Perfect Blend: A Novel by Sue Margolis Read Free Book Online Page A

bosses at DHF were forced to honor their former partner’s bank loans to the tune of several million pounds. It was inevitable that redundancies would be made. Since Amy was one of their most highly favored employees, they held on to her as long as they could, but in the end she was just too expensive and they had to let her go.
    What the directors at DHF never knew was that Amy, while by no means delighted to have been sacked, wasn’t quite as devastated as she might have been. Her substantial payoff combined with her savings meant she could put her plan into operation. She could have a baby.
    She moved to a cheaper part of town and bought a ground-floor garden flat in a Victorian house. At the same time she started cutting back on expensive clothes and luxuries. By doing this, she had gotten by for over six years.
    By the time Charlie started school, she had set her heart on becoming a journalist. Time and again she wished she had gone into the profession straight from university, but back then she’d had no idea that she could write.
    If she hadn’t been so set on getting pregnant, she would have tried breaking into journalism after leaving DHF. Back then it wouldn’t have been so hard because she still had all her media contacts. In the last half dozen years they had disappeared. The journalists she once knew had moved on or lost their jobs in the recession. There was nobody to schmooze over lunch and ask if he’d put in a good word for her with his features editor.
    She realized that without contacts it would be well-nigh impossible to get her foot on the journalistic ladder. On the other hand, she had nothing to lose by trying.
    After Charlie started school, she spent the first few months scouring the local papers for stories that might interest the nationals. She followed up articles on dodgy time-share deals and Spanish property developers conning people by selling them nonexistent apartments on the Costa Brava. She wrote a piece about debt collectors terrorizing the ill and the elderly, who it often turned out weren’t even in debt. This piece had been based on her elderly neighbor Mr. Fletcher, who had spent months trying to convince British Gas that he didn’t owe a preposterous two thousand pounds for three months’ worth of gas. Despite letters going back and forth from poor old Mr. Fletcher to British Gas, the company had “sold” the debt to a firm of debt collectors, and he was now being pursued and threatened by, as he put it, “shaven-headed yobs built like brick shithouses.” The fear had taken its toll, and he was taking pills for his nerves.
    The Mr. Fletcher story almost made it. The Daily Mail even sent a photographer to take his picture. Then a weather girl Amy had never heard of gave birth to quads, and Mr. Fletcher was forgotten.
    She carried on pitching ideas. Some editors replied to her e-mails. Most didn’t. The ones who did usually said she was thinking along the right lines. The only reason they weren’t using the piece was that they had covered the story a few weeks earlier. Then Amy would feel stupid and kick herself for not keeping herself up to speed with what was appearing in the papers. Occasionally they paid her for a tip or idea but refused to let her write the piece. The Daily Mirror , for example, loved her idea for a feature on the pros and cons of breast-feeding but insisted it be written by some woman who had recently given birth on Big Brother .
    Occasionally, when she submitted an on-spec piece, an editor would get back to her to say how well written it was. This at least made her feel she hadn’t lost her touch writingwise. Then came the “but.” “But families living on the breadline is so boring.” “But the whole antifur thing just is so 2001.”
    She was earning nothing and her savings were dwindling, as was the romantic image she had of herself as a freelance journalist who spent school hours penning meaningful pieces on social injustice.
    When Brian