Читать книгу Plume - Will Wiles - Страница 7

We want beginnings. We want strong, obvious beginnings. Start late, finish early, that’s the advice from people who write magazine features. Ditch the scene-setting, background-illustrating and throat-clearing and get stuck in. It’s not a novel.

Lately, however, I’ve been fixated on beginnings, and their impossibility. I trace back and back through my life, trying to find the day, the hour I started to fail. Whenever I alight upon a plausible incident, where it might make sense to begin, I find causes and reasons and conditions and patterns that can be traced back further. And then I discover that I have gone back too far, that I have reached a point well before the event horizon of my failure, where the mass of it in my future overcomes any possibility of escape in the present. No fatal slip, or fatal sip.

Start late, finish early. Start with a bang. Later, a couple of my colleagues would claim that they heard the explosion. The rest would insist that it was too far away to be heard and that the others were mistaken.

I did not hear it. I felt it. The shockwave, widening and waning as it raced through east London, passed through my chair, through my notebook, through my phone, and through the people seated around the aquarium conference table. As it passed through me – through the acid wash of my gut, through raw, quivering membranes, through the poisoned fireworks of my brain – the wave registered as a shudder. It tripped a full-body quake, a cascade of involuntary movements beginning at the base of my spine and progressing out to my fingertips. These episodes had been getting worse lately, but I knew this was more than the usual shakes: as I felt the wave, I saw it. My eyes were focused on the glass of sparkling water in front of me. I had been trying to lose myself in its steady, pure, radio-telescope crackling. When the shock of the blast reached us, it had just enough strength to knock every bubble from the sides of the glass, and they all rose together in a rush. No one else reacted. No one else saw.

No ripple could be seen in the rectangular black pond of my phone, which was lying on the conference table in front of me. Within it, though, beneath its surface, ripples … But the Monday meeting had rules, strict rules, and my phone was silenced. Really, it should have been turned off, but I knew that it was on behind that finger-smeared glass, awaiting my activating caress.

‘Explosion’ was not my first thought. I guessed that a car had hit the building, or one nearby. These Victorian industrial relics all leaned up against each other, and interconnected and overlapped in unexpected ways. Strike one and the whole block might quiver. But it could have been nothing. Without the evidence of the glass in front of me, I might have believed that I had imagined the shock, or that it had taken place within me, a convulsion among my jangling nerves, and I had projected it onto the world.

Even the bubbles were no more than a wisp of proof that an Event had taken place; they were gone now, and no further indications had shown themselves. None of my colleagues had stirred – they were either discussing what to put in the magazine, or looking attentive. As was I. There were no shouts or sirens from the street, not that we’d hear them behind double glazing six storeys up.

But on the phone, though, through that window … Whatever had happened might now be filling that silent shingle with bright reaction. With a touch, I would be able to see if anyone else had heard, or felt, an impact or quake in east London; I would be able to ask that question of the crowd, and see who else was asking it. And I might be able to watch as an event in the world became an Event in the floodlit window-world – the window we use to look in, not out. It was magical seeing real news break online, from the first hesitant, confused notices to the deluge of report and response. An earthquake, a bomb, a celebrity death. And if you scrolled down, reached back, you could find the very first appearance of that Event in your feed or timeline, the threshold – the point where, for you, the Event began, the point at which the world changed a little. Or a lot. In front of me, in real time, the Event would be identified, located, named and photographed. And the real Event would generate shadow events, doppelhappens, mistaken impressions, malicious rumours, overreactions, conspiracy theories. More than merely watching, I would be participating, relaying what I had seen or heard or felt, recirculating the views of others if I thought they deserved it, trimming away error and boosting truth. Journalism, really, in its distributed twenty-first-century form.

(I sickened as I thought of the Upgrade, the digitisation effort taking place on the floor below, all those features I had written being plucked from their dusty, safe, obscure sarcophagus in the magazine’s archives, scanned, and run through text-recognition software. Soon they would be online. It couldn’t be stopped.)

Being denied the chance to check if an Event was indeed happening felt physical to me, withdrawal layered over withdrawal. The action would be so quick: a squeeze on the power button, dismiss the welcome screen, select the appropriate network from the platter of inviting icons on my home page. I no longer even saw those icons: the white bird of Twitter against its baby-blue background, the navy lower-case t of Tumblr, the mid-blue upper-case T of Tamesis, enclosed in a riverine bend. For something happening in London, Tamesis might be best, the smallest and the newest of those three. It had started as a way of finding bars and restaurants, and prospered on the eerie strength of its recommendations. But it was evolving into much more than that, rolling out new functions and abilities, constantly sucking in data from other networks, informing itself about the city and its users. If there had been a bomb, or a gas explosion, or even a significant car accident, Tamesis would know about it before most people, pulling in keywords and speculation from Twitter and Facebook and elsewhere, cross-checking and corroborating, and making informed guesses – preternaturally informed. Maybe that, really, was twenty-first-century journalism: done by an algorithm in a black box.

With the passing minutes the importance of the vibration diminished, but my desire to escape this room and dive into the messages, amusements and distractions of the phone only strengthened. It was right there in front of me, but inaccessible – Eddie would be greatly displeased. He was relaxed about a lot of things that might bother other bosses, but the no phones rule in the Monday meeting was sacrosanct, and I saw his point. Allow one, just for a second, and everyone would be on them the whole time. But the thought had taken root. Not only was I cut off from the sparkling constellation of others, I was cut off from myself, the online me, the one who didn’t tremor and sicken at 11 a.m. on a Monday morning, the one who charmed and kept regular hours and lived a fascinating life, not this shambles who sweltered in the aquarium. The old image of life after death was the ghost, which inhabited without occupying, and observed without possessing or influencing. But here I was, in this meeting, alive and a ghost. Death, I imagined, would be more akin to being stuck on the outside of an unpowered screen – the world still blazing away there, wherever there was, but imprisoned behind vitrified smoke.

If I could be reunited with that shining soul behind the glass, though, the happy success, not the ailing failure, I could check in with the others – Kay, for instance, sitting across from me but looking at Eddie, as mute and inaccessible as my phone. I could send her a message, see what she had been saying on Twitter, Tamesis, Facebook, Instagram … I doubted there would be anything to see. I greatly preferred the other version of me who would be doing the looking, though, the assurance and charisma of his interactions with others. He had no hands that might shake or knees that might buckle. His visage appeared only behind moody filters, hiding the sweat and pallor. He was always on his way somewhere interesting, not fleeing rooms full of people. What would become of that Jack Bick when this one was finished? I wondered. His was the greater tragedy. He had not brought failure upon himself. How I wanted to be in his company, but how bittersweet I now found those times together. It was like seeing an attractive house from a train window and thinking, Yes, what a fine place to live – and realising that the railway line ran right past its windows, the passing trains full of strangers gawping in. This was the relationship between my online and my offline. The phone is the dark reflecting pool for the monument of the self.

‘Jack?’

Kay was looking at me now, and so was Freya, and so were the Rays, and Ilse, and Mohit and the others. They were all looking at me. Eddie was looking at me – he had spoken.

‘You with us, buddy?’ Eddie said, and some of the others laughed. I forced a smile.

‘Feature profile,’ Eddie continued. Everyone looking.

How must I look to them? I wonder: the thin layer of greasy sweat pushed up by the warmth of the aquarium, the unlaundered shirt over an unlaundered T-shirt, unshowered and unshaved on a Monday morning. Was there odour? The air around me could not be trusted; I feared the tell-tale vapours that might be creeping into it. My index finger was resting on the rim of my glass, where I had been watching for tremors and thinking about the bubbles.

‘Something just happened …’

Thirty or so eyes on me. No one spoke.

‘Did anyone feel that?’

No one spoke.

‘Feature, profile,’ Eddie said. ‘What do you got for us, Jack?’ He enunciated this carefully, savouring the carefully remixed syntax.

The really bad part was that I actually had an answer to this, I was in fact prepared, but I had completely tuned out while Freya was talking, lost in ascending bubbles and the vibrating gulf between the icy crystalline world of the water and me, its observer, a low-voltage battery made by coiling an acid-coated length of bowel around a spine filled with tinfoil and bad cartilage. I searched for the correct page in my notebook, sweat prickling.

‘Oliver Pierce,’ I said.

One of the Rays pulled their head back, an almost-nod of recognition. Ilse appeared to tighten. Kay smiled, though only specialist devices aboard the Hubble Space Telescope could have detected it. The others did not react.

‘The mugging guy,’ Eddie said.

‘Yes, the mugging guy.’

‘He’s been interviewed a lot.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘He was interviewed a lot, when the mugging book came out. But he hasn’t said anything to anyone in years. Not a word. Deleted his Twitter, doesn’t answer emails …’

‘Does he have a book coming out?’

‘No,’ I said, too quickly, a mistake. Then, scrambling to recover: ‘Well, he must have been working on something – when I—’

‘Maybe he’s got nothing to say,’ Eddie said. ‘No book, no hook. How do we make it urgent?’

‘He must have been working on something …’

‘I haven’t even seen any pieces by him lately,’ Freya said. She was as bright-lit as the rest of us, but it was as if she had stepped from the shadows. I had tuned out of the meeting during a lengthy argument about feature lifestyle, her domain. We used to have a food correspondent, but after she left, food was added to Freya’s brief. Freya hated food. Her one idea had been a feature about the next big thing in grains – trying to sniff out the next quinoa, the spelt-in-waiting – which Eddie, Polly and Ilse had united in hating. Boring, impossible to illustrate. It had been a bruising business for Freya, and part of her recovery was to try to make someone else’s ideas and preparation look worse than hers had been. That someone would be me. Every month the flatplan served me up after Freya, a convenient victim if the meeting had gone badly for her. Unless I booked an interview high-profile enough to lead the feature section (not for a while now), feature profile followed feature lifestyle like chicken bones in the gutter followed Friday night.

‘Nothing on Vice,’ Freya continued, ‘nothing in Tank. What if he’s blocked or something?’

Pain, a steady drizzle behind my eyes. The quake visited my right hand, which was resting on the table in front of me, on top of my pen. I stopped it by picking up the pen and making a fist around it. The aquarium air was acrid in my sinuses, impure. What time was it? The Need wanted to know. I had to push on.

‘Isn’t that interesting in itself?’ I asked, emphasising with the pen-holding hand, keeping it moving until the quake subsided. ‘A writer has a smash hit like that mugging book. Big surprise. Awards. Colour supplements. Then, he goes Pynchon. Recluse. Emails bounce. Changes mobile number. Why? Isn’t that worth a follow-up?’

‘But he’s not a recluse,’ Eddie said. ‘He’s talking to you. Why’s that?’

I wished I knew. ‘He must have something to say.’

‘There were loads of interviews when that book came out,’ Freya said. There was brightness in her tone, no obvious malice, but I knew her game. She was trying to smear my pitch. And as she spoke, it was as if I could detect the gaseous content of each word, the carbon dioxide in each treacherous exhalation, subtracting from the breathable air in the room, adding to the fog around me. ‘And besides … A novelist … Not much visual appeal.’ She pursed her lips into a red spot of disapproval.

No one else spoke. Eddie pushed back in his chair. ‘When are you meeting him?’

‘Tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Morning. Tomorrow morning.’

‘Let’s have a back-up,’ Eddie said. ‘I want you to meet Alexander De Chauncey.’

An action took me without my willing it, an autonomous protest from my body. My head fell back and my eyes rolled; my lower jaw sagged; and I made a noise: ‘Euuhhhh …’

Another boss might have regarded this as insolence – it was insolence, after all, a momentary lapse into teenage rebellion, not calculated but real – and hit back hard, but this was Eddie, our friend. He smiled at it. ‘Look, I know you don’t rate the guy …’

‘He’s a prick.’

‘Have you met him? You wouldn’t say that if you met him. Ivan introduced us. He’s actually a great guy. Fun, creative, down-to-earth. An ideas guy.’

‘He’s a fucking estate agent.’

Eddie was away, fizzing with enthusiasm for his own proposal. ‘That’s the angle. An estate agent, but a new breed. Young, hip, creative. Progressive. One of us, you know? Not one of them. He’s got some really amazing ideas. You’ll love him.’

Every particle of my body screamed with cosmic certainty that I would hate him. ‘Maybe next month?’

The change in Eddie’s manner was so slight that perhaps only half the people in the room picked up on it, if they were paying attention: a hardening, a cooling. ‘What, you’re too busy this month?’ A chuckle from the ones who had detected the change in Eddie-weather. ‘Look, it’s win-win, Jack. If your mugging guy pays off we can go large on him and maybe hold De Chauncey for next month. It won’t hurt you to have one in the bag, to get ahead of yourself. If mugging guy is so-so, we do both. If Mr Mugging is a dud, we do De Chauncey. Yeah?’

There was no real question at the end of Eddie’s statement – more a choice between consenting by saying something or consenting by staying quiet. I chose to stay quiet. Eddie turned to his flatplan and struck out six spreads, over which he scrawled PROFILE PIERCE? / ALEX. The spread after this block he put an X through.

The flatplan was the map of the magazine – a blank A3 grid of paired boxes indicating double-page spreads, used to plot out the sequence of stories, features and adverts, letting editors decide the distribution and balance of contents: too word-heavy or too picture-heavy? Are there deserts to be populated or slums to be aerated? Editors, not generally a whimsical breed, often attribute mystical properties to the ‘art’ of flatplanning. They talk – their eyes drifting to the middle distance – of matching ‘light’ and ‘dark’, of rhythm and counterpoint, and the magazine’s ‘centre of gravity’, its terrain, its movement. But basically, the flatplan is a simple graphical tool and can be mercilessly blunt in what it shows.

Those Xed-out spreads that came between features were advertising. And each of those ads would be for a high-status brand – BMW, Breitling, Paul Smith – appropriate to the magazine’s luxury-lifestyle brief. One spread, very occasionally two, between each feature. No one commented on that, as if it had always been that way. But when I had started at the magazine there had been three or four ad spreads between features. Sometimes ad spreads would interrupt features. Advertisers would insert their own magazines and sponsored supplements into ours. The ads would experiment and try freakish new forms. They would have sachets of moisturiser glued to them, or fold-out strips reeking of perfume, or the page would be an authentic sample of textured designer wallpaper or a hologram or it would come with 3D specs. It had been quite normal for the magazine’s writers and editors to complain about the ads, about features getting swamped by them, about the magazine becoming cumbersome. We were afloat on a sea of gold, and whining it was too thick to paddle, that the shine of it hurt our eyes.

There were still grumbles about the adverts, but now they dwelled on quality, not quantity. Was this Australian lager, or that Korean automobile, really the kind of advertiser we wanted? Couldn’t the ad team do better? But Eddie was able to turn away these gripes with a sympathetic yet helpless shrug – a shrug that said, ‘I know, but what can you do?’ – and no one pushed past that.

Every year there were fewer of us to complain.

Ilse was unhappy with the inclusions, the loose advertising leaflets tucked into the magazine. One was a sealed envelope printed with a black and white photograph of a child’s face, dirty and miserable. Underneath the face was the message IF YOU THROW THIS AWAY, MIRA MAY DIE.

‘This kid, I don’t know – this kid is threatening me? They are holding a gun to this kid and threatening it? It’s a threat?’

‘It’s a charity appeal,’ Kay said. ‘They are just trying to create some urgency.’

‘It is ugly,’ Ilse said. ‘Not the photograph, a good photograph I suppose, lettering fine, but what they are saying with this is ugly, it is a threat. When I open my magazine, my beautiful magazine’ – she acted this out, closing last month’s edition on the envelope, then opening it again – ‘and, oh my goodness, this kid, I don’t even know. It is not the correct mood.’

Eddie pushed a hand into his thick black curls. Ilse had been with the magazine longer than anyone except him, and along with him was the only surviving remnant of the Errol era. Dutch, brittle, she had a temper that was the basis of several office legends: that she was unsackable, that she had once hit a sub-editor with a computer mouse, that her giant desk was not a reflection of her status as art director but rather an exclusion zone established to keep the peace. When I was new, before the office became the roomy, under-populated space it was now, I had to sit near Ilse for two days while the wall behind my desk was repainted. Two days of terrified silence. On the second day, I ate lunch at my desk and for some reason – a self-destructive, reckless impulse, a death wish – that lunch included a packet of Hula Hoops. As I crunched my way through the fourth or fifth Hula Hoop, I became aware of eyes focused through steel-framed glass, of pale skin taut over sharp cheekbones. She said nothing, just looked. The remainder of the pack I softened in my mouth before chewing. It took about an hour and twenty minutes to finish them all.

This was back at the beginning of my time, and it was commonly held that she had mellowed. Recent budget cuts she had borne with (public) silence, if not good grace. Nevertheless, art directors are dangerous as a breed. They spend too much time playing with scalpels. Here we are in the age of Adobe Indesign and Photoshop, and still they won’t be separated from those vicious little blades that come wrapped in wax paper like sticks of gum, and those surgical green rubber cutting boards. Why, if not for murder? Or at least recreational torture.

Before Eddie could answer, Freya spoke. ‘Last month it was the National Trust. That seems off, to me. I mean, stately homes?’ She threw up her hands and grimaced.

Eddie smiled. ‘Good high-quality product. Not starving kiddies.’

‘But it’s just so Boden. Where do we draw the line? Those fucking catalogues of William Morris shawls and ceramic owls and reproduction Victorian thimbles?’

‘If their money’s green,’ Eddie said with a teasing little shrug, clearly relieved to be arguing with Freya and not Ilse, who could thus be answered by proxy. ‘Look, these pay, and quite frankly beggars can’t be choosers. You want to sit in on one of my meetings with the ad team. You don’t want.’

One of Eddie’s tics – along with the suffering-in-silence hands-in-the-hair – was starting sentences with the word ‘look’. You could see why he liked it: there was that note of Blairish candour, of plain dealing. It insisted on your attention and assent. But it was also a tell. It cropped up when he felt a discussion was not going his way. When he felt, for whatever reason, that he was not being sufficiently convincing. This was a double-look.

‘Look, they’re not going to do anyone any harm, they’re not going to kill anyone. You might not like them, I don’t care for them, but we need them.’

A silence fell.

‘Is that everything?’

Polly, the deputy editor, whispered, ‘Friday …’

‘Aha, Friday, yes,’ he said as he caught her eye. ‘A reminder of what we agreed last week: I’m not here next week, so the next Monday meeting will be on Friday, and it’s an important one. Has everyone kept the morning free?’

There were nods and mumbles of agreement. The change in schedule had been mentioned at the last Monday meeting, and its importance had been emphasised. Since then, it had been much discussed, out of Eddie and Polly’s hearing, in quiet, nervous huddles. Eddie or no Eddie, the Monday meeting was sacred. When Eddie was away, Polly took his place, and the meeting went on. A Monday meeting on Friday was a patent absurdity, and an ill omen. But how to express the suspicions of the group?

After a tense silence, Kay spoke, and was direct. ‘Are there going to be redundancies?’ Seeing Eddie wince, she added, ‘I don’t like to ask, no one does, but we’re all thinking about it and, frankly, the atmosphere is beginning to get a little stifling.’

Stifling was about right. Could Kay see it too? The room was filling with smoke, slowly, silently. It was going to choke us all, me first, unless we got out. No one else appeared to notice it – was it not affecting them, or was it killing them invisibly, undetectably, like carbon monoxide? No, I reasoned, probably not them, they would be just fine. The smoke was for me alone, it would fill my lungs and drag me down, and I would end right here in front of everyone before Eddie rapped the table with his knuckles and said, ‘That’s it.’ How would they react if I expired in the middle of the Monday meeting? Would they be sad, would there be a tasteful black-border tribute in the next issue, using that photo they took last month for the new website? Or the other photo, the one from four years ago when I was entered for an award, the one with the puppy fat and the smile, not the gaunt, hollow-eyed creature I had become. I feared the new picture, crisp shadows in 8-bit greyscale.

Or would the expressions of grief be limited to: ‘Sadly Jack has let us down again, so we have ten pages to fill …’

My death might save Eddie a redundancy. Kay was right. She had asked the question we all feared to, the question we asked each other when Eddie wasn’t present, preferring to swap ignorant speculation for an actual answer.

‘Look,’ Eddie said, grabbing a fistful of his hair as he spoke, ‘I’m not going to sugar-coat it. It’s tough. Tougher than it’s ever been. But I promise you I will do everything it takes to avoid … having to do anything like that.’

He looked around the table, carefully making eye contact with each of us in turn. Freya, at his left hand, was reached last, and she did not raise her eyes from her pad, where an extensive pattern of angry spirals had appeared.

‘So for the time being the inserts stay,’ Eddie continued. ‘We’ll just have to live with them. Even those fucking pewter eggcups, if it comes to that, God help us.’

A couple of people managed to chuckle. Eddie rapped his knuckles against the table. ‘OK. Friday then. That’s all.’ And the meeting broke up, like a cloud dispersing.

In spite of my desperation, I did not immediately rise from my seat, fearful of wobbling in front of the others. Polly had been sitting at Eddie’s right hand, on my side of the table, and my view of her had been blocked during the meeting by Ilse and Mohit. As the others left the aquarium, she was revealed. And she was staring right at me, chair swivelled in my direction, no trace of a smile. Her clipboard, a stainless-steel thing that was in effect a corporate logo for Brand Polly, lay on her lap. At first I thought she was going to speak to me, so I turned my own chair her way and looked attentive, trying to straighten up and compose myself. But she said nothing, and just stared at me, as if I were an inanimate object that presented a problem; a knackered sofa that needed to be taken to the dump, for instance. She was still staring as she stood, and only looked away when she reached the door and left the meeting room.

My head swam. I had to get out.

It was a relief to be out of the aquarium, out of the meeting, but I was not free yet. The earliest, the absolute earliest, I could justifiably leave for lunch was after noon, and it had only turned eleven thirty. The Monday meetings used to start at nine thirty sharp and had been known to run until one or even two. Now they started at ten and rarely ran past twelve. Fewer pages to fill, smaller, simpler flatplans, less international travel to coordinate in the diary, fewer voices around the table. Today we hadn’t even started until ten fifteen – my fault, I had been late.

I wanted to talk to Eddie, to try to excuse myself from the office until Friday. That was the one advantage of being expected to do two interviews: I could justifiably work from home all this week and perhaps half of next week, in theory using the time to meet the subjects, type up the transcripts and then write the pieces. And other things.

But Eddie was talking with Polly in his ‘office’. This was not truly a separate room, more a stockade in the corner of our open-plan expanse, made more private by metal archive cabinets on one side and chest-high acoustic panels on the other. The publisher – who had a very nice office – had fixed ideas about editors working in the midst of their staff. And so it had been, back in the Errol days: he had a big desk opposite Ilse, right in the middle of the floor, surrounded by his team. By the time I started on the magazine, Eddie had migrated to the corner. The archive cabinets and acoustic panels had appeared during a reorganisation a couple of years ago, a reorganisation made possible by our declining numbers. We would tease Eddie about his fortress, and he would tease back, saying he needed a bit of space to himself, to give him a break from all of us. Then those deep, gentle brown eyes would turn serious, perhaps even a little sorrowful, and he would say that sometimes people, us, came to him with delicate matters, sensitive personal or professional issues, and he wanted us to feel secure in doing that, to have some privacy. Really it was for our benefit, not his. And didn’t we prefer having a bit of distance from our boss? Not having him looking over our shoulder the whole time?

He really was an amazingly thoughtful guy. But he was talking with Polly, and it looked tense. Polly was holding her steel clipboard in Clipboard Pose #4: Body Armour, clutching it to her chest in crossed arms. As Eddie spoke, she gave a series of little nods to punctuate what he was saying, a human metronome on a slow beat. She was behind the De Chauncey stitch-up, I was certain of it. Two interviews – the injustice of it was planetary, galactic.

As if to confirm my private suspicions, she abruptly turned to leave Eddie’s office, and as she did so she looked straight at me. Our eyes connected, and something burned in hers, something that could be read as ruthlessness, or even cruelty.

Eddie looked up wearily as I entered his enclosure, announcing myself with a knock on the acoustic panel, a knock robbed of almost all its sound, reduced to a submarine bump. I had gone over as soon as Polly left, wanting to catch him before he picked up the phone or was detained by someone else.

‘Jack …’ he began, and his expression said, Never a quiet moment.

‘Eddie,’ I said. ‘These two interviews …’

He rolled his eyes. ‘No. Stop. We discussed this in the meeting. You’re doing both.’

‘It’s fine, that’s fine,’ I said, holding up my hands in surrender. There was a little armchair by Eddie’s desk for visitors to sit in but I chose to stand, as Polly had done. Business-like. On task. ‘I just want to make sure it’s OK to take the time I’ll need to do them properly. I’m seeing Pierce tomorrow, Wednesday for transcribing, then Thursday and Friday for writing. So if we arrange De Chauncey for Monday next week …’

‘No,’ Eddie said. He frowned, eyebrows coupling. ‘No. No. I’m not having you out of the office for two weeks, not when I’m out as well. You don’t need that much time. You’re meeting Pierce tomorrow morning, right?’

I nodded.

‘You can do De Chauncey in the afternoon, while you’re out. Transcribe both on Wednesday. On Thursday I can take a look at both transcripts, and we’ll know where we stand.’

I shifted from one foot to the other, uncomfortable. Standing suddenly felt like a lot of effort.

‘Come on,’ Eddie said. ‘Don’t give me this. I know you can do it, you used to do it all the time. Come Thursday, I want you back in the office, and we’ll make decisions about which feature to prioritise. I want clear progress before I go on leave, something I can have confidence in. Ready to show on Friday. Important day, Friday. Then you’ll have a clear run at writing, OK? Without me breathing down your neck.’

My ankles were doing a lot of extra work to keep me upright, I realised. I was being undermined – the pleasant sensation of the sand being sucked from under the soles of your feet by a receding wave on the beach, reborn as a nightmare. Undermined, yes, that was it – Polly digging away at my basis, unseen.

‘Sure,’ I said. I wished I had sat down when I came in – it might have looked less formal and professional, but there was nothing formal and professional about falling over.

‘Look, I don’t enjoy micromanaging you this way, but I also don’t enjoy it when you let us down, and when I have the others complaining that they have to pick up your slack.’

Polly – that had to mean Polly. Or Freya?

‘I don’t want a reprise of last month, or the month before,’ Eddie continued. ‘You were in the meeting this morning – it’s a tough time. The toughest. We can’t carry anyone. No passengers, get it? Need you up front, stoking coal.’

‘Sure,’ I said, squeezing out a smile. Had I been in the meeting? What had been said? It was a swirl already, nothing but half-gestures and loose words.

‘Great.’ Eddie smiled back, a comforting sight, which gave me hope I might make it out of his office and back to my chair without total collapse. ‘Pierce is a good catch. How did you get him?’

‘Uh, I’m a fan,’ I said. ‘Quin – F.A.Q. – put me in touch with him.’

‘The Tamesis guy? F.A.Q.?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I thought he wasn’t best pleased with us?’

I shrugged. ‘I smoothed him over.’

‘Anyway, Pierce could be great,’ Eddie said. Even in my depleted state, I noticed this was a bit more equivocal than ‘great catch’. ‘Get the goods from him, something new and exclusive, and you’ll have a great piece. Listen for a strong opening. Once you’ve got that the rest’ll write itself on the Tube home.’

‘Sure thing,’ I said, and my affirming smile took a little less effort.

‘Big week, then,’ Eddie said. He nudged his computer mouse, waking the screen, to indicate that the meeting was over. ‘Real chance to do something great. Make us all proud.’

‘Sure. Great. Thanks, Eddie.’

It was 12.04. That would do. I slipped out of the office. Having had my dreams for the rest of the week dashed, I had no desire to be interrupted over lunch, so I ‘accidentally’ left my phone on my desk. The bubbles, the vibration, had completely left me.

It was about ten to two when I returned. We were allowed an hour for lunch and I liked to do some generous rounding in my interpretation of that rule. Eddie was pretty relaxed and didn’t count the minutes. I figured that if it was twelve-something when I left and one-something when I returned, that’s an hour. The people who left at one wouldn’t be back yet, the people who left at twelve thirty would have only just returned. It was normally quite easy to slide back into the office without anyone paying attention to how long I had been gone.

Normally. Today, however, there was a small crowd of my colleagues gathered between my desk and the window: woman Ray, Polly, Mohit, Kay, Kim from promotions, and even a couple of golf wankers and craft weirdos from downstairs, whose names, of course, I did not know. My desk, with its dank heaps of notebooks and magazines, was not their focus, thank heavens. They were looking out of the window.

‘Walthamstow?’

‘Don’t be silly, Walthamstow’s over there. It’s the estuary somewhere.’

‘Royal Docks?’

‘City Airport? Oh God …’ A murmur of horror passed through the group; a couple of people covered their mouths.

We were on the sixth storey of an eight-storey building, and the windows on my side faced east, ‘offering’, as Wolfe / De Chauncey would put it, ‘panoramic views of east London and Docklands’. In the foreground were the roofs and tower cranes of Shoreditch; much further away, to the right, were the towers of Canary Wharf, and behind those the yellow masts of the O2 Arena; to the left, at about the same remove, you could make out a little of the Olympic Park. On a clear day you could see a distant, dark line of hills on the far right and in places the mercury glimmer of the river. But in winter a grimy white dome, twin to the Teflon tent in Greenwich, was clamped down on the city.

Today, however, a new landmark had appeared. A column of black smoke rose from the ill-defined low-rise muddle of the horizon city. Further out than the skyscrapers on the Isle of Dogs, it nevertheless bested them in height and weight. While their glass and steel edges blurred in the cold grey air, the smoke tower was crisp and shocking, appearing as the most solid structure in sight, an impression only strengthened by its slow distensions and convolutions. It was blackening the dome, pumping darkness into the pallid sky.

‘Not City,’ a voice said behind us. The other Ray, man Ray, was hunched at his Mac. ‘It’s on the BBC, just a couple of lines: fuel depot in Barking. Explosion and fire. Oh, that’s awful. It says here people are being evacuated.’

‘Better than being in danger,’ Polly said.

Ray shook his head. ‘But people aren’t evacuated. Places, buildings, neighbourhoods are evacuated. Evacuating people would mean scooping out their insides.’

‘And that’s the BBC?’ the other Ray asked. ‘Really, you expect better.’

Man Ray shook his head in sad agreement.

‘Are we in danger?’ Kim from promotions asked. ‘From – I don’t know – gases.’

‘I doubt it,’ Polly said. ‘It’s a good long way away. If they were evacuating here, they’d be evacuating half of London. It’s just a fire, a big fire.’

‘It’s drifting this way,’ Kim from promotions said.

‘It’s just smoke,’ Mohit said.

‘When did it happen?’ I asked. I had reached my desk, which put me to the rear of the group, and I don’t think that any of them noticed my approach. Their eyes were on the plume.

‘When did what happen?’

‘Ray said it was an explosion …’

‘It doesn’t say,’ Ray said. ‘This morning.’

‘I think I …’ How to explain about the bubbles? If I said I saw the explosion I would sound ridiculous. ‘I think I felt it … The vibration …’

‘The earth moved for you?’ Kay asked, and a couple of people chuckled, Mohit and a golf wanker.

‘Now you mention it,’ Ray – woman Ray – said, ‘I think I felt it too.’

This prompted a more general and impossible-to-transcribe group conversation about who thought they had heard or felt what, whether it was possible to feel anything at this distance, and so on. I didn’t contribute much, and the group’s focus, such as it was, broke away from me. But Polly was still looking at me, and I frowned back, trying to figure out what I had said or done to earn this special attention. Her eyes darted down to my desk, which I was leaning against. My right hand was resting on one of the stacks of papers that are permanently encroaching on my keyboard and work space. It was this heap that Polly had glanced at, just a pile of torn-off notes, newspapers and magazines like the others, but I saw the top sheet, the one pinned under my hand, was not in fact mine at all. It was a yellow leaf from an American legal pad, and it was clipped, with many others like it, to a steel clipboard, which must have been left there by its owner while she was distracted by the drama at the window.

‘Excuse me,’ Polly said, and she grabbed her clipboard out from under my hand just as I lifted it to see what was written on it. Then she flipped the pages that had been folded over the back of the board to cover the sheet I had seen. But I had seen it. Columns of numbers – dates, times. The lowest line, the only one I saw in detail, read:

MONDAY: 10.11 12.05

Then two blank columns. I knew immediately, instinctively, what was recorded there, and what it meant. It was the time I had arrived that morning, and the time I had left for lunch, with spaces left for the times I returned from lunch and left the office at the end of the day. Polly was recording my movements – my latenesses, my absences, the myriad small (and not so small) ways I was robbing the magazine of time. The purpose of this record was obvious: she was building a case for my dismissal.

I did my best to hide the fact that I had seen the numbers and guessed their meaning. Grey oblivion enclosed my panicking mind on all sides, squeezing in. I pulled the chair from under my desk and sat down heavily. Polly was no longer looking at me. Instead she was staring fixedly out of the window, jaw tense, clipboard clutched to chest, being scrupulous about not looking at me. The grey closed in, appearing in my peripheral vision, cutting off my oxygen. I hit the space bar to rouse my computer and that small action felt like an immense drain on my resources. Fainting was a real possibility. No air. Horrible implications were spreading outwards from what I had seen, a thickening miasma of betrayal and threat. Firing an employee was cheaper than making them redundant – perhaps that was Polly’s game. Perhaps she was collecting a dossier against me to spare someone else, a friend, an ally: Freya? Kay? Mohit? But of those names, none was more clearly on the axe list than mine. If I was already doomed, and they could save themselves that redundancy payment into the bargain …

Unread emails. Hundreds of new tweets. Fifty new Tumblr posts. I looked at the latter, not able to face the clamour of Twitter, and it was a good choice – calming. Attractive concrete ruins. Unusual bus shelters in Romania. Book covers from the 1970s. Silent gifs of pretty popstars. New Yorker cartoons. Feel-good homilies and great strings of people agreeing with heartfelt, bland statements against racism and injustice.

But the smoke was there, too. A camera-phone photograph on the blog of another magazine, showing the same plume we could see but over a different roofline. A much better photograph from the feed of Bunk, F.A.Q.’s company, taken from a higher angle and showing the column’s base, orange destruction under buckling industrial roofs, in a necklace of emergency-service blue lights.

More of my colleagues were returning from lunch, some unaware of what was going on in the east, others brimming with urgency, disappointed to find that we all knew about the fire already. There was a volatile, excitable atmosphere in the office. Having an unusual event like this, a news event, so very visible in front of us all was turning people into restless little broadcasters, vectors for the virus of knowing, eager to find audiences as yet uninfected with awareness of it. This floor of this building was dead, saturated, so the group broke up and the spectators went to their phones and their keyboards to email, tweet, update Tamesis, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat – transmit, transmit, tell, tell. And all with this weird glee, the perverse euphoria that accompanies any dramatic news event taking place nearby, even a terrible event. Any other day, I would be among them – I felt that rush, that fascination, but at a distance, behind a firewall of private pain – but all I could do was gaze at my screen, barely seeing, hand dead on my mouse.

‘Crazy.’

Polly was at my side. I had no idea how long she had been standing there, but I knew I had done nothing in that time, not the slightest movement.

‘What?’

She nodded at my screen. It was still showing the Bunk picture of the fire.

‘Crazy,’ she repeated. ‘I wonder how they got that shot? The high angle … Helicopter? From the look of it, it’s amazing no one was hurt.’

Her tone was pleasant – just a regular chat between co-workers, as if nothing had happened, or was about to happen. A very casual assassin.

‘Long lunch?’ she asked.

Aha, I thought, here we go. I patted the book I had taken with me – Pierce’s Murder Boards, decorated with a jolly fringe of fluorescent sticky bookmarks. ‘Was doing some background. Working. Notes. Ready for tomorrow.’

‘Oh, good.’ Polly appeared genuinely pleased by this, which only intensified my suspicion that a trap lay ahead. ‘Have you looked at your emails? I’ve set things up with De Chauncey’s people – 3 p.m. tomorrow, at their Shoreditch branch. Easy-peasy.’

‘Right,’ I said. Grim tidings, but it didn’t feel like the gut-shot I had been expecting. Her chirpiness was concealing something, I knew. Sure enough, the trap revealed itself. She adopted Clipboard Pose #2: Moses, supporting it with the left forearm and laying her right palm on the attached papers, as if drawing from them some inviolable truth.

‘I wonder if you could do something else for me?’

I didn’t reply. Maybe I shuddered.

‘I’m trying to do some planning. To see if we can get past living hand-to-mouth, as we have been. When you have a spare moment, do you think you could jot down some future subjects for profiles? Your top ten people you would like to interview for the magazine.’

‘The thing is, what with De Chauncey …’

‘Eddie’s keen to see this as well.’

‘I just spoke with Eddie.’

‘I think he said to help me out with the front? This is what I want you to do. Just this.’

I coughed, throat dry, and the action churned the liquid lunch in my stomach, acid frothing, rising.

‘Just give me your target list,’ Polly continued, no less sanguine. ‘You must have people you’re pursuing? Ideas? Ambitions?’

Once I did, sure. ‘Sure.’

‘Just stick ’em on a page and give them to me. Say by Friday? Then we can get planning for the future.’

‘Sure.’

‘Great!’ And she hurried away cheerfully, clipboard swinging like a scythe.

The photograph of the plume on my computer screen disappeared, replaced by the writhing rainbow tentacles of my screensaver. But I didn’t need photographs to see it. I could just raise my eyes to the window and look at the real thing: a tight black column at the bottom of the frame, an ominous addition to the dusty publishing trophies lined up on the sill; filling the sky at the top of the frame, choking out the light.

The tasks I had been set were impossible. Not for the others, but impossible for me. I knew I would not be able to do them. I knew that I was going to be fired. I knew the how, and I knew the when. And I already knew the why.