At least the bankers and lawyers worked all hours. We had nothing but time. My own calls were usually done and dusted by eleven thirty—bearing in mind I arrived at my desk around ten. Oh, time felt different then! When I took my hour and a half for lunch that’s all I did with it: lunch. No e-mail in our offices, not quite yet, and I had no mobile phone. I went through the loading-bay exit, straight out to the canal, and walked along the water’s edge, a plastic-wrapped, quintessentially British sandwich in my hand, taking in the day, the open-air drug deals and the fat mallards quacking for tourist bread crumbs, the decorated houseboats, and the sad young Goths hanging their feet over the bridge, bunking off school, shadows of myself from a decade before. Often I went as far as the zoo. There I’d sit on the grassy bank and look up at Snowdon’s aviary, around which a flock of African birds flew, bone-white with blood-red beaks. I never knew their names until I saw them on their own continent, where they anyway had a different name. After lunch I strolled back, sometimes with a book in hand, in no particular hurry, and what’s astonishing to me now is that I found none of this unusual or a special piece of luck. I, too, thought of free time as my God-given right. Yes, compared to the excesses of my colleagues, I considered myself hard-working, serious, with a sense of proportion the others lacked, the product of my background. Too junior to go on any of their multiple “company bonding trips,” I was the one who booked their flights—to Vienna, to Budapest, to New York—and privately marveled at the price of a business-class seat, at the very existence of business class, never able to decide, as I filed away these “expenses,” if this sort of thing had always been going on, all around me, during my childhood (but invisible to me, at a level above my awareness) or if I had come of age at an especially buoyant moment in the history of England, a period in which money had new meaning and uses and the “freebie” had become a form of social principle, unheard of in my neighborhood and yet normal elsewhere. “Freebism”: the practice of giving free things to people who have no need of them. I thought of all the kids from school who could have done my present job easily—who knew so much more than me about music, who were genuinely cool, truly “street,” as I was everywhere wrongly assumed to be—but who were as likely to turn up at these offices as go to the moon. I wondered: why me?
In the great piles of glossy magazines, also freebies, left around the office, we now read that Britannia was cool—or some version of it that struck even me as intensely uncool—and after a while began to understand that it must be on precisely this optimistic wave that the company surfed. Optimism infused with nostalgia: the boys in our office looked like rebooted Mods—with Kinks haircuts from thirty years earlier—and the girls were Julie Christie bottle-blondes in short skirts with smudgy black eyes. Everybody rode a Vespa to work, everybody’s cubicle seemed to feature a picture of Michael Caine in Alfie or The Italian Job. It was nostalgia for an era and a culture that had meant nothing to me in the first place, and perhaps because of this I was, in the eyes of my colleagues, cool, by virtue of not being like them. New American hip-hop was brought solemnly to my desk by middle-aged executives who assumed I must have some very learned opinions about it and, in fact, the little I knew did seem a lot in this context. Even the task of chaperoning Aimee that day was given to me, I’m sure, because I was assumed to be too cool to care. My disapproval of most things was always already assumed: “Oh, no, don’t bother asking her, she wouldn’t like it.” Said ironically, as everything was back then, but with a cold streak of defensive pride.
My most unexpected asset was my boss, Zoe. She had also begun as an intern, but with no trust fund or moneyed parents like the rest, nor even, as I had myself, a rent-free parental crash pad. She’d lived in a filthy Chalk Farm squat, remained unpaid for over a year, and yet came in every morning at nine—punctuality was considered, at YTV, an almost inconceivable virtue—where she proceeded to “work her arse off.” A foster-care kid originally, in and out of the group homes of Westminster, she was familiar to me from other kids I’d known who’d gone through that system. She had that same wild thirst for whatever was on offer, and a disassociated, hypermanic persona—traits you sometimes find in war reporters, or in soldiers themselves. Rightfully she should have been fearful of life. Instead she was recklessly bold. The opposite of me. Yet in the context of the office, Zoe and I were viewed as interchangeable. Her politics, like mine, were always already assumed, although in her case the office had it quite wrong: she was an ardent Thatcherite, the kind who feels that having pulled herself up by her own bootstraps everybody else better follow her example and do the same. For some reason she “saw herself in me.” I admired her grit, but did not see myself in her. I had been to university, after all, and she hadn’t; she was a cokehead, I wasn’t; she dressed like the Spice Girl she resembled, instead of the executive she actually was; made unfunny sexual jokes, slept with the youngest, poshest, floppiest-haired, whitest, indie-boy interns; I prudishly disapproved. She liked me anyway. When she was drunk or high she liked to remind me that we were sisters, two brown girls with a duty toward each other. Just before Christmas she sent me to our European Music Awards, in Salzburg, where one of my tasks was accompanying Whitney Houston to a soundcheck. I don’t remember the song she sang—I never really liked her songs—but standing in that empty concert hall, listening to her sing without backing music, with no support of any kind, I found that the sheer beauty of the voice, its monumental dose of soul, the pain implicit within it, bypassed all my conscious opinions, my critical intelligence or sense of the sentimental, or whatever it is that people are referring to when they talk about their own “good taste,” going instead straight into my spine, where it convulsed a muscle and undid me. Way back by the EXIT sign I burst into tears. By the time I’d got to Hawley Lane this story had done the rounds, although it did me no harm, quite the opposite—it was taken to mean I was a true believer.
Three