It’s almost midnight when Chloe arrives at the office. As she approaches the glass doors in the darkness, a sudden thought hits her – what if they’ve changed the keycode since she left? She lingers outside a moment, biting her nails, trying to avoid an obvious search for the CCTV cameras, instead turning her head and momentarily allowing her eyes to flicker up to check the angle of them. Behind her, the odd car drives by on the black road. One slows and she quickly turns her face back to the door, keeping it down to avoid recognition. Her fingers hover on top of the keypad as if, for a second, unsure whether to go through with this plan. But there’s no going back now. She punches in the code, wincing as each number she presses sounds its own tune, and then she hits the lit key symbol. A second later and she is inside.
She takes the stairs two at time, keeping her head down to avoid the security cameras nestled in the top corners of each floor.
On the third floor, at the double doors to the newsroom, she takes her keycard out of her coat pocket. She stares at it in her hand. Slowly, she draws it up to the sensor. She’s amazed to see the light turn green. There’s a beep and the door handle releases into her hand. She crosses the threshold.
The newsroom is in darkness except for the odd desk lamp left on, a tiny flash here and there from a sleeping printer.
She walks down the blue carpet path, forgetting as she does that each light disguised in the suspended ceiling above her will blink into life, lighting her way. Either side of her, the windows instantly turn to mirrors. She watches herself in them as she walks – an intruder. She looks away and moves quickly, purposefully. She doesn’t intend to stay long.
Her melamine desk has now become a dumping ground for boxes; even her swivel chair has three lever-arch files stacked on it. She stands, paying a moment’s respect to the graveyard of her working life. Suddenly, from the other end of the room, she hears a click, a rumble. She jumps, ducking down before realising it’s the coffee machine. But it reminds her, she needs to work quickly.
Chloe heads into the archive, quickly finding the drawer marked KR–LA. She pulls it open, the scratch of metal tearing through the silence. She finds the Kyles.
Kyle; Amanda
Kyle; Norman
Kyle; Sharon
Kyle; Patricia
Kyle; Angela.
Bingo. She pulls it out, it’s more creased than she remembered, but when she peers in, she can see all the cuttings are there, packed away in a tight weave.
The nearest photocopier is outside the editor’s office. She presses the standby button and wills the machine to life. It clunks and clicks, waking dozy from slumber.
‘Come on,’ she whispers to herself as she taps the top of the machine. ‘Come on.’
She counts the seconds until the green light on the ‘ready’ button flashes and when it does, Chloe empties the cuttings onto Sandra’s in-tray. Then she starts unfolding them one by one, smoothing out the creases, putting one under the scanner at a time, watching, satisfied, as copy after copy appears in the tray beneath.
‘Come on,’ she says again to no one but herself.
She curses when she has to pause to refill the A4 paper tray.
She goes on and on like this, the pile in the tray getting thicker, stopping only to feed the machine more paper. One eye on the door at the top of the office which is once again plunged into darkness.
As the pile grows so does her excitement. She takes one copy from the stack at random; the photographs aren’t perfect, some emotion in the faces of Maureen and Patrick has been replaced with inkjet splodges, but the rest is there: the words, the detail. That’s exactly what she needs.
In the silence of the office, the machine spits out copies into the tray, a rhythmic mechanical beat.
And then something else. A bleep at the other end of the office. The release of the door. A cough. The click as half a dozen ceiling lights flicker on above the reporters’ desks. Chloe ducks behind a tall spider plant perched on Sandra’s desk and watches as a late-shift reporter heads towards her desk. Chloe freezes. Wincing now at the copier, glancing between the machine and the file. She has just a few cuttings left. She makes a quick calculation. Could she manage without them? No, she needs every cutting, every detail. Any missing part of this jigsaw might be the most vital.
Chloe sticks her head out from behind the plant. The reporter is typing away at her computer, oblivious to her hiding outside the editor’s office. The light above Chloe has gone off now, but she knows the second she moves it will flicker back into life, alerting the reporter. And then what? Could she be arrested? Charged with breaking and entering? Is it even stealing if she’s only copying?
A huge wad of cuttings waits in the copier tray, at least half a packet of A4. She pictures someone finding them in the morning. Surely that would pose more questions? No, she’s not leaving without them, or the rest of them. She has to finish.
She takes a deep breath, though her heart is pounding. She steps out from behind the plant with the last few cuttings in her hand, willing a pretence of confidence into her stature. She doesn’t look back towards the reporter’s desk, not at first. She just carries on, telling herself she’s working overtime, making it look like that too. She even dares to hum a little to make it feel more realistic – if only to convince herself.
Finally, it’s done, the machine spits out the last sheet of A4 and Chloe scoops them up quickly, pushing them into her handbag. She winces at the creases that appear in the paper – it’s hard to erase that archivist in her – but she has to hurry.
She returns the file to the archive, takes one last look at her old desk, and then, with as much confidence as she can muster, walks down the long carpet of the office. Her hand grips the strap of her bag on her shoulder; underneath it, she feels her heart is hammering inside. As she gets closer she sees the reporter is wearing earphones as she types. Perhaps she’ll even be able to slip right by? She’s level with the newsdesk now; just a few more feet to go until she reaches the doors. She looks straight ahead, fixes her eye on her target.
But then:
‘Hey.’ She hears a call. She ignores it, increases her pace a little. Then again: ‘Hey.’
Chloe freezes, her elbow pressing her bag tight under her arm.
She turns in time to see the reporter removing the earphones from her head. She’s a young girl, the one who arrived to replace the guy who left, whatever his name was. She’s got short blonde hair and the smell of cigarettes and a cheap burger sits in the air between them.
‘Bloody council meetings,’ the reporter says, coughing. ‘Why is it they always leave the one thing that you’re there to report on until the end?’
Chloe isn’t sure if this is a question she’s meant to answer. She shrugs. She looks at the door. She wants to go.
The reporter looks her up and down. ‘You’re working late,’ she says.
Again, Chloe isn’t sure whether this is a question. But at least this reporter still thinks she works here.
‘Yeah, we’re preparing for the new electronic filing system so . . .’ Chloe tilts her head towards the archive and shrugs and the reporter turns back to her computer screen. She knows other people don’t find the archive as fascinating as she does. She feels a sadness then in her chest. Chloe starts to walk away. Just two more feet and she’s out the door.
‘Wait,’ the reporter says.
Chloe freezes again. The reporter gets up from her desk and walks over. Chloe is sure she catches her glance at her bag.
‘You don’t have any change, do you?’ the reporter asks.
‘Sorry?’
‘I could kill for a coffee, but I’ve only got notes.’
‘Oh . . . oh yeah, sure.’
She quickly – too quickly? – takes her bag from her shoulder, conscious not to open it in front of the reporter. She goes over to the picture desk to fish out her purse. The reporter looks pleased when she hands her a shiny one-pound coin.
‘Oh, thanks so much, I owe you one. I’ll give you it back tomorr—’
‘Forget it,’ Chloe says quickly. The last thing she needs is this reporter asking for her at the archive. ‘Honestly, don’t even think of paying me back.’
‘OK, I’ll buy you a drink next time there’s a leaving do. In fact, isn’t Sam on Subs off this week?’
Chloe shuffles her weight between her feet. ‘I . . . er . . . I don’t—’
‘Yeh, drinks at the Tut, I think. I’ll buy you a drink, I couldn’t get through tonight without caffeine.’
Chloe pauses for a moment, long after the reporter has returned to her computer. No one in the office has ever offered to buy her a drink at a leaving do. No one has even asked her if she’s going to one. She looks at this girl with her bright pink nails and her black leather handbag, a celebrity magazine peering from the top of it. Might they have become friends if she hadn’t been fired? She’d never had a friend at work.
The reporter has turned back to her screen.
‘See you tomorrow then,’ the reporter calls without turning round.
Chloe hauls her bag back onto her shoulder, the weight of it replacing a sudden emptiness. She heads towards the door, the brightness of the hallway beyond like a beacon to safety. She’s out the doors, down the stairs, out into the street.
It’s only then that she allows her breath to return to normal.
She’s done it. She’s got the file.
Her hands are still shaking when she gets back to Nan’s house. She rummages through Nan’s bureau for some Blu-Tack then runs upstairs to her room. She shakes the photocopies onto her bed, and they land on the eiderdown with a satisfying thud. Then she gets to work.
She starts by removing a couple of pictures from the wall, then the pins that had held them there. They leave faint smoky outlines of themselves, but she’ll soon cover them. She flicks through for the earliest cutting from the pile, dragging a stool from Nan’s dressing table so she can reach up to the top left-hand corner of the room. She works from left to right, up and down on the chair until her thighs burn, but she won’t stop. She tacks each copy up with four tiny bits of pale-blue putty, and once she’s done the top two rows it’s easier, faster, not having to mount the stool. She works without stopping, a need to see what she’s had in her mind all day.
An hour and a half later she stands back and there it is, the whole story of the Kyles covering three walls of her bedroom – just a few leftover cuttings creep around the next corner. It irritates her that they don’t all fit, but she would never have left them. No, here she has everything.
She shrugs her shoulders a few times, massages the knots that have appeared in them. She’s tired and it’s nearly 3 a.m. She gets into bed, lying on her right side, an arm stretched under her pillow, so she can study this new newsprint wallpaper. She squints ever so slightly and the words blur to grey and, just for a second, it’s as if the photographs of Maureen and Patrick have been chosen from her own family album. Just like that, she has her very own archive. And under its gaze, she sleeps.