Elizabeth Day - Paradise City

‘Light reading?’

Every week, Esme gritted her teeth and smiled politely at this charmless imbecile then went home and flicked straight to her pieces. Some weekends, the article she’d expected to see wasn’t there and she realised it had been spiked and no one had bothered to tell her. Those were the worst days. She found it hard to pull herself out of a bad mood when she had no byline in the paper. It felt as though she didn’t exist.

It is just as she is typing ‘academic study’ into Google News that Esme feels a looming presence behind her chair.

‘Try “Watergate”,’ Dave says, smirking. ‘See if anything comes up. I’ve heard, on the down low, that geezer Nixon might be up to something.’

Esme flushes. Across from her, Sanjay is busy looking busy.

‘Can I have a word?’ Dave asks ominously. ‘In my office.’

She follows him into a glass-partitioned box that Dave has clung on to, in spite of the owners’ constant attempts to make everything into an open-plan, twenty-four-hour, internet-focused news hub. It is an airless room: the windows overlook the building’s interior atrium and the walls are lined with bookcases stuffed with out-of-date editions of Who’s Who, lever-arch files and long-ago awards certificates encased in dusty Perspex. On one wall, there is a framed picture of the Sunday Tribune wall clock from the glory days of Fleet Street, set perpetually to ten past two: a civilised time, Esme always thinks, for a more civilised era.

‘Take a seat,’ he says, gesturing to a chair covered in back copies of the New Statesman and old Snickers wrappers. Esme removes the detritus and sits, opening her notepad to a fresh page and readying her pen in an effort to look on top of things.

‘Nice piece on Sunday,’ Dave says, chewing his thumbnail.

Esme is surprised. The optimism study was precisely the kind of thing Dave usually hated: no investigation, no titillation, just a space-filler to keep the readers happy while they ate their Sunday morning croissants and muesli.

‘Sir Howard complained,’ he says.

‘Howard Pink?’ Esme jots down his name for no reason.

‘Yeah. We used a picture he wasn’t happy with.’

‘Well that was the picture desk, not me …’

Dave waves her objections aside. ‘Yeah, I know that, obviously,’ he says, over-enunciating each word to underline her frustrating slowness. He looks at her levelly across his desk. His skin is weathered and pouchy and he has a patch of eczema on one corner of his mouth. The backs of his hands are smattered with faint brown hairs. He’s only forty-seven but seems older, more weary. Esme realises she is staring and drops her gaze. Her mouth is dry.

‘I wondered why Mike used it actually,’ she says. ‘Given all the stuff that happened to Sir Howard. It didn’t seem exactly right for a light-hearted …’

Dave cuts across her. ‘I told Mike to use it.’

‘Oh. Right. I just thought, what with Sir Howard’s daughter going missing all those years ago …’

‘Yeah, I know, all very sad,’ Dave says, not seeming remotely perturbed. ‘But life goes on, doesn’t it, and Sir Howard hasn’t exactly been the shy and retiring type since then, so we were perfectly within our rights to use the picture, but …’

She waits. Dave stands up, flexes his arms and takes up the imaginary 4-iron, swinging it back and forward, warming up to hit some non-existent ball. ‘Well, his PR guy had asked newspapers not to use that particular photo. Pink doesn’t like it, apparently. Thinks it makes him look like a buffoon which is, of course,’ Dave takes aim somewhere near the under-watered rubber plant on his bookshelf and swings, ‘true.’

Esme suppresses a groan. She finds this display extremely tiresome. It is what Dave believes to be a show of masculinity, the news editor’s equivalent of a peacock displaying its plumage. Every time she thinks she might properly fancy Dave, that it might be more than a workplace crush, he goes and does something that shatters the idea completely.

‘Right, so why did you use it then?’

Dave grins. ‘Because he told me not to.’

Esme smiles in spite of herself. ‘And what I’d like you to do, young lady, is to call Pink up, apologise, say it’s not your fault, beyond your control blah, blah, blah but that the least you could do is take him out for lunch to say sorry.’ Dave flicks through a Rolodex on the desk in front of him. He is the only person she knows who refuses to get an iPhone or a BlackBerry and keeps all his contacts on a series of battered index cards. ‘Take him to Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester, he’ll love that,’ he says, handing over a card which has several numbers on it, all but one of them scribbled out in red ballpoint pen.

‘Thanks, I can look the number up …’

‘Take it.’

She reaches across, accidentally touching his fingers as she takes the card. She feels a small internal spasm as she does so.

‘You’ll need to speak to his PR man first. Rupert Leitch. He’s a mate of mine from university days. I’ll let him know you’re calling—’ Dave hands her another dog-eared card. ‘Well sod off then,’ he says, clicking on his computer mouse. ‘Look lively.’

Esme returns to her desk, closing the door to Dave’s office as she leaves.

‘What was that about?’ Sanjay asks.

‘Howard Pink,’ she says.

‘The guy whose daughter went missing?’

Esme nods.

‘What was her name? It’s on the tip of my tongue,’ Sanjay continues. He has an astonishing recall for current affairs-based trivia. ‘Ada. That was it. Ada Pink. Sweet-looking girl. Weird that she was never found.’

She lets him burble on, murmuring at intervals to appear interested. Sanjay was perfectly capable of talking for half an hour about the kind of sandwiches he was going to have for lunch that day. The weekly appearance of ‘Pizza Thursday’ in the canteen was a cause for conversational frenzy. After a while, his train of thought peters out and he falls silent. Esme glances at her watch. Only ten minutes till conference. Back to the nudists, then. She’ll deal with Pink later.

CAROL

Carol wakes in the early hours when there is a heavy, pressing sensation on her lower legs and she knows that Milton has jumped onto the bed. Milton paws at the duvet, kneading the feathers like dough before settling himself into the curve shaped by the crook of her right knee, which happens to be precisely the most awkward position for Carol.

Why does he always go for the least convenient option? Carol can barely get through the newspaper these days without Milton walking all over the pages, pushing his head against her face, purring and mewling until she pays him the necessary attention.

She shouldn’t be so hard on him. He misses Derek of course. Derek had always been the softer touch: spooning jellied chunks of Whiskas into the feeding bowl when he thought she wasn’t looking and tickling Milton’s chin until the cat was rolled over, eyes closed, whiskers trembling with pleasure.

Unwilling to disturb him, Carol waits to see what the cat will do next, her senses pricked with the peculiar alertness that comes with the density of darkness after midnight. There is a bit of shuffling, then the sound of conscientious licking.

Oh Lord, she thinks, he’s washing himself. We’ll be here all night – or what there was left of it. She wonders what time it is. It feels like 5 a.m. but she refuses to look at the clock on the bedside table in case it confirms her fear there is even longer to go until daylight. Sleep is such a nuisance these days. The doctor has given her pills but she doesn’t like to take them in case she never wakes up. Besides, she knows what the problem is. She’s not used to the absence on the other side of the bed, not yet anyhow, and there’s nothing anyone can do about that. She edges her left foot to the side, like a bather testing the water. For a moment, she convinces herself that her toes are going to make contact with the warm cotton of his pyjamas but instead her foot grazes against the coolness of the sheets where Derek should be.