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
