by Will Wiles
And I had nothing to transcribe from. The recordings had been lost.
Polly was inclined towards me, head tipped to one side, looking at what I was looking at. Her expression changed from pleasure to confusion as I kept leafing through the pages. I had been quiet too long, and I had furrowed my brow. I un-furrowed it.
‘Everything OK?’ she asked.
‘Yes, yes,’ I said. ‘I’m glad … you got this.’
She had said that I had sent it over yesterday. When, yesterday? I returned my attention to the cover sheet, looking for the time stamp on the email: just before four in the afternoon, around the time I left for De Chauncey’s event. Impossible. I had not sent it. Could I have been hacked? I looked at the sender’s address: [email protected]
Bunkmail. I didn’t use a Bunkmail account, although it was possible I had set one up in order to register for one of Bunk’s services. The how of it didn’t matter, though – I already knew the who. Quin had taken my DVRs and selectively transcribed their contents. The why, that was the part I couldn’t get. He wanted all the evidence for himself, that was straightforward enough – but why help me out, at Pierce’s expense?
‘We’ll want to go very big on this, of course,’ Polly said. ‘How many words do you need to do it properly? Four thousand? Five?’
‘Uh,’ I said, trying to begin a sentence, but only producing a croak. ‘We can talk about that.’
‘Sure. And, I have to say, I am very excited about your ideas as well. I didn’t want to pry inside your creative process, but once again, great job.’
‘My ideas?’
‘Your ideas for future interviews.’
For a room-revolving moment I had the ghastly thought that Quin might be able to peer inside my head, and had composed Polly’s list by telepathy. But even if he was capable of cracking open my skull, he would find little of use within. Had he simply come up with his own?
‘I don’t remember sending you any ideas,’ I said, wary.
Polly blinked and shook her head. ‘No. My apologies.’ She opened her clipboard and took out a sheet of yellow notepaper. ‘I came over to your desk yesterday to thank you for sending over the Pierce transcript, but you had already gone, I think – anyway, this was on your pad. I took the liberty of having a sneaky peek.’
The notepaper she passed me was covered in my own handwriting – a list of names. Alexander De Chauncey, crossed out; Boris Johnson; Mike Butcher; Hugo Pleasance … It was the targets list I had drawn up with Pierce, the people we thought might deserve to be mugged.
‘Great stuff,’ Polly said. ‘We could fill half a year, here and now.’
‘This isn’t really …’ I began.
‘It’s a work in progress, I know,’ Polly said. ‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist.’
‘They’re all white men.’
‘I know, but we can pad it out with a bit of diversity as we go along. It’s an excellent start. Some really unexpected choices.’
‘I hate all these people,’ I said.
‘And I admire you for getting out of your comfort zone,’ Polly said. She smiled at me, with real warmth.
A faint ringing sounded in my ears, the song of my own blood, and the smell of burning filled my sinuses. Behind Polly was a rank of windows, looking out towards Clerkenwell and, beyond, the Telecom Tower. And there was the plume, plump and oily, an umbilicus filling the sky with the poison of the earth.
The window faced west, away from the estuary and London’s industrial horizon. On Monday, when the Barking fire was raging, we had been watching from the opposite side of the office. This plume had nothing to do with that fire. I feared it might have nothing to do with any fire.
‘So I’m not fired?’ I said, returning my attention to the room, a feat demanding considerable effort.
‘No! We … You’ve more than shown your value to the magazine. I’ve always been a big admirer of your work, as you know.’
‘Kay has value.’
‘Absolutely. I know, I know.’ Polly frowned, saddened. ‘It’s been a hugely difficult decision to make. Almost impossible. But you’re producing exactly what we need.’
‘I’ve got to say,’ I said, shaking my head, ‘that I’m surprised. I know that my attendance isn’t great …’ I glanced at the clipboard.
‘Eddie did raise a concern about that, said I should keep an eye on it,’ Polly said, patting the clipboard gently, like a faithful hound that had earned its rest. ‘But we can work on things like punctuality, and it doesn’t seem to make much difference to your ability to generate stories. You’re unorthodox. A free spirit. I respect that.’
‘I’m not well.’ It was as if I said the words to myself, that I was telling myself, in the sight of the plume, the impossible smoke column in the west. I’m not well.
I’m not well.
‘I know,’ Polly said, face again criss-crossed with concern. ‘You didn’t want to get the news this way. It’s a terrible day. I don’t mind telling you that this has been the worst morning of my career, and it’s been a rough week for us all. It’s awful to have to say goodbye to so many talented colleagues, awful. No one wants this to happen, least of all Eddie.’
I had been staring at Polly’s clipboard, hardly listening, just as she did not seem to be listening to me, but now I snapped to attention.
‘He quit,’ I said.
‘He couldn’t face making redundancies,’ Polly said. ‘Of course, no one wants to—’
‘Of course,’ I said, standing with enough force and suddenness to send my chair rocketing back into the glass wall of the aquarium. ‘No one wants to!’
Polly gaped as I spun around and pulled the meeting room door open. The noise of my chair striking the glass had attracted the notice of the few left in the office, who stared at me, their faces masks, unknowing as to what had happened and what might happen now.
Eddie rose slowly from his chair as I approached him. ‘Jack,’ he said. ‘Take a deep breath, and—’
‘Fire me,’ I said, slashing the distance between us with a few strides. I was at his desk, inside his fort, I could feel my shoulders shaking, my lungs burning, smell the smoke.
‘Sit down and let’s talk this out.’
‘Fire me,’ I repeated, louder, spreading out my arms.
Eddie held up his hands. ‘Polly has made her decision, and I am not about to—’
‘Coward,’ I said.
‘Excuse me?’ There, there it was, an angry light coming on in the eyes, the brows coming down.
‘Coward!’ I made sure the whole office heard me. All else was quiet, but I did not take my attention away from Eddie. No one was intervening, no hands dragged me away.
‘Look,’ Eddie said hotly. ‘You had better stop before—’
‘Before what? Before you fire me?’ I demanded. ‘Couldn’t face it, could you? You had to stay everyone’s friend. You didn’t want to be the bad guy. You gave all that to Polly, always. How long did you delay? How much time did you waste, and money? All because you couldn’t … When one of your writers was falling apart in front of you.’
Eddie was still scowling, but a shade of doubt had entered his expression, either doubt or bewilderment. His lips parted, but he didn’t say anything.
‘You didn’t do anything. Why didn’t you fire me? You could … Should … When I needed …’
I stopped. I was belatedly aware of my tears, which were hotter than my overheated skin, and gritty from the dirt on my face. All this time I had seen my job as a bastion against the Need, the disease – my last strongpoint against final collapse. Now I saw that the Need needed the job more than I did, it had been driving my increasingly desperate attempts to keep it, filling in the gaps left by drinking with copy-pasted quotes and outright fabrications, making me feel that I had to jump through Pierce and Quin’s hoops. All those months of scrambling and stumbling had been on behalf of the Need, or to counter its malign effects, not as a defence against it. The Need and the job worked tog
ether, staving off collapse, keeping me going, keeping me drinking, preventing me from admitting to myself that I was not well. I was not averting anything. The only way to survive the disaster was to go through it.
‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘I resign.’
What else could I do? I went to the pub.
No one wants this, of course. No one wants confrontation, no one wants to face the obvious, ghastly truth. It will follow you around, it will put itself in front of you again and again. But if you don’t want to confront it, if you don’t want to have that discussion, that argument … Not wanting can be as powerful as wanting. Great stretches of life can be lived, or half-lived, in the in-between space that is created by not wanting. How long had I been carrying on at the magazine, with Eddie knowing what should be done, and yet not wanting to do it? And me not wanting to face the truth myself? As it happened, I had prevailed, I had secured my place. I had won. The Need had won, I had lost.
No one wants this: it had been the same with Elise. We spent a full half of our relationship in the shadow of the conversation – the conversation that neither of us wanted to have, the conversation that we were jointly prepared to invest vast emotional resources and imagination into not having. The conversation that would contain the forbidden, fatal words, the ones that we thought every day. I did not need to have the conversation to know that they were in Elise’s mind as prominently as they were in mine. But we never wanted to form them in the air, in the outer realness. That one word in particular: alcoholic. I didn’t want to hear that – it was the Game Over sound, when the loop you’re holding touches the bendy wire and completes the circuit and a buzzer buzzes. The wire had grown so twisted, and we hung on to the loop with white knuckles, working through the convolutions. I would watch her, terrified, as we had one of the conversations that was not the conversation, and I would have that word in my mind, burning there so clearly that I fancied it might manifest itself in the space between us, letters dripping oily fire, or appear branded on my forehead like a third eye opening. And I’d see it reflected in her eyes, in the glass of the glasses she wore in the evenings but not at work, and I’d be thinking, She’s going to say it, it’s coming, I know that she’s thinking it and she is definitely going to say it this time, and then this conversation will become that conversation. But she didn’t. We never had that conversation. Not wanting. We went from preferring to stay together rather than have that conversation, to preferring to split rather than have that conversation. What was it all for, then?
To give an example. We were eating dinner in an Italian restaurant near our flat. There are many other examples that I could cite – perhaps this one comes to mind for the setting. It wasn’t a tense discussion in the kitchen, or the bedroom, or the living room, the three places in which these discussions took place nine times out of ten. We had gone to this little neighbourhood restaurant, one of a dying breed, in the middle of the week, for no good reason. We were simply both too demoralised to cook. Talk had turned to the amount I drank, I don’t remember exactly why or how, but it often did. No, I do remember why, and I don’t know why I am claiming I don’t. The time had eased past ten and I had mentioned that I wanted to go to the convenience store before it closed. Elise had asked if that was really necessary – didn’t I have a can or two in the fridge? Which was true, but I had squirmed nevertheless, and she had picked up on my squirm, my reluctance.
‘Jack, the cans, the drinking in the evening,’ she said, voice thin with exhaustion, close to a break. ‘I’m worried …’
And I kept my face calm, all the while thinking, This is it, this time we are going to have the conversation, and she will say the word, and the buzzer will sound and that will be that.
‘I’m worried that it’s becoming a problem.’
That was as close as we came. Not even: It’s a problem. Just, becoming. She said how worried she was, and she considerately emphasised her concern for my health and my work. I was not oblivious to her pain. I wanted to soothe it. That was where we differed: the problem that had to be solved.
She wanted me to drink less, to set myself limits and stick to them, bringing everything back to a healthy level. I wanted to make her concern go away, with as few other changes as possible. I wanted her to stop worrying – it was a problem of perception, her perception. I could do a better job of concealing what I drank, that was one priority. But I also needed to make a show of proving that I didn’t have a problem – that I wasn’t addicted, to use another word that we never spoke.
Hiding the drinking never worked for long. I sneaked pub visits after work, and I filled innocuous containers with lager. I bought the can-crusher. Being drunk, I was sloppy, I made mistakes and the ruses rarely lasted long. They only served to reinforce the impression that I had … that there was a problem. I would have to undergo some genuine deprivation to remove that impression.
The summer of 2012 rolled around. The problem was still becoming a problem – both the problem itself and the problematic impression that there was a problem. Nevertheless, we were often happy. We spent long weekend days in the pub, sitting outdoors, reading newspapers and magazines. I spent a little too long one Sunday and became more or less catatonic. This is impossible for me to describe because I have no memory of it, and Elise’s account was hobbled by her anger and her embarrassment. I could not be moved, and I had to be helped home by Elise and one of the regulars, taking an arm each. The next day I had to miss work. (I claimed food poisoning, and my absences were still seldom enough for the excuse to work.) Elise spent Sunday night sitting awake beside my motionless form in bed, afraid that I might stop breathing or swallow my tongue. Satisfied that I would live, she spent Monday night at a friend’s house. She called me at about 10 p.m. – I had been drinking for hours already, delighted to be out of work and left on my own, and I was unusually drunk for that time on a weeknight. I slurred and forgot things, and she became very upset, and hung up on me.
On Tuesday morning, I called her. Extraordinary measures were needed.
I said I would stop drinking. And I did.
Two empty pint glasses stood on the table in front of me, grey suds clinging to the interiors. A third was full and fresh, still frosted with condensation. My lips had made a little wound at the edge of the foam, but that was the only sign that it had been touched. Perfection. I was in the brightly lit, tacky pub near the office, the one that my colleagues avoided. Friday night was the only time I had seen it busy, full of deafening men in suits and workers from nearby construction sites, but in office hours it had a sleepy air.
Kay dropped herself into the seat opposite me at about four. I would have asked her how she knew where to find me, but I knew already: she would have asked Tamesis for a pub recommendation, perhaps specifying that she wanted to run into people. The app would have done the rest, given that we were T-plus mutuals. No Quin needed – this was just Tamesis doing what it was supposed to do.
She was carrying an early edition of the Standard, and tossed it onto the table, folded to the front page headline: ONE HURT IN PIMLICO STREET COLLAPSE.
‘Cover story,’ she said. ‘Another cover. You’re on fire.’
‘Being on fire would be the end to a perfect day,’ I said.
‘Want to compare days?’ Kay said, with a warning raise of her eyebrows.
‘Not particularly,’ I said.
She shrugged. ‘To be honest, I don’t think I could beat “house fell down”, even today. Although this morning I did think I was going to be homeless.’
The London question, of course – how did she make it work? And Kay’s answer: she shared with a friend, and went payday to payday. My answer, too, although not the sharing part, and that made for bigger gulfs between paydays. I made a mental note to cancel the standing order to Dave, or whatever lay behind the software construct ‘Dave’.
‘This morning? But not now?’
‘I’m back, baby,’ Kay said with an acid smile. ‘Reinstated.’ She put on a voice – a b
lustering, gruff ‘authority’ voice. ‘Regrettable error, premature, embarrassing, acted without full consultation, sincere apologies.’
‘Polly said that?’
‘The publisher said that. I was taken upstairs. But Polly did it.’
I bent over my pint, and frowned into it. ‘Aren’t you going to find it difficult working for Polly after this?’
‘Yeah. Awkward.’ She widened her eyes. ‘But I did see a side of her that I liked. After you left – I won’t recap the whole thing, but she had a stand-up row with Eddie. Said that she had been kept waiting for years to be editor, doing his dirty work for him, and he couldn’t even step down without making her do all the shit he didn’t want to do.’
‘Wow,’ I said.
‘I know. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Polly get angry. She’s always so calm. It must have been building up a while. It was good. I think she might be a good boss, actually. She might be straight with people. Unlike Eddie.’
‘Eddie’s an arsehole,’ I said, taking a drink.
‘Everyone thinks so,’ Kay said. ‘I need to raise a glass to that. Let me get a drink.’
While Kay was at the bar, I unfolded the Standard to look at the story about my house. The splash picture was an aerial shot of the cratered street. A tattered veil of smoke or dust still clung to the heaped wreckage in the crater, like the caldera of a slumbering volcano. The story itself had a couple of quotes from Bella – edited for length, I imagined. The collapse had been attributed to ‘nearby basement excavations, weakened by heavy rain’. The street was still closed, it said, while the fire brigade investigated the safety of the surrounding houses.