Elizabeth Day - Paradise City

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 sad to see them go. There was a limit to how effective she could be after several large glasses of Sauvignon blanc in the middle of the day.

Wednesdays were for faffing around – doing the odd telephone interview to stand up a story and surreptitiously booking holidays online when Dave wasn’t looking.

By Thursday, you needed to have at least one concrete story for that weekend’s paper so that Dave could add it to the news list and present it to the editor. If you didn’t, then you were in the perilous position of being sent out to cover running stories like murder cases or political scandals and that involved a lot of standing around with other journalists in the rain, waiting for an important person to comment, then elbowing your way to the front when they did so.

Friday consisted of long hours, frantic typing and last-minute changes of mind from the desk. You were lucky to get out by midnight. Then on Saturday, the misery of working on a weekend gave rise to a shared solidarity of spirit that left you feeling strangely cheerful. When the paper went off stone at 7.30 p.m., almost everyone decamped to the pub (apart from Rita, the part-time sub, who was older and wore the perpetually harassed expression of a working mother whose needs were conspicuously not being met).

Sunday started with a hangover and a nervous feeling in the pit of Esme’s stomach about where her article would appear and whether she’d got any fact or quote horribly wrong. The first thing she did was to walk round the corner from her flat to buy the papers from a shop on the Uxbridge Road. Every week, without fail, the newsagent would make the same joke as he totted up the total on the cash register.