Ambition (3 page)

Trash had two hyphens, not one, in her surname. Susan once didn’t see or hear her for six weeks. They never talked. Trash seemed to regard conversation as a breach of good manners.
Once Susan, a little drunk and lonely, stopped her as they passed in the hallway and asked her why she needed a flatmate. Trash smiled like a game-show host.

‘Because I can’t stand a cold toilet seat.’

When she killed herself in the bath one Monday morning, Susan discovered that Trash had really been Georgia. ‘But I always called her Trash!’ she said to Isabella as they waited
for the lift down one night. Somehow it seemed very important.

Isabella smiled absently. ‘Oh, don’t worry. Everyone called her Trash. Even her ma.’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘Sorry?’

Who, what, why, where, when? This was supposed to be the mantra of journalism. It went through her head, more and more, like the slick black backbeat of a soul song. She couldn’t
answer any of them. She read cereal packets and racing results to find an answer. She spent a preternatural amount of time listening to the lyrics of popular songs. A song called ‘Boogie
Oogie Oogie’ drove her to distraction for a few weeks; she bought the single and stayed at home in the evenings with the stylus on auto, listening to it fifty times in a row. She was
convinced it was trying to tell her something.

She got drunk every night and every morning woke up with a headache where her memory had once been. The thought of suicide was always there, comforting, like old money to be fallen back on
in desperate times. Sometimes only the thought of death made life bearable. A greyhound winner called Too Much Too Young made her laugh for half an hour. WHO, WHAT, WHY, WHERE, WHEN?

Then she met Matthew.

Matthew Stockbridge sat at his desk in the big South London hospital and looked across at the pretty, sick-looking girl who was trying to insert a cheese sandwich into her
tape recoder.

‘I’m ver’ sorry,’ she slurred. ‘Some sort of malpractice.’

He laughed, a little shocked. ‘No, Miss Street, you came
here
to ask
me
about malpractice suits. Didn’t you?’

‘Malpractice. No, malfunction.’ She dropped the sandwich on to the desk and stared at it. ‘Oh look,’ she said brightly. ‘I wondered where that got to.’
She looked up at him, her pupils almost completely covering her grey irises.

‘Miss Street, which drug are you on?’

She rifled through her bag and triumphantly shoved a twist of foil under his nose. ‘Sulphate. Almost pure. Want some?’

‘No thank you.’

Now she was gazing over his shoulder into the far corner of the room with something between amusement and terror.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘There’s a bird in that corner. It’s the Roadrunner,’ she said matter-of-factly.

‘Really?’

‘Oh yes. It’s the Roadrunner and it’s doing the Charleston.’

‘Miss Street, I assure you it’s not. It’s amphetamine sulphate, which has gone to your liver and been transformed into mescalin due to extreme abuse and lack of food and
sleep. Am I right?’

She smiled knowingly at him. Then she leaned across the desk and shot the best part of the litre bottle of Perrier water she had been drinking into his lap. Then she began to laugh, so hard
that she fell off her chair. She lay on her back, retching up a vile yellow bile and laughing.

Matthew Stockbridge dodged around the desk and knelt beside her. She looked at him.

‘Who, what, why, where, when?’ she asked weakly.

‘Whatever you want.’ He laughed too. ‘It’s all right now, Susan.’

That had been seven years ago. Time, the great vandal, had had its bash at them, and love had gone about halfway through, but she still hadn’t got around to moving out. When you were
both busy moderns, there was very little time for elaborate things like leaving. You were always too busy buying things and signing things and throwing things, from dinner parties to dishes. There
weren’t enough hours in the day for you to move out. Even when everything else had gone.

She was twenty when she met Charles Anstey, a man with a mission to take the void out of tabloid, at London Fashion Week. He was with his tall, dark and ugly clothesaholic
French wife Lorraine. Twenty years ago she must have seemed like good value to a provincial boy in the outer suburbs of his youth but now she had the bitter, disappointed face and grudgingly
anorexic body of the fading fashion victim in danger of becoming a fashion fatality.

They sat on either side of Charles, Lorraine nagging for clothes, Susan hustling for a job, like cross caricatures of pre- and post-feminist woman.

‘The young reader,’ Susan elaborated enthusiastically, telling him things he knew already but doing it in such an excited way that he couldn’t help but nod seriously,
‘that’s what you want – no one needs a dying readership. Get them young. And the women readers – don’t marginalize them. Think about them on every page. Newspapers
aren’t just about news any more. You should be taking readers from the women’s magazines – not just from each other.’

She never found out if Lorraine got what she wanted from Charles Anstey – but
she
did. A week later he called her at
Parvenu
and asked her if she would like a job as
a feature writer on the new
Sunday Best.

She was a good journalist, but not that good. She had once thrown a scare into a rentboy trying to sell the dirt on a Labour MP just because she was young and idealistic and believed in the
things he stood for. And because he was fun to lunch. She wouldn’t do that now, she thought. And a really good tabloid reporter would never have done it. She had been pleased when promotion
to features editor lifted her out of the scramble for stories. And then for almost two years she had been deputy editor and next in line to the editor’s chair. Until now.

She was jolted in her seat and out of her dreams. The train had arrived.

And so had she.

The next day was a Tuesday, first day of the working week for the Sunday papers. She slept like a baby – one hour sleeping, one hour crying, and so on – rose early
and dressed carefully.

Her best Azzedine Alalïa, plain and black and respectful. Ok, so it was tight as a tourniquet and had only a passing acquaintance with her thighs. But Charles had always been a leg man. Her
earrings were small and jet, Cobra and Bellamy, and her shoes were simple and black, Kurt Geiger, with a very modest four-inch heel.

Talking of shoes, she expected it would be fairly easy to step into Charles’s, and she didn’t mean the ones still waiting patiently outside the Brighton bedroom fresh from their
overnight cleaning. Poor Charles; he had died not with his boots on but his hard on.

The
Best
’s proprietor, Lord Tooth, was a sweetie, and a fairly senile one at that. Susan’s protégée, Zero, called anyone over forty a Senile Citizen, and Lord
Tooth qualified nicely. He was fond of Susan, thought her very young and daring, and always asked her if the Beatles had re-formed yet. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that one of them
was really dead and the other three were brain dead. It was a cinch.

It was nothing of the sort.

As she walked into the open-plan office, people sniggered in small groups. She thought she heard someone hum a few bars of the Dead March from
Saul.
Holding her head high she walked
into her room and shut the door.

When Susan picked up one of the three telephones that squatted smugly on her desk, she was greeted by the noise she most dreaded hearing, that of five smacking wet kisses in a row. It was in
this way that Ingrid Irving invariably greeted her. A few steps behind Susan but climbing fast, and well connected to a long line of dukes and judges in a way Susan could only dream of, Ingrid was
a regular fixture on BBC panel games – telegenic and, if her grasp of gossip was anything to go by, telepathic. She was always described in print as ‘vivacious’, which meant that
she giggled a lot and sucked up to anything in boxer shorts. She was the only person Susan knew who wore taffeta before noon. An old song of Frank Sinatra’s that her mother had played to
death came to Susan’s mind, slightly subbed, at the thought of Ingrid.
Picture a tarantula in tulle . . . that’s Ingrid with the grinning skull.

Now the five kisses exploded wetly in her ear, making her wince. ‘Darling, tell me
everything!
Did he die with his boots on? Or his trousers?’

‘So far as I know, he died with his overcoat on. Hello, Ingrid.’

‘Hello, darling.’ There was a barrage of popping corks at the other end of the phone, much shrieking and a few bars of ‘Tomorrow Belongs To Me’.

‘Why are you at home, Ingrid?’

‘Oh, I’m not, darling. Nose to the grindstone. Come on, you know what it’s like . . . even the seccies stay drunk until Friday. Just having a few mates over – Jasper,
stop
it. Leave that poor little messenger
alone
.’

‘Listen, Ingrid, I know even less about this terrible thing than you. I’m going to find Oliver and get the story. See you anon, OK?’

‘See you for lunch, sweetie.’

Not if I see you first,
sweetie.

She rose grimly to her feet and walked next door into Oliver Fane’s office; number three on the paper and a prize snoot to boot. Like the rest of his colleagues he loathed her – for
her age, her gender and a horde of less important reasons, such as believing that she was spectacularly untalented. ‘A woman’s place is on the woman’s page,’ said a memo on
her desk soon after her promotion. She was sure it came from him.

He was lounging, with a smile on his face and his feet on the desk, but jumped up when he saw her.

‘Susan, Susan!’ He came round the desk and took her consolingly by the arm. ‘Have a seat! Heard the news? No, of course not, you’ve been too . . . upset.’

‘News?’

‘We’ve been sold!’

‘Sold?’ She sat down quickly.

‘Sold!’ he said triumphantly, like a gleeful auctioneer unloading a naff antique. ‘This very morning!’

‘But . . .’

‘To Tobias Pope!’ He leered. ‘Not very good news, is it? Especially considering what a . . . special relationship you had with old Tooth.’
That
put the
tail-switching little counterjumper in her place.
He
had a 2:1 from Oxford
and
had trained at the
Times and
done the mandatory NUJ stint at the provincial hellhole. There
was nothing he hated more than someone who hadn’t paid their dues – unless it was someone who got paid more than him. Susan Street was both.

Susan Street was stunned. Tobias Pope was as different a prospect from old Lord Tooth as you could imagine. With a reputation somewhere between Rupert Murdoch, G. Gordon Liddy and the Marquis de
Sade, he ruled his communications empire with fear and loathing – his employees feared him, and he loathed them. He had been heard to refer to the people in his pay and his pocket as
‘my reps’ – short not for representatives, but for reptiles. If Lord Tooth would have seen Silly Putty in her hands, Tobias Pope was going to be US Steel.

Oliver Fane was burbling on. ‘Apparently it’s been on the cards for months. Only that idiot Tooth didn’t have the heart to tell Charles. He thought he’d be upset or
something, because of their
special relationship
– I think that means he bonked Charles’s mother on a house party thirty years ago. Anyway, he planned to tell him today, but as
the fickle finger of fate would have it . . . Susan?’

There was a thump. Susan Street had fainted.

When she came to she was being slapped, much harder than was absolutely necessary. A suntanned man in his fifties, the lines on his face a conspiracy between climate and a
cruel nature, was hitting her rhythmically around the face with a black-gloved hand. ‘Ah, here it is!’ he said, looking straight into her wide-open eyes and smiling. Taking a glass of
water from Oliver Fane’s secretary, he threw it straight at her chest.

She gasped in shock and horror. The skintight Alalïa seemed as though it might burst open like a peach hit by a hammer under the weight and wetness of her breasts. The assembled staff of
the
Sunday Best
stood around and gaped. In their wildest, wettest dreams, the rude awakening of Susan Street had never been so beautifully, humiliatingly realized.

The man laughed. ‘You seem refreshed, my dear.’ He hauled her to her feet and shook her hand delicately. ‘Allow me. My name is Tobias X. Pope and I am your new owner.’ He
turned on his heel, a flurry of flunkies swelling on all sides. ‘Oh, and by the way – you’re fired. Have a nice day!’

Matthew Stockbridge sat on the bed, clean-cut even at nine in the evening, wearing a blue Czech & Speake bathrobe, with a bottle of Badoit and a Virago paperback by his
side. Handsome, sensitive, successful – and completely undesirable, she reflected sourly as she looked at his image in the five mirrors of her dressing table. Five Matthews! She
couldn’t find the correct use for
one
any more.

Matthew was fair in both temperament and colouring; a basic blond dreamboat to be eaten up with the eyes and toyed with by the other senses until it sank in with some surprise that he was
intelligent and droll, with a smile around the eyes that rarely reached his mouth and therefore seemed all the more genuine. He was the English Popular Schoolboy grown up: with a broken voice and a
brace of broken hearts behind him, he was still putting his best foot forward. He was the boy who
did
like games, but also liked Henry James; defender of the weak and seducer of the sleek.
He had never given his mother a sleepless night or his girls edible underwear and sexually transmitted diseases. Some would have said he was the perfect New Man.

Susan’s Zero, though, said the only New Man women had time for was
Paul.
For such lines was Zero paid 45K p.a. by Susan and referred to as ‘The Executive Toy’ by her
colleagues. She was also known as Caligula’s Little Pony, because the boy emperor had been powerful, wilful and foolish enough to make his horse a senator.