LITMIR.BIZ

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Schoeman flicked her gaze across the newsroom to Darren, who had hustled himself a long, safe distance away and now stood looking pointedly nonchalant as he sipped coffee and conferred with another colleague. She dragged her eyes back to Vee, the film on her irises taking on an oily, vaguely threatening glint. “May I add that I believe the office runs far better when we all look to our assigned duties, and concentrate on performing them exclusively and well. No-one need step outside the confines of their job description. It’s disruptive.”

      And I believe you look like a rolling grape, Vee smirked at her back, watching her duck-waddle away.

      She rotated kinks out of her neck and shoulders down the corridor to the managing editor’s office, apprehension stirring up her breakfast. She really wasn’t up for crap this early. Investigating for Urban magazine had been one thing, but wading through the innards of the City Chronicle beast had so far proved a different adventure altogether. Yes … definitely a Jonah-in-the-belly-of-the-whale level of wading. Nico van Wyk captained his ship using strangely different coordinates, ones she had yet to decipher.

      “Bugger off,” he barked in answer to her knock. “Unless it’s Johnson.”

      The office was cool and furnished with spartan, practical taste; a man’s space. The premises of Chronicle were close to the top floor of the high-rise, the room made larger somehow by a perpetual cool breeze. Envious, Vee thought of her cubicle next to a sealed-off window. Then the memory of her new, private spot lifted her heart. Before it plunged immediately. They’d be ‘having a chat’ about that too, of course.

      “Overtaking specific projects without permission.”

      She blinked. “Beg your pardon?”

      Rifling through the filing cabinet opposite his desk, he didn’t turn or look up. “Seat,” he pointed. She toyed with being a badass, thought better of it and sat. Nico towered almost two full heads over her and though his temperament was closer to a surly simmer than full-on belligerence, she’d seen him lose it a few times, really flip his shit, leaving underlings cowering on the brink of tears. Male underlings. Best not rock the boat.

      He pulled a sheet from a folder and sank into his armchair. He vigorously massaged his face with both hands before dragging them over his head, his honey-gold hair buzzed short to downplay the balding dome on top, and down the back of his neck. Deep-set, grey-green eyes that saved his face from being plain were rimmed faintly red.

      He stared for ages. Vee let him. Van Wyk was a consummate eyeballer; it seemed to temper his mind and mood. She waited it out, bouncing the tips of her heeled sandals against the floor a tad impatiently.

      Finally, he smacked a palm on the desk in a ‘let’s get down to it’ manner.

      “Saskia can’t stand you. You’re not madly in love with her either. She says you’re mucking about with the online team, making it hard for her to do her job. Why can’t you learn to stay out of her way? You’ve been here over a year. You should have the hang of it by now.” He squinted at the piece of paper. “Meddling.” He looked up. “Why?”

      Vee sighed. He was quoting off one of the reference letters in her file, and bet her right arm this one was from none other than her old boss, Portia Kruger. “I’m not meddling. Not exactly. It’s just … Saskia’s fulla wahala, everything got to be palaver with her. She’s more concerned with running us than quality output. Who cares if I help Darren and them? They’re understaffed.”

      “They’re doing fine, all things considered.”

      “They’re not. What things considered? That we’re a small newspaper with a tiny staff and if we all stuck strictly to our job descriptions we’d sink within six months?”

      “Backchat and authority issues.” He tapped a line on the sheet, nodding emphatically at her sceptical blinks. “Seriously, that’s really on here. Kruger’s thorough.”

      “I can get a copy of that?”

      “What do you think?” He leaned back. “Talk me through this Saskia animosity. I detect something deeper.”

      Vee spread her hands, an open-palmed question mark. Wherever this was going, it stank already. “Ahhhh. We got issues with each other, and if she want make it her business to gimme free cheek day in and out, no problem. We both grown. We can squash it, or be civil enough to manage to work together. But,” she stabbed her finger into the desk, “she’s hellbent on harassing Chlöe’s life and I won’t have it. We made a deal when I started here. Where there’s room for me, there’s room for her.”

      His mask cracked by a whisper, a hint, of a smile. “There’s room for both of you.”

      “Then what? Saskia’s style, if I can call it that,” she steamed on while she had the floor, “is turning underlings into toilet paper. And Chlöe may be a junior but that, she is not. Hell, she even helps out on the Afrikaans editorial.”

      “Does she now?”

      “Yes! She’s half Afrikaans but grew up mostly English. She learnt by pushing herself out of her comfort zone. Plus she studied languages at UCT. You know all this. Bishop is no typical boarie-missy.”

      “Boeremeisie,” Nico corrected.

      The wolfish glint in his eyes was by now too rabid to miss. Shit, you know better than this, she cursed silently, wanting to kick herself. Constantly read the room – miss no shifts, however subtle. And never, never incite conversation or turn the spotlight on Chlöe. He’d done this before, baiting her, but he was definitely improving at blindsiding. Bishop was her charge but unqualified, uncategorised; the target on her back was huge. “She’s caught on amazingly fast. You can’t honestly tell me she’s not an asset around here,” she hurried on.

      “Propensity to preach and pick up strays,” Nico intoned, making an invisible tick against the paper, which he dangled limp-wristed. Vee muttered a curse and sat back. If all he’d hauled her in for was to dish out a verbal flogging, let him get it out of his system.

      His eyes bored through her forehead, a hint of a frown making a crease between his brows. He leaned forward, resting on his elbows. The pink streaks under his eyes looked angrier up close. “What are you doing up there?” he asked.

      “My job,” she snapped. “But if –”

      He shook his head. “Not out there,” he tipped a nod in the general direction of the newsroom. He lifted a solitary index finger, pointed it towards the ceiling and mouthed ‘up’, gaze never wavering from her face.

      Vee cursed again under her breath.

      After fifteen months, the urge to go crawling back to Urban still niggled her occasionally. Even crappy jobs had perks, and she deeply missed having a real office, with a real desk, a sprawl of polished wood on which to dump assignments and empty mugs to her heart’s content. And her old view, of downtown Cape Town and the ABSA head office building. Chronicle’s newsroom feel had the allure of the old guard; she was spoiled now, over it. The persistent undercurrent of noise … the guy with no sense of personal space, who always talked right in your face after his lunch … the irksome treks to an exit for sunshine and breeze … it couldn’t be borne.

      The haven was her godsend. Snooping around the second floor, she’d stumbled on it: a small, dingy room crammed with unused office furniture and discarded odds and ends. A hole in the wall, with power outlets and a working sink. And a view, through a window that actually opened. A bribe to one of the cleaners saw the excess junk shifted and the space made presentable.

      “One of the cleaners sold you out,” Nico preened. He took annoying pride in his spy program.

      “I need a place to think,” she insisted.

      “Use the inside of your skull. At work, unfortunately, one must learn to play with the other children. What kind of self-respecting journalist hates a newsroom?”

      “I don’t hate it. There’s just no … elbowroom sometimes. I’m not up there during working hours.” Usually.

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