You never saw Zee coming. You’d just look up from your screen or turn around and there he was, all coiffed up, perfectly sartorial and expensive-smelling. After he strode past you invariably without a word, you couldn’t miss his ever-rotating entourage of interns, usually three or four of them, like lemmings, following their master. The only fixed member of his trailing wake of assistants was his PR manager Laura, for whom Merida Immer had, undeniably, “the hots”.
Merida stood by the coffee machine warming her hands on a fresh cup she had just poured as Zee’s posse rode through the modern open office. Her eyes followed Laura, focusing on her golden geometrically shaped earring as she passed within a reaching distance without even so much as noticing her. She wondered where she could get a pair like that, and whether she could afford them. Immediately once the group had entered the boardroom and the door had slammed shut behind them, Merida sprung to action.
“where r u??”, she typed furiously to the chat. Her boss didn’t like when she abbreviated messages, but at this point her choice of words was strategic. She’d rather receive an angry reply chastising her grammar than no reply at all. It was absolutely infuriating that he refused to get a smartphone, and sending SMS felt like screaming into the void. Without read receipts, she didn’t even know when she was being left “on read”. And don’t even get her started on the green bubbles.
It wasn’t like Wint to just not show up. He’d often call in sick or show up a bit late, but he had never missed the weekly editorial board meeting. Merida looked at her watch. Wint had fifteen minutes to show up. She hadn’t heard of him all morning.
“Ummm sorry.”
Merida sidestepped out of the way to make room at the coffee machine. Nicky. She could swear she never saw the kid getting a cup except when she was hanging about, in which case he’d suddenly get a craving for coffee.
“You’re transparent”, Merida said under her breath in that inhaling voice she often used when she needed to get something out of her system but she wasn’t up for starting drama.
“Do you think your idea’s going to make it to the agenda?” Nicky asked. His booming voice was way too deep for his bony frame. He stood a head taller than Merida, and their bodies couldn’t have been more different. His was made of tight pink skin stretched over bones that poked against his clothes around his hips and shoulder blades; hers had a deep tan complexion and a roundness she didn’t like but men seemingly did — what a waste.
“Mmmh”, Merida responded automatically while her fingers frantically tapped the screen of her phone.
Nick Napier was her nemesis. Well, that wasn’t quite true. Nick Napier was a very nice boy, too pure to have a single adversarial thought about anyone, a quality that Merida simply couldn’t stand.
“Not at this rate”, she replied. “Wint’s AWOL.”
“The caff?”
“Tried already”, Merida replied, referring to the classic Italian-style sandwich shop down Marylebone High Street where Wint often worked over breakfast.
At that moment, Wint walked in through the doors that reached all the way to the double-high ceiling of the editorial office, where two overworked staff writers were too busy furiously typing up their stories for the lunch push to notice that their boss had just staggered in three hours late and, seemingly, in a bad state.
“Oh god”, Merida said, taking a few quick steps towards her boss approaching the coffee point. It appeared to her as if he was on an unstable footing, but she wasn’t sure. She instinctively reached her hand towards the large white bandage wrapped around his forehead. When she tried to touch him, he flinched and pulled his head away. “What happened? Are you ok?”
Wint brushed past her and stomped into his office. Apart from Zee, he was the only person with a private room in the open plan room sized for four times their fourteen person headcount. A cluster of desks near the tea point still had monitors, books and papers haphazardly strewn about. Normally the cleaners would take care of it, but the office manager who arranged for these kinds of practicalities had been part of the last week’s round of layoffs that had swallowed these desks’ former occupants. The stuff would probably languish there until there was nobody left to keep on the lights.
Merida followed Wint to his office. Wint had turned on his computer, and was staring at the monitor morosely. He squinted in concentration.
“I can’t remember it.”
Merida walked around his desk, took the keyboard and typed in her boss’s password. She shouldn’t have known it, but it wasn’t the first time he forgot, so they’d made a pact — she’d remember his password for him and not rat him out to the IT security who’d force him to change the password, further exacerbating the problem. In return Wint would help Merida with her special project.
A desktop background picture of a foggy Scottish landscape came into view. Wint grabbed the keyboard back, opened a web browser and waited for the home page to load. The Platform’s home screen greeted him with a small red bubble showing 17 new notifications he should check out.
“Are we just going to sit here and pretend that your head isn’t wrapped in a massive white bandage?”, Merida said. Her eyes dropped down to his shirt collar peeking from under his jacket. There was red blood splatter on the collar, and the entire front of his jacket was covered by a mist of red specks. “And that you need to go into the editorial board meeting in ten minutes, looking like a well-fed vampire.”
Wint looked down at the front of his shirt and grunted. “There’s a fresh one in the closet”, he said, tugging on his shoulder to remove his blood-stained jacket while keeping his other hand on the mouse, clicking through notifications. Merida opened the corner closet and picked up a light blue shirt still in a crinkly plastic wrapping. She opened the packaging and removed the pins around the collar, sleeves and tails of the shirt, holding it in shape. One of many useless things she had learned during her university years, which on her resume she might as well called her “retail assistant” years, since a drop-out from a philosophy degree was even worse than not having gone to school at all. Now here she was, a social media writer for a storied 250-year-old newspaper whose past editors had gone on to be prime ministers, nobel laureates and prize winning writers among other venerable posts, dressing up the current editor whose job it was to get cleaned up and show up at the board meeting so they wouldn’t all get fired.
She helped Wint unbutton his shirt. Thank god, he was wearing a t-shirt underneath. She imagined he was a hairy type of geezer, but did not care to find out. Undressing and dressing her boss was apparently yet another addition to the long list of things she was expected to do at the office, the list starting with being always the one who had to make a fresh pot of coffee. She might not have been a full-fledged staff writer yet, but that didn’t mean she was expected to act as their assistant either. As a senior intern — a ridiculous Silicon Valley title Zee had imported straight from the west coast in order to not have to pay her proper wages and give her a permanent employment contract — she did have a real job writing content and “driving engagement” to other writers’ pieces via social media, which most of them were too old to understand. The only thing “senior” about her role was that she had held the title of intern for almost two years.
Merida didn’t like many of the people at The Intrepid, but she couldn’t help but get along with her boss. He was an impressive intellectual, a prize-winning biographer, and genuinely, Merida thought, a nice guy, though he might have seen better years than the last two she’d been working under him.
She took a step back and looked at Wint. The shirt was clean, but looked frumpy thanks to the creases from its packaging. Cheap fabrics did that. The bandage made him look like a comic book character who’d gotten knocked over the head, or maybe like an old-timey tennis player with one of those white bandannas. He looked shook.
“Ok, we have a few minutes”, Merida said. “What happened?” She looked into his glassy eyes expectantly. He didn’t answer.
“There was an accident… on the bus”, Wint finally managed. “Someone died, I think.”
“A cyclist”, Merida declared. It was always a cyclist.
“No. I don’t think so. Ahhh, I’m not sure.”
“You’ve got a concussion.”
“Yeah, probably, they said.”
“You’ve been to the hospital then.”
“No, on-site. They had ambulances on-site. They wrapped me up and sent me off.” He looked at his watch. It was almost noon. He’d taken the bus at eight. What had happened to the hours in between?
“You should go home”, Merida said. “You don’t look too good.”
“Mmmmh.”
“I’ll take you home”, Merida said. “But before that, I need you to do me a big favor.”
“…”
“I need you to go to the editorial meeting and get our new content strategy approved for next year because my hours are up, and sadly I need this dumb garbage job.”