A Very Accidental Love Story. Claudia Carroll
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early-morning stillness, a few precious hours before the phones start hopping and things really get pressurised round here.
And every single morning of my life when I flash my pass at the security doors and stride across the main open-plan office to get to my inner sanctum, there waiting for me on the wall above my desk is a giant portrait of one Douglas Merriman, our founder and first editor. Who by the way, would have sat in the very same office now occupied by me, all of a hundred and fifty years ago. He’s a heavily bearded geezer who looks exactly like Tolstoy, and when I feel those stern Victorian round owl glasses glaring down at me, I look back up at him, thinking the same thought that I do every single day since I took this job.
Bastard. You never had to work in a digital age, with email and mobiles to connect you to the office even on a Sunday at two a.m. did you? You never had to compete with twenty-four hour news channels or try to sell papers in the middle of the worse economic slump since the Great Depression, did you?
I’m just flipping open my briefcase and whipping out my initial draft of notes on today’s edition, always how we kick off the day round here: with a thorough going over of this morning’s early edition; where we scored, where we could have done better, where there’s vast room for improvement, that kind of thing. All department heads are required to be here for this, which means about a dozen people sitting round the conference room in total, ranging from political affairs, to foreign, to sports and culture.
Next thing, without even bothering to knock, Seth Coleman’s lean, slimy, Basil Rathbone-esque form is filling my office door. Looking like he always does, like he was dressed by his mammy. Funny, but for the longest time I assumed he was gay but still in the closet; no straight man would ever wear trousers that sharply ironed, for starters. But then a few years back, he made a bizarre and badly misjudged pass at me at the Christmas party. I remember looking at him in blank astonishment that he’d somehow misread my deep loathing of him for in-your-face lust and it now lives on forevermore in the comedy quadrant of my brain.
‘Morning Eloise. So what’s keeping you? In exactly one minute, you’re going to be late.’
Like this is an episode of 24, and I’m Jack Bauer.
‘Everyone’s already waiting for you in the boardroom, you know,’ he says in his nasal whine, slicking his hair back, even though there must be a half-pound of grease already holding it there. ‘All department heads, present and correct. Hope there’s nothing wrong with you, is there? Not like you to sail this dangerously close to unpunctuality.’
I say nothing, nod curtly and smile though gritted teeth.
‘So have you thought any more about my offer to escort you to the directors’ weekend this year? It’s just round the corner you know.’
A brief, unspoken thought filters between us, him mentally spelling it out to me: ‘and let’s face it, I’m the best offer you’re going to get’.
I totally ignore it, hide my annoyance behind a sheet of A4 paper, then briskly brush past him, ready to start the day.
And just when I think things can’t get possibly get any worse, da-daaa, they do. Course they do. What else did I expect? It’s already past two in the afternoon and I’m back in the conference room, feeling like I’ve never left it, chairing our first meeting about the mock-up of tomorrow’s paper.
This, by the way, is where we sit around and thrash out the overall shape of the news, what the lead item should be on the front page, what stories are developing and need to be closely monitored over the next few hours, what feature and opinion pieces should be placed where. Everyone’s here at my insistence, the political editor, foreign, financial, regional, culture, the whole lot of them, all pitching their stories and vying for the maximum coverage possible, with a front page slot the absolute Holy Grail.
Ordinarily I get a huge buzz out of this meeting; tempers tend to flare, passions run high – something I freely encourage – and it’s always exhilarating to hear each editor push their stories and battle to get the maximum number of column inches allowed. We’re a bit like a debating club, minus the alcohol, but bear in mind the department heads here are about as vocal, argumentative and aggressive a bunch as you’d care to fight in a bar-room brawl on a Friday night. For some reason though, I just don’t seem to be on the ball this afternoon.
Can’t concentrate, can’t focus. Impossible to after what’s unfolded since this day from hell began, and certainly not given what’s happening in my personal life outside of these four walls. Oh sure, no doubt about it, by about eight this morning I was supremely confident that I’d have a replacement for Elka before the day was out; someone far more suitable, I even went so far as to think smugly. Someone, let’s just say, a bit less moody and demanding, who understood what it was like to work for a busy, professional single parent.
By ten-thirty, when I’d clocked a look at the first few candidates for the job, admittedly I was taken aback, but still reasonably sure that it was just a matter of trawling through the dross before I hit on my perfect Mary Poppins. Candidate numbers one and two were just a bit of a blip, no more that that. Just a simple matter of doing a little bit more weeding, that was all, with absolutely no call for panic whatsoever.
By eleven forty-five, yes, okay … so the mood had shifted a bit and now I was starting to get tetchy, unable to figure out why in the name of God it was so bloody difficult to fill a perfectly simple job in the throes of an economic meltdown, but I still held onto a sliver of hope that so far I’d just been unlucky and it was simply a matter of hanging in there till the perfect nanny calmly strolled into my life. To stay.
And right now at two in the afternoon, after the last and final disastrous interview, there’s no other way to describe it: I’m in a blind bleeding panic. About a dozen voices are bickering for all they’re worth, clamouring for my attention across the boardroom, while I sit at the top of the table, looking and acting like I’m listening intently; but actually, I’m a million miles away.
Because now I know. It’s finally official. I’m on the brink of a crisis.
I Have. No. Childcare. As of the end of this week, I have no one to help me; not a single soul. And what in the name of God am I going to do then? Take Lily into work with me and stick her into a playpen in the middle of my office, hoping no one will notice? Yeah, right, some hope. If I were to even think about doing that, I might as well tie a large neon sign around my neck saying, ‘Have finally cracked up, kindly fire me ASAP as Seth Coleman is only chomping at the bit waiting to take over anyway’.
The more I dwell on the problem, the more my mouth begins to feel dry; and although I’m desperately trying not to let it show, I know that tiny beads of worry sweat are forming on my forehead, as my heart palpitates with anxiety. I hear nervous rattling and realise it’s my ring off the desk in front of me, so I snap open a bottle of water and try to focus on the length of my inhale and exhale, desperately trying to stay in the game. Because if I am in the throes of a full-blown panic attack, no one in this room can ever know about it. Try as I might though, the same sickening thought keeps playing like a loop in my head, over and over again, and there’s just no getting away from it.
Every available nanny out there is completely unhireable, I’m in the middle of the biggest crisis I’ve had since having Lily, there is no one, absolutely NO ONE out there to help me and what in the name of arse am I supposed to do now?
Earlier today, Rachel, my long-suffering assistant, managed to trawl through the few childcare agencies that I haven’t been blacklisted from as of yet and scraped together a grand total of four nannies for me to interview. Yes, that’s right, four. We’re in the middle of the deepest recession since the Dark Ages, no one is spending a red cent, property values have dropped so much that people’s homes have fallen back to the prices they would have been in Viking times and above all … There are NO JOBS.
And yet here I am, fully poised to pay top dollar plus bribe money to someone who’ll take care of a child who’s almost three years old, and move into a perfectly comfortable home in Rathgar, with their own bedroom and ensuite to boot. Not exactly a demanding gig;