A Cast of Vultures

by Judith Flanders

  We quickly ran through the possible rumours, and moved on to the impossible ones, before settling into more ordinary conversation, some work-related, some social, and even more falling into that fuzzy in-between area. Publishing is relentlessly social, and so a conversation about authors, or agents, or acquisitions can, in the blink of an eye, shift from work – Did you know that XXX agent had sold YYY’s new novel to ZZZ? – to gossip – Did you know that XXX was sleeping with YYY, and that was why the novel wasn’t offered to QQQ, because QQQ had had a relationship with YYY, and it had ended messily?

  All good things must come to an end, however, and as it got closer to ten, conversations grew quieter, and then ceased, and we headed down to the meeting.

  Our group sidled in as though we’d been caught smoking behind the bike shed, and had been sent to the headmaster’s office, shuffling silently to the back of the room instead of sitting at the table. Only swots sat at the front, so they could wave their hands in the air, calling, ‘Oh, please, Miss, I know the answer, I know,’ while the cool kids sneered balefully behind them.

  And, in a fine example of how school life never leaves you, I stood halfway between the two groups. I knew – I’d always known – that I was a swot, not a cool kid, but I’d so longed to be the latter and evade the former that I’d always ended up on the edges of both. I told myself I wasn’t in between, that I was just standing at the front of the group by the wall because I was short, but I knew in my heart I belonged with the nerds. Screw it. I pushed back into the wall crowd, and watched Olive, who was standing at the end of the room away from the door talking to three people.

  One was Evie, her secretary. The other two were strangers, I was pretty sure. I leant towards Miranda, who was behind me – there had never been any doubt she was cool. ‘Do we know them?’

  ‘Never seen them before. None of us has.’

  What the assistants didn’t know wasn’t worth knowing. If no one in the room recognised them, they weren’t publishing people.

  As we waited for the rest of the company to arrive, I watched the two strangers. They were both in their twenties, he probably a handful of years older than she. He looked like he thought he was good-looking, and he was, in that he was young, with lots of well-cut brown hair, matched by a well-cut dark suit. Those three things – youth, good hair and good clothes – get you a long way in your twenties. In a few years he’d be pudgy, but now he was just a little, well, soft was probably the best word. His features were a little too small for his face, and they would grow smaller as he grew bigger. His colleague was the opposite. She was not naturally attractive, having forceful, masculine features that were greatly oversized for her tiny frame: heavy, blue-veined eyelids, big horsey teeth. But while the man assumed his natural advantages would carry him through, she had taken her disadvantages and turned herself into something spectacular. Her hair was blonde and done in an elaborate 1930s style. She wore no make-up, and a pair of thick, black-framed spectacles ensured its lack was noticeable. The push-pull continued with her suit, which was entirely office-appropriate, neither too low-cut nor too short, but so fitted you could count every clavicle on her whip-thin body. She was, basically, every man’s fantasy dominatrix librarian.

  I was pulled out of my girly fan-clubbing when Olive cleared her throat. She didn’t have to do more, because no one had been talking since we’d arrived. ‘Thank you for coming.’ She looked up from her notes and grinned. ‘Not that you had a choice.’

  That was why we liked Olive.

  ‘As you know, we’ve had a hard year.’ Smiles vanished. ‘Our investors, however, are behind us. Profits, while they have dropped, are carrying us through. We have plans for new markets’ – she looked over at the digital media team, who, I noted unkindly, were sitting with the nerds – ‘and we have some very promising projects in the pipeline.’

  We began to relax, even as we knew that we shouldn’t. If everything was so perfect, why were we there, and who were these people?

  ‘However.’ There it was. ‘However, it has been a hard year. To try and forestall more hard years, we have been looking at our structural organisation.’

  I looked around the room and nearly laughed. Everyone over the age of thirty-five had clenched their teeth. It is impossible to work in publishing for more than five years without the company that employs you undertaking a restructure. It’s one of those things you just live through, like chickenpox. Or maybe something a little more serious, like shingles. It’s not as bad as the Black Death: it only kills a few. But when times are hard, managers decide to reorganise how the company is run, and who reports to whom.

  Normally, within each company, there are a bunch of mini-publishers, called imprints. Timmins & Ross published about half its books with T&R on the spine. For the rest, ten years ago they’d bought out a publisher of craft books that was going bust, and so our craft books were still published under the old name. Then there were our sports books, our literary fiction, our business list – each of them was published under a different imprint. Each imprint had it own editors, its own reporting structures and bosses. Apart from editorial, where an in-depth knowledge of the subject was essential – it doesn’t take a genius to understand that the sports editor shouldn’t acquire books on economics – other departments, like design, marketing and publicity, were pooled. Most companies are organised like this, and departments and reporting lines are, for the most part, a mixture of history, organic development, company takeovers, and changes in structure to give people you wanted to hire a job they were suited for. And then there was that other ingredient, the pragmatic ‘it works better this way’.

  But because it was hard to give one reason why any imprint or department was structured the way it was, it was also the standard jumping-off point for anyone who wanted to ‘fix’ things. If Bob didn’t, or did, report to Accounting, or sales didn’t have oversight of promotional material, all would be well, and we’d make a billion pounds a minute. That was always the standard explanation, and it was the reason, too, that we were clenching our teeth. Another restructure, with the expense, time, energy and upheaval that that entailed, and then in a few months we’d end up just where we’d been before. I’m not being cynical. Before I worked at T&R, after a restructuring at my old company that took months, and cost tens, if not hundreds of thousands of pounds, my boss was shocked when I pointed out that the shiny new job he was offering me covered half of what I was already doing, and it came with a higher salary. That was a fun day.

  Except that it hadn’t been, and this wasn’t going to be either. I refocused on Olive. She was introducing the two strangers who were – oh joy – management consultants. They would, she assured us brightly, be working their way through the company over the next few weeks, meeting staff, individually and in groups, to discuss what we did, and come up with new and thrilling ways of doing it in half the time for a tenth of the money.

  A few people stopped pretending, and as Olive painted this rosy image of our gloriously efficient and financially prosperous future, sighs could be heard. By the time she’d finished, the gloves were off, and arms were crossing across bodies around the room. Not happy.

  Olive knew it. Her smile, normally so sunny, grew tight. ‘I know you’ll welcome Adam Rossiter,’ she said, her tone warning, You’d better. He stood and the woman beside him sat back. He smiled at us with flagrantly bored insincerity, and read out a paragraph from a sheet he held. His company (name unintelligible) was so excited to be working with a publisher as well known as – he checked the paper again – as Timmins & Ross. He was looking forward to learning from us as much as we learnt from them, and it was a great opportunity.

  So great that he couldn’t be bothered to memorise the four sentences he’d just read. Or the name of the company that was paying his bill. Or look at anyone. Or introduce his colleague.

  My arms were folded too. It was either that, or I’d throw something. Once. Just once. Just one sodding time, I wanted to be in a meeti
ng where, if the people doing a presentation were a man and a woman, the woman got to speak. Not even lead. Just speak.

  Today was not going to be that day, but at least I was not alone. As we walked out, Sandra, from publicity, said in a whisper intended to be heard in the next county, ‘Since she’s got two X-chromosomes, no one needs to know her name.’

  Olive and her little management buddies retreated to a huddle by the window, and the rest of us just retreated.

  Miranda trailed me into my office. ‘What’s going to happen?’

  I waved my hand in dismissal. ‘A bunch of bullshit. They’ll piss around for a few months, send in a bill for a few hundred thousand pounds, and after they’ve gone we’ll reorganise their reorganisation so that we can get the same work done we were already doing, after we’ve hired new people to replace the ones they made redundant.’

  She stiffened. ‘Redundant?’

  I was careless. ‘Management consultants never think they’ve done a good job if everyone is happy when they leave.’ Then I looked at her, wide-eyed and terrified. I’d forgotten she was only twenty-two and hadn’t been through this before. And she’d told me a few weeks before that she and a friend had made an offer on their first flat. ‘Try not to worry. I know that sounds impossible, but you’re essential. Your job is essential.’

  She didn’t look convinced. And she looked less convinced by late afternoon. I’d come back after our weekly cover meeting, which is when the art department shows the potential designs for the jackets of the upcoming books, to be approved by the editors, marketing, sales and publicity people. Everyone was on edge, and discussions that would normally have been calm, even pleasant, degenerated into playgroup-like squabbling about who had delivered work late, and whose fault it was. Finding a memo from the consultants to the senior editors on my desk was the icing on the cake. They were, they wrote, setting up meetings with each division ‘to map out and explore our journey in the creative enterprise that is Timmins & Ross’. After that group hug, a stark order: block out three hours on Tuesday – that is, in less than three working days, we needed to clear our calendars, whatever we had scheduled. They had written ‘please’, but it was an order. If our journeys in the creative enterprise were meant to involve doing any work, that was just too damn bad. Then the sign-off: ‘We look forward to learning from you!’ and a smiley face.

  Miranda must have heard me reading, because she called through the wall: ‘After the morning with the editors, they’ve summoned the assistants for the afternoon. So no one will do any work the entire day. Isn’t that great?’ I ditched my earlier plan to become a dentist and decided I’d run away and join the circus. I could be a clown. I already had lots of badly fitting clothes.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE GENERAL FEELING of irritability that pervaded the building was not helped by the weather. It had already been hot on the commute in. It quickly worked its way past that, to hotter, and then to Oh-dear-lord-this-is-unbearable. I frowned at the sky as I headed home. When it was my turn to run the universe, things were going to be very different. But it wasn’t my turn yet, and I waded to the Tube through the lowering, clammy air, air that felt as if a thunderstorm were due. And, until it arrived, the Tube itself was going to be worse. Fancy-pants cities like Paris and New York have air-conditioning on their undergrounds. We Brits pretend we’re too tough to need it, butching it out summer after summer. Today the temperatures underground would have seen you prosecuted for cruelty to animals, had you been transporting cattle.

  No cattle in my tube carriage, just lots of smelly, sweaty people. When I was above ground again, I made a quick stop and then headed out of the station. As I walked past the café, Mo knocked on the window and gestured me in. She was always there: her hours seemed to be ‘From opening until she fell over from tiredness’.

  ‘Steve hasn’t talked about anything else,’ she began. ‘At least, that’s when he hasn’t been drawing plans of what he can grow with so much extra space.’ As she spoke, she was boxing up a salad. ‘He asked me to say, if I saw you, that he’d like to start clearing the ground as soon as possible. He wanted to check it was OK with you.’

  I shrugged. ‘Sure. Whenever he likes.’

  She passed me the box, again refusing payment. Between my future harvest from Steve, Mr Rudiger’s contributions, and now salads from Mo, I might end up like Dennis Harefield, never having to cook at all. The thought of Harefield made me say, as I balanced the salad on the top of my bookbag, ‘Can you sit for a few minutes? Do you have time for a cup of tea?’

  I don’t know what possessed me. I’d never said more than three sentences to the woman before. I don’t like strangers. I don’t like bland chat. And I don’t like tea.

  Mo was as startled as I was, and then she smiled. ‘Thanks. It would be good to have a break.’

  She made herself a cup of tea, and me some coffee – she paid attention to her customers. We sat.

  I couldn’t exactly say, So, tell me, why were you giving space to a drug dealer? I went for, ‘Is it always so quiet in here in the evenings? Why do you stay open if it is?’ instead.

  ‘We used to close after the school run was finished, but once I began the prepared food, even though we still don’t get customers who sit, the rush-hour takings went up and the owner extended our hours. So it’s really my own fault.’ She slumped, and then straightened. I got the feeling that Mo was used to fighting her own battles, and everyone else’s. ‘On the other hand, it’s because I found him another revenue stream that he’s letting us stay in the flat upstairs while we’re … until we’re …’

  She might be used to fighting, but she couldn’t bring herself to say the word ‘homeless’, and the ‘until’ made it worse. Until what? Even if the house was rebuilt and made habitable again, there was no guarantee that they’d be allowed to move back into what had been their home for years. If anything, now it was forcibly going to be renovated, it was almost a certainty the owner would make sure they didn’t move back. If he hadn’t known about them before, he did now.

  Her voice trembled. ‘We’re still on the council waiting list for housing, but who knows how long that will take? And that was home. We’d been there ten years; there was every chance we’d have been able to stay. Dennis was helping us with that—’ She cut herself off.

  This had to be horribly painful: Dennis had deceived them, and used their generosity against them. ‘Had you known him a long time?’

  ‘Three, maybe four years? More?’ She waved her hand vaguely. ‘He was a regular at the Neighbourhood Association, and we knew him from there. Once the boys began their T-shirt thing—’ She paused, checking I was up to date with ‘the T-shirt thing’. I was. ‘After that, he needed a place for their equipment. The shed was convenient for him, and he was helpful to us – he …’ She took a deep breath and finished off her tea before she went on, her voice steadier. ‘He was also helping the boys with the council, which was planning to sell off the railway arches where they skated. Dennis was helping them work with the Neighbourhood Association to protect the space. That’s what he was good at. He was …’ Her lip trembled again. Then she pulled her shoulders back. This was the Mo who looked after her family, the café, her customers. She was a carer, not someone who was cared for. She stood, pushing her cup and emotion aside. ‘Speaking of which, will you be coming to the Neighbourhood Association meeting this evening?’ She gave me a stern look.

  Which I deserved. I had never once, in the twenty-odd years I’d lived there, gone to a Neighbourhood Association meeting. I’m not terrific with groups, I don’t play well with others. In truth, if I could find an anti-joiner club to join, I would. We’d have badges that read ‘Home Alone’, and we would wear them proudly at the hour dedicated to our meetings, as we each sat quietly by ourselves in our own houses.

  ‘I’ll try,’ I said. That was a translation of, I will, right after hell freezes over.

  Unfortunately, Mo appeared to be bilingual, and her stare responded
to the meaning, not the words. ‘I’ll see you there, then,’ she said, dismissing me with a flick of her grey plait. ‘St Thomas’s church hall. Seven o’clock.’

  ‘Sir, yes, sir!’ I replied, snapping out a spiffy salute. But only in my head. Out loud, I just repeated, ‘I’ll try.’ Even to myself I sounded meek, not evasive, this time.

  Another bossy older woman. Maybe it was like ducklings. I’d imprinted on Helena at birth, and now I automatically followed the instructions of any imperious-sounding woman a set number of years older than me. Blaming it on biological determinism made me feel a bit better, because otherwise I was just a wimp.

  Refusing to entertain that as a possibility, when I got home I dropped my bag by the door and took my purchases upstairs to Mr Rudiger. I knocked, and when he opened the door I didn’t even bother going through the routine of inviting him downstairs so that he could refuse and invite me in.

  Instead, I just waved the plastic bag in the air. ‘Pimm’s!’ I carolled, in the tone of a day-care assistant whipping out the SpongeBob SquarePants jigsaw. Only then did I hesitate. When I’d tried out iced coffee on Mr Rudiger, he’d gone all Central European on me. Maybe six decades in Britain wasn’t long enough to appreciate Pimm’s either? But it wasn’t like Marmite, where your mother’s mother’s mother had to have been born here before you didn’t gag when you smelt it. Pimm’s was cool, delicious, and 99.9 per cent gin. What’s not to like?

  And Mr Rudiger was smiling, and it wasn’t that rictus smile he’d given me with my iced coffee. ‘We’re on the terrace,’ he said.

  We? This was the first time I’d just barged in, and he had company. ‘I didn’t mean to interrupt.’ I began to edge backwards, but he took the bag in one hand, and my elbow in the other. As usual, he looked benevolently amused by me.

  Once out on the terrace, I saw the joke too. Helena. Not that she was a joke, of course, just that I hadn’t expected her. I wasn’t aware she was on visiting terms with Mr Rudiger, and she rarely left her office before six, mostly much later. I looked at my watch: not quite six now, and from the empty glass in front of her, she’d been there for a while. I kissed her, but raised my eyebrows. What time do you call this, Missy? the eyebrows said sternly.