A Cast of Vultures (20 page)

It was Ben who cracked. ‘I have a request.’ He raised his hand, the good schoolboy. Annie and Jessie bounced happily. Someone was finally engaging with them. ‘As a courtesy,’ he said, even more politely, ‘as a courtesy, do you think you could perhaps stop referring to books as “product”?’

The women went back to giving each other little
side glances. Even Rossiter looked up, puzzled by the strangeness of the request. What was wrong with ‘product’?

‘“Product”,’ Ben responded to the unspoken question, his voice still level, ‘is a word that suggests that each item – or, to use the technical term, each “book” – is interchangeable. This is not the case, and if you are under the impression that it is, that any one can be substituted for any other, then you have failed to understand the business you are so gleefully restructuring – excuse me, re-silo-ing. And, if you have failed to understand the business, then not only is our company wasting money on your fees, but you are wasting our time, when we could be back at our desks, busily enriching our product in our old-fashioned, un-siloed way.’ Then he very carefully picked up his papers, stood, and, just as carefully, pushed his chair neatly under the table. ‘Ladies and gentlemen?’ said the twenty-six-year-old, looking around. And, somehow, it wasn’t pompous, or silly. The eight of us, excluding David, gathered our belongings as one, and silently filed out of the room.

It wasn’t going to solve anything, but by God it was satisfying. The downside was that it looked like I might have to revise my opinion that Ben was a poisonous little runt. I hated doing that: the mental paperwork was exhausting. By the time I got back to my office, however, I realised that that wasn’t going to be a problem. Even if I had been planning to try and like Ben, Ben wasn’t going to try and like me in return, because there on my desk, lying foursquare in the centre, where I couldn’t even pretend not to see it, was Miranda’s draft memo about the bogus gangbanger book.

She left no doubts about it. Her memo was a total demolition job, persuasive, thorough, and completely irrefutable. In three concise pages, Miranda had proved beyond doubt that she deserved her promotion, and also made it a certainty that Ben was going to hate me to the end of time. There was no way we could publish this book; Miranda was my assistant, ergo, its non-publication was going to be my fault.

Unless. I stared out the window. Unless I could persuade Ben to use the problems Miranda had uncovered as a weapon in our battle against the product-enrichers. In this situation, Miranda hadn’t fine-tuned a radio station. I brought that metaphor to a screaming halt. It was more like looking at a piece of fabric, I decided. Ben was a retailer who wanted to buy a range of cashmere jumpers. To an amateur, the jumpers had a pretty design and sleek finish, and so the jumpers should fetch a high price. But to a knitting expert – Miranda – the shoddy manufacturing process behind them was apparent. The moment these pretty jumpers were subjected to wear and tear, they would unravel, customers would demand their money back, and in addition would swear never to buy a T&R jumper again. This wasn’t about product enrichment; it was about having the expertise to know when a product was of inferior quality, to prevent financial losses and a public-relations disaster down the road.

Maybe I could swing it. I messaged Ben:
Things to discuss. Are you free for lunch/drink at some point?
That would confuse the hell out of him. The last civil thing we’d said to each other in the past half-year had been— I thought for a moment. I wasn’t sure we had
said a civil word to each other in the past half-year.

There’s a first time for everything.

Ben messaged back almost immediately. ‘On holiday from Thurs, so Weds?’ Which was worse, I wondered, having men try to kill me in a botanical garden, or telling Ben his book was bogus? I stared hopelessly at the screen. Both. Both in forty-eight hours was definitely worse. ‘Great!’ I typed. ‘Tomorrow first thing?’ I wanted to add an emoji, but I couldn’t find the one for sarcasm.

What I did find, however, were sixteen messages from the other editors, the gist of which was ‘Pub. At six.’ I texted an ‘I’m in’, and then also shot off a quick text to Sam, asking him if there was any news. After that the day got swallowed in catching up on what I’d missed the day before, plus various ‘secret’ pre-pub meetings (you could tell they were secret, because we closed the door) and, mostly, fighting off intermittent waves of fear. From my schooldays onwards, I had always worked with my desk facing a wall, to cut down on distractions. That layout, however, put my back to the door, which now felt like a very bad decision. Had my cut-up hands permitted, I would have rearranged my office furniture. As they didn’t, I just looked over my shoulder a lot, which was neither an efficient use of my time, nor conducive to getting any work done. I spent the day on high alert, ready for a madman to rush in and – what? Assault me with a proof copy of
A Tour of the Tour de France
, picked up from the pulp shelf outside my door? Whatever it was that a madman might do in a publishing house, I was on the alert for it, and it was exhausting, and stupid, and more exhausting for recognising how stupid it was.

It was also, apparently, highly visible to others. Or at least it was to Miranda. She came in as I was on the phone to an agent about an author I admired but who was notoriously resistant to having her work edited, who always hated her jacket designs, and who adamantly refused to do any publicity, a publisher’s triple whammy. On a good day, that would have been a tense conversation, even without factoring in that I disliked the agent because she never listened to anyone except herself. Today that was mostly a blessing, because I was listening to neither of us.

Miranda was. Her eyebrows rose and her lips pursed as she leant against the door jamb, waiting for me to finish. When I finally got the agent to pause long enough so that I could say goodbye in publishing-ese – ‘We must have lunch’ – Miranda just gathered up my handbag and my bookbag and asked, ‘Did you have anything else?’ I shook my head silently, and she handed the bags over. ‘See you tomorrow,’ she said firmly.

I was now being bossed around by younger women as well as older. I refused to think of the implications, and said instead, ‘I can’t go. The editors are meeting at six.’

She knew that. The assistants knew everything. ‘If you leave for the pub now, you’ll be ten minutes early, but tomorrow you won’t have to ring back all the people you’re ringing now, when you can’t remember what you talked about.’

Ouch. ‘I’m going to quit,’ I announced. ‘Pack it in and become a hermit. The only thing is, I don’t know where you find job openings for hermits.’

‘The classifieds in the back of the
London Review of
Books
,’ she said, hustling me out the door. The assistants really did know everything.

As I walked past reception a text pinged in. Steve.
Just to say I’ll be working late in your garden a few nights this week, so don’t worry if you hear noises outside
.

That was thoughtful of him. And it would make a great horror film: a woman alone at home hears ominous sounds in the night. She investigates, and her screams carry for miles as she discovers … tomatoes being planted.

I shared this with Rog, who was also leaving early for our local, and we planned out the schedule for a gardening-cum-horror-film festival.
The Nightmare on Elm Street
was about a neighbourhood terrorised by Dutch elm disease, while the villain of the
Jeepers Creepers
series made his bid for world domination through an infestation of Japanese knotweed.

Once at the pub, the others joined in the game, and it took a while to settle down to our more immediate problems. That was partly because we had no control, no way of stopping what was happening, and so our meeting could do little except entrench us in our positions. The conversation was contentious, circular and filled with implausible scenarios, ranging from the entire department quitting en masse to staging a publishing version of a hunger strike, where we’d refuse to take agents out to lunch. The only unexpected aspect was that Ben, the youngest and newest member of the department, continued in the role he’d slipped into that morning, and became our de facto leader. I had had nothing but miserable interactions with him, and even I had to admit he was impressive. He kept us on topic, he made people feel that they’d been heard
even as he neatly headed off their rambling digressions – in short, he was in charge not because he’d decided he would be, but because the rest of us decided he should be.

I knew from experience that the meeting would swiftly move from discussion of the management consultants to discussion of our colleagues, and from there it was anybody’s guess – it could be who was sleeping with whom, or it could be the situation in Syria. Whatever it was, we never stayed on point for long, so on my way out of the building I had asked Bernie to order me a cab for six-thirty, to give me an excuse for cutting out as soon as I could.

It was too early for Helena to be home, but I had a key, and Helena’s house felt like a refuge, unlike mine, where I’d had a break-in by an unknown person, and where Steve also seemed to have gained access with no trouble. I moved straight to her welcoming yellow kitchen and poured myself a glass of iced coffee and then just waited. I didn’t try to work out what was going on, or make any other use of my time, productive or recreational. I just let go of everything.

Helena tippy-tapped in about half an hour later. Really, it’s a wonder anyone is intimidated by her, much less everyone. She’s not even five foot two (she claims five foot three, but she lies), and from her neat little curly head down to her neat little high-heeled feet, she could be a picture-book definition of ‘demure’, if picture books took to defining words like ‘demure’. And yet grown men quailed when she glanced their way. She’s a mystery.

She kissed me hello with no more visible emotion than any other day, but looked carefully at my face and said, ‘You handled that well.’ My throat tightened. Praise from
Helena was both sparing, and sincere. I thought I’d been an idiot, treed like a cat in the dark. Now I felt six feet tall.

‘Thanks,’ I said. We’re undemonstrative, what can I tell you? If you were expecting an out-take from one of those Neapolitan realist films where everyone screams at each other all the time, you’ve got the wrong address.

I gave her the
Reader’s Digest
version of what had happened at Kew. It wasn’t something I wanted to linger on, and she must have agreed that she didn’t need to hear it. Either that or she’d spoken to Jake, which was more likely. In any case, she allowed the conversation to move on to more soothing topics. We performed the ritual scandalised discussion of the guests at her party, which as far as I’m concerned is the only reason ever to have a party; she checked to see if I’d be free for dinner on my birthday, which was coming up; and we discussed a case of hers that was about to go to court. Her assistant was on maternity leave and, ‘The paperwork is out of control without her there,’ Helena moaned.

Out of control to Helena most likely meant that two memos had been left unfiled for twenty minutes. But the word paperwork reminded me. I’d had my passport application in my bag all week, as if the act of carrying it around would substitute for dealing with it. I dragged the envelope out now and dumped the contents on the table. ‘Will you please sign to prove to the passport people that I am me?’

Helena paged slowly through the forms. God bless her, I’ve been her daughter for my entire life, but she still wasn’t going to sign something without reading it first.

Rightly, as it proved. She pushed it back to me. ‘I can’t.’

I snatched it back petulantly. ‘Why? You’re a solicitor. It
says that’s one of the professions they accept.’ I jabbed at the paragraph.

She gave me one of those fond looks that mothers give their children when they’re being particularly dense. But all she said was, ‘I’m also your mother. The person who vouches for you can’t be related to you.’

‘But I don’t know any vets,’ I whined.

The fond look turned into a pull-yourself-together one. ‘Leave it with me.’

Happily. I loved people who said ‘Leave it with me’. I thought of Steve, and his I’ll-grow-it-you-eat-it plan. Maybe it wasn’t bossy women I attracted, maybe I just let everyone run my life.

Helena had returned to telling me about her case, and was in the middle of telling me about the young but shark-like barrister who was leading it, and I dutifully tuned back in. ‘… and so he said, “You can’t fight city hall”, but I
like
fighting city hall.’ Helena’s shark-like barrister could be no sharkier than Helena when she smelt blood in the water, and if she wanted to fight city hall, then—My mind stuttered and a series of sentences echoed in my head: the Neighbourhood Association trying to turn a local park into a legally protected space, so it couldn’t be built on; the planning issues about re-zoning properties for commercial use; Mo telling me Dennis had helped the skateboarders fight off developers who wanted the land where they skated.

I said abruptly, ‘Mother, how do you find out who owns a building?’

She raised an eyebrow at the interruption. ‘The Land Registry, dear.’ As always, she asked no follow-up question,
just clarified: ‘The register is online, but if a property is owned by a company, you won’t get much information.’ And she returned to the wonders of her barrister, and we ate dinner, and all the while I turned an idea over in my head.

When I got home, I googled the Land Registry. Helena was right, not that I’d had any doubts. There it was, at the top of the homepage: ‘Find out who owns a property or piece of land.’ For three quid, it assured me, as long as I had those two essentials of modern life, a credit card and Adobe Acrobat, the information could be mine, with the caveat that the website would not be able to supply information on tunnels, pipelines, mines and minerals or airspace leases. Although the thought of leasing the airspace over my flat had never previously occurred to me, the Land Registry’s refusal to let me know if it were possible now seemed wilfully obstructive. Then I remembered the £3 fee. Finding out if I could lease airspace would probably cost at least a fiver, and I wasn’t sure I was willing to spend so recklessly.