In the lobby, Jeanne introduced them – Oliver, Dan, Beth and Edie.

  The other three turned to look at Beth. Anyone aspiring to be a journalist knew about her big story.

  The male interns stood together – tall Oliver in horn-rimmed glasses and a sand-coloured suit, and Dan, keen as a Dobermann, practically dancing on the balls of his feet. Beth glanced twice at Oliver, almost handsome, with the long straight nose and ironical bearing of a nineteenth-century Englishman. Dan looked faintly rock and roll in a narrow leather tie. Edie, standing apart, wore a neon orange minidress and green plastic earrings. She had short, bleached hair. Beth felt dull as a carp.

  Oliver noticed her noticing.

  Jeanne led them through to the cafeteria, ordered coffee and explained that Oliver and Dan would start in editorial and Edie and Beth in features, that they’d swap departments and partners as time went on. The other interns could obviously taste their Pulitzers for investigative reporting or, at the very least, droll restaurant and film reviews. Beth was happy just to be there.

  ‘Remember, please,’ Jeanne said with stern emphasis, as if reading their thoughts, ‘that you are not cub reporters. The point of the internship is to experience everything and leave with an overview.’

  Each was assigned an open cubicle opposite Jeanne’s office.

  While still reading over her agreement from personnel, Beth heard a pssst from above. Edie was standing on her desk, leaning over the top of the partition.

  ‘Hey!’ she said. ‘You’re the one who broke that high school scandal story, aren’t you?’

  Beth nodded.

  ‘Wow. You busy for lunch?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good.’ Edie disappeared.

  At twelve thirty precisely, she reappeared at ground level and whispered, ‘Come on,’ loud enough to alert the boys. Beth, still struggling with her contract, jumped.

  ‘Don’t bother with that,’ Edie said. ‘You’re not supposed to read it. Most of it’s not true anyway. That stuff about evaluations and warnings? Forget it. They like you, you stay. They don’t like you, your body gets washed up in the East River forty-eight hours later.’

  Beth stared.

  ‘And eaten by rats.’

  ‘Actual rats?’

  Edie nodded.

  Beth thought for a moment. ‘I don’t like rats.’

  ‘Nobody likes rats,’ Edie said. ‘Sandwich?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Let’s go to the cafeteria. Then some place to warm up.’

  Beth glanced sideways, lowered her voice. ‘Should we ask the boys?’

  Edie’s answer was to open her eyes wide with mock horror. She headed out and Beth followed.

  ‘Why is it so cold in here?’ Beth was shivering.

  ‘Presses generate tons of heat, so they keep the place freezing. To compensate.’

  She wondered how Edie knew so much.

  They waited in line at the cafeteria. As it came to her turn, Beth saw that the grill man’s outer forearm was marked with a blue tattooed number. She looked again. A survivor of the most terrible genocide in human history was making her grilled cheese sandwich. She felt sick with shock.

  ‘Did you see that?’ she whispered to Edie as they paid.

  Edie nodded.

  They took their sandwiches around the corner to the only nearby patch of green. Dealers exchanged small stacks of bills and people prepared syringes on park benches. What if her parents could see her now? She liked being part of something dirty and dangerous.

  Edie wore very round, very dark sunglasses that made her look ridiculously cool. She informed Beth that she was from the Upper West Side, that she was Jewish, that she hated her name.

  ‘Edie Gale. I mean, give me strength,’ she said. ‘It was Gerschkowitz until someone at Ellis Island had the great idea to change it. Gale, like gale-force wind. Not that Gerschkowitz is anything to write home about, but Gale? I never experience anything gently. My shrink says it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.’

  Her shrink? ‘Maybe you should change your name to something more temperate,’ Beth said. ‘Like Sunbeam or Zephyr.’

  ‘Zephyr? Who’s called Zephyr? That’s almost as bad as Gerschkowitz. And if I was Edie Sunbeam I’d end up working in a gift shop selling flowers, imprisoned for all eternity in plastic paperweights. It would be the souvenir shop version of Sartre’s No Exit, after two days I’d be searching the eyes of customers trying to locate my soul.’

  Her patter captivated Beth. ‘What about Edie Vale? Edie Glade?’

  Edie snorted. ‘When I do change it, I’ll choose something hyper-Protestant like Quincy-Adams or Cabot-Lodge. I bet they have fewer mental health problems than Gales. Has anyone done a study on it? They definitely should. I wonder who I can talk to. NYU? Linguistics department? Psychology? Someone at the yeshiva?’ Edie reached into her bag, pulled out a pack of Vantage, tapped one out and lit it. ‘You want one? Not sure I like working here, what do you think?’ As she exhaled smoke, she tilted her sunglasses down and met Beth’s eyes as if searching for her own answer there as well.

  Beth laughed. After half a day? It seemed absurd to express an opinion so early – or at all. It hadn’t occurred to her that you were even allowed an opinion, much less a negative one. ‘Isn’t it kind of early to tell?’

  ‘I always make up my mind immediately. About everything. The minute I saw you I knew we’d be friends. Didn’t you?’

  Beth hesitated, dazed and seduced by the other girl’s candour. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I never know anything till I’ve thought about it practically forever.’

  ‘That is sad. What you need are good instincts. My instincts are amazing. If I think I’m going to like someone, I’m always right. Those boys, for instance. New Wave Dan and that awful Kennebunkport preppy. I don’t even have to name him Oliver Wrigglesworth cos it’s already his name.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘I saw his application on Jeanne’s desk. This job is just a technicality for him. He’s going to Harvard in September, edited the Exonian, and his uncle’s political editor of the Washington Post. No wonder he’s so nice. I would be too if I had absolutely nothing to prove. We do not want to get friendly with his sort.’

  Beth frowned. Surely Oliver was exactly the sort to get friendly with. The sort likely to end up as managing editor in a few years. She didn’t understand how Edie managed to hold so many opinions so strongly. Beth didn’t know what she thought until she’d considered the question at least overnight, while her brain buzzed with possibilities, alternatives, doubts.

  ‘One thing I do think,’ Beth said, ‘is that nearly everyone who works here is a man. Not counting Jeanne and us. It’s kind of weird.’

  ‘Nail on the head! Too many damn men. Too many men in high places, too many men in the elevators, too many men on the third floor playing who’s got the biggest dick.’

  ‘The third floor?’

  ‘Newsroom. Where all the big dicks live.’

  Newsroom? They hadn’t even been to the newsroom. ‘So, uh, who does … ?’ She couldn’t quite bring herself to say ‘dick’.

  ‘Have the biggest dick?’ Edie considered. ‘Editor in Chief, of course. Publisher doesn’t count. He’s too big a dick to notice that anyone else even has a dick. Followed by Managing Editor. Deputy. Political editor. Business. Foreign editor. City editor. Sports kind of hovers on the outside. Whoever wins the play-offs automatically has the biggest dick. Columnists have their own dick league.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Then way down at the bottom, so far down you can barely see them, like ants from an airplane, there’s arts, culture, style and food. Society. Travel. The women. Not that they make less money for the paper. They probably make more. But who’s got the bigger dick, Brezhnev or pesto? I ask you.’

  Beth felt dizzy. ‘How on earth do you know so much about newspapers? I hardly know anything.’

  ‘Ha! Says Junior Investigative Reporter of the Year.’

  ‘I was lucky.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. No luck involved. I inherited my knowledge, which is luck by the way, good or bad, hard to say. Grandma’s a photographer, parents met on the Tribune. Dad has a column in Forbes. Every conversation in my house is about news. Unless it’s about me and why I’m such a fuck-up.’

  No wonder Edie got the job. Born to it. ‘What do you mean, a fuck-up?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. Ask them.’ And that was the end of that conversation. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ Edie said, as if noticing how awful the park was for the first time. ‘I’d rather sit inside and freeze.’

  As they left, they passed a haggard teenager, concentrating hard on inserting a needle into the vein of one purplish arm. Her hands shook violently. Beth tried not to stare.

  With lunch break over, Jeanne took them upstairs to the newsroom, the picture desk and library, back down to meet the compositors and see the presses. They began at the delivery bays where trucks delivered gigantic rolls of newsprint, saw the curved plastic plates cast from cold type laser scans, watched the page editors and typesetters at work. Three floors below reception, finished feature sections of tomorrow’s paper flipped out of huge steel presses, just like in the movies.

  ‘Just like in the movies,’ said Oliver, close to her ear. The noise down here was a syncopated roar; one of the machinists shouted to the group that they’d worked here so long any dud note stood out.

  ‘It’s these guys who actually produce the paper,’ Jeanne said. ‘Without them there’s nothing. And don’t they let you know it.’

  Dan led the intern pack, keen to hear everything first, scribbling notes in a reporter’s notepad. He was followed by Oliver and Edie. Beth brought up the rear.

  Anything you don’t know, they were told, just ask.

  Dan asked questions about deadlines and bylines and ethical protection of sources. Beth suspected he was showing off. She saw Jeanne’s eyes narrow.

  Back in the lobby, a young reporter greeted Oliver warmly. ‘Catch you later for lunch,’ the guy said, and Oliver explained they’d been to the same school.

  When Jeanne asked if there were any questions, he caught Beth’s eye and shrugged in mock despair. ‘Have to borrow Dan’s notes,’ he said in a low voice.

  At the end of the day, Beth and Edie left the building together but turned off in opposite directions, Edie to the subway, Beth to walk home. She was relieved, needing time alone to digest the onslaught of information. How on earth would she remember it all?

  Dinner came from the salad bar at the Korean grocer on Broadway. The woman behind the counter weighed Beth’s BBQ chicken and green salad. It came to more than she’d expected.

  At home, she slid immediately into her room to avoid Dawn, ate with the box on her knees and didn’t emerge till the noises in the apartment had died down. Then she sneaked out, washed her cutlery, dumped the cardboard container down the garbage chute on the landing, took a shower, brushed her teeth, ran the water till it was cool for a drink and got into bed.

  It was only a little after nine, but they didn’t have a TV and she felt uncomfortable walking around the Village after dark, so she read until the mosquitoes that lived in the urban jungle started buzzing around her ears. A T-shirt tied over her head didn’t block out the horrible whine, so she gave up and turned off the light.

  6

  Beth finally encountered Tom a few mornings later, making coffee in the tiny kitchen. Why on earth would anyone do that, she wondered. It was cheap to get take-out and the stove made the apartment even hotter, something she hadn’t thought possible. He looked up at her but said nothing.

  ‘Tom?’

  He nodded.

  ‘I’m Beth.’

  Tom was lanky with dark eyes and longish dark hair. ‘I figured,’ he said. ‘How do you know Dawn?’

  ‘Her sister was in my class,’ she said. ‘Did you buy another fan?’

  ‘I will.’ He was heating milk. The air in the tiny room wobbled.

  ‘Sorry not to hang around,’ she said, ‘but I’ve got work.’

  ‘You have a job?’ He turned to look at her.

  She nodded. It seemed strange that he and Dawn hadn’t exchanged even basic information about her.

  ‘What kind of work?’

  ‘Summer intern. Newspaper.’

  ‘Dogsbody.’

  It was true that a well-trained dog might be able to do most of the running and fetching she was ex-pected to do. She wondered what a dog would spend its salary on. Meat probably.

  Tom lit a cigarette. ‘You smoke?’ He offered her the pack.

  ‘I have to get dressed,’ she said, and fled.

  There’d been no sign of Dawn since the weekend and Beth wondered what kind of hours she kept. The bedroom door was always closed.

  She examined the odd combination of new and old clothes laid out on her bed and tried mixing them to make the pathetic shortage of style go further. Instead of giving her old clothes a lift, the new clothes sank under the sheer weight of habitual wrongness. Even the striped skirt and pink T-shirt looked bad with her horrible sandals.

  Beth sighed, closed her eyes, and chose.

  7

  The best thing about having Edie for a friend was the invincible feeling it gave her. Whatever she did with Edie was censure-exempt. Edie knew where to go, what to do, how to act, who to talk to and who to avoid. Oliver and New Wave Dan were to be shunned above all.

  ‘Losers,’ Edie said, holding her thumb and forefinger in an L and shuddering, as if the mere thought of them was … well.

  Beth accepted the pronouncement, rating Edie’s instincts over her own. And yet. Dan’s ambition annoyed her but didn’t seem particularly evil. As for Oliver – she had no prior with WASPs but he always looked immaculate, weatherproof and entirely at home in the world. He smelled expensive. His confidence and good manners bemused her, attracted her, made her jealous. He noticed everything, including the fact that she noticed everything too.

  ‘Those two are exactly the wrong type,’ Edie said.

  But what type was that? And why were they one type, when they couldn’t have been more different? Upper East Side Oliver, and Dan from a small town in Michigan. She and Edie couldn’t have been more different, were they a single type? Beth had started pretending to understand things she didn’t.

  Edie passed a note under the partition. Why does Jeanne dye her hair that colour?

  How can you tell she dyes her hair? Beth wrote back.

  Edie appeared over the partition with a look of incredulity. ‘It’s as obvious as what’s-his-name, the guy at reception’s false teeth.’

  False teeth? How did you know just by looking?

  At the end of the first week, Edie announced that she’d found a new place to eat. They got sandwiches in the cafeteria as usual, took the elevator to the twelfth floor, walked through a fire door, up a further flight of steps at the very end of an unused corridor and emerged on to the roof.

  The view was fantastic, across all of Midtown, down Broadway to the Village. New York looked completely different up here, a land of French chateaux in the sky.

  ‘Don’t you love water towers?’ Edie asked, pointing at the ubiquitous wooden vessels-on-stilts.

  ‘How do they work? I thought water came from pipes.’

  Edie shrugged and unwrapped her second sandwich. ‘No idea. They’re nice though. Great place to dispose of a body.’

  Not so great, Beth thought, once it started to decompose.

  She was surprised at how much Edie ate. It seemed incongruous with her childlike body. Today she seemed distracted, glum. Beth frowned at her.

  ‘Don’t mind me, it’s just the old family affliction. Everyone in my family’s depressed. We’re all in therapy, which costs a fortune.’ Edie recounted this fact blandly. ‘Dr Lieb is ancient, been supporting Gales for generations.’ She giggled. ‘And vice versa.’

  She talked about Dr Liebermann as if having a shrink was totally normal. ‘He really likes me, laughs at my jokes. I’ve read all about transference and he’s supposed to remind me of my father but he doesn’t. Too old, for one thing. Too nice. I mean, sometimes he gets tough but not often. Mostly he listens and says, “Uh-huh.” Occasionally he says, “Has it ever occurred to you …” and then says something that occurred to me last century. But I like going. At least he listens.’

  ‘How do you talk to someone twice a week for six years? Don’t you run out of things to say?’

  ‘Nah. Lately I’ve been telling him about you. He thinks you’re good for me.’

  That she could be the subject of Edie’s therapy astonished Beth. ‘What do you mean, good for you?’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious? You’re intelligent, not a show-off. Honest, loyal and responsible.’

  ‘Like a dog.’

  Edie held up one finger. ‘And funny and smart and naturally sane. I had no chance to be naturally sane. My whole family is screwed-up. Every one of them. My shrink wants me to think of depression as a family trait, like big noses or being good at math. It helps desensitise the subject – stops it being all about my mother.’

  ‘Your mother?’

  Edie looked at her. ‘Who else? Isn’t your mother a freak? Mine wants to control how I look and how I think and pretty much everything I do. She totally didn’t want me to take this job.’ Edie’s face changed when she talked about her mother.

  Beth’s parents were German Jews with terrible pasts, which no one in the family ever discussed. Even her parents didn’t speak about her parents.

  ‘But the internship! You beat, like, a hundred people to get it.’

  ‘No kidding. Other people think I’m smart. But she thinks I should branch out on my own. Stop using family connections. Like she did, right? Go into fashion or real estate. Dog training. I don’t know, open a restaurant.’

  ‘I don’t see you as a dog trainer.’

  ‘I don’t like dogs. They don’t like me either. I’m sure that says something important about my vibe. Like they can tell I’m unstable just by sniffing me.’

  Beth considered this. ‘I wonder what unstable smells like.’

  ‘Who knows. Liquorice? Fish? Glue? Anyway, I wanted to go to Bennington but my parents said I had to stay home and go to NYU because it’s cheaper but I’m sure it’s so they can keep an eye on me. Not that NYU is punishment exactly, but I’ve spent practically every second of my life in New York City and shouldn’t I get acquainted with nature someday? Also, living at home for another four years? And when you think about it, we can afford a house in East Hampton but not me going away to college? Nothing suspicious about that.’