She glanced over her shoulder. ‘Saturday,’ she said. ‘That work?’
‘Perfect,’ Adam said.
And then she was swinging her legs into the back of the Prius, the car door closing after her. Adam stood and watched as its brake lights faded into the night.
13
In the meeting room, the conference phone was spurting out the harsh tones of caffeinated British voices. The American staff, crammed onto the sofa and several chairs in the confined space, still coming to terms with Monday morning, frowned, leaning in towards the phone and trying to decipher the cacophony of laughter, raised voices, sarcasm and occasional anger.
‘OK, OK,’ the Autodidact said, silencing the room at the British end. ‘Americans, you with us?’
‘Yep,’ everyone said at once.
‘Good. Where’s Abi?’ Adam, finely attuned to the intricacies of the weekly marketing conference call, could tell that this question was directed to the London meeting room rather than the assembled global staff. Abidemi was the office manager, responsible for taking minutes.
Someone in London muttered a reply to the effect that Abi was not currently available.
‘Right,’ the Autodidact said. ‘Probably downstairs sending out phishing emails from the office server.’
Adam grimaced and avoided his colleagues’ eyes. At the other end of the line, a few male voices sniggered uncertainly.
‘OK, well, let’s crack on then,’ the Autodidact said.
‘Right then,’ said a cheerful Irish voice at the British end. This was Jennifer, a talented Oxford graduate whose role was head of operations. Due to the Autodidact’s belief that titles were cheaper than raises, most people were heads of something.
‘Shall we talk about the latest on the branding side?’ Jennifer continued.
‘Yeah, er, we’re making some pin badges,’ a deep male voice said. This was Steven, head of marketing. ‘And we’re gonna do our own tents, in time for the summer festivals and that.’
‘Cool,’ Kristen in the LA office said. ‘Like, what do they look like?’
‘They’re black,’ Steven said. ‘With a small white logo on the door.’
Excellent, Adam thought. Black tents will stay nice and cool in the sun.
‘Great. Let’s talk Shades?’ Jennifer said.
The Autodidact cleared his throat, but didn’t speak.
‘Jason?’ Jennifer said.
‘What?’ the Autodidact replied.
‘What’s the latest?’ Jennifer said.
‘What do you mean what’s the latest?’ the Autodidact said, sounding more Liverpudlian. ‘This isn’t for me to run. It’s meant to be run by the people of colour among the staff.’
‘Yes, but…’
‘But what?’
‘Well, it was your idea? And no one’s really leading it.’
‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ the Autodidact said.
‘It’s just not very well organized,’ an unidentified female voice said.
‘OK, OK, OK. Does everyone know about this?’ the Autodidact said.
‘No,’ Scott said, breaking the silence in the LA meeting room, frowning deeply at the conference phone. He leaned closely over it, with one hand planted in his hair. Nothing was worse, for Scott, than not knowing something before the majority of his colleagues.
‘OK, so I guess I’ll give a bit of a prologue,’ the Autodidact said.
‘Pre-logue!’ a few male voices chanted – the Autodidact’s loyalists.
‘So the idea is that it’s a total disgrace how white-led everything is in the indie-rock scene,’ the Autodidact said. ‘We’re starting to build a genuine BAME roster, and this is about a project being completely run and decided by the BAME members of staff.’
‘But it was your idea?’ Brian, the British head of radio, had known the Autodidact long enough to taunt him.
‘Yes, it was my bloody idea,’ the Autodidact screeched. ‘And I’ve taken more shit for it than anything else ever.’
‘Well, am I going to be taking it into stations?’ Brian said, abruptly prim. ‘Because if so I want approval over the edits.’
‘Noyouwillfuckingnotbetakingit!’ the Autodidact raged. ‘A person of colour will be taking it in.’
‘But that’s my job!’ Brian said.
‘Maybe you should appoint a project manager?’ Jennifer suggested to Jason.
‘Fucking hell,’ the Autodidact said. ‘It’s not for me to appoint one. They should be appointed by a person of colour.’
There was a long moment of silence. ‘Fuck’s sakes, where’s Abidemi?’ the Autodidact said. ‘Someone call the fucking fraud team.’
A few people in the background laughed nervously. As far as Adam could tell, Jason thought of these jokes as a sort of ironic meta-humour. An edgy, comic commentary on the ugly behaviour of bad bosses – of which he so clearly wasn’t one. It wasn’t an argument Adam would have wanted to defend in an employment tribunal.
‘Are we really gonna go forward with White Slavery?’ This was Ed, head of retail, whose gruff West Country tone was easily identifiable.
‘Why would we not move forward with it?’ the Autodidact asked.
‘Well, she can barely play her instruments,’ Ed moaned. ‘Me and Brian went to see her on Saturday. She was holding a guitar and playing one note on it over a backing track, and chanting sections from the Labour Party manifesto. Over and over again. It was embarrassing.’
‘So you think we can afford to send people to music lessons, or wait around while some other twat signs these bastards?’ the Autodidact said. ‘It’s all artifice, this game. No one gives a shit about how well you can play guitar. None of these fuckwits have done their ten thousand hours.’
‘What?’ someone asked.
‘Gladwell,’ the Autodidact said, sagely. ‘Anyway, White Slavery’s music seems to me to have potential to go exactly the right way.’
‘I agree,’ Scott said, seizing the chance to support Jason in his best, weary-expert voice. ‘We just need to be smarter about the projects we pick up. Think more tactically and less… emotionally. She looks great, too. It’s gonna be very important that she’s on her own album cover and in all the videos.’
‘Exactly,’ Jason said. ‘But not in an exploitative way. She dresses like a total LDN hipster with an ethnic twist, so that’s perfect.’
There was a long pause as the Autodidact let his words sink in.
‘But mainly,’ he continued, ‘she’s a black female civil rights activist making indietronica, and we’ve got hardly any female artists, which is a disgrace in itself.’
In both conference rooms, there was silence. Adam felt an unbearable tension spread within him. His leg, in response, began jiggling furiously.
‘OK,’ Jennifer said, calmly. ‘I think Sasha should lead Shades then. Is that OK, Sasha?
‘Sure,’ came the distant reply.
‘So you guys get together for a meeting about it later. The title is just provisional, so if anyone has any better ideas that’d be great.’
‘I like Spectrum,’ someone said.
‘In Full Colour?’ said somebody else.
‘Maybe something to do with vinyl and that?’ Steven said. ‘Maybe, like… Black on Black?’
‘What?’ the Autodidact said.
Someone in London giggled.
‘Sasha and her team can discuss that later,’ Jennifer said. ‘If you guys could get a tracklist together too, that’d be brilliant.’
‘Send that to me when it’s done though, yeah?’ the Autodidact said.
‘OK,’ Sasha said.
‘Anyway, let’s move on,’ the Autodidact barked.
The conversation headed into the calmer waters of digital metadata delivery. Aaron, the hirsute Monday intern, appeared outside the conference room and mouthed ‘Coffee?’ Scott made a prayer gesture, and Adam held up a thumb and mouthed ‘Thanks’.
His mind drifting from the numbing detail of digital song registration, Adam idly
opened Instagram on his phone, leaning back so that no one could see his screen. He felt an instinctive loathing for social media – for its shoutiness and his increasing inability to understand how it worked – but it often seemed to be the only way to find out what anyone was doing.
Scrolling down his feed, he very quickly entered the familiar mood of anxious absorption. Craig had posted a picture of himself, standing on a rooftop in pale morning sunshine, arm around a well-known techno DJ. From the look of the buildings behind him, Adam could see that he wasn’t in LA. Detroit maybe? He ran his eyes down to the hashtags, trying to decipher them.
#berlin, they told him. #partylife #music #lovingit #sick
Berlin? Adam thought. What the fuck? Weren’t they supposed to be going out on Thursday? He made a mental note to message Craig later. In fact, he thought, maybe I’ll message him in Instagram. That’s probably faster these days. If he could only remember how to get into the messaging bit.
A little lower down was a post from Sofia, whom Adam had mistakenly followed a few months back in a spirit of short-lived optimism about doing so. The picture was of her book – a beautiful, bright hardback, elegantly designed and perfectly typeset, her name writ large upon it. Above an array of art- and writing-related hashtags, she’d posted excitedly that the book was going into its third print run.
An image came to Adam of his favourite, birding uncle, sitting across from him amid the dark wood of a London pub, shaking his head as Adam told him what had happened with Sofia.
‘Well,’ his uncle had said, lowering his eyes and raising his pint to his lips. ‘You had it made there, pal.’
Fuck, Adam thought now. Fuck fuck fuck.
Lower down still was a picture of some long, brown, attractive female legs. They were crossed at the knee, embedded in sand with the bright blue-white of the ocean beyond them. In the foreground, the picture was cut off high up on the thighs, just before the point Adam assumed a swimsuited crotch would appear. The photo had been posted by Meg, with a single hashtag.
#headspace
In a strange way, it cheered him. Good on you, he thought. Rather there than here.
For a short while after that, none of the posts interested him. People he barely knew, at weddings or on holidays, posing like rappers or fashion models. Bizarre little videos that looked like they’d been shot accidentally then covered in hand-drawn digital ink. These were interspersed with pictures of flying birds or improbably luminous, enhanced landscapes. Places that taunted him by being somewhere he wasn’t while trapped in the curdled air of the meeting room – the digital equivalent of the desert island postcard on the jail cell wall.
Could it only be him who thought that all this stuff had made the world a worse, more confusing place? That a culture in which people had stopped buying newspapers and books, and instead ingested this inane nonsense all day, had better be careful about where it was going? The real world was being forsaken for this flattened virtual one, where disembodied voices regurgitated received wisdoms or insulted each other horribly. And he, of course, was part of the problem – why couldn’t he stop looking at this stuff?
Yes, he thought. Life before social media had definitely been better.
The worst aspect of it was that it had made the previously unspoken pecking order hideously tangible. Like everything else in life, it was now a simple matter of data, of looking at the numbers. This was a world fit only for the most craven, cold-eyed social climbers, who could measure their influence in hard statistics. A worldwide school playground, where the in-crowd would only speak to each other.
Suddenly, taking him by surprise, Angelina appeared on his feed.
She was standing atop a rock formation in Joshua Tree, the image filtered to black and white. A flowing black dress revealed her legs and shiny, black leather ankle boots. She gazed off into the distance, brushing a strand of hair from her upturned face. Adam scrutinized the picture, feeling a pang of jealousy and unhappiness.
Below the image was one of her poems:
I want to fly
Above the world
To see your beauty
In its context
There were more hashtags than words, and a series of emojis of prayer hands, cherries, flowers and hearts. The post had 5,348 likes. Adam took a deep breath, anxiety clutching his chest.
‘Adam,’ a voice was saying. ‘Adam?’
Shit, it was the Autodidact.
‘Yes?’ Adam said.
‘What are your thoughts on this?’
No no no no no! Fatal error! He’d walked straight into the conference call trap, again! The Autodidact had pounced on him like a hawk on a hapless pigeon.
‘Sorry,’ he said, trying to sound casual. ‘Got distracted by an email there.’
The Autodidact impersonated this sentence in one of his funny voices – a sort of rapid, low-pitched jabber – like a schoolboy parodying someone with special needs. In the meeting room in London, men and women alike roared with laughter.
Adam’s innards burned with anger and hatred. He glanced at Scott, who was smirking at the conference phone.
‘I was saying,’ the Autodidact continued, ‘that the project seems to be paying dividends.’
Ah, Adam thought, the heat slowly draining from his neck and cheeks, receding into a ball of rage in his gut. The Project. The Autodidact’s gradual, craven commercialization of everything Adam had once held dear.
‘Yes,’ Adam said, weakly. ‘It’s certainly working well for us here.’
‘I think we can all recognize that there’s real knowledge out there in the industry at large about what we’re capable of doing now,’ the Autodidact said. There were murmurs of approval from the London team. In LA, Scott leaned closer to the phone, nodding frantically, his expression serious once more.
‘Big artists are telling us they want to sign, that we feel like the right home for them.’ The worst artists, Adam thought. The artists who make music for people who own selfie sticks.
‘We have to acknowledge that the project is working,’ the Autodidact said, with real passion.
Oh dear, Adam thought. This was the climax of the marketing meeting, he knew, the Autodidact’s grand summing-up: his state of the nation address.
‘And there’s more to come,’ he was saying now. ‘With The Passion rolling over for a tummy tickle and Lunar Patrol showing some arse, I think we’ve got two solid, first-eleven players lined up, capable of delivering decent coffee-table albums.’
Adam’s head swam with metaphors. He glanced at the sofa-full of Americans, who were frowning into the middle distance, deeply puzzled. All except Scott, whose nods had become a series of orgiastic thrashings, like a woodpecker on good cocaine.
The Passion made the kind of mind-numbing, generic house music that soundtracked self-conscious hotel pool parties. I am going to have to work on The Passion, Adam thought.
‘If we can get their album right,’ Jason was saying, ‘I truly believe we’re going to have a global megahit on our hands.’
How would you know when it was right? Adam wondered. It would be like trying to judge the quality of liquid shit.
‘As for concerns about credibility,’ the Autodidact continued, ‘with albums from White Slavery, Hot Knives and Chapels coming this year, I do feel like we’re already some distance ahead on the intellectual curve, at least when it comes to this very conservative contemporary music scene.’
There was a pause here, and Adam wondered hopefully if that was the end of the meeting.
‘These more commercial projects have much bigger reach, though,’ the Autodidact continued, ‘and I do take some pleasure in feeling like we’re creating the soundtrack to a very meaningful and profound phase in the lives of young people.’
Scott, lips pursed in solemn agreement, slowed his nod to match the Autodidact’s rhythm, his movements now like that of a nodding donkey pump in an LA oil field.
Christ, Adam thought. His mind felt completely numb.
‘Adam,’ the Autodidact said. ‘Anything to add?’
‘Nothing at all,’ he said in his best encouraging tone. ‘Very well put.’
‘Great, man,’ the Autodidact said. ‘Can you stay on the line actually, and we’ll have a catch-up?’
‘Sure,’ Adam said, feeling sick.
After the LA team had filed out, heading for the kitchen to make oatmeal and more coffee and hear about each other’s weekends, Adam closed the sliding glass door to the meeting room.
‘Hold on,’ the Autodidact said. ‘I’m just going to get Serena.’
Serena. The boss. The dear, departing boss.
‘Hi, mate,’ Serena’s warm, south London accent rang out from the phone. Adam felt a flush of affection.
Save me! he thought. ‘Hello,’ he said.
‘Alright?’ Serena sounded bright and cheerful. Maybe it’s good news? Adam allowed himself to wonder.
‘So listen, couple of bits,’ the Autodidact said.
‘OK,’ Adam said.
Outside the meeting room, Scott walked past slowly, flip-flops scuffing the floor, a bowl of cereal in one hand and a coffee in the other. He glanced into the meeting room, and looked away quickly when he saw Adam was watching.
‘So I dunno how that meeting with Roger went,’ the Autodidact was saying. Adam felt a cold hand clench around his heart. ‘But he’s gone very cool on us. I’m sensing the presence of a larger predator. I think we need to take some radical action.’
‘Right,’ Adam said.
‘They’re playing Red Rocks next week, right?’
‘Yes,’ Adam said.
‘Were you planning on going?’ Serena asked.
‘No, I wasn’t.’ Adam saw where this was going. ‘But I can.’
‘Someone should be there,’ the Autodidact said. ‘Neither of us can make it.’
‘It’s my wedding anniversary that day,’ Serena said, apologetically.
‘And I’ve got a mentoring session,’ the Autodidact said.
Jason spent a couple of evenings each week mentoring the troubled youth of Hackney Wick. Adam had encountered one or two of them at gigs, during trips to London. From what he’d been able to tell, Jason’s teaching had primarily resulted in their acquiring several of his favourite business buzz phrases and his own supercilious expression. Adam sometimes wondered if the Autodidact was trying to create an army of replicants.
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