappeared to lunch ‘contacts’ while secretly lunching each other and racking up considerable wine bills that they then claimed on expenses. Those days had long passed and she wasn’t entirely