“So, why did you leave Australia to come here?”
“Oh!” She gave an enormous shrug.
“Are you mad?”
“Probably!”
“Okay, you don’t have to say why, but when?”
“When did I move? Just after the Olympics.”
“I see. You waited until London was good again. Some of us were forced to be here the whole time. And what do you do? Is that…”
“Boring!”
“Boring! Sorry! You’re right. It’s too boring to ask.”
“It’s fine to ask, but it’s boring to say. Basically, I’m a copywriter.”
He cupped his chin and said, mock-fascinated, “Go on.” They laughed. “But don’t you miss home? Where did you grow up?”
“I mainly grew up in Canberra. Which is…”The capital city, she was going to helpfully add.
But Adam knew it, had been there, was enthusing about it. “It was ages ago now—nine years? I was doing a profile of the Australian Labor leader at the time, Mark Latham. We thought he was a sort of heir to Blair, the Third Way, all that.”
“No way, wow…” Coralie did remember Mark Latham—vaguely. “I can’t believe you’ve been there!”
Did she miss home? She would let that one go. She didn’t know the answer.
It was her turn to ask questions. Adam was thirty-seven. He was a journalist. “Just a sec,” she said. “When you tell me who you write for—please don’t be offended if I don’t know it. I might! I just might not. I’ve only been here a few months.”
“You won’t know it,” he said. “You know theNew Statesman?”
“Oh, I do!”
“Well, it’s not it!” They laughed; they seemed to be laughing nonstop. That was what had been missing from her life: jokes! Hearing them, making them. “No, I write for a modern pretender,Young Country. Never heard of it—okay! It was set up in 1996, just before I left university, by a multi-multimillionaire with a packaging fortune. Charlie Tuck? Charles, Lord Tuck? None of this means anything to you. It was right before the Blair landslide—Blair? Tony Blair? No?”
They laughed again, because of course she’d heard of Tony Blair, Cool Britannia or whatever, and Iraq.
“The title actually comes from a Blair speech.” Suddenly Adam dropped into character, his shining eyes fixed on a point behind her, his voice vibrating with passion. “I want us to be a young country again, with a common purpose, ideals we cherish and live up to, not resting on past glories, fighting old battles and sitting back, hand on mouth, concealing a yawn of cynicism, but ready for the day’s challenge. Ambitious! Idealistic! United! Not saying, ‘Thiswasa great country….’ ” He held out two fists. “But ‘Britain can and will be. A great country! Again!’ ”
“Extremely intense, wow! Tony, is that you?”
He wasn’t coasting on his floppy hair and knitwear. Adam was performing—for her.
“Probably my best impression,” he said. “I can’t do accents, which limits me. Yes, I’d missed out on all the good traineeships, likeThe Times, and I was rejected by the civil service fast-track scheme, and obviously I couldn’t take the slow track.” He made an appalled face. “So I was very lucky to be hired atYC. Not as a writer then, as a general dogsbody.”
“Like Bridget Jones,” Coralie said appreciatively. “Fannying about with press releases.”
“In my little skirt.Bridget Jonescame out that year! The book. Everyone was talking like her: v.g. Very good. Those were the days. Now I write forYoung Country, and I host their award-winning podcast, also calledYoung Country, regularly in the top twelve, or fifteen, in the News bit of UK iTunes, and I freelance at other places, and I also do a bit of…” He coughed modestly. “Broadcast.”
“Wow!” Coralie gave him the reply he clearly craved: “v.g.”
It was nice he liked his job. She wouldn’t be able to conjure a single anecdote from hers. Except maybe the time she’d asked how many people worked there. Stefan had said—so dryly she hadn’t at first realized it was funny—“About half.”
“Same again? Do you fancy a bowl of chips?”
Strictly, it was her round, but although she wouldn’t dream of complaining, her crap new secondhand iPhone had cost £300. “I’d love the same again,” she said. “Thanks!”
