Buying Time Page 4

  Ella spoke into her wrist-com, making a few ad hoc observations, descriptive details she’d splice into her report this evening.

  The last of the refugees left the plane and trooped into the terminal building. Ella moved from the window and positioned herself behind the barrier in sight of the exit. She hadn’t seen an image of Kit for almost five years; she wondered if she’d recognise her old lover. Old, she thought; hell, she and Kit were the same damned age: both sixty now, though Ella tried to tell herself that she looked ten years younger.

  Her wrist-com chimed and Douglas’s big face filled the small screen.

  “Ella, we’ve secured an exclusive with the PM about the airlift and its consequences. We’re leading with that at nine. Will you have something to follow that, by midnight?”

  “You said a long piece by the morning…” she began.

  “That was an hour ago, Ella. You think you can get an exclusive with Kit Marquez?”

  “I’ll do my best, but I can’t promise anything.”

  She’d worked it to her advantage, not telling her editor that Kit was an ex when she mooted the outside chance of getting an exclusive with the one-time Director of the now-defunct Civil Liberties Organisation. It’d be kudos for her when she presented the package; she just hoped she had time to compose something hard-hitting by midnight.

  “And have you seen the latest from the States?” Douglas asked.

  “Go on.” She’d killed her wrist-com’s news update while waiting for the landing, the better to concentrate her thoughts and compose herself.

  “An off-air comment by the President of the good ole US of A. Caught by a by-stander and squirted two minutes ago. I’ll patch it through.”

  Ella heard a squall of static followed by President O’Ryan’s lazy Texan drawl: “We’re best rid of the queers, bud. Pity the plane didn’t ditch in the Atlantic.”

  Douglas looked up at her. “What do you think?”

  “Deliberate,” Ella said. “O’Ryan might be a bastard, but he’s smart. It’ll go down well with cretins in Fucksville, Idaho. The midterm elections are later this year, remember?”

  “We’re getting together a montage of his inflammatory statements over the past year, then doing a contrast piece with the PM’s latest statements.”

  “Hey,” Ella said, “the first of the refugees are coming out. Catch you later.”

  She cut the connection and scanned the drawn faces of the men and women emerging to a scatter of cheers and ragged applause.

  Representatives of various aid organisations and charities were on hand to meet the refugees; those without friends or family in Scotland were to be housed in temporary refugee centres outside Edinburgh and Glasgow. Over the course of the next week, a further six planes were scheduled to leave the US, and civil liberties groups were chartering more flights next month. Many people had left the US of their own accord over the past couple of years, but after the bombings of gay nightclubs in New York, San Francisco and Phoenix, and the murder of over a hundred LGBTQ people across the States last month alone, the mass exodus had begun.

  Ella felt a rush of blood to her face as she caught sight of Kit Marquez. But Jesus, she looked old… Ten years ago, Kit had been tall, broad, and straight-backed, an athlete and an intellectual. She’d worked as a lecturer at UCL in London, and then in Edinburgh, a towering figure, both physically and intellectually. Now she appeared shrunken, bent over, her hair iron-grey and her face lined.

  The press-pack tagged her and swooped, cramming mics in her face and jabbering for sound-bites. At that second, Kit looked up through the melee, caught Ella’s eye, and smiled – and the years rolled away.

  She barged her way through the press with her old determination, dropped her bag and stood facing Ella. They embraced.

  Ella found herself unable to speak.

  “I never thought,” Kit whispered fiercely into her ear, “that our reunion would be like this, in such dreadful circumstances. But we make the best, girl, we make the best.”

  Ella pulled away and brushed tears from her cheeks. She shook her head, words still beyond her.

  Kit said, “You look good, El.”

  How could she return the sentiment, utter a flagrant lie? She smiled through tears and then, annoyed by the buffeting, said, “Let’s get out of here. I have a taxi booked. As I said in the last email, you’re staying at my place for as long as you like.”

  “El… One thing. There’s someone… I hope you don’t mind?” Kit turned and indicated a tiny young woman with a shaved scalp and a thin, scowling face, hanging back. She looked no older than twenty-five.

  Ella felt relieved and smiled at the young woman. “You should see the size of my place, Kit. I have an upper villa in Morningside. Plenty of room.”

  “This is Aimee,” Kit said. “Aimee, Ella.”

  Aimee gave a guarded smile and a thin, cold hand. “Kit’s told me a lot about you, Ella,” Aimee murmured.

  “It’s good to meet you. Come on, let’s get out of here. I did some cooking this afternoon. You must be famished.”

  They squeezed through the crowd and took the elevator down to the car park.

  “Not one of your famous curries?” Kit said.

  “How did you guess? It’s the only thing I cook with anything like competence.”

  As the taxi carried them through the rapidly descending twilight, from a still frost-white countryside around the airport to the brightly illuminated city, Aimee said, “You have a strange accent, but not Scottish?”

  Ella laughed. “I’m from London, Aimee. Peckham. I came up here when things started getting bad down south.”

  “From what I read,” Kit said, “things are almost as bad down there as they are in the States.”

  “You know what they used to say,” Ella said. “When America sneezes, England catches a cold.”

  Aimee looked shocked. “But we’ll be okay up here?” She glanced from Kit to Ella, a frightened rabbit.

  Kit squeezed her hand with maternal affection. “We’ll be fine, Aimee. Trust me.”

  They arrived in Morningside and Ella showed them around her spacious villa with pride; from Ella’s top-floor lounge they looked across the lighted spread of the capital.

  After the meal, which Aimee picked at but Kit devoured, they sat in the lounge before the multi-fuel stove as, through the picture window, the first fat snowflakes began to fall. Ella told them about her life in Scotland, her friends in the capital, and her job for ScotFreeMedia.

  Kit said at one point, “You have a rich life, El.”

  She nodded. “I’m reasonably happy.”

  Kit looked around the room. “You’re here alone?”

  “That’s right.”

  Ella changed the subject.

  They talked politics, with Kit dissecting the situation in the US and giving a bleak forecast of what was to come, contrasted with the fortunes of Europe. Aimee, Ella noticed, fell silent and stared into her wine; she wondered if the girl found the talk boring, or couldn’t keep up.

  Then Aimee yawned and said she’d turn in. Ella gave her the choice of bedrooms, a single or the double she’d set aside for Kit. “Are you two…?”

  Kit said, “We’ll take the double, if that’s okay?”

  “That’s fine.” She indicated the room. “En suite. I think you’ll have everything you need. Just shout if not.”

  Kit kissed Aimee. “I’ll stay up, okay?”

  When they were alone, Kit sat cross-legged on the sofa, her relaxed posture bringing back memories.

  Ella said, “I feel I need to apologise… walking out the way I did.”

  Kit shook her head, smiling. “Don’t apologise. I understand.”

  Ella stared, surprised. “You do?” How could Kit understand what had motivated her back then, when Ella herself could hardly make sense of why she had ended their relationship?

  Kit smiled and gestured with her glass towards the bedroom. “Hey, I must apologise for landing Aimee on you like th
at.”

  “Really, there’s no need.”

  “She’s a great kid, but she’s… I met her last year. She’s from a Mormon family in Utah, and you can imagine their reaction when she came back from university one vacation and announced she was seeing someone, and a woman at that. They disowned her.” Kit shrugged. “I think I’m a surrogate mother figure.”

  “You’ll be good for her.”

  “She’s… she has problems, El. She’s traumatised. Her lover at uni… this was eighteen months back… Her lover was out late one night, on the way back from a party… Just her luck to run into a vigilante gang of AWs.”

  Ella repeated the acronym. “Meaning?”

  “Aryan Wolves, they call themselves. White supremacists.”

  “And this girl… she was black?”

  Kit nodded. “And the little fool had a rainbow badge. So when the pricks saw it… El, she didn’t stand a chance.”

  El swallowed and stared at her wine.

  “They killed her, but not before…” Kit paused, then went on, “Aimee fled to New York, then tried to take her own life. A cry for help. I helped.” She took a long drink of wine. “You know something, El? I thought long and hard about leaving the States. In the early days, I was determined to stay. I looked down on the people who’d had enough and decided to get out. I said it was best to stay, to fight the hatred and prejudice. I really thought I could do something, I thought that, together, the voice of reason could change things.” She stared into the flames of the stove. “How fucking wrong was I there, El?”

  She fell silent for a while, then went on, “So, I’m sorry about hauling Aimee along, but I hope you understand.”

  Ella smiled. “Of course I do.”

  In fact, it made things easier for her.

  When Kit had contacted her a couple of months ago, out of the blue, and told her she was leaving the States and seeking asylum in Scotland, Ella had offered her a place with her, and sponsorship, without really thinking through the emotional consequences of her altruism. It had been the right thing to do for an old lover in trouble.

  Only later, when the reality of Kit’s return kicked in, had she feared that her old lover might want to resume their relationship on more than just a friendly footing.

  Ella turned the talk back to her work, and then asked, “Have you thought of what you might do here?”

  Kit shrugged. “Write. Try to pick up a bit of lecturing…”

  “As I said in my last email, I think I can help there. With the writing, anyway.”

  “That’d be great.”

  “My editor at the newsfeed wants me to do a piece on the airlift, and you, for midnight. I’ll knock out something about what you told us over dinner, your take on the situation over there and where it’s heading. And I’ll include a suitably altered version of what you said about the murder of Aimee’s lover, if that’s okay, as an emotional hook.”

  “That should be fine, but let me check with Aimee. No names.”

  “Of course not. Trust me,” Ella said. “The thing is, my editor doesn’t know about you and me, so when he asked me to try to get an exclusive, I said I’d try. He’ll be ecstatic.”

  Kit smiled over her wine glass. “Just where is this leading, El?”

  “He’ll be even more knocked out if I say I might be able to get you to write for him.”

  Kit looked dubious. “For a newsfeed?”

  “Don’t pooh-pooh it, Kit. Do you know how much they pay?”

  “Go on.”

  “Two pounds a word,” Ella said. “And you could wrangle more from them if you sign an exclusivity deal. They run everything from a few hundred-word opinion pieces, to full articles of two thousand or so. It’d give you a voice, a platform, and a foot in the door. If you sign for a year, at the end of it you could look around for other things.”

  “But a newsfeed, El?”

  “It’s a prestigious outlet. Obama and Monbiot do pieces for them; it’s the future.”

  Kit regarded her wine. “It’s tempting, The money is good.”

  “If you like, I’ll arrange a meeting with my editor, Douglas Munroe. I’m seeing him in the morning. I’ll mention your name. He’ll snap my hand off, of course, and you’ll have all the bargaining chips on your side. What do you say?”

  “Very well,” Kit nodded. “As you say, it’s a platform, and I have a lot to get off my chest.”

  Talk, inevitably, drifted back to the political situation in the States, and Kit’s feelings about leaving the place of her birth, for good. She rounded off her peroration with a line that Ella knew she would use in her article: “You know, El, some people think that America in the twentieth century was a social experiment: a nation founded on liberty, equality, and freedom of speech; a nation whose motto was the American Dream, where anyone, no matter what their social status, origin, race or gender, might enjoy an equal status and equal opportunities… And that experiment has ended in failure.”

  Later, Kit drained her wine, said she was dog-tired, and paused on the way to the bedroom. “El, you still planning on writing your book on that writer guy?”

  “Still planning, Kit. In fact, I hope to get down to it pretty soon now. Pity I have to go to England to do the interviews.”

  “Into the lion’s den, El. Good night.”

  “Sleep well.”

  Ella sat for a while when Kit had retired, thinking about the book and her meeting with Douglas Munroe tomorrow. She had a proposal to put to her editor, and she was not at all sure how Douglas might take it.

  She considered another glass of wine, but abstained: she still had the fifteen hundred words to write on Kit Marquez and the airlift.

  For the next hour she curled in her armchair and tapped away at her laptop. She read the article through, toned down a few of the purple patches, then squirted it off to ScotFreeMedia minutes before the midnight deadline.

  Then she did have another glass of wine and sat thinking about Kit.

  IN THE MORNING, after a leisurely breakfast, she left Kit and Aimee to explore the city and took a taxi into the centre of town.

  The head office of ScotFreeMedia was on the third floor of the old Royal Over-Seas building on Princes Street, overlooking Princes Street Gardens and facing the imposing monolith of Edinburgh Castle.

  Ella’s wrist-com told her it was seven below zero, and as she stepped from the cab into the keening wind she marvelled that it was as much as that. She crunched across the gritted pavement, hurried into the warmth of the Over-Seas building, and took the lift to the third floor.

  Douglas Munroe was seated in an old armchair with his feet lodged on a coffee table. Like Douglas himself, the building was old and decrepit, the oak panelling and plaster cornices pitted and crumbling. Douglas was vastly overweight, his face empurpled, and his long hair grey and unkempt. In contrast to the old room, a dozen state-of-the-art smartscreens hung at every height, relaying images from around the world. The editor worked at a laptop, wobbling on his meaty thighs, a mic and earpiece emerging from the tangle of his hair.

  When Ella entered the room, he looked up briefly and grunted, “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Ella pulled up a dining chair and sat before him. “I made an appointment, remember? Yesterday morning, for eleven today?”

  Douglas grunted again, his eyes flickering across the screen. Without looking up, he said, “Fine piece you filed last night.” He dispensed praise with bad grace, like a miser parting with pennies.“But how the buggery, I asked myself, did you do it?”

  He slipped the laptop onto the worn carpet and tugged the mic and earpiece free, giving her his full attention. “You didn’t pay the woman?” he asked, almost wincing in anticipation of her reply.

  “Called in an old favour.”

  “That’s what I like to hear, Ella. Now, why the hell are you wasting my time? If you’ve come for a pay rise, no way. If you want a transfer to sunny Australia, on your bike.”

  “I don’t know why I p
ut up with you, Doug, you old curmudgeon.”

  “You love it. You know where you stand with old Dougy. Say it as it is. Now, out with it.”

  “I think I can do you a big favour.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “This sounds ominous. I don’t like favours. In this business, favours are a debt. Go on, girl.”

  “What would you say to having Kit Marquez writing for ScotFreeMedia?”

  “Couldn’t afford her,” he grunted.

  “I think you could.”

  “She wouldn’t work for us.”

  “But she would, if you gave her free rein to express herself. I even think she’d sign an exclusivity clause. For a year.”

  “You sure?”

  “I think I can swing it.”

  “I’d need to meet her, sound her out.”

  “I can arrange that.”

  Douglas raked a hand through his thatch and bared nicotine-stained teeth at her. “So, Ella… What’s in it for you?”

  “I want a month off.”

  “I can’t pay you.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “What?” He feigned shock. “Let me repeat: I can’t pay you.”

  “And I said: fine. I don’t need paying.”

  “Well… that puts a different complexion on the matter. I’ll miss you, but I suppose I can give Bob and Letty more hours. Okey-dokey, you’ve got it.”

  “You’re a star, Douglas.”

  “Don’t tell me, you’re going to sunny Thailand or some such tropical clime?”

  “I’m going to England.”

  “That cess-pit? You must be bloody mad.” He stopped and pointed at her. “I get it. That damned book of yours? You’re finally going to write the bloody thing.”