Hot off the Press | Charles Leclerc | F1

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If Fia Holliday had learnt anything since graduating from university, it was that there weren't many benefits to being unemployed. She had an abundance of free time—that was one—but neither the money nor the friends to enjoy it with. Having the house to herself during the day was another positive, possibly the only one. She realised this soon after moving in with her best friend, Sadie, who had to fight with her housemates every morning to use the bathroom before work.

The truth was that, after graduating from the University of Oxford, Fia had thought the hardest part was over. Now that she had her shiny first-class degree, she'd assumed doors would open for her like they did for other people. People like Sadie.

She'd been wrong.

These were the types of things Fia liked to think about during her lengthy mid-morning showers—a time of the day when no respectable person would be using the limited hot water because, of course, they'd be at their job.

She wrapped a towel around herself and exited the bathroom—another perk of being jobless was that she didn't have to get dressed to wander around the house. She went into the kitchen and opened the fridge door, staring at a slab of leftover lasagne on the top shelf. Her stomach growled. Like the mouse that lived in the cavity wall of their kitchen and came in through a hole behind the freezer, she'd mostly been living off odds and ends. Ritz crackers, pickles, slices of cheese thin enough that nobody would notice she'd taken them.

She'd noticed recently that she'd lost a lot of weight, which she tried to hide by wearing baggy tracksuit bottoms. Another perk of unemployment: you didn't have to dress smart. Fia wasn't even sure that was a perk. Either way, it wasn't like she could ask Sadie for more help—she was already letting her stay in the house for free—and her family was out of the question.

Ritz it was. She grabbed the box and headed into the living room, shoving a handful of crackers into her mouth as she opened her laptop and started scrolling through rejection emails.

She'd lost count of the jobs she'd applied for over the past few months. Hundreds, probably. Marketing, PR, copywriting, events, many of them motor sports related. She'd cycled through every job title she could think of that she was vaguely qualified for. Even though she'd interned at Sky Sports in her second year of university, it still wasn't enough to land her a role.

She scanned her email account, feeling numb. We're sorry to inform you...Thank you for your interest...You were a strong candidate, but unfortunately, we've chosen to go in another direction...

Unfortunately. It was a word that always irked Fia. Why did companies insist on saying it? It wasn't unfortunate for them; they'd picked their preferred candidate.

"Fuck," she sighed, sending each email into the trash folder.

Stuart—she'd given the mouse a name, of course—came scuttling into the room and shat on the floor before darting under the sofa. She stared at his turd, a solid, raisin-like thing, and sighed again. No matter how often Sadie complained, the landlord wasn't interested in pest control.

"Here." She dropped a crumbled cracker on the carpet, and Stuart scurried out to nibble it. "Don't say I don't do anything for you, Stu. We unemployed rodents have to stick together."

Fia made a mental note to clean the house later, just as soon as she was done wallowing. How had she got to this low point? She found herself trying to pinpoint a time when things had been worse, even when she was growing up and realised she couldn't. At least when she'd been a kid wishing she could be somewhere else—someone else—the promise of a gilded university education had kept her going. She'd dreamed of Oxford's spires since she was a little girl. It represented a way to escape from the rural village in the North of England where she'd grown up.