Ambition

Ambition

Julie Burchill has written more than a dozen books, with the TV adaptation of one of them,
Sugar Rush
, winning an International Emmy. Her hobbies include spite, luncheon,
philanthropy and learning Modern Hebrew. She is married and lives in Brighton. She has been a journalist since the age of 17 and is now 53 years old.

First published in Great Britain in 1989 by The Bodley Head, an imprint of Random House.

This edition published in paperback in Great Britain in 2013
by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Julie Burchill, 1989

The moral right of Julie Burchill to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 78239 118 0
E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 117 3
OME ISBN: 978 1 78239 154 8

Printed in Great Britain.

Corvus
An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
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www.corvus-books.co.uk

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

There were two people in the Regency four-poster that swamped the suite overlooking the Brighton seafront but only one of them was breathing, deeply and evenly, as she sipped
flat Bollinger Brut and decided what to do next.

Her name was Susan Street, and she was almost twenty-seven and almost beautiful with long dark hair, long pale legs and a short temper. Beside her lay a man who would never see fifty again and
who now would never see sixty either. He had been, until half an hour ago, the editor of the
Sunday Best
, a tabloid with teeth whose circulation was three million and rising. Unfortunately
he would never see it reach four million, because his deputy editor Susan Street had just dispatched him to that big boardroom in the sky with a sexual performance of such singular virtuosity that
his heart couldn’t stand it.

His heart, like everything else about him, was weak, she thought as she kissed his still-warm lips.

She jumped from the bed in her Janet Reger teddy, looking like a call girl and thinking like a pimp. She saw herself in the mirror and reflected that the frail garment had to bear at least
two-thirds of the responsibility for Charles Anstey’s early death on its flimsy back. Men were so predictable, the helpful little sweeties: they all loved blowjobs, they all loved high heels
and they all loved black Janet Reger teddies. If she ever made it up the Amazon and found a tribe totally untouched by both white man and
Playboy
, she just knew that once you got down to
it they too would love blowjobs, high heels and Janet Reger teddies.

It was in the blood and under the skin of men. And who was she to withhold the addictive, destructive drug they craved so badly?

Who was she? She was Susan Street . . .

The smile slid from her face like the scribble from a child’s Magic Slate, shaken suddenly. On her hands and knees she circled the deep pile of the red carpeted room, delicately picking up
the small smashed phials which had contained the amyl nitrate. When she had covered the floor twice, she made a tiny glass mountain on a newspaper – yesterday’s copy of the
Best
– pulled on her lethal red Blahnik heels and ground the glass into a fine powder. For one wild moment she thought of mixing it with talcum, taking it back to town and giving it
to her best friend and worst enemy, Ingrid Irving. Ingrid was number three on a vastly more upmarket Sunday, a source of constant irritation and a complete and utter cokehead; her sinuses were so
badly shot that she could snort straight Vim without missing a beat.

Then she looked at the man on the bed. She had done enough damage for one day.

Or nine lifetimes.

Grinding down the agent of Anstey’s death on to the paper he had loved so much made her laugh hysterically. Who needs yesterday’s paper, who needs yesterday’s man? She sat down
quickly on the bed as though she had received a fatal telegram, fighting her laughter. Tears came to her eyes.

It had been a sort of eternal triangle – not his wife, she wasn’t important. But him, Susan and the
Best.
They had both loved it, both worked on it together for six years,
both taken it so far and planned to take it further. To the top . . .

She jumped up and ran to the bathroom. Cry later. Tears on ice, shaken and stirred. She slid the glass into the bowl and flushed again and again until even the fussiest guest could have drunk
their daiquiris from it. Then she walked into the bedroom, summoning back her hysteria. She brought her hands together to make a giant fist and smashed it into her stomach, hard, gasping with pain.
Then she screamed, over and over, as (to be careful of her nails) she dialled 999 with the heavy black and gold Mont Blanc pen – Charles’s first-ever present to her.

When the policeman answered, she gasped, ‘Oh
please – quickly
– there’s been a death, at the big hotel by the West Pier, the really big one . . . yes
that
one . . . Charles Anstey . . . no, I’m not, I’m an employee. My name is Susan Street. Thank you, yes, as soon as possible.’

She replaced the receiver carefully and smiled at her bright-eyed, wet-lipped reflection. She had never looked better. Wasn’t this the way sappy male writers had their heroines looking
after sex? No, sex had never done this for her; just blurred her mascara and kissed away her lipstick. Only power made a girl look this good . . .

‘My name is Susan Street, and I am the youngest ever female newspaper editor in the world.’

The man on the bed jerked one more time, as if in agreement.

She rested her forehead against the window and watched the pretty Sussex countryside go by. All those people in all those houses . . . how many of them were teenage girls
dreaming of escape? Thousands. And how many would make it? Not even a hundred.

She felt impossibly tired. Her ordeal, for the moment, was over. The police had seen the stained sheets and her long, long legs in their red shoes. They had listened silently to her tearful
recitation of his medical history, including the two small heart attacks before she met him. The younger constable – it was true about the police looking younger – had even gone pink
around the edges.

She had mumbled something about his wife in Richmond and it all being horrid.

The older policeman said not to worry, miss, his lad would see to it personally, breaking the news to Madame Anstey. It was all she had been able to do to stop herself jumping up and offering to
break the news to Madame Anstey herself: ‘Oh, and by the way, Lorraine . . . his last words were “I’m coming, you bitch . . .” ’

She leaned forward in her First Class train seat like a jockey in sight of the home stretch, urging the iron horse on. Hurry up,
please.
The country was for cows; the country was where
you ran away from, or retired to, not where you
lived
, when you were young and almost beautiful. She loved the city, she needed the city, she
belonged
to the city . . .

And now the city belonged to her . . .

Once, all she had had of the city had been a map of the London Underground. In later years, when time had wrapped a tourniquet around the terrible anguish of her adolescence, she would
always reply with a straight face, ‘Harry Beck’ when asked which artists she liked. Harry Beck was the man who had designed the map of the London Underground; the map under which she
slept, wept and crossed the days off the calendars she kept beneath her winter clothes, as other adolescents kept dirty books. She knew that in the eyes of her friends and family, her maps and
calendars would mark her out as being touched with something even worse than nymphomania.

Ambition.

But she slept beneath the map and she dreamed in tube stations: Angel, Marble Arch, White City. Once or twice a year she escaped alone and made the six hour round trip to her promised land
where she would roam the streets wide-eyed, her tape recorder in her hand. At night she fell asleep to the sound of London, in dreams she saw it, and in the morning she wept to find herself beached
in the backwater of the pretty West Country town she had been condemned to birth in.

But something rubbed off. By the age of fifteen she looked like a citizen of the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, talked like a citizen of the Borough of Bow and thought like a citizen of
the City. By now she knew that the country could never claim her and as if in retaliation the lost souls already sinking into its porous soil turned on the cocky cuckoo in the nest as they sank
into the teenage quicksand of fiancé with room-temperature IQ, small screaming vampires in Viyella vests and
le petit
mortgage.

Right-wing ideas about the bond between people of a similar culture and pigmentation, and left-wing ideas about the bond between women left Susan Street early, flushed down the school
toilets her former friends held her head down when they smelled a rat planning to leave the sinking ship of their youth. She was relieved of all illusions before she reached the age of consent,
when she shed her tight and shrivelled adolescent skin and emerged as a creature without conscience or scruples, with an almost irritable desire to
get on with it.
When
The Beat
ran the advert and she answered it on school notepaper (she could have typed it, but let them drool over her immaculate youth, old crumblies in their twenties who probably thought that
teenagers were mythical beast figments of their wildest, wettest rock dreams), and they asked her to write something, and she wrote it in her smudgiest, most schoolgirlish hand and the editor, Sam
Kelly, called the principal’s office to summon her from double Maths to offer her the job and she realized she was going to work for the best and biggest music paper in the world, she felt
not elation but great relief and something almost like . . . it
was . . .
disappointment.