LITMIR.BIZ

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return you could teach me the ways of your digital world. We’d be unstoppable. We’d propel the magazine and website into the stratosphere. More readers, more advertisers, more sponsors, more everything. I would initiate our partnership by conceding to your absurd millennial vocabulary.

      ‘Triggers for my illness … Well, I would say it wasn’t just one thing and I’m not sure I wholly believe in triggers, not for me anyway. I’d had hard times before and they hadn’t got me down, not down-down. If anything, the dark days got me up, off my feet. Then when I got ill, it was just … total. I felt flattened, the world didn’t look like the world anymore. It’s hard to explain, but I don’t think it was just a case of, “Oh my god, we’re broke,” or “Oh my god, am I really celebrating my fortieth birthday at Leadership?” or any one thing that pushed me over the edge. It was nothing and everything.’ I shrugged, as if I was talking about some mysterious thing that had happened to me a very long time ago. You changed tack.

      ‘Wow. So from the late nineties to now, that’s like, a whole bunch of time. Leadership must be like a home-away-from-home.’

      ‘It is, or it was, before everything changed.’

      ‘Maybe it can be again?’ you said softly and I had to look away so you couldn’t see how much you’d moved me.

      ‘Sometimes I … I feel as if I’ve let Leadership down. I’ve let myself down. I know we’re going to be OK; I know we can survive using a rolling buffet of interns to keep the lights on and sponsored content to pay me.’ You visibly bristled at this, I ignored it. ‘But I can still see it, we’re slipping behind editorially. Readers, they’re so fickle these days. I’ve seen the data. They skip through a story that took a week to put together for the magazine in fifteen fucking seconds on the website and I don’t know why. You know, I did see the digital revolution coming? I thought I could ignore it, but it got bigger and bigger, so much bigger than I thought it ever would, until it changed fucking everything and it feels like I don’t get anything anymore.’ I saw some bubbles of spit land on my sleeve on the ‘m’ of ‘more’. I was literally, as you would say (correctly for once), frothing at the mouth. ‘Sorry. I—’ I began and you rubbed my forearm. ‘I don’t usually spill my guts like this.’

      ‘Well, get used to it, boss. OK? Shall we get a bottle of something red and warming?’

      ‘Yes! Allow me. Fuck it all, right?’

      I noticed you recoiled slightly whenever I swore. I suppose I naturally swear a lot, but I’d always thought most journalists were prone to sweariness, whatever their age. As much as I believe people like you need to toughen-up, I didn’t like the faint tell as the skin under your eyes tightened at each curse. Before too long into our night, I stopped the ‘fucks’ and ‘cunts’ and even the ‘arseholes’. I started to feel less angry in doing so. You helped me soothe myself. Maybe you millennials were actually onto something.

      It began to feel, as we sat there in the corner of The George that night, when tourists and beery workmates came and went around us unnoticed, that you and I were really communicating. I felt the warmth of a couple of gins and a bottle of Rioja and the full flush of releasing all the conversation I had pent up in me. And it was thrilling to observe your pristine complexion up-close, the swell of your cheeks, the way you tapped the white triangle of skin above your tangerine v-neck from time to time. My skin once glowed like yours.

      We both looked at our glasses, only a drip in each of them. You poured the remainder of the bottle into my glass. I sensed our evening drawing to a close. I didn’t want it over yet.

      ‘Writing was a real escape for me. Not just journalism, writing my own stuff too. I wrote my first manuscript, just for me, to get my head together about … childhood stuff, I suppose. Does your blog help you get your head straight?’

      ‘I guess. That and my diary. I try to work out my future by processing the past and reporting on the present there.’

      ‘I used to keep my notepad with me at all times in case I ran into a story, but also if I had a thought about something or other I wanted to get down. Iain used to call it my “little book of lottery tickets”. One of them had the winning line on it, the one that would help me write the next manuscript. The One. The one that would save me, get me out of Leadership and put my life where it deserved to be …’

      ‘Wow. It sounds like, what did you say your husband’s called again, Iain? He sounds super-supportive.’

      ‘Iain. My partner, not my husband.’

      You’d invited him into the conversation and then I really let myself go, encouraging you to excavate me, draw things to the surface. Because when I spoke about Iain, it felt so good to share all the gestures, big and small, that made him so wonderful. When our relationship seemed of interest to you, he and I became my proudest achievement. I seemed to be educating you about proper, grown-up partnerships. You asked me more and more questions.

      ‘How did you know Iain was right for you?’

      ‘I suppose I fell for him, hard. I sort of realised when I met him, I thought I’d been walking forward into my life. I mean, I had, but I’d been limping on one leg, because now I felt complete, balanced, a left leg to the right.’

      And then I started telling you how Iain and I had come to sleep with other people, figuring I could educate you about the world, how things could be. ‘We were at a party and I had this thought that we shouldn’t deny ourselves, even though we knew we were going to be together for a long time, maybe forever. He knew exactly what I meant. That’s why we work, Lily. We have rules, like I said. We talked about everyone before and after.’

      ‘Who were the other guys you were with?’

      ‘God, all sorts really. Contacts. Friends. Friends of friends. A good many colleagues. Interns. Lots of interns.’ I immediately regretted saying this as your face twitched when I said ‘interns’ and I instantly tried to cover my tracks. In truth, there had been fewer takers over recent years, which couldn’t have helped me much. It suggested either that I wasn’t as attractive as I was when I was younger and/or most of the millennial generation were as ridiculously puritanical about sex in the workplace as I suspected. It’s hard to say which I found intuitively more disappointing. ‘I mean, yes, interns, but not for a while. Mostly when I was closer to their age. The thing with Asif? We have a bit more of a connection than interns from back in the day. He’s like my work-husband. We don’t play that way anymore, by the way. My idea.’

      ‘Sure,’ you nodded, giving nothing away. ‘So, what’s Iain’s type?’

      ‘Well, he doesn’t do wallflowers. He likes the firecrackers. Women who aren’t backwards in coming forwards, if you know what I mean.’

      I liked talking about the women of yesteryear, who I really was and how I played things before living made me sick. It was all so amazingly sexy then. Until it wasn’t. Until it started to feel like an effort, like every other plate I had to keep spinning in my life. Even before I got properly ill, I’d barely looked at another man for months. Iain had calmed right down too. We’d fallen into a slower rhythm. Gone was the bed-hopping high summer, and in came a calmer September which risked heading to the freezing dead of winter if I wasn’t careful. And I wasn’t careful enough in the end, because of you.

      ‘What about you? Is there anyone special in your life?’

      ‘No, not at the moment. Hey, I’d love to meet Iain one day.’

      And I let you leave it there. Because I immediately had an image of the three of us together: sat around a table, wine and conversation flying between us. We’d laugh; I’d catch Iain’s eye and he’d send me a smile that told me he was glad I’d met you, happy I had someone new to share my thoughts with, enlivened by the idea you’d be good for me, and therefore, for both of us.

      ‘What are you doing this weekend? Why don’t the three of us have lunch?’

      ‘Hey, that’d be perfect.’

      We

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