‘I’m sorry. I must have heard Asif or one of the interns say something.’ You tucked your hair behind your ears and looked back at your screen before deciding to power down. I logged off too, watching for a second as the light drained away from my machine, mesmerised by the little white dot in front of me, feeling the exhaustion in my bones, my brain. A sensation rushed in around me with sickening familiarity: the compulsion to lie down and never get up again. I didn’t even notice you’d come to stand by my chair, so when I turned to leave, your body blocked my path. I gasped. Awake again.
‘Katherine. Would you consider going for a drink with me? Tonight? Now? Give me a chance to clear the air? I’m sorry, I think I’ve really overstepped the mark. I’m still feeling my way with this place. With Gem.’
Your black eyes seemed to plead with me. And I thought I saw it again, that loneliness. Your need to connect with another person. Perhaps we would end up getting a burger and talking like we’d known each other forever after all?
‘Alright. OK,’ I said, nodding dumbly, taken aback by the glint of a feeling shared.
You handed me my leather from the nearby coat stand.
‘Shall we?’ you said, smiling.
‘Give me one second.’
I nipped to the loo to text Iain:
Snowflake wants to go for a drink. Don’t worry about dinner. See you later xx
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d sent a ‘Going for a drink, be home late’ text over some spontaneous invitation, maybe one of the girls finding themselves on the Southbank or London Bridge and thinking Sod it, let’s see if Rossy’s up for a drink. Iain knew how good it would have felt for me to be able to say I wasn’t coming home yet. He texted back:
That’s fab. Enjoy xxxx
You and I left the office, and that’s when we really started to talk.
I don’t think I’ve ever really seen you laugh, but you’re very beautiful when you smile. I remember thinking that you smiled a lot that night and how good that made me feel about myself. You were enjoying my company, my stories. You weren’t watching the clock, not like my old mates towards the end. And unlike them, with you, there was no sense of you waiting for the moment when you might, in not so many words, suggest I ‘pull myself together,’ or inevitably get to asking if there was any way whatsoever it would be possible to get some money back after The Film. Talking without these things hanging over the conversation made me feel more like me again. And you asked so many questions that let me hear something of my old voice again. You knew how we all love a great listener, didn’t you?
Looking back, I can see there was a tinge of something pre-rehearsed about some of your questions, and somewhere I clocked you’d all but had a personality transplant since your almost total indifference to me in the cab on Monday. But I jumped clean over my doubts and right into telling you my life story.
Chatting to another woman again about my career, my reflections on life so far, was like slipping into a warm bath. How I wanted to soak away the aches and the pains of the last few years. The imprinting process in full swing as I tried to forget all the friends who’d abandoned me. First, the ones who had babies left me, though I could understand why. I was terrible around children. Who would want the scary lady in the leather jacket who never smiled near their kids? Then, The Film did for some of the women I’d cared about most. That hurt, a specific pain I’d not known before. I suppose it was like being dumped, but I didn’t know because I’d never been dumped. My luck had run clean out. My girls, my main girls were ‘pressing pause’ on me, that’s what they said. But they never came back. Finally, there were a couple of remaining second circle friends who hadn’t invested in The Film. But they didn’t know what to do with me when the beige began to blow in. They left me too. Soon enough, the only things left standing were my work and my Iain.
‘So, where did it all start for you, being a journalist? I’d love to know. I’m so early in my journey, I know how much I need to learn!’
‘Well, I came down to London late nineties, worked in a pub for a bit, this was in the days when you could rent a room in Walthamstow for forty quid a week. I know, fucking ridiculous, right? I applied for work experience at every local paper all over London, but with no training, no degree and no connections, no one would look at me. Then one night, I was out seeing some mates in Islington and I saw these two guys start on some bloke. They had baseball bats. It was … ugly. My mates ran off home, fair enough, but I watched from across the way, got out my notepad and started getting down the details. Someone called the police and an ambulance. I managed to get some other eyewitness quotes and something from the police too. I told them and everyone else I was a reporter from the Islington Gazette. Then, I scooted back up the Victoria Line to my room, begged one of my housemates to borrow his PC, and filed the story to the Gazette. Just 250 words, but it was enough to persuade them I could come and do work experience. Pretty cool, eh?’
‘My god, yes! Amazing! Then what?’
‘I got there, loved it, worked my tits off, got on staff. The money was shit though. I knew I’d earn more on a trade mag. Junior news and features writer on Leadership was the first thing I applied for.’
‘And you got it.’
‘And I got it.’
‘And quickly became indispensable, then the youngest editor in the title’s history.’
‘Yes … Yes, that’s me. How did you—’
‘I’ve been proofing biographies for the awards supplement?’
I nodded. It sounded feasible.
‘I want you to know, I have, like, so much respect for your experience and how you’ve come up the ranks. It’s inspiring. I also really want you to know, I’m so embarrassed about the Gem-making-us-do-copy-camp-thing. I basically begged her not to make us do it. But she’s got her “own ideas” about how she’s going to run things, even though she has basically zero experience in journalism. But who are we to talk her down?’
We.
I liked how that sounded, so much. Too much. It resonated around my loneliness, arousing something deep and dormant. You and me: friends. The cub reporter and the grizzled editor, an alliance across generations against ‘the man’, or woman, in this case.
‘Don’t worry about it. I’m sure it’ll be fine,’ I said, swallowing the end of my second gin.
‘But I really do. I’m such a worry-wort. Are you a worrier? Sorry, I’m not talking about, you know, your time off or anything.’
‘My beige period?’ I tried to laugh.
‘Could I ask … was there a trigger for what happened to you?’
I sighed and looked at you side on, my head cocked to show you I was trying to decide whether to share my private thoughts with you or not. But at that point, it was just that: a show. The sad fact was, I was dying to tell you everything about me. While I was still, apparently, thinking about it, you added, ‘You don’t need to worry about me. You can trust me.’ And I wanted to believe you. I wanted to forget about the taxi ride and your holding back the truth about how you came to my magazine. I wanted to put all that to one side, chalk it up to coincidences and let myself believe the only thing for me to worry about was my failing talent. I wanted to let you convince me this was the case and at times like those, you were so dreadfully convincing.
‘I’m not worried about you.’ Probably the greatest lie I told myself about you, worse than convincing myself you were a friend-in-waiting.
‘Because I think you’ll find I could be very good for you. If you give me a chance.’
And your smile shone at me again as you moved one hand out across the table in my direction, reminding me of my young self again, that combination of steel and softness.