Swing Time Read online

  It was a company that set great store on appearances. Twenty-something receptionists became assistant producers, just because they seemed “fun” and “up for it.” My thirty-one-year-old boss had gone from production intern to Head of Talent in only four and a half years. During my own eight-month stint I was promoted twice. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed—if digital hadn’t killed the video stars. At the time I felt lucky: I had no particular career plans, yet my career advanced anyway. Drinking played a role. At Hawley Lane drinking was mandatory: going out for drinks, holding one’s drink, drinking others under the table, never declining a drink, even if on antibiotics, even if ill. Keen, at that point in my life, to avoid evenings alone with my father, I went to all office drinks and office parties, and I could hold my alcohol, I’d been perfecting that very British skill since the age of thirteen. The big difference at YTV was that we drank for free. Money sloshed around the company. “Freebie” and “open bar”: two of our most repeated office nouns. Compared to the jobs I’d had before—even compared to college—it felt like being in an extended period of playtime, in which we were forever expecting the arrival of adults, who never appeared.

  One of my earliest tasks was to collate the guest lists for our departmental parties, of which there was about one a month. They tended to be in expensive venues in the center of town, and there were always loads of freebies: T-shirts, trainers, MiniDisc players, stacks of CDs. Officially sponsored by one vodka company or another, unofficially by Colombian drug cartels. In and out of the bathroom stalls we trooped. Next morning walks-of-shame, nosebleeds, holding your high heels in your hands. I also filed the company’s mini-cab receipts. People booked mini-cabs back from one-night stands or to airports to go on holiday. They booked them in the wee hours at weekends to and from all-night off-licenses or house parties. I once booked a cab to my Uncle Lambert’s. An executive became office-wide famous for booking a cab to Manchester, having woken up late and missed the train. After I left I heard there was a clampdown, but that year the annual bill for transport was over a hundred thousand pounds. I once asked Zoe to explain the logic behind it all and was told that VHS tape—which employees were often carrying upon their person—could be “corrupted” if taken on the tube. But most of our people didn’t even know this was their official alibi, free travel was something they took for granted, as a sort of right that came with being “in the media,” and which they felt to be the least they deserved. Certainly when compared to what old college friends—who had chosen, instead, banking or lawyering—were finding each Christmas in their bonus envelopes.

  At least the bankers and lawyers worked all hours. We had nothing but time. My own calls were usually done and dusted by eleven thirty—bearing in mind I arrived at my desk around ten. Oh, time felt different then! When I took my hour and a half for lunch that’s all I did with it: lunch. No e-mail in our offices, not quite yet, and I had no mobile phone. I went through the loading-bay exit, straight out to the canal, and walked along the water’s edge, a plastic-wrapped, quintessentially British sandwich in my hand, taking in the day, the open-air drug deals and the fat mallards quacking for tourist bread crumbs, the decorated houseboats, and the sad young Goths hanging their feet over the bridge, bunking off school, shadows of myself from a decade before. Often I went as far as the zoo. There I’d sit on the grassy bank and look up at Snowdon’s aviary, around which a flock of African birds flew, bone-white with blood-red beaks. I never knew their names until I saw them on their own continent, where they anyway had a different name. After lunch I strolled back, sometimes with a book in hand, in no particular hurry, and what’s astonishing to me now is that I found none of this unusual or a special piece of luck. I, too, thought of free time as my God-given right. Yes, compared to the excesses of my colleagues, I considered myself hard-working, serious, with a sense of proportion the others lacked, the product of my background. Too junior to go on any of their multiple “company bonding trips,” I was the one who booked their flights—to Vienna, to Budapest, to New York—and privately marveled at the price of a business-class seat, at the very existence of business class, never able to decide, as I filed away these “expenses,” if this sort of thing had always been going on, all around me, during my childhood (but invisible to me, at a level above my awareness) or if I had come of age at an especially buoyant moment in the history of England, a period in which money had new meaning and uses and the “freebie” had become a form of social principle, unheard of in my neighborhood and yet normal elsewhere. “Freebism”: the practice of giving free things to people who have no need of them. I thought of all the kids from school who could have done my present job easily—who knew so much more than me about music, who were genuinely cool, truly “street,” as I was everywhere wrongly assumed to be—but who were as likely to turn up at these offices as go to the moon. I wondered: why me?

  In the great piles of glossy magazines, also freebies, left around the office, we now read that Britannia was cool—or some version of it that struck even me as intensely uncool—and after a while began to understand that it must be on precisely this optimistic wave that the company surfed. Optimism infused with nostalgia: the boys in our office looked like rebooted Mods—with Kinks haircuts from thirty years earlier—and the girls were Julie Christie bottle-blondes in short skirts with smudgy black eyes. Everybody rode a Vespa to work, everybody’s cubicle seemed to feature a picture of Michael Caine in Alfie or The Italian Job. It was nostalgia for an era and a culture that had meant nothing to me in the first place, and perhaps because of this I was, in the eyes of my colleagues, cool, by virtue of not being like them. New American hip-hop was brought solemnly to my desk by middle-aged executives who assumed I must have some very learned opinions about it and, in fact, the little I knew did seem a lot in this context. Even the task of chaperoning Aimee that day was given to me, I’m sure, because I was assumed to be too cool to care. My disapproval of most things was always already assumed: “Oh, no, don’t bother asking her, she wouldn’t like it.” Said ironically, as everything was back then, but with a cold streak of defensive pride.

  My most unexpected asset was my boss, Zoe. She had also begun as an intern, but with no trust fund or moneyed parents like the rest, nor even, as I had myself, a rent-free parental crash pad. She’d lived in a filthy Chalk Farm squat, remained unpaid for over a year, and yet came in every morning at nine—punctuality was considered, at YTV, an almost inconceivable virtue—where she proceeded to “work her arse off.” A foster-care kid originally, in and out of the group homes of Westminster, she was familiar to me from other kids I’d known who’d gone through that system. She had that same wild thirst for whatever was on offer, and a disassociated, hypermanic persona—traits you sometimes find in war reporters, or in soldiers themselves. Rightfully she should have been fearful of life. Instead she was recklessly bold. The opposite of me. Yet in the context of the office, Zoe and I were viewed as interchangeable. Her politics, like mine, were always already assumed, although in her case the office had it quite wrong: she was an ardent Thatcherite, the kind who feels that having pulled herself up by her own bootstraps everybody else better follow her example and do the same. For some reason she “saw herself in me.” I admired her grit, but did not see myself in her. I had been to university, after all, and she hadn’t; she was a cokehead, I wasn’t; she dressed like the Spice Girl she resembled, instead of the executive she actually was; made unfunny sexual jokes, slept with the youngest, poshest, floppiest-haired, whitest, indie-boy interns; I prudishly disapproved. She liked me anyway. When she was drunk or high she liked to remind me that we were sisters, two brown girls with a duty toward each other. Just before Christmas she sent me to our European Music Awards, in Salzburg, where one of my tasks was accompanying Whitney Houston to a soundcheck. I don’t remember the song she sang—I never really liked her songs—but standing in that empty concert hall, listening to her sing without backing music, with no suppo
rt of any kind, I found that the sheer beauty of the voice, its monumental dose of soul, the pain implicit within it, bypassed all my conscious opinions, my critical intelligence or sense of the sentimental, or whatever it is that people are referring to when they talk about their own “good taste,” going instead straight into my spine, where it convulsed a muscle and undid me. Way back by the EXIT sign I burst into tears. By the time I’d got to Hawley Lane this story had done the rounds, although it did me no harm, quite the opposite—it was taken to mean I was a true believer.

  Three

  It seems funny now, pathetic almost—and maybe only technology can achieve this comic revenge on our memories—but when we had an artist coming in and needed to make a dossier on them, to give to interviewers and advertisers and so on, we would go down to a little library in the basement and pull out a four-volume encyclopedia called The Biography of Rock. Everything in Aimee’s entry, major or minor, I already knew—Bendigo-born, allergic to walnuts—excepting one detail: her favorite color was green. I made my notes, by hand, collated all relevant requests, stood in the copy room by a noisy fax machine and slowly fed the documents into it, thinking of someone in New York—a dream city to me—waiting by a similar contraption as my document came through to them, at the exact same time I sent it, which felt so very modern in the doing of it, a triumph over distance and time. And then of course to meet her I would need new clothes, perhaps new hair, a fresh way of speaking and walking, a whole new attitude to life. What to wear? The only place I ever shopped back then was Camden Market, and from inside that warren of Doc Martens and hippy shawls I was very pleased to draw out a huge pair of bright green cargo pants of a silky parachute material, a close-fitting green crop top—which had, as an added bonus, The Low End Theory album cover art on the front of it picked out in black, green and red glitter—and a pair of space-age Air Jordans, also green. I finished with a fake nose ring. Nostalgic and futuristic, hip-hop and indie, rrriot girl and violent femme. Women often believe clothes will solve a problem, one way or another, but by the Tuesday before she was due to arrive I understood nothing I wore was going to help me, I was too nervous, couldn’t work or concentrate on anything. I sat in front of my giant gray monitor listening to the whirr of the modem, anticipating Thursday and typing, in my distraction, Tracey’s full name into the little white box, over and over again. It’s what I did at work when I was bored or anxious though it never really relieved either condition. I had done it many times by then, firing up Netscape, waiting for our interminably slow dial-up, and always finding the same three little islands of information: Tracey’s Equity listing, her personal web page, and a chat room she frequented, under the alias Truthteller_LeGon. The Equity listing was static, it never changed. It mentioned her stint the previous year in the chorus of Guys and Dolls, but no other shows were ever added, no fresh news appeared. Her page changed all the time. Sometimes I would check it twice in a day and find the song different or that the exploding pink firework graphic had been replaced by flashing rainbow hearts. It was on this page, a month earlier, that she had mentioned the chat room, with a hyperlinked note—Sometimes truth is hard to hear!!!—and this single reference was all I’d needed: the door was open and I began to wander through it a few times a week. I don’t think anyone else who followed that link—no one but me—would have known that the “truth teller” in that bizarre conversation was Tracey herself. But then no one, as far as I could see, was reading her page anyway. There was a sad, austere purity to this: the songs she chose no one heard, the words she wrote—banal aphorisms, usually (“The Arc of the Moral Universe is Long but It Bends toward Justice”)—no one but me ever read. Only in that chat room did she seem to be in the world, though it was such a bizarre world, filled only with the echoing voices of people who had apparently already agreed with each other. From what I could tell she spent a frightening amount of time in there, especially late at night, and by now I’d read through all her threads, both current and archived, until I was able to follow the logic of it all—better to say I was no longer shocked by it—and could trace and appreciate the line of argument. I became less inclined to tell my colleagues stories about my crazy ex-friend Tracey, her surreal chat-room adventures, her apocalyptic obsessions. I hadn’t forgiven her—or forgotten—but using her in this way became somehow distasteful to me.

  One of the oddest things about it was the fact that the man whose spell she appeared to be under, the guru himself, had once been a breakfast-TV reporter, had worked in the very building I sat in now, and when we were kids I can remember often sitting with Tracey, watching him, bowls of cereal in our laps, waiting for his boring grown-up show to be over and for our Saturday-morning cartoons to begin. Once, during my first winter break from university, I went to buy some textbooks in a chain bookshop on the Finchley Road, and while wandering around the film section saw him in person, presenting one of his books in a far-off corner of that mammoth shop. He sat at a plain white desk, dressed all in white, with his prematurely white head of hair, facing a sizable audience. Two girls who worked there stood near me and from behind shelving they peeked out at the peculiar gathering. They were laughing at him. But I was struck not so much by what he was saying as by the odd composition of his audience. There were a few middle-aged white women, dressed in their cozily patterned Christmas jumpers, looking no different from the housewives who would have liked him ten years earlier, but by far the greater part of his crowd was young black men, of about my own age, holding well-worn copies of his books on their knee and listening with an absolute focus and determination to an elaborate conspiracy theory. For the world was run by lizards in human form: the Rockefellers were lizards, and the Kennedys, and almost everybody at Goldman Sachs, and William Hearst had been a lizard, and Ronald Reagan and Napoleon—it was a global lizard plot. Eventually the shop-girls tired of their sniggering and wandered off. I stayed till the end, deeply troubled by what I’d seen, not knowing what to make of it. Only later, when I started reading Tracey’s threads—which were, if you could put aside their insane first premise, striking in their detail and perverse erudition, linking many diverse historical periods and political ideas and facts, combining them all into a sort of theory of everything, which even in its comic wrongness required a certain depth of study and a persistent attention—yes, only then did I feel that I better understood why all those serious-looking young men had gathered in the bookshop that day. It became possible to read between the lines. Wasn’t it all a way of explaining power, in the end? The power that certainly exists in the world? Which few hold and most never get near? A power my old friend must have felt, at that point in her life, she utterly lacked?

  “Er, what the fuck is that?”

  I turned round in my swivel chair and found Zoe at my shoulder, examining a flashing graphic of a lizard wearing, on top of his lizard head, the Crown Jewels. I minimized the page.

  “Album graphics. Bad.”

  “Listen, Thursday morning—you’re on, they’ve confirmed. Are you ready? Got everything you need?”

  “Don’t worry. It’s going to be fine.”

  “Oh, I know it will be. But if you need some Dutch courage,” said Zoe, tapping her nose, “let me know.”

  • • •

  It didn’t come to that. Difficult to piece back together exactly what it did come to. My memory of it and Aimee’s have never had much overlap. I’ve heard her say that she hired me because she felt “we had an immediate connection” that day or, sometimes, because I struck her as being so capable. I think it was because I was inadvertently rude to her, a thing few people were at that time in her life, and in my rudeness must have lodged myself in her brain. A fortnight later, when she found herself in sudden need of a new, young assistant, there I was, lodged in there. She emerged anyway from a car with blacked-out windows in mid-argument with her then assistant, Melanie Wu. Her manager, Judy Ryan, walked two steps behind them both, shouting into a phone. The first thing I
ever heard Aimee say was a put-down: “Everything coming out of your mouth right now is totally worthless to me.” I noticed she did not have an Australian accent, not any more, but neither was it quite American or quite British, it was global: it was New York and Paris and Moscow and LA and London combined. Of course now lots of people speak in this way but Aimee’s version was the first time I heard it. “You’re the opposite of helpful,” she said now, to which Melanie replied: “I can totally see that.” A moment later this poor girl found herself in front of me, looked down at my chest, seeking a name tag, and when she looked back up I could see she was broken, struggling not to cry. “So we’re on schedule,” she said, firmly as could be managed, “and it would be great if we could stay on schedule?”

  We four stood in the lift, silent. I was determined to speak, but before I managed it Aimee turned to me and pouted at my top, like a pretty teenage boy in a sulk.

  “Interesting choice,” she said, to Judy. “Wearing another artist’s shirt when you’re meeting an artist? Professional.”

  I looked down at myself and blushed.

  “Oh! No! Miss—I mean, Mrs.—Ms. Aimee. I wasn’t trying to make any—”