“Davina Trench That’s her But anyway, they’re trialing in bloody Maidenhead. I mean—hello?—who ever wants to go to Maidenhead? It might as well be in…”
“Indonesia.”
“Wherever.”
“Be great when you arrive, though. You can really relax and pamper yourself.” He hated the word “pamper” almost as much as he hated the word “indulgence,” which in turn was almost as much as he loathed the word “treatment,” with its wretchedly inane pretension toward medicine. Even more dispiriting was that this kind of idiotic vocabulary had become his daily vernacular; most of the people he dealt with these days could not even imagine him employing such words sarcastically, never mind noticing any nuance in his voice. No more than they could imagine the seven solid years of round-the-clock blood-and-agony life-and-death slog that it actually took to become a doctor. “Are they just an indulgence outfit, or do they do other stuff too?”
“Yoga.”
“Expensive?”
“Very.”
“Well, three-sixty inner calm is priceless, I suppose.”
“Oh, you cow — that fat cow just cut me off.” There was the sound of a horn. “This is a freebie. Said I might do a write-up for them.”
And he hated the word “freebie.” And the thought of Francine never doing any of the write-ups for all the million “freebies” she accepted, and the thought of how excruciating it would be to have to run one of her pieces if ever she did.
“Anyway,” Francine said, “I just wanted to be sure that you are taking the feedback on board from the last issue. I know both of our teams agreed to move on—”
And “feedback.” And especially “team”; he never ever wanted to be on anyone’s team for anything, ever. But it was his own fault: clearly the rest of humanity was on a journey to some other place he did not understand.
“This is going to be a top-level-watched issue, Gabriel, and I need to be sure that the lessons we learned from ‘Depress Your Depression’ are going to be implemented for ‘Toxic Parents.’”
The engine note was climbing. “Francine, I’m looking at the proofs right now and I can tell you that all the design concerns have been dealt with. This is a much more readable edition. I think my team just got a little bit too… too creative—and maybe we left some of the readers behind. So, yes, we have made sure to… well, to row back with this one.”
“Great. Good. Excellent. Okay, we’ll speak again Friday. Have to dash.”
The line went dead. And with it, another fraction of his soul.
Without ever for a single minute intending to, Gabriel Glover worked for Roland Sheekey Ltd., a medium-sized contract publishing outfit operating in the nether regions of the Paddington sump, responsible for some thirty-five titles, ranging from in-flight and supermarket tie-in magazines to trade press via corporate brochures and cat-club newsletters—each unnecessary in its own way. But to all intents and purposes his immediate boss was Randy K. Norris, or rather the Randy K. Norris Organization. Gabriel was the editor of Self-Help!, a monthly spinoff from the embarrassingly successful series of Randy K. Norris self-help books, “translated into sixty languages and the first step on the road to recovery for millions.”
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.
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.