Ever since that drunken night at the end of spring, May and Sally-Anne had devoted every waking hour to the newspaper, body and soul. They spent the entire summer working on the project, with the exception of one short Sunday at the beach.
First, a great paper had to have a great name. May took the first stab, drawing inspiration from Robert Stack’s portrayal of Eliot Ness in old reruns of The Untouchables. Even though it was a bit dated, the show still ran late at night on ABC. At first, Sally-Anne thought May’s idea was a joke. Not only was the name pretentious, but she could already hear the lewd jokes some men would make. A newspaper run by women could never be called The Untouchables.
Sally-Anne found an abandoned warehouse on the docks that she planned to transform into the paper’s newsroom, and got Keith to help with the renovation. On a particularly hot July afternoon, Sally-Anne stood admiring their muscled friend’s physique as he lent them a hand with the work.
Sally-Anne had declared that all the warehouse really needed was a new coat of paint. Keith took the time for a thorough walk-through and found she had vastly underestimated the scope of the work. What was more, they had an absurdly small budget for the project. This was all the more absurd, Keith observed, considering that Sally-Anne’s family wasn’t exactly strapped for cash.
What Keith didn’t know was that behind the facade of carefree temptress, Sally-Anne lived by an unshakably strong moral code. As far back as she could remember, long before her teenage years, she had known she was different from her family, as illustrated in a tale she recounted to Keith and May.
Sally-Anne had once told her teacher that she had so little in common with her father, and even less with her mother, that she sometimes wondered if she had been switched at birth. Her observation was rewarded with a long lecture, in which the teacher berated the brazen young lady for being so judgmental of parents who were models of success. Sally-Anne thought the only success anyone could credit her parents with was managing to cling to their inheritance, compromising their principles and telling unforgivable lies in the process.
Suddenly, it clicked. Keith’s offhand remark had triggered an idea, a common ground that both women could wholeheartedly unite on: they didn’t owe anyone a single thing. Thus, the name the Independent seemed to be a perfect fit for the paper.
“Well, lovely as that sounds, without any resources, this is going to be one mammoth undertaking,” Keith exclaimed. “The window frames are all eaten through with salt. The hardwood floor is such a mess you can actually fit your whole hand between the planks! I’m not sure even Superman could get that boiler up and running, and this shit-hole hasn’t had electricity in ages.”
“There are only two types of men in this world,” Sally-Anne replied with a chiding smile. “Men with problems and men with solutions.”
Sally-Anne had learned out of sheer necessity—and often when dealing with men—that she sometimes had to put her ethics on hold. The deed was done: Keith had walked straight into Sally-Anne’s trap. Watching the man leap back into his work with an extra dose of fervor and energy almost made May feel sorry for him. But it was for a good cause, after all.
Keith certainly hadn’t been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and his rugged upbringing had required him to be resourceful and make do with what he had. On the first Sunday he came to work, Keith tried to pull a cable from the main circuit breaker. It was after dark by the time he finally reconnected it, and the task had required a perilous climb to access the transformer on an electrical pole outside. It had taken him all day and a good part of the night. But in the end, they had electricity.
In the days that followed, Keith spent all his free time at the warehouse. Within a week, he had begun to consider the project a personal challenge. Keith would cart in truckloads of wood scraps he had collected at work, to use on the window frames, and decided to completely redo the hardwood floor from scratch. While the scheme was hard to keep under wraps and did not go unnoticed by his employer, his talent as a carpenter kept him from getting fired. By the end of the first week, Keith at last came to his senses, realizing that the task was far too vast for him to tackle on his own. He pulled together a scrappy little work crew consisting of friends who came aboard after they were treated to a few meals prepared by May and Sally-Anne. Apprentice plumbers, masons, painters, and locksmiths came in turn, to take care of the boiler and the pipework, to remove the cast-iron radiators, repair the decrepit walls, and deal with every last inch of rust-covered metal in the space. Nor did May and Sally-Anne sit around twiddling their thumbs. When they weren’t busy bringing drinks and snacks to Keith’s ragtag crew, they would help drill, hammer, paint . . . whatever needed doing.