Falling Off Air Read Online Free PDF

just hoped
     it wasn't a priceless antique.

    I sweet-talked my way past Gayle and into Maeve's office, and Maeve was as surprised to see me as I was to be there. She looked
     up from her papers and her face broke into a smile.
    “Well, hello stranger. My God, Robin, what's brought you back to the land of the living? I hardly recognized you.”
    Which was a polite way of saying I looked a wreck. What had I been thinking of to make my office debut in yesterday's jeans?
     I hadn't washed my hair for three days now. Four perhaps. I tried to think back. Had I brushed my teeth before I left the
     house? Maeve had half-risen from her chair as if to come and kiss me, but I wasn't sure it was safe for her to come that close.
     I retreated and sank into the low leather chair in the corner, and she sat back down. She could scarcely see me across the
     top of her desk.
    “I e-mailed you a month ago to ask whether we could discuss my return to work,” I reminded her. Maeve is head of the Current
     Affairs department's Documentaries for Television division. Which makes her HCA(DTV), just one of an army of managers who
     run the Corporation's vast broadcasting empire. Day to day she has no hands-on program-making responsibilities, which is just
     as well since she has never made a television documentary in her life. Her responsibilities are primarily to oversee the commissioning
     process and to mastermind personnel. She is a bureaucrat born and bred, and seems to have an army of minibureaucrats working
     under her.
    “You did,” she agreed, her smile slipping. “You did indeed.” Her eyes ran over me, and I saw her take in the scuffed boots,
     the mysterious white stains on my jeans, the baggy sweater, the hair that hung limply around my makeup-free face. I wasn't
     what you'd call dirty, but I didn't exactly sparkle.
    “Do you feel ready to come back?” she asked, working to keep the doubt from her voice. “I'd hate to snatch a mother away from
     her little ones.” She made it sound like a cat snatching a mouse away from her litter.
    “Absolutely,” I was trying to sound professional. I was supposed to be a journalist, however, not part of the news, so something
     kept me from mentioning Paula Carmichael. “I'm sorry I'm a bit of a mess this morning. I was involved in an incident yesterday,
     and I spent most of the night giving a statement to the police.”
    “Oh dear.” If anything she looked more concerned now, as though perhaps she thought I was hallucinating from lack of sleep.
    Maeve is used to vanquishing government spin doctors and hysterical program editors with a flick of her whiplike tongue, but
     I was problematic. I could sense it in the way her manicured forefinger was rubbing at her lower lip.
    “Well we're all dying to have you back on board,” she said, her eyes not quite meeting mine. “Terry never stops talking about
     you.”
    Good old Terry—my biggest fan, also my immediate boss, which helps, but a mere handservant to Maeve.
    “How do you see yourself fitting back in?” she persevered. I could tell that the question was just a way of killing time while
     she worked out a way to get me off her back.
    “I just want to make programs again,” I said. “I'll find a way to make things fit.”
    Maeve stuck out her jaw and nodded slowly. She'd been hoping for a longer answer.
    “Of course, of course, it's what you're best at. It's what you win awards for.” She gave a little smile, then heaved a sigh
     and looked me in the eye for the first time. “Well we'll see what we can do, Robin, but I have to be honest, we're implementing
     some stringent streamlining measures here.”
    “You're cutting editorial jobs?”
    “We're,” she hesitated, “losing people. Mostly through natural wastage. You've been away, you probably haven't heard …”
    “I'm guaranteed a job on return from maternity leave.” I gritted my teeth.
    She nodded again, and this time she didn't even try to cover her discomfiture