Pravda (26 page)

Francine O'Brien was the woman in charge at Norris HQ UK (South Kensington). Gabriel was pretty sure that even her own blood cells loathed her. All the same, it was now Tuesday afternoon, and it was to Francine O'Brien by Friday at 0900 hours that Gabriel had to
deliver the twenty-four deliriously interesting pages of next month's
Self-Help! In Association with Randy K. Norris.

The job in hand:
Self-Help! Number 29: The Toxic Parents Issue.
As yet, all but eight pages of the two dozen were nowhere. Four were so badly written that they would have blushed to serve as toilet paper during the siege of Leningrad. Another four, likewise the work of ridge-browed illiterates, seemed to be about things entirely unrelated to the professed subject of the cover (itself in need of radical attention). The eight pages that were okay were all prepaid ads, mostly for variously lamentable Randy K. Norris products (as if every line of the whole magazine weren't pushing his crap already). As to the remaining eight, they were as yet entirely and formidably blank.

He sat back from the layouts on his desk and once again considered running away. (Mexico? Skye? Shepherd's Bush?) How did it happen this way
every single time?
Did he have the courage for the second sandwich? No.

Instead he opened up his e-mail screen: something from his friend Kolya, about a 1920s party (remember to grow a mustache); something from Larry about a new TV show ("Fuck and Run"? Surely not?) that Larry's company had just commissioned for some TV channel he had never heard of and a celebratory drink being in order. An internal round-robin message, someone from one of the travel magazines advertising a room to let in a shared house in Chalk Farm. Some bulk mail inquiring as to whether he needed help maintaining an erection (no, it's the getting rid of them that's problematic). Something from Isabella about could she crash in a few weeks' time? (Was she coming to London? She hadn't mentioned this. Odd. Very odd.) And something from an address he did not recognize.

Dear Gabriel Glover,

My name is Arkady Artamenkov. I was a friend of your mother, Mrs. Maria Glover, here in St. Petersburg. I am hoping to come to London in December and wondered whether I might meet up with you.

You mother shared a great deal with me before she died and I would very much like to talk to you. Unfortunately, I am not sure where I will be staying just yet but I will get in touch when I am in London.

Hope to see you then.

Yours sincerely,
Arkady Artamenkov

Jesus. Some friend of his mother's ... Now that was interesting. He typed an immediate reply. And for the thousandth time, he tried to imagine her life out there. What did you do all day, Ma? Where did you go? Why didn't I come and see you more often? He blinked. She was gone, forever gone. And he missed her so very much.

Like his sister, from the moment he had returned home after the funeral, Gabriel had become sensible of the feeling that he had left the reserves, that he was suddenly frontline, and that it was all about to become a great deal uglier and more real. (How ugly could it get?) But he also knew (when the recollection of Isabella's last half-hour of graveside intensity came to his mind) that he did not have his sister's singular sense of psychological purpose, her focus, or her fury. Instead the war his mother had bequeathed him seemed vast and vague, fought across many fronts, stretched out across time zones, idiotic, agonizing, senseless, and terrible by turn, locally fatuous, everywhere critical.

Most immediately there were his conscious wars—sectarian, inane, and petty. There was the war against cigarettes, for example, a war of hard-won and commendable open-air victories overturned in seconds by cellar-sprung ambush and subsequent rout. Or there was the war against food—a trench-trapped grind through the calendar, the fat canons of greed facing the sniper rifles of fitness across the elaborate slop of a million senselessly expensive eating occasions. There was the war against booze—a game of false friends and alliances betrayed, in which he vowed over and over never again to trust the sleight hand of camaraderie (offered with a lopsided grin) and yet found himself somehow suckered like an ingénue three times a week. There was the chemical war on drugs, the war on terror—two or three episodes of utter annihilation every year and a lifetime of anxious vigilance and security checks the never-ending price to pay.

But these were only the conscious wars, the phony wars. Deeper down, closer to his heart, the real war was now pressing: the war against his father. And here hung the shadow of the mushroom cloud. For this was indeed a cold, cold war, all about areas of influence and control, posturing, troops massed, invisible borders drawn, crossed, and redrawn, blanket-smuggled exchanges on shivery bridges by night, years of watching, listening, propaganda, betrayals, chronic suspicion, and the endless, endless silence. A war
that felt as though it too were now shifting toward some new point of crisis.

But deeper than even this, at the very bottom, never spoken, never admitted, was the loneliest war of all: the war against despair. This last a solitary staggering struggle that took place in the freezing darkness of the polar night, a struggle from which he could not rest but for which he must be forever on the lookout, perpetually exhausted and perpetually tensed, peering hard into the blizzard, ready for the shape of that hooded foe emerging, ready for the three furious minutes of nail, tooth, and blood that would decide it.

The worst of it was that these wars (and many more) were all being waged simultaneously. Had he been fighting any single campaign in isolation, he would have required all his available resources to prevail. But en masse, he had no chance. And so, like every other human being alive, Gabriel now found that his only free time was filled with craving for more free time so that he could gather the space and energy to engage his foes. Pick them off. (Deal with the cigarette problem at the very least.) Since he had returned from Petersburg, though, he had found that day-to-day distractions pressed in on him from all sides all the more. Considered thought, intelligent resolve, emotional balance—there was no chance. Weaknesses faced, dilemmas considered, relationships weighed—there was no time. No chance and no time for anything other than the blind and foolhardy living of it all.

And the nightmare scenario was already happening: since the death of his mother, his enemies had started talking. Smoking, for example, seemed to hijack his evenings under the casual pennants of his mother's lung cancer (for that, he was sure, was what she had been suffering from), and then, just as he was raising his arms in surrender, some leering little corporal would swing the main banner around and he'd be looking at the insignia, not of his poor mother, but of his father. Yes, cigarettes now reminded him of his dad. Simple as that. A cigarette in itself—white, thin, blithely toxic—said "father" to him as noisily as if it were able to speak out loud. Worst of all—and irony's perfectly curved scimitar this—his father had managed to give up. Easily.

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.