Boys and Girls (7 page)

‘Well I can
use
a computer. I do have one. So I don't know what you mean. Please do have a cigarette if you'd care to. I shan't.'

Martin Leather nodded, and knocked one out of the pack.

‘You don't?'

‘Don't what? Mind? I told you not.'

‘No. I mean smoke. You don't?'

‘I don't, no. Otherwise I should have, you see.'

‘Right then. Well now. So you do
use
a computer, then. Well that's good. But it's all to do with, I don't know – formatting, and so on. I myself do not. Use one. Never have. Last of the, um …'

‘Dinosaurs?'

‘Well no. Well yes, if you like. Yes, I suppose I am. But I was actually going to say, er – well I can't actually remember
what it was I was going to say, as a matter of simple fact. Book. Book title, conceivably. And yes, talking of which – what was it, Susan, that drew you to publishing? All of a sudden. You haven't worked for any other house, I notice.'

‘I wasn't. Not actually.'

‘You weren't? You weren't what, in fact? Mohicans – that's what I … well there, never mind. You weren't what, Susan?'

‘Drawn, as you put it. To publishing. Not drawn a bit. It's just really that this job I saw advertised. The fact that you are a publisher is by the bye. Or that, at least was my first thought. And then I considered it. I could be very good indeed, you know, at bringing people together. Sparking ideas. Making things happen. People sit up. I would be great as a publisher, if not in publishing, if you see the distinction.'

Martin Leather exhaled, long and reflectively. He pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes, the better to evaluate this lady before him.

‘You do know …' he said quite slowly, ‘that the post is that of a junior publicity assistant? You are aware?'

‘Oh well yes of
course
I know – of course I know that, else why should I be here? As I say, that was the job on offer, and so I applied. I have not the slightest interest in being a junior publicity assistant – which means what, precisely? You concentrate upon obtaining very minor puffs indeed. Conceivably. Anyway – no. No interest whatever. And I don't frankly suppose, Mr Leather—'

‘Oh Martin. Do please call me Martin, Susan.'

‘As you like. All I was about to say then, Martin, is that I can hardly imagine I'd even be very good at it. Or any use at all. I do not excel in a junior capacity. My idea is that I could demonstrate as the weeks go by my real and evident talents,
and you would come to feel foolish for having failed to exploit them. Is that a Braque over there?'

‘Hm? Oh yes. Reproduction, of course. Can't bear it. But just let me recap for a moment, can I Susan?'

‘I think, that had it not been for the impossibly long shadow of Picasso, you know, then Braque might now be hailed as the greatest twentieth-century innovator of them all. Debatable, obviously …'

‘You like art, do you Susan?'

And rather to Martin Leather's quite startled surprise, Susan threw back her head, as people are said to, when the laughter is both glottal and unstoppable.

‘Oh but it isn't a
question
, surely, of liking or disliking. Is it really? It is more in the nature of
response
. I am a sensualist, you see. It is all a matter,' she said now darkly, and leaning forward, and looking quite hard at the man, ‘of
feeling
 …'

Martin Leather ceased to fool with the knot of his tie the very instant he realised he was doing it. He folded over the rest of his cigarette into a large glass ashtray and shifted it around, only then looking over to her.

‘Shall we …?' he suggested.

‘Shall we what?'

‘Recap? Just briefly? On the situation so far. You have never before worked in publishing – oh, and incidentally, had you done so you would know that even with a position like junior publicity assistant, we and every other house in London are simply inundated with applications. Hundreds. Literally. The lure of publishing is a very strong one. But not, it seems, in your case. So. The job on offer you consider yourself unequal to—'

‘Unequal, yes. In a particular sense.'

‘Quite. Yes quite. You have basic PC skills, but no more. You
would not, I imagine, take at all kindly to being subordinate to people – women, largely, rather younger than yourself, if you will permit … and your sole intention is to one day more or less run the company and possibly and incidentally put me out of a job. Have I missed something? Oh yes – and if I stand in your way, fail to perceive your talents, I am made to feel foolish. It is hardly, Susan, compelling …'

‘Except for the fact that I am sitting here now. I have already been interviewed by Cyril, have I not? Who has spoken to you. And now I am here. Something, surely?'

Martin Leather smiled, and quite expansively, as he had been simply yearning to do for just bloody ages now. Such cool audacity, raised to this level – it was energising, yes, to the point of high excitement.

‘Well, Susan. You know what they say, don't you? At this juncture.'

Susan stooped to pick up her bag, her slender fingers knocking back the thick block of hair that momentarily covered her eyes, their lashes now flickering.

‘What, Mr Leather, do they say? At this juncture.'

‘Martin, I told you. Please call me Martin. They say, Susan, that we'll let you know.'

‘Aha. I see. And you will then, will you? Let me know.'

Martin Leather closed his eyes and flattened his lips and nodded briefly.

‘Will, yes. Indeed. Actually, Susan … my friends, they all call me, um – Black.'

‘Really? How innovative. And why do you suppose they do that? Your friends. Because you're not, are you? Black.'

Martin Leather laughed, enjoying this whole morning more than he could say.

‘Not, no. No I'm not.'

‘No. I thought not. I perceived as much. Well now – you'll take up no more of my time. For the present, of course. I shall leave you, shall I, to let down lightly the literally hundreds of disappointed young women whose hopes and dreams of becoming your junior publicity assistant now lie just dashed and broken. Poor Black: so much to see to.'

And when she had gone, I lit another cigarette. Well now. Well now. And Cyril had been right: she'll do well. She's got a, I don't know … presence, maybe. Determination about her, you know? And I have to say, by God she does look good (half the battle – isn't it, really?). And do you know what I just have to do now? Jesus, Jesus – it kills me, this thing. I've got to pull it out. There. That's a whole lot better. I wish in a way that I'd never even got the damn thing, but I couldn't go on wearing the old one. That's the trouble, you see, if you've gone a bit … if you find it harder to hear things. You either have this unsightly great beige sort of lump thing sticking out of your ear with a bloody curly wire hanging down and out of it (and then everyone talks at you not just too loudly, and then you have to turn the volume down, but also quite achingly slowly, because they have seen you advertise the fact that of course you're little more now than a complete and fucking imbecile) – or if not, if you don't wear it, then you're saying what, I'm sorry, say again, run that past me one more time (but not bleeding
pardon
: there is such a thing as a limit) – raising an eyebrow, cocking your head – and people, well, they soon lose patience with all that sort of caper, I can tell you that as a certain fact. Or else you take to nodding serenely while not in fact having the smallest clue as to even the nature of what is being said to you (changing the nod, stopping it in its tracks, if the wince of bewilderment
should shadow their eyes) – and look let's face it, it's no way at all to be carrying on now really: is it? Not if you're supposed to be running the bloody company. So. I got this new damn thing after it was brought home to me by an outraged author that I had okayed a sadomasochistic jacket under pressure from Sales for his pretty milk-and-water so-called damned novel, if you really want the truth of it (but he sells: what are you supposed to do?), and I had had not even the slightest idea that I was ever being pressured at all (and nor, if I'm honest, that the design of the jacket was even under discussion). That was, admittedly, one of my worse days. Sometimes, I genuinely can barely hear a thing; normally, though, it's just a bit faint and then quite boomingly distorted. So I saw an ad, some magazine or other. Virtually undetectable, it said it was. No wires, nothing. And it is, I have to agree. I have these quite thick sideburns that I brush back over a good half of the ears (I know, I know – last of the dinosaurs, sixties hangover, pick which one you want) and you really can't spot it at all. But God it hurts: you feel invaded – almost as if your ear is going to breathe in sharply, gulp and swallow the thing whole, and then it will stop your heart. And I think I am particularly sensitive in matters of the heart, and I do not speak of romance. Since the last palpitation, I have to be careful: remember, Black, the medico said – you're not as young as you used to be, so try to take it easy, yes? Well I do now – of course I do. No bloody choice in the matter. What chances do I get these days for a bit of a roister, for a rollicking ride? It's mostly early to bed with a DVD, and I'm even quite chary about the rude ones, now (excitation and all the rest of it: God, it's no sort of a life at all really, is it?).

And all this time, while I assumed I had just been sitting here and mulling it all over, I find that I have in fact been scratching
away at the inside of my elbow, right into the crook of that tender little fold. Because if ever I am stimulated (and how rare is that?) then the old eczema starts to needle me to death – I've never quite wholly shaken it off, you see, not since my childhood. Lot better than it was in those days, of course (my I was a pitiable sight, wrapped in gauze, my hands in cotton mittens, and all of me under there, alive and livid with it) but still though it can fire me right up. And then I have to take a puffer, used to be Ventolin, now it's something else, which I always have to carry about with me. Because they're linked, you see, there's a truly unholy alliance – eczema and the asthma. One can quite often trigger the other, twin and cruel goblins, one on each shoulder. And yes of
course
I know I shouldn't be a smoker – how many decades have I been aware of that? And after all the years of pounding I've given it, the old liver is starting to rebel on me as well. Stick to spritzers, the other medic says – if, that is, you have to drink at all. Well yes I
do
, as a matter of fact – it's the job. It's how it runs, publishing: part and parcel, the oiling of the wheels, not to say the personnel. Smoking, though – yes, I know it's a mug's game, of course I do, and every morning, every single morning when I wake up and I'm parched and strained and wheezing from the last day's fags and the first little rasp of asthma I think OK well right then – that's it. No more. But how could I go down and make coffee? How could I even get myself into the bathroom, if I couldn't light up that first and blissful cigarette? And then I go mauve and hack up my guts in the time-honoured way and then I drag deep down into me another purple lungful, and then I'm OK, and then I'm calm and smiling, and then I'm off into another couple of packets, as the day wears on. I did manage it once, just the once, to give it up. Go cold turkey. Well Jesus. Worst afternoon of my entire life on earth.

So that's how my mornings begin – first the fag, then the coffee, and after that, all of the pills. Not nearly as many as I used to have to take, but still quite a colourful array. There was a time when it got completely out of hand. Go and ask him, Mylene said – this is when we were still married, of course, when she was still around. Go and see him and ask him, this bloody quack doctor of yours – lay out on his desk all the pills you take every morning noon and night, and ask him explain to you what each of them is, and why you take it: what does it suppress or promote, counteract or stimulate? And so, rather remarkably, I did that (never listened, in the normal run of things; half the time, of course, I didn't even hear her). Well, he made a mighty great stab at it, give him his due, silly old sod (Damn, he's even older than I am, David is – been my doctor since God knows when. And few are, you know, these days – or at least in my world, anyway. Older, I mean. Than I am). There were three or four that stumped him completely (he was man enough to admit it) but the gist of what he said to me then was that the majority of the others seemed to be a succession of fail-safe antidotes to the potential and deviant side effects of a good deal of those remaining, whose purpose still lay shrouded in pharmaceutical mystery. So I just stopped – stopped the lot. Next morning, and the one after, I didn't swallow a single pill – very liberating, I remember the feeling. And do you know what? Shall I tell you? Within an extraordinarily short while, I was feeling close to death. So I resumed with a motley selection, which more or less restored a form of equilibrium, or at least kept me blanketed from the wilder excesses of behaviour, while still saving me from slumping into a virtual coma. The official diagnosis of (very) mild schizophrenia, of course – they call it something else now: the illness, it now has dual identity – that
came later. I personally am of the opinion that they are lying or mad: Jesus, if anyone knows their own mind it's me. I
never
see the other point of view, let alone go changing my mind – so how that mind can be schizoid …! Well I ask you. Meanwhile, I receive the diagnosis, and I nod. And since then, oh dear Lord, what can I not have ingested? Risperidone, Haloperidol, Carbamazepine, Lofepramine – they all sound like wizards or knights errant, don't you think? Maybe? Magical crusaders. Of some quite ancient and arcane order. Or maybe not. Sodium valproate and Sertraline. Prozac – oh God yes, but of course: does anyone escape it? There may be one or two out there. Olanzapine and Clozapine (ugly sisters?). I think of them all as this collective of not at all chums but possibly aliens I was once at school with. Anyway. It comes and goes – and what, I ask you, doesn't? I'm completely fine at the moment: not at all frenzied, nor sunk down into the depths. I can always tell when I'm on a fairly even keel because then I find myself dwelling on all of the other and lesser ailments – because there are many more, I do assure you: unlike with the eczema, I've barely scratched the surface. And I do seem to add to them on an almost weekly basis. The arches, my arches – that's the latest thing, apparently. In danger of falling, is what yet another of these thirteen-year-old doctors is telling me now. How odd, I thought, that the very thing beneath your feet can come to fall. He couldn't explain the condition, how it came about, but I can. It's down to the shoes I wear with the hidden lifts – elevators in America, they call them. And in common with this tiny little hearing thing I have to suffer, they are virtually undetectable. There's this company in the West End that custom makes them for me – expensive, of course, but worth it, I think. I've never liked it, being short: even the word, even the word. And to this day, you know, I
wonder if that's the real reason why Mylene, she was always so rude to me – because she had this thing, you see, about heels: five-inch stilettos, a lot of women like them, and let's thank God for that at least. I said I didn't mind – I didn't have a complex, I explained to her. I would
like
to be taller, of course I would – in common with the way that everyone really would like to be more
something
: rich, young, beautiful, powerful – famous, talented or immortal. But I didn't have a
complex
about it: I quite lost track of the number of times I insisted upon that. She said I was missing the point. She said that while I might not mind walking alongside a willowy woman who teetered and towered above me, she bloody well
did
 – and that not the least of it was to risk a twisted ankle in all the time ducking her head down to hear what I was talking about (while I of course quite routinely never heard whatever it was she might have said in reply). Because all of this, it was before the tiny miracle hearing aid that seems to be eating its way well into my brain, and before the secret and uplifting shoes, which are causing my feet to break and decompose. I hadn't even yet had all those hundreds of little fleshy divots of tufty healthy hair punched into my skull: they came from the back of the neck, largely, the trichologist was explaining – is that all right with you? Oh yes, I assured him – that's quite all right with me: a bald neck I can live with. It bloody well hurt, of course, the entire procedure – eternally ongoing, needless to say – but when you're spending a fucking fortune, what can you expect? I couldn't really say if it's virtually undetectable (I'm never high enough to see). I can certainly tell you, though, that if you fail to brush it with care immediately after a shampoo, it can come to resemble pond growth. It takes someone new to be a judge, I suppose: someone like Sue, that cute little Susie Q. Did she see across the
desk from her a mature and debonair publisher, rich and suave and maybe just a little bit attractive? Or just an old deaf dwarf with clunky shoes and a scalp quite recently grazed upon by a passing herd of fallow deer, and all the while scratching at his elbow, in the manner of a simian forebear? Time, I suppose will hold the answer. And if I had gone ahead with all of these body repairs just, say, five years sooner … would she still have been rude to me, Mylene? Would she still be here now? And maybe even loving me? You can't ever know. Can you? What might have been. The marriage, I just must put it aside – try now never to remember: make it a forgotten atrocity. She came to hate me, though, that's for sure. And whether she fed them, the children, with sly and malicious morsels of it – force-fed them, conceivably, with great big gobbets of it, this hate that she had for me … I'll never really know that either. And of course they're
not
children, are they? That's what one has to remember. Tim, now – he's got to be, what? Christ – not much shy of thirty, I suppose. Jesus – that's a thought, isn't it? That's a thought in itself. And little Millie, my sweet and pretty little baby girl – twenty-five? Could be. Maybe twenty-four. No younger, though. You lose all track, don't you really? Tim, he's been married himself now for … must be three years. Got to be. Warned him against it: didn't listen. But she's quite a nice girl – never really got to know her. Got a little boy, name of Adam. And yes I do know, thank you, exactly what that makes me – I don't need reminding, believe me.