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05:35

Saturday 31 October

From where she stood in the doorway of the bedroom of 39 Blackbird Road, London, E14, Freddie could see blood. A lot of blood. The plastic overall she was wearing rustled in time with her clipped, panicked breaths. The blue walls were splattered with red, as if a food fight had taken place with thin, runny Lidl ketchup. But it wasn’t tomato sauce. She could taste it: metallic. It was coating her tongue. Sweat stuck clumps of her thick frizzy hair to her forehead, loosened her glasses on her nose, and opened her pores to the gore. She was absorbing it.

Dread pinpricked her skin. The source was to her right, shielded by the open room door. There was still time to leave. To turn back. To run. She could be home in thirty; pretend none of this had happened. Heavy footsteps fell on the stairs behind her. More people were coming. She had to decide.

Seize the story. It was now or never. Opportunity follows struggle. Fear makes you braver. Despite deriding the inspirational quotes that appear over photos of sunsets and the ocean on Facebook, Freddie was disappointed to discover that when she reached her own life crossroads her brain filled with nothing but clichés.

To shut herself up, she stepped forward. Reassuring herself: it was just like the movies. You’ve seen it all before. (The time she’d had to lie down after watching a beheading video online didn’t count. This was different. She was prepared.) She turned.

The floor undulated under Freddie’s feet. The body of what had once been a man was slumped over a desk, his neck cut like deli salami, blood pooling round his bare feet. A computer, its wormhole screensaver winding over the monitor seemed to propel blood toward her. The last thing she heard before the dark red obliterated everything was her childhood friend Nasreen Cudmore’s voice.

‘Freddie Venton, what the hell are you doing here?’

Fifteen hours earlier

14:32

Friday 30 October

Sat on the windowsill, trying to block out the late lunch drinkers in the Queen Elizabeth pub below, Freddie pressed her phone to her ear. How, in Dalston, in the middle of the country’s capital, could this be the only place to get signal in her room? Her new flatmate – what was his name, short guy, wore glasses, worked in ad sales, always out drinking after work. Pete? P – something. Edged into her room, en route to the kitchen, mouthing, ‘Sorry’. Must be his day off.

She nodded. Three people in one pokey two-bed flat had seemed a great money-saving plan. But that was five flatmates ago, when she’d actually known the two girls she shared with. Now she slept in the lounge, the sofa claimed as a bed, and all and sundry crossed her room to get their breakfast cereal. Privacy and mobile reception were for other people.

Freddie gurned at her reflection in the seventies mirror above the faux thirties fireplace opposite. Her brown hair, cut by a mate with kitchen scissors, sprang away from her shoulders like she’d been shocked. Flashes of red hair chalk zigzagged toward her DIY fringe. Her legs, stubbornly plump despite working on her feet and taking more than the recommended 10,000 steps a day, poked out from beneath her nightshirt (a T-shirt that had belonged to a long-forgotten one-night stand). Unless she squished herself in with her hands or a belt, she never looked like she had a waist. Her torso, like her mum’s, was square, with the addition of breasts that practically needed scaffolding to restrain them. She wiggled her black plastic rectangular-framed glasses. Not traditionally beautiful.

The line in her ear clicked, and the noise of the busy newsroom came through. ‘Freddie.’ Sandra, the deputy editor of The Family Paper online, sounded tense and tired. Business as usual. ‘Is there a problem with this week’s copy?’

‘No. No problem.’ Freddie pushed her back into the cold glass, willing the signal to hold. ‘It’s just I’ve been writing the Typical Student column for three years now…’

‘Time flies when you’re having fun.’

Freddie thought of the two years she’d spent on the dole, clawing her way into glass collecting jobs, churning out pitches, unpaid articles and free features during the day – a blur of coffee, cigarettes and unpaid bills since she graduated. ‘Yes, it is fun. And popular. Didn’t I get over 90,000 hits last week?’

Sandra didn’t deign to confirm or deny this figure.

‘Well I was wondering if, given the column’s popularity, I might get paid for writing it?’

There was silence on the other end. Only the sound of the UK’s busiest and most hated newsroom could be heard. The clamorous grind and grunt as the newspaper was conceived in a hail of profanities all journalists told you was the best-paid gig. The one that Freddie had written one hundred and fifty-six eight-hundred-word columns for, and been paid precisely nothing by.

‘Sandra?’

‘We don’t have the budget. If you could get the column into the print edition then you’d be paid,’ Sandra sighed. Freddie noticed it was more from annoyance than shame.

‘How do I do that?’ Surely you could do that for me, you lazy cow.

‘I’ll think about it. I’ll send you some emails.’

Unlikely.

‘Didn’t we try this before?’ Sandra sounded on the verge of dozing off.

We? There’s no we in this, Sandra. You go off with your monthly pay packet, and I sit in my lounge bedroom trying to work out how I’m going to afford to eat this month. ‘Yes.’

‘What did they say?’

‘The student focus was too young for the main paper.’ Snotty baby-boomers.

‘The online readers enjoy your stories of debauched students, Freddie. They really go for it.’

They really go for hating on it. Last week she’d written about getting wasted the night before an exam. Total fabrication. Her and her mates had sat in night after night working in fear, as they watched the collapsing economy swallow everything around it like a dead star: paid internships, graduate schemes, jobs, benefits. She might as well have spent her time downing pints of vodka. ‘I graduated two summers ago, I’m not even at university anymore.’

‘It’s up to you, it’s all good experience.’

Experience. Everything was good experience: writing articles for free for a national newspaper, landing a job in Espress-oh’s coffee chain to pay her bills, pitching, publishing, pumping out all her words for no reward. When was this experience supposed to pay off? When would she have enough experience? ‘I’ll send the copy over now.’

‘Let’s do drinks soon.’

They wouldn’t. That was what people with paid jobs said to get rid of you. They didn’t need contacts. They didn’t need any more drags on their time. When they were done, they wanted to go home and wank off in front of their latest box set. Drinks were for those who needed a way in. Drinks were fucking fictional.

Freddie left the phone on the windowsill. She should sleep. What had she managed? Her shift finished at 6.00am. She’d brainstormed ideas on the way home on the Ginger Line. 9.30am first commission came in. There were three in total today, all wanted them filed within a couple of hours, all under a thousand words, only one of them was paid. Thirty pounds from a privately funded online satire site. Gotta love the rich kids. Awash with their parents’ money, they didn’t have enough business sense to demand that their contributors work for experience.

She clicked refresh on her Mac mail. No new emails. Then she clicked refresh again. Then she did the same on Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp and Snapchat. Round and round. Waiting. For what? Something. Something big.

She placed her glasses on the coffee table, closed her eyes, and pulled her duvet up. She’d been awake for nineteen, nearly twenty hours. Her flatmate, Pete, whatever, moved quietly through the room, only ruining it when he spilt hot tea on his thumb and swore. She liked him. Good egg. The tug of sleep came easily.

Her head was shaking. No, vibrating. Her hand had the phone and she was answering before her brain caught up.

‘Freddie, it’s Neil here. Neil Sanderson.’

Neil Sanderson. The Post. Broadsheet. She’d met him at the industry awards she’d blagged a ticket to. Built the relationship on Twitter.

‘Neil, hi,’ she gulped from a cold coffee as she climbed up onto the windowsill. Work brain, work.

‘I’ve taken a look at the stuff you’ve sent me and it’s great.’

Fuck!

‘The writing is sound, the points salient and well argued,’ he continued.

Fuck, fuck!

‘But I can’t use it.’

Fuck. ‘Why?’

‘The thing is, Freddie, you’re a great writer, but that’s not enough these days. The world’s full of great writers and the Internet’s only made it easier to find them. You need that extra something to stand out.’

‘Like what?’ She wasn’t sure she had much left to give.

‘Did you see Olivia Williams’ piece on being kidnapped by Somali pirates? Laura McBethan’s blog on surviving the Air Asiana plane crash? Or Gaz Wagon’s real-time microblogging from the London riots? All excellent reporting. All game changers. All propelled to stardom now.’

‘So I need to get kidnapped, or embroil myself in a riot? I’ll get right onto it.’

Neil laughed. ‘Are you working class?’

She thought of her parents, her mum a dedicated junior school teacher, and her dad a local council worker (retired early, following one too many dazed and confused moments at work), in their leafy suburban home. ‘Er, no.’

‘Shame, that’s quite in at the moment. Not landed gentry?’

What was this, an UsVsTh3m online game – What Social Class Are You?

Neil continued, ‘Because of Made in Chelsea, people are obsessed with the posh.’

‘I’m middle class.’

‘Middle class like Kate Middleton?’

‘Nobody is middle class like Kate Middleton.’ My career’s over at the age of twenty-three, condemned by my parents’ traditional jobs and the good fortune not to have been caught in a natural disaster, thought Freddie.

‘And you’re not black…’

Did he even remember meeting her? ‘I don’t see how that’s relevant.’

‘Just looking for a unique angle.’

‘Being black is a unique angle?’

‘Pieces written about the ethnic experience are very popular with readers.’

‘I’ll tell my Asian mates who lived in the same street as me, went to the same school, studied at the same university, and get paid the same as me, to give you a call to share their ethnic experience.’

Neil laughed. ‘Okay, then you’ll have to try the old-fashioned way. Keep getting your name in print, and with a bit of luck you’ll land a contract.’

She felt all the air go out of her. ‘How’d you do it?’

‘Wrote small pieces for a local newspaper and worked my way up till I was on the nationals. I was an apprenticeship lad.’

An apprenticeship: so scarce it’d be easier to book onto a plane that was going to crash. There was silence for a moment.

‘You could always consider another career, I pay my accountant a fortune?’ Neil sounded like he was only half joking.

‘Thanks. I mean, for the advice and that.’

‘Anytime, good luck.’ He sounded sad. Or guilty. ‘You’ve just got to seize the story, Freddie. Push yourself into uncomfortable situations. Keep your eyes and ears open.’ He was trying to be encouraging.

‘Sure,’ she tried to sound upbeat. ‘Something’ll turn up.’

After the phone call, Freddie lay looking at the nicotine-stained ceiling. Replaying Neil’s words over in her head. You’ve just got to seize the story. If she called her mum she’d only have to fend off her soft pleading to give up this ‘London madness’ and return to Pendrick, the commuter market town she’d left behind. Her mum didn’t understand she wanted to do more than try for a job at Pendrick’s local council. She wanted to make a difference. Bear witness. Maybe one day be a war correspondent. She sighed. It was half past four and already getting dark. The night was winning the fight.