Plume

by Will Wiles

  ‘Polly, hi.’

  ‘Jack, hi. Can you join us a minute? It would be great to hear where you’re at.’ I watched her eyes flicker as she registered the state of my face.

  ‘Sure.’ I stood and grabbed my notepad, trying to look normal, and followed her back to the aquarium, both hands and chin smeared with part-dried beer. Eddie did not take his eyes off me, his gaze level, neither pleased nor displeased, but fierce, attentive. This might be how regular bosses look, and I didn’t like it. I wanted the old Eddie, our friend, back.

  I circuited the conference table, sitting on the side Polly had been sitting, but further from Eddie. I wanted to be able to see out into the office. Polly did not resume her former seat, but sat across from me, nearer Eddie. Me and Them. Confrontational.

  ‘How did it go on Tuesday?’ Eddie asked, without particular emphasis or inflection. But there was no hello, how are you, what happened to your face, and that spoke for itself.

  The success of my lie would depend on what Eddie knew, and I started to do the maths. If he had called De Chauncey, or De Chauncey’s irate PR had made a call, then Eddie would already know that there had been no interview, but he was keeping that information to himself. Or he was working under the assumption that the meeting had gone ahead, which meant that I was in a different kind of trouble, not quite so bad, but with further to fall. To put it another way, it was possible that my employment was already as good as terminated because Eddie knew that I had ditched De Chauncey and then lied about it, in which case lying again wouldn’t make things all that much worse. But if Eddie believed that the meeting had happened, then telling the truth would make a salvageable situation far worse, perhaps fatally worse. So there was only one answer worth giving.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Great.’

  ‘You got everything you need?’ Eddie asked. He was giving nothing away. Was that suggestive of a man who had information that he did not wish to give away? Or was I being paranoid?

  ‘Yeah, more or less,’ I said. I was committed, then. De Chauncey had added me as a contact on Tamesis, I remembered. He had not cut me off. It wasn’t much, but it was grounds for hope. I could make more calls, fix up another meeting. But my reply had been suspiciously ambivalent, so I added, ‘I’m doing follow-ups.’ That was always a good line.

  ‘And Wednesday? Get much done?’

  I shrugged. ‘Transcribing. Yes. Absolutely.’

  ‘Can we see?’

  He wasn’t going to take my word. ‘Well, it’s not quite done.’

  Eddie cut me off with a sharp exhalation, and pushed his fingers into his hair, exposing a lined forehead. ‘I thought you were going to have something for us to see,’ he said, with distinct tetch in his tone.

  Polly had not said anything yet. Her demeanour was, to my surprise, far less hostile than Eddie’s. She was not staring me down, turning me into a wall shadow with her death ray. And she was not obviously gloating at my discomfort. Her clipboard was held lightly in one hand, its top resting against the table, tilted towards her so I could not see what was displayed there. Was that why she had sat opposite, so I could not see her notes? What was it? A typed and indexed dossier on me? And on that thought, I twigged why she wasn’t joining Eddie in his cross-examination, why she looked sympathetic, even kindly. Her work was done. She had given all the facts to Eddie, built the case against me, poisoned his mind. Now she could relax, and it would serve her to appear neutral rather than vindictive.

  ‘Jack?’

  A thick, caustic substance was in my mouth, coating the interior of the cheeks, filling my throat. My hands felt unbearably hot and dirty.

  ‘There’s a lot to do,’ I said. ‘Two interviews. You know.’

  Absurdly, I found myself riling up on the back of my own falsehood, indignant at the thought that I could have typed up two interviews in one day. I’m not a machine! That I had failed to attend one interview and had lost the recordings of the other did nothing to dim my righteousness. This was unreasonable! They were holding me to an unrealistically high standard! The fictional me that had coalesced for the purpose of this meeting was filled with thunder. I swallowed, trying to clear the bitter glue from the back of my mouth, and tasted blood. It was hot in the aquarium, too hot. The air was foul. How did they expect me to defend myself if I couldn’t breathe?

  ‘Uh, sorry,’ I said. ‘I was … trying to do both. I wanted to have both, for now. And I ended up not quite finishing either.’

  Polly smiled at this – it nearly sent me unconscious, but she smiled, a pleasant little smile of alliance. Her duplicity turned my stomach.

  Eddie picked up his pen and examined the flatplan that was laid on the table in front of him. ‘That happens. We’ve assigned pages for both. It would be great to get a sense of what they talked about, the kind of tone you’re going for. To make sure there aren’t any conflicts. What did you talk about with Alexander?’

  I puffed out my cheeks. My heart was doing about two hundred beats per minute. ‘Phoo … lots of things.’

  It was Eddie’s turn to smile, a mischievous, conspiratorial grin. ‘Sounds like Alex,’ he said. ‘One of God’s talkers – I bet you couldn’t believe your luck.’

  ‘Well, er,’ I said. It was true, I couldn’t believe my luck – Eddie had not heard anything from De Chauncey and my lie was temporarily intact. And I saw an opportunity. ‘That’s why transcribing has been such a challenge.’

  ‘Did he go into his background? That’s all quite interesting.’

  Success had made me willing to gamble. Alexander De Chauncey – what could be read into a name like that? ‘I don’t know if the readers would care all that much about all that rich-boy stuff, to be honest.’

  Eddie’s brows crashed together and his top lip wrinkled in disbelief. Error, error, abort, abort. ‘I mean,’ I said, ‘De Chauncey is interesting because he’s so different to that kind of story.’

  The storm dispersed. ‘That’s what I thought. So what did he say to get your interest? What angle do you want to take?’

  ‘Property,’ I said, with a decisive little nod. ‘The property industry. In London.’

  Eddie blinked. ‘Yes. Well, I should think so. But what in particular?’

  ‘In particular,’ I said, tasting the words, ‘he was … very interesting on giving a … general overview, taking in a lot.’

  Eddie was nodding. ‘Top-down, eagle’s-eye stuff? On the industry?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Where it’s at. Where it might be going.’

  ‘What did he say about that? Where it might be going.’

  ‘He says …’ I stopped. Coming up with convincing lies was one thing, it would get me through the next couple of minutes. But I was also running up a bill for the future, placing demands and constraints on an interview that had not yet taken place, that had not even been arranged, and might never take place. If De Chauncey emailed today saying, ‘Sorry, I’m off to Miami for eight weeks, let’s do something in the summer,’ then I was stuffed.

  ‘It’s not quite there yet,’ I said, meaning to restrain the lie. It was getting away, pulling the boat. ‘Like I say, I’m doing follow-ups.’

  Eddie narrowed his eyes. ‘What do you mean? I thought you said you had lots of material.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. But I really want to refine his central point, make sure I got it.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘What was what?’

  ‘His central point.’

  ‘Well, as I say—’

  ‘As you understand it.’

  Both of them leaned in slightly, waiting for my reply. I feared my chair might somehow be on an incline, and could slip away from underneath me, sending me to the floor. The air-con needed a service, for sure, it was blowing out only hot, stale, monoxidey air, scented with hot electrics and smouldering dust.

  ‘It’s hot in here,’ I said. ‘Don’t you feel hot?’

  Polly and Eddie exchanged a glance. It was an interrogatory glance on Eddie’s part, see
king a cue or confirmation from Polly. She bit her lip in response, uncertain.

  ‘You look awful,’ Eddie said with a sigh. His tone was not kindly. ‘I got you out of bed, didn’t I? You haven’t washed. You’re a mess. What happened to your face?’

  ‘I fell down in the garden,’ I said, suddenly aware how pathetic the whole story sounded, even if it was the truth. ‘Hit myself on a wall.’

  There was no sign of whether Eddie accepted this explanation. He simply moved on. ‘Did you go out last night?’

  ‘No,’ I said. I thought I hadn’t. I genuinely believed that I had not ‘gone out’ in any conventional sense. After all, while I was out, I had only had two pints, and a couple of bottles. If you didn’t count the roadies on the train, which I considered an extension of my at-home drinking. There had been drinking afterwards as well, but that was also at home, not out. But it wasn’t as if I had gone out, not in the accusatory way that Eddie meant it. ‘No, kind of. Not out late though.’

  ‘You were out on Tuesday. I saw on Tamesis.’

  Yes, obviously. Everyone had seen that. But that was magazine business! In a way.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re out every night, you’re in a state, you’re not getting the job done, you’re not getting it half done …’ Eddie sighed and cast his eyes downwards, breaking what had been a chilling stare. ‘You’re putting me in a very difficult position.’

  The long-delayed moment had arrived. I had to play my last card.

  ‘We should postpone the De Chauncey interview,’ I said.

  Eddie closed his eyes and axed his hand down on the flatplan, hard. ‘As I have explained, more than once—’

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘You’ll want to postpone it when you hear what happened with Pierce. You’ll want the pages.’

  He reopened his eyes. Polly, who had been tense and straight-spined since Eddie’s change in questioning, was staring at me intently, not with malice, but with interest. I had their attention.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The mugging book,’ I said. I had spent a great deal of time thinking about this moment, but, I realised, had not rehearsed it. ‘The bestseller, weeks in the chart.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s fake. He invented it. Made it all up. It’s a fraud, a hoax. He’s been lying about it for years and he wants to confess. To us. Exclusive.’

  Polly was smiling. Her expression was one of pure avarice. I knew it well: she wanted the story. When you get that, you’ve got them. To want to hear it is to want to believe it. ‘That’s … incredible.’

  ‘Unbelievable,’ Eddie said. He wasn’t smiling. He was wide-eyed, though. ‘He exaggerated it, or …?’

  ‘Invented the whole thing,’ I said. ‘From nothing.’

  ‘That’s a phenomenal story,’ Polly said. ‘We …’ She turned to Eddie. ‘Syndication. National pick-up, definitely. Maybe international.’

  Eddie waved his hand, a slow down gesture. ‘We have this?’ he asked me. ‘For sure?’

  ‘For sure. Exclusive.’

  ‘You’ve got it on tape? There’s the legal side to consider. We need belt and braces.’

  ‘Belt and braces,’ I said, basking in the transformed atmosphere of the room. ‘He said he’d sign something for us.’ That wasn’t even untrue.

  ‘He said he would sign something?’ Eddie said, ears pricking up. ‘He hasn’t?’

  ‘He said he’d get it to me this evening.’

  ‘I’d like to listen to the recording.’

  I don’t know what my face did, exactly, but it wasn’t voluntary and it hurt.

  ‘We don’t want a repeat of what happened with the Bunk guy,’ Eddie said firmly. ‘Remember? Definitely not with a big story like this, where a man …’ He stopped. ‘Does he understand the seriousness of it? Pierce, I mean. There might even be legal consequences for him, who knows. We can’t afford the slightest risk.’

  ‘It won’t be a repeat of what happened with F.A.Q.,’ I said.

  ‘I will need to see your notes, and hear the recordings.’

  My instinct – an obscene, self-destructive instinct – was to smirk. What notes, what recordings? Hardly a word on paper, nothing on tape. Why did I find that so funny? Because of the gigantic trap I was setting for my apparent nemesis, the future me who would have to make good on these promises?

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Put the right spin on it and the word yes can be terribly non-committal. ‘It’s such a big story. I’m still amassing material. I’m seeing him again this afternoon – Pierce, I mean.’

  Eddie darkened, but Polly spoke before he could reply. ‘There’s still tomorrow,’ she said to Eddie. Still tomorrow? What did that mean? The meeting? But I knew what it meant: much as I might want to find myself delivered into safety, a load of wild promises in a meeting room wasn’t going to do it, not alone. I did still have to produce the goods. The Jack of this instant might have evaded disaster, but not future Jack, that poor swine, who had more debts to his name than ever.

  ‘It’s a great story, Jack, really great,’ she continued, to me. ‘I’m excited. It’s a cover, I’d say, possibly.’ I was very used to phoney encouragement and enthusiasm from Polly, but this seemed to be the real deal. It was disorienting.

  Eddie’s less enthusiastic attitude was harder to explain. ‘Yeah, a great story,’ he added, without much heart. ‘It’s like I say – belt and braces.’

  ‘Got it,’ I said. ‘Belt and braces.’

  ‘And that means De Chauncey as well. Get the transcript ready for tomorrow. Just polishing to be done, right? A story in the bag, in case something goes wrong and it’s Pierce we have to hold over. Belt and braces.’

  ‘Belt and braces. Got it.’

  Belt and braces. Belt and braces. Belt and braces.

  I left the aquarium in a typhoon of emotion. Pulling me one way was the elation of having avoided certain doom – that would have been it, for me, that meeting, had it not been for Pierce’s literary fraud. Pushing me the other way, back towards the abyss, was the certain knowledge that I had neither story and precious little time. To go back now and say, ‘Well, I had the Pierce confession, and I lost it, and I never did the De Chauncey interview,’ I would be worse off than ever.

  Kay followed me with her eyes as I left the meeting, concern jostling with ferocious curiosity. But she did not rise from her seat. Eddie and Polly had remained in place, continuing their mysterious summit – I assumed that Kay did not want to be seen pouncing on me for gossip. The whole team was on edge, with redundancies in the air. I knew that when I sat down and checked my phone, there would be messages from her there.

  I was right – and Mohit had messaged too.

  What’s going on? Kay’s first message read. You OK? That looked intense.

  Mohit asked the same thing: What’s going on?

  I glanced up at him and he gave me a half-smile, still buried in a phone call.

  All fine, I replied to Mohit.

  I’m fine, I replied to Kay. It was a bit intense but basically just a catch-up.

  Lunch? Kay fired back.

  Maybe later, I replied. Got loads to do.

  But what could I do? I had neither belt nor braces, and my fly was open as well. Pierce couldn’t be relied upon. I was coming to the conclusion that he was unwell. The burden of concealing his fraud had broken him – and fraud itself wasn’t the work of a healthy mind. This bizarre obsession with somehow recreating a non-existent crime was evidence of a deep disturbance. There was a ritual quality to it, but what was the ritual supposed to achieve? Balm for his tortured conscience, somehow.

  I wish I could say that my worry for him was pure human sympathy, but it was not. My main fear was that he was unravelling too fast for my story, and that his descent might not help me reverse my own.

  The horizon kept getting closer, a blazing line of failure that would soon be under my every fleeing footstep. There had been a time when Pierce’s welfare might have mattered to me, but it was just
interference now, a dull hiss in the ears as I tried to keep myself ahead of disaster. Just as, at the time, I had hardly cared about the consequences of filling the Quin piece with recycled material. The present was a narrow, slippery strip of time, always sliding out from under my feet, and ahead lay the wall. Close, closer than ever.

  As if in sympathy with these reflections, the office had taken on a twilight quality, at the height of the day. I looked up to the window and saw a thick grey sheet of incoming winter rain. Into this shroud belched the plume.

  But that could not be. When the rain slapped a dome over the city, its edge was always just streets away, not as far as Barking or beyond. But there was the smoke, wide as a borough and taxi black against the grey of the sky. And I could smell it, even behind the office’s triple-glazing and air conditioning. I could taste it, that low-octane, high-carcinogen tang, that bouquet of badly maintained gas appliances, dying cars and overloaded wall sockets. The scent of mucus membranes dissolving on contact with compounds not found in nature. It could not be the same fire – it was closer, wider, its pulse more insistent. But where was the concern? No one gathered at the window as they had on Monday. Could they have become somehow desensitised while the city burned out of control? They had their heads down, working.

  I put my own head down, taking another slurp from my bottle. The sight of the plume had disturbed me deeply. Just to be sure, I brought up Tamesis on my phone and checked for events and emergencies to the east of the office that might account for the smoke. There was no major fire. I thumbed the screen eastward, out to Barking, to see what was happening. No alerts, no warnings. The news stories were all a day or two old, apart from one about insurers.