Pravda Page 21

  Another thing: he had become curious about—no, fascinated by; no, preoccupied with—his mother's life. Not her life with his father (though this too) but her life before that, her life around, behind, beneath the life he thought he already knew. (What did this Russian guy know?) Related to this was his panic that he would forget what she looked like, what she sounded like—hence his need for hourly mental checks. And related to this was his quest for pictures, for mementos, for anything at all that he might gather, hoard, treasure. And somehow—somehow—related to this was ... was the strong sense that he had to sort his life out. Sort his bloody life out.

  He dialed Lina's cell phone. Her office phone was usually diverted, and he didn't want to speak to her secretary.

  "Hi, how's it going?"

  "Busy," she said. "I'm supposed to have written a presentation and people keep coming in and asking me stuff. And the phone keeps going."

  "Shut your door."

  "I do. Then they knock and I can't think of anything else to say except 'Come in.'"

  "How about a sign—'Fuck off unless you are giving me money or can do interesting tricks.'"

  "Gabriel."

  "Sorry. Do you want me to check through the presentation?"

  "Yes. That would be nice, thanks. It's a pitch."

  "When's it for?"

  "Friday. Will you have time?"

  "Yes ... yes, if it's important." He paused. "Are you out tonight?"

  "No. You?"

  "I'm on the radio. It's the late show again."

  "Okay. Don't wake me up. I have to catch a train at eight-thirty." She changed register. "Quality Kitchens just rang, by the way."

  "I love those guys."

  "They're sending someone new to start next Monday." She shuffled something. "Frank Delaney."

  "Can't wait."

  "Okay—I have to go. I'll put your pajamas in the lounge so you don't have to turn on our light. See you later."

  "Bye."

  The afternoon arrived like an aggrieved trade unionist. Not a single one of his so-called writers had filed their so-called copy on time. And what he did have was universally shit. Unbelievably shit—even by the standards of modern journalism, even by the standards of contract publishing, even by the standards of Self-Help! Further, there was no single person among his staff to whom he could appeal for help. He looked out across the empty office floor. Ten to three, and they were all still out at lunch—probably drinking in the Alfred. Not that having them back would make things any better...

  His chief (and only) picture editor, Pablo, was a pouting Portuguese prima donna who accused him of being antigay every time he ever so gently suggested that an additional effort of the imagination might be required on such and such a spread, or whenever he delicately pointed out that perhaps a cover picture of Charles and Diana circa 1986 was not the best idea for the "Toxic Parents" issue; his one (and only) copy editor, Craig, was now openly smoking cannabis during his many screen breaks and only last Friday had declared to all comers at the Alfred that he "couldn't be arsed"; his features editor, Annabel (home counties, public school, Durham), had some sort of trouble with her thyroid and was as maniacally ambitious "to make a national" as she was utterly unsuited to her chosen career—completely unable to cope with any kind of decision-making or pressure and totally incapable as an editor, designer, or, he sometimes suspected, even as a reader; his deputy, Maureen, forty-seven (and forty-seven a day), was probably the single most bitter and poisonous woman ever to scratch a living in the miserable secondhand dirt of the profession—in an industry riddled with rancor, rashed with resentment, choked with bile, gall, and spleen, Maureen Wilson was head and shoulders above everyone else, by some distance the most noxious human being Gabriel had ever called colleague, she spent her days whispering on the phone to the National Union of Journalists or lying in wait for just the right moment to take him to an employment tribunal—a woman outdone only by Francine O'Brien in sheer pound-for-pound toxicity; Wendy, meanwhile, his one and only in-house staff writer—aside from the fact that she was Chinese and English was her fourth language, behind Cantonese, Mandarin, and Japanese—simply could not be made to understand that interviews with fashion gurus and Tokyo pop stars, however hard to get, had no place in the magazine unless there was a clear self-help angle and so continued (on her own initiative, at her own expense, and at the expense of the jobs she was supposed to be doing) to file three-thousand-word pieces on the latest glamour boy of Japanese death metal—only to break down in tears when he had to explain why they could not run her stuff before she sprinted off to the toilets to lock herself in for the rest of the day.

  The job in hand.

  He conjured the current cover onto his computer screen. There was the masthead with its familiar exclamation mark: Self-Help! (It was company policy that every title that belly-crawled out of the building did so under the distracting fire of that exclamation mark.) Beneath his own subtitle, "The Toxic Parents Issue," a youngish Prince of Wales and a near-teenage Diana stared back at him, unhappiness drawn in clear lines across their faces. Both photographs had been tipped slightly sideways and were overlaid by the transparencies of two test tubes, as if about to pour and mingle their contents.

  What the living fuck was Pablo trying to do? Gabriel sighed. He was going to have to go it alone. Again.

  The cheerless reality was that twelve times a year, working night and day as each deadline approached, Gabriel commissioned, designed, wrote, copy-edited, illustrated, captioned, laid out, and proof-checked the entire magazine. In truth, Self-Help! was a one-man operation. Yes, the others—Pablo, Craig, and Annabel, at least—did their stuff eventually, however unprofessionally. But he had never once felt able to leave their work unchecked. And almost without fail, he found himself rewriting, revising, redesigning, reworking, later and later into the night as the deadline approached.

  The problem was one of conscience. For even though he could not stand the Randy K. Norris Organization, even though he thought Randy K. Norris himself one of the greatest charlatans alive, Gabriel nonetheless felt a crushing sense of responsibility toward the people who read Self-Help! The people who might—Jesus Christ—actually turn to the magazine for succor and guidance in their genuine distress. Despite himself, he was trying to make a go of it.

  He looked up. His colleagues were returning. Maureen—heels high, chin low—walked straight into her office opposite (far larger than his own), shut the door, sat down, and lit the cigarette that she had readied in the lift. Given the flurries of rain, she would soon be joined by various pinch-faced delegations of fellow smokers from other magazines in the building, whom she welcomed with sardonic zest throughout the day, and who had grown used to using her room as the only alternative to the stairwell or the street. Pablo, meanwhile, sat down at his desk opposite Craig, who did the same for the count of three before standing up again, wedging his armpit with newspapers, and heading in the direction of the men's room. Ominously, there was still no sign of Wendy. For a foolish moment, Gabriel considered calling an editorial conference. But really, there was no point; it was way too late for that. No, his only chance was to try to pick them off one by one. (He must remember to phone Annabel at home, too; check if she was okay; maybe she was genuinely ill. The hours that he had spent counseling that girl ... and oh man, what do you say, what can you say?) He drew breath and got to his feet.

  "Hey, Pablo."

  "Hello. You seen the layouts?"

  "Yes, I looked through them over lunch. And the new cover. I really like the two test tubes things—clever."

  Pablo sucked in his cheeks. "Yes, it's very oh-my-God. Mum and Dad, like two poison test tubes, pouring down into one bottle"—he mimed the chemist's concentrated decantation—"which is you."

  "I see that." Gabriel had the sense that he was being personally compared to a newly mixed tube of poison. Perhaps it was paranoia.

  Pablo clicked his mouse and made as if to return his attention to the screen. "Okay.
So, great—send me through the copy when you have it. You got anything ready now?"

  Gabriel was unsure whether to perch on the desk or ask Pablo to come over to the big table so that he could talk directly over each of the alterations he required. He glanced up. Craig and Wendy's absence argued in favor of staying put. He perched.

  "I've got some changes." He put the mocked-up cover on the design desk adjacent to Pablo's terminal. "First, I don't think we can use the Prince of Wales and ... and Princess Diana on the cover of the 'Toxic Parents' issue."

  Instantly Pablo contorted his face, as if Gabriel's stupidity were beyond the merely unbelievable and on into something that might be medically interesting. "That's everything. Just, like, the whole cover idea"

  "No—not everything. As I say, I love the concept. We just need different people in the test tubes. What about some celebrities from ... from one of the soaps. A famously toxic couple. There must be one."

  "And, like, you would know."

  This seemed unnecessarily aggressive. Though, perversely, Gabriel was flattered. Which only served to remind him how far apart they were as human beings. He feigned a measured hurt. But Pablo was now staring dead ahead at his screen, busily clicking on pages as if to suggest that some people around here had work to do.

  "Come on, Pablo—change the cover. If you don't, you know I will."

  "Diana sells."

  "She is also dead."

  "But her painful legacy lives on. That's the whole point. Duh. Every single person who picks this up"—Pablo indicated the printout with his finger but without taking his eyes off the screen—"will know exactly what this issue is about. Instantly. In one visual hit. They'll think parents. They'll think toxic. They'll think William and Harry's struggle. What more can you ask from a cover?"

  "Charles has remarried," Gabriel returned. "This is cheap. Worse than that—it's nasty, it's lame, it's offensive, it's lazy, it participates in everything about our national life that we should dislike. Come on, Pablo—it's also more than twenty years old, and hardly a scoop or a particularly new image." He held the proof up, his tone still just about jocular. "It's tired. It's worse than tired—it's unimaginative, it's ill-judged, it's childish, it's without taste, it's a slight on the dead and an insult to the living, it's—"

  "Iconic."

  Jesus. Argument was futile. Power was the only recourse. "And it's never going to be approved by the client, or Hamish"—the group editor in chief still signed off on everything individually—"or anyone else who has to approve every single thing we do here."

  Pablo now turned in his chair so that he was facing his editor with folded arms. "Well, let's fight for it."

  "Pablo, our readers do not think of Diana as toxic. They love her. They love her to death."

  "Fight for it."

  "For Christ's sake, Pablo, I—we—we are not going to fight for this shit ... We're just going to get on with it and stop wasting fucking time."

  He had never cursed in anger at the office before. And for a moment Gabriel could not think of anything acceptable further to say. For the first time in his working life, he found himself wanting to lash out at one of his colleagues. He found himself wanting to say something truthful for once: Look, you utter penis of a man, we're in contract publishing—there's nothing to fight for. We've lost every claim to dignity already. Let alone art. We're totally and utterly beaten. Christ, they're all beaten, even the bastards on the nationals. Journalism is over. Art is over. Design is over. Publishing is over. Fact is fiction. And fiction is fucked. Money won. We're here because we're slaves. And the only claim we are permitted to make is to tug on the chains of our wages once a month. That's the deal. I get to buy my girlfriends overpriced tapas every so often. You get your tight designer T-shirts and a night out at Cream or Lube or wherever you go on the weekend by way of forgetting. So shut the fuck up and get on with it. Or get out there and start your revolution.

  Somehow, though, he controlled himself, ignored the echoes of his mother's voice (you would say it, wouldn't you, Ma—you'd just come right out and say it), and tried to take advantage of Pablo's horrified attention.

  He repeated himself slowly. "We are not going to fight for this, Pablo. And it's not just the cover."

  Pablo straightened his back and set his jaw, as if to arrange himself against the moment of his life's greatest indignity.

  "Also, I can see what you're trying to do with the center spread, but it's ... it is all image, Pablo. The copy just has to be bigger than this." Gabriel ran his finger along the bottom of the page, where Pablo had reduced the point size of Annabel's (wretched) interview with a celebrity famous for forgiving her parents to something that resembled a slapdash massacre of starving ants. "Nobody is going to be able to read it."

  Gabriel began to turn through each of the layouts at speed. "And—I'm sorry, but we have to have headlines at the top. So pages five and seven, can you redesign? On nine, you've got the body copy running sideways—I think it's sideways. We can't do it. Sorry. Hamish hates all that space. So do I. So does everyone. Okay? Right. Readers' letters should be the same font size—at least the same font size for each individual letter. And Spirited Away has to go back around the right way ... Our readers won't guess that they have to turn the magazine upside down for those pages. They're desperate, Pablo. Let's not make it any worse."

  Pablo's eyes were two slits.

  But Gabriel had moved beyond care. "The neobrutalist stuff, or whatever it is, that you want to do on the back—well, okay, I'll allow that on the inside back cover. But. But Inner Space can't stay in this ... this galaxy effect. Yeah, I know what you're trying to do—I get it. It's just totally unreadable. And not really that clever. Spiral text—it's for kids' mags."

  "I'm not doing it. I'm not changing anything." Pablo was actually crying.

  Tears. This was a first.

  "I'm sick of ... I'm sick ... I'm sick of you squashing my creativity."

  Gabriel felt the surge of his furious blood. Beethoven was creative, Pablo—Mozart was creative, Dickens, Dante, Kant, Dürer, Newton, Raphael, Aeschylus, Balzac. Yes, there have been a good few genuinely creative human beings. But you're not one of them. You are not in the least bit creative. You are not even talented. You just have a computer. That's all. The same as every other mediocre fucker whose terrible shit we all have to suffer every second of the day. So let's leave that word "creative" alone for a few decades, shall we? Let's all stop pretending. There are no creative departments in London. Creativity is not copywriting or art directing, creativity is not interior, graphic, or fashion design, creativity is not mimicry or doodle, is not gesture or token, is not a clever text message, a new and even sillier pair of trousers, or an unmade bed, it's not your shitty computer music, or your shitty homemade films, or your shitty Web site with a flashing cock. Creativity is ... creativity is a massive and serious lifetime's endeavor to further humankind's fundamental understanding of itself. Creativity is 154 perfect sonnets and 38 immortal plays, creativity is 1,126 masterworks of music, every note perfect, creativity is E = MC2, the Rougon-Macquart cycle, the discovery of planets. What you do is total horseshit. Got that? Total and utter horseshit.

  And suddenly it came at him like a whetted knife slicing out of the fog in which he was living: he wasn't thinking like his mother at all, he was thinking like his father. The journey that he had feared in Petersburg was already under way. Thinking like a nasty, bullying, cowardly, small-time little bastard.

  "Pablo—I'm sorry. No further argument about the changes. Just—"

  "I really..."He was fighting through the tears. "I really do not respect you, Gabriel. You are a fucking fascist. A fucking homophobic fascist."

  "I'm neither of those things, Pablo. And you know that I am not." Gabriel handed his colleague some tissues. The distress of others had always distressed him more than his own distress. He reached out his hand and put it on the other man's shoulder as gently as he could manage. "I apologize, Pablo. You are a
great designer. I mean it." He spoke softly. "But please, can you make the changes? If not, if you still feel upset in half an hour, then let me know and I will do them."

  The fat taxi wallowed west on the Westway. All through the late afternoon he had been chasing so-called experts for quotes, opinion, insight ... To no avail. Even down in the thickened sedimentary murk at the bottom of the journalistic swamp, the same rusty old rule applied: anyone worth speaking to was impossible to get hold of, and anyone free to talk or write wasn't worth listening to or reading. He made a vow to go in even earlier tomorrow and track down at least one serious human being whom he might ask for information and guidance with his piece.

  November nighttime London rolled by his window—white strip lights in the places of work, amber low lights in the bedrooms, the flickering blue of a thousand TVs.

  His mind would permit him no rest.

  Everyone said that it was unsustainable. Mother, sister, and the few friends who knew. But, Gabriel told himself, none of them could really understand it, or feel it, because none of them were inside the circumstances. None of them had the day-to-day experience. None of them lived it. No, Gabriel alone knew the truth: that it was utterly unsustainable. Because he alone had been sustaining it. For the past eighteen months.