THREE

As the lift doors opened I took a deep breath and walked out onto my floor. My job isn’t that bad, really – Garry often quips that I’ve had ‘another hard day down the glittermine’ – but I don’t think I’m overreacting to say my soul seeps out of every pore for every single second I’m here. No matter how content I feel after a morning swim or a long weekend, it only takes 30 minutes of being in the office before I feel complete and utter despair at having to do this for another 40 years.

My boss, Adam, was at his desk across the table from me and in no way acknowledged my presence when I arrived. I’d be offended, but I’m long past that. If he quit, our little sub-team (the youth-facing part of a mental health charity) would fall into total chaos, and maybe he feels absolutely no need to waste a single second of his day on such things as initiating pleasantries with subordinates.

‘Good morning!’ I said with as much chirpiness as I could muster.

‘Morning,’ he muttered back – the bare minimum without being actively rude.

‘Alright, pet?’ said Claire, smiling cheerily from directly across the desk. Like me, Claire is a senior content producer at Youth Steady and although she can be relied upon after a few gins to get weepy about Adam’s behaviour, she’s not so obsessed as me. ‘Good weekend?’

‘Fine, thanks. You?’

‘Yeah, good. Took Edie down to Brighton to paddle in the sea for the first time.’

‘How’d she like that?’

‘She screamed the whole time, poor love, but liked the ice cream for afters.’

I half-listened to Claire prattle on about her adorable toddler while I loaded up my computer. Steady is a charity, and not even a sexy charity which has people clamouring to run marathons for us, so our equipment is incredibly old. If you took the case off my computer tower, I’m sure you’d find a tiny old man sat on a penny-farthing, shrugging and saying, ‘Eh, what do you want me to do about it?’ in a voice that’s 90 per cent tobacco ash. The whole reason Claire and I arrive 20 minutes earlier than we have to is so that our computers can be up and running by 9am. I’m not sure why Adam arrives so early. To be honest, I’m not sure he ever leaves.

I opened up my emails. There was one from Adam marked with a little red exclamation point. My stomach lurched.

I’m happy with this but as it’s advertising the service we need to get Marketing & Elias to sign off too ASAP

He liked what I wrote last week! I’d feel relief, but I’m already so tense that at this point I’d need an orgasm and a family bar of Dairy Milk to unclench. Instead, I exhale the breath I didn’t know I was holding, open a new email, attach the school leaflet copy to it, and begin to type.

Hello! So, this is the copy we’re proposing for the new school leaflet. It’s got an introduction to the service and the website, and then an extract from our page on self-esteem, as that’s the theme that comms really wants to push this year.

We need your sign-off on this before it can be sent to the printer. Can you cast your eye over it and let me know if there are any problems, please?

Any questions, just ask.

Thanks!

Take care,

Amy

I sent it to Elias (head of youth activities) and my favourite person in Marketing, Joe. Struck by a sudden fear that I’d started the email with ‘Dear fuckheads’ or something along those lines, I checked my sent-folder. I hadn’t, thankfully. Almost immediately, I got a reply.

Hi there. Thanks for your email. I’m out of the office this week. If you need anything urgently, please contact Rosie Lucas.

Thanks,

Joe

Fucksticks! I don’t know Rosie Lucas, I don’t have a relationship with her. I don’t know if she’s a quick replier, when her meetings are, if I can call her a lazy git without her reporting me to HR. I have no fucking idea how to proceed, which means I have no fucking idea how this week is going to go. Why are the tiny, admin-based things always so much more stressful and so much harder to deal with than the big ones? I can do a presentation to a hundred donors about exactly how we used their money no problem, but the idea of getting sign-off from someone I didn’t know was bringing me out in a cold sweat. Swallowing my nerves, I click on the link to Rosie’s email in Joe’s out-of-office and start to type.

Hi Rosie. I’m Amy, and I’m senior content producer in the youth arm of the Editorial Content team. I tried to email Joe Hart and his OOO directed me towards you …

I copied and pasted the email sent to Joe into the email, hit send and let out my breath. Without realising it, I had curled my toes into tiny feet fists in my shoes. I needed to get this done, or Adam would hate me even more than he did already. I glanced at him miserably: he was still absorbed in his phone. I wouldn’t mind that he hated me so much apart from the fact that I quite liked him. Most people here are killing time until they can retire, but not him. He’s hungry. He wants to keep doing things bigger and better, to win awards and impress people, and give talks and all that work stuff we’re supposed to aspire to #girlboss #goals #leanin. And I don’t know why he hates me. Everyone else seems to get on with me. My constant need for validation and desire to please mean that I work hard, I work fast, and I work long. Also, I’m not so far into my self-loathing that I can’t see the objective truth: I’m clever, I’m capable, and I’m good at my job – no matter how I feel most Friday afternoons.

Our office was filling up. The main Editorial team arrived in groups of two or three, talking about taking bike rides down to the coast or the incredible hangovers they had this weekend. I glanced over longingly at their head of team, Rowena, who has a mane of golden gingery hair and is simultaneously incredibly friendly and so calmly powerful you get the impression she’d make your eyeballs into earrings if you disappointed her.

When Youth Steady’s junior content producers, Fee and Nish, arrived together, they were discussing the latest episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. with an intensity most people reserve for political debate. Nish was wearing a t-shirt that I knew for a fact had moth holes in the armpits, and Fee looked … well. Like Fee. They had once joked to me that, as a non-binary babe, their goal was that people would look at them and feel nothing but confusion about what their gender was. Their amazing dress sense meant they achieved that goal every day of their lives.

Adam cleared his throat, typing something with such ferocity it was like he was trying to punch through the keyboard.

‘Team meeting at two, yes?’ he said tersely, eyes not moving from the screen. We muttered in agreement, turning to our screens in silence.

The morning passed in a blur. I was half-editing scripts for the new videos we were about to produce for the Steady: On Now YouTube channel, half-obsessing over why Adam hated me, and half-WhatsApping Penny about whether or not I should be applying for jobs. I realise that’s too many halves for one person, but I don’t think you appreciate how quickly I was working. By the time lunch came around, I was nauseous with the stress of it all and had to focus on keeping my hands steady.

Amy: I think I’m going to be sick

Penny: Then go and be sick, darling

Amy: I don’t want to be sick

Penny: If you’re going to be sick, you might as well just go and be sick. In private, not all over your desk

Penny: But also, your job shouldn’t be making you want to be sick

Amy: I know

Amy: I need to leave

Penny: You do. Your job is an utter shitshow.

Penny: Just remember, they’re cunts, my love, and they don’t deserve you

Amy: Okay. Yes. Cunts. The lot of them, cunts

Penny: Exactly. A veritable bouquet of cunts. Time to find you a non-cunty workplace. What have you applied for?

I was typing out a reply to Penny, telling her about the job at an indie art charity which would have required me to travel to Zone 6 and paid slightly less than I was on now, when I sensed someone coming up behind me. Quickly, I closed the WhatsApp Web window and when Adam appeared at my chair, I spun round to face him.

‘Any luck with the school copy yet?’ he asked.

‘Uh, no,’ I said, spinning slightly back towards the computer so I could open my email and gesture vaguely at the screen. ‘Joe is off, so I’ve emailed someone called Rosie Lucas about it …?’ I trailed off, hoping he might go, ‘Oh, Rosie Lucas! I know her, I’ll just go and have a word,’ but nada. I’m usually quite good at reading body language, but Adam’s shoulders stayed set, his eyes didn’t flicker, his mouth didn’t move. MI6 agents give away more.

‘But no response yet, from her or from Elias. I’ll wait until after the meeting, and then I’ll … chase?’ I phrased it as a question rather than a statement and cursed myself – according to the people who write long articles for the Observer about how the pay gap is all down to the way women communicate, that’s exactly the wrong thing to do. Then again, I could probably write a statement on a giant plate, smash it over Adam’s head and he’d give it only a passing amount of interest.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Do you want to take us through the new scripts in the meeting?’

It’s not really a question.

‘I can do.’

‘Great.’

He walked off without another word. I turned back to my desk, digging my nails into my palm. Shit. Okay, two hours to go. I need to actually get some work done.

I work better on a deadline so I snapped my headphones on, blasted film scores, said goodbye to dreams of sitting outside in the sun to eat my lunch, and got it done. By the time 2pm rolled around, I had five copies of a passable script on OCD printed out. I would have felt proud of myself if I wasn’t too busy feeling sick.

My little team schlepped to the meeting room, Fee wiping crisp crumbs from around their mouth and Nish with his usual array of pens and pencils he uses to take precise, incredibly detailed notes. Adam sat furthest from the door, tapping furiously on his phone; he didn’t look up when we came in. Claire, Fee and Nish were having an enthusiastic conversation about RuPaul’s Drag Race, which I am the only person in the world not to have seen, so I sat quietly until Adam looked up and the conversation faltered.

‘Right,’ he said, putting his phone face-down on the table. ‘Fee, stats for this week?’

They flipped open their notebook, which had a glittery unicorn on the front. ‘Twenty-four thousand uniques, 33 per cent new users. Up on last week, but our time on page has suffered because of it. Most popular section is the self-harm section. I’ve done a bit of digging and there’s been a Hollyoaks storyline on it this week, so that’ll be why, and search has been the biggest driver of traffic this week.’

‘Have you told the social team?’ Adam asked.

Fee met his gaze unflinchingly.

‘No, do you want me to?’ they asked.

‘Well, yes. If they know that Hollyoaks is driving traffic, they can reference it in their posts and catch anyone who knows Hollyoaks but doesn’t know us,’ he replied. He kept his voice and tone neutral, but I swore there was a glimmer of irritation there. Fee didn’t seem to notice – or if they did, they didn’t care.

‘Cool, can do,’ they said brightly, making a note in green ink. Adam was still staring unblinkingly. Something twinged heavily in my gut. Oh, God, this is excruciating! How are they not panicking? Why are they so unbothered?

‘Claire,’ he said. She jumped next to me. ‘What’s the progress with the new site structure?’

Claire took us through the new information architecture planned for the website, then Nish went through the research he’d been doing on the new therapeutic games. I was half-listening, half-daydreaming about going to work as a primary teacher in a small seaside town when Nish suddenly put his notebook back on the table, picked up a pen and looked at me expectantly. I glanced round. Everyone was looking at me.

‘Amy,’ said Adam. ‘Take us through the work you’re doing on YouTube.’

‘Sure,’ I said, somehow making my voice sound a lot steadier than I felt. I passed round the printouts of my script, cleared my throat, and started to talk.

‘So, we’ve decided to go for three topics initially – OCD, social anxiety and self-harm,’ I began. ‘We’ve gone for –’ I interrupted myself with a cough. ‘We’ve gone for these first because we know from the message boards and feedback that OCD is one of the most misunderstood conditions, social anxiety is becoming more and more searched for as … as celebrities talk about it and the issue gains awareness, and self-harm is consistently a big issue. So … I … yeah, I decided that these are the first three to look at, and the OCD script is what you’ve got here …’

I looked around the room. Claire was smiling encouragingly. Fee was reading the script and nodding. Nish was scribbling in his notebook, colour coding and drawing little symbols that make no sense to anyone apart from him. Adam was looking at me blankly.

‘What are you trying to do here?’

‘Right! Right, so, our first videos are going to be very Mental Health 101 …’

Even though I’d spent all morning on the script, it was only a three-minute video and so it didn’t take me long to talk it through. My heart was buzzing, my chest filled with butterflies, and I pressed my fingertips into the desk to try and hide the fact that my hands were shaking. Even so, I felt a weird swell of pride as I re-read the script out loud and explained my choices. I’m good at this, this is a good script! This will make a good video! By the time I’d finished, even though I was still incredibly nervous, I was also strangely hopeful. Nish, Fee and Claire were looking at me with interest, agreement – maybe even respect? Huh! Maybe I did okay? But then Adam cleared his throat, and my swollen chest deflated to a balloon that’s been forgotten about and hidden under the sofa for two days.

Oh, God! Clearly, it’s terrible and I did everything wrong and …

‘When do you think you’re going to have the other scripts ready?’ he asked.

So that was it. No comment on whether it was good or bad, no praise, no suggestions, no indication he’s paid any attention to the ten minutes I spent explaining a piece of work I’d poured my heart into for the past two hours, nothing. Just a question of logistics.

‘Hopefully, by the end of tomorrow, if I can keep …’

‘Fine. Have you heard back from Elias and Rosie yet?’

‘N … no.’

‘Don’t forget to chase them. We need to get that signed off as soon as possible.’ He locked his phone, shoved it in his pocket and stood up. ‘Thanks, everyone.’ Except when he said ‘Thanks’, the subtext was very much ‘Fuck off’.

Not making eye contact with anyone, I walked steadily back to my desk. I dumped my notebook and printout on the keyboard, turned and headed straight out of the building and into the cafe across the road, where I bought a large mocha and a salted caramel brownie and brought them back to my desk. I worked my way steadily through both items, even when full, even when the sugar overwhelmed me. I kept going, especially when sugar overwhelmed me; it overwhelmed my fear and my sadness and my shame at being me. By the time I’d finished, I felt more physically than emotionally sick, and that’s what I put all my focus on. I threw the wrapper and the cup in the bin, returned to my desk, put my headphones on and hid behind the computer screen until it was time to go home, sit quietly while Garry watched TV, and regain the strength to do it all again tomorrow.