She pressed the button. Something dropped in her. She sighed as the lift sighed.
‘No, boys,’ Pearl was saying, ‘Dad’ll be back on his feet before we know it. And up to his old tricks again. Won’t you Xan.’
‘… Course I will.’
‘Of course he will. Whoo-pa. Here she comes. Christ she’s fat. Russia! I’ve been admiring your picture in the newspaper!’
Explosive Anger and Irritability, Family Abuse, Grief and Depression, Lack of Insight and Awareness, Bladder and Bowel Incontinence, Anxiety and Panic, Sexual Problems, Loss of Love, Coping with Loss of Love, Letting Go … Russia walked on, making herself taller. The waisted blouse, the dynamic brassière, the olive cleavage: all this — just in case — had been for Pearl.
2. The high-IQ moron
What used to be funny? wondered Clint Smoker. What’s funny now? And is it still funny?
A hushed conference room in the sick building. On the other side of the sealed window a tubercular pigeon silently flapped and thrashed. The Chief Publisher sat at his desk with his face in his palms.
For the Morning Lark was in crisis. Desmond Heaf (who made a habit of disappearing, of fading in and out of things) had returned, on a thirty-hour flight from the South Pacific, to rally his men.
He eventually said, ‘I simply don’t see how something as extreme as this could have actually … What were you thinking of?’ Gingerly and evasively he looked down at the double-page spread flattened out in front of him. ‘Sacred heart of Jesus. I mean, it’s not in nature …’
‘When I saw the first one,’ said Clint, ‘I thought it was an exposé on Battersea Dogs’ Home.’
‘Yeah,’ said Jeff Strite, ‘or a “shock issue” about Romanian mental homes.’
‘And the actual damage, so far?’
‘This whole thing is being taken very personally,’ said Mackelyne. ‘There’s a lot of anger out there.’
‘Are we losing them, Supermaniam?’
‘Judging by my e’s, they’re all dying of heart attacks.’
‘That’s good, that is,’ said Heaf. ‘We’re killing our own wankers.’
Supermaniam said, ‘It’s like Black Thursday.’
On the Wednesday before Black Thursday, the Lark had put together a playful piece about the Guinness Book of Records and the new category saluting the biggest ever, or longest ever, male member. On the same page (with more than a little twinkle in its eye) the Lark had reproduced a twelve-inch ruler and (tongue still firmly in cheek) challenged its readers to make an invidious comparison. As an obvious tease — or so the Lark believed — the twelve-inch ruler had been renumbered to make it look like a six-inch ruler. Soon after dawn it started coming in: word of the Black Thursday suicides.
Heaf said, ‘Bill. You made up these pages. How did you physically bring yourself to do it?’
‘When the first lot came in,’ said Bill Woyno, ‘I assumed they were taking the piss. When the next lot came in I must have thought, Well, this is … this is what it’s like.’
‘Let’s face it, lads,’ said Clint, ‘we’ve gone and strafed ourselves in the metatarsus on this one. But there’s a way out of it, Chief. May I essay a marxist analysis?’
‘By all means, Clint,’ said Heaf with a frown of intense respect.
‘Right. The quality broadsheets are aimed at the establishment and the intelligentsia. The upmarket tabloids are aimed at the bourgeoisie. The downmarket tabloids are aimed at the proletariat. At the Lark our target wanker is unemployed.’
‘Come to the point, Clint.’
‘Welclass="underline" who can you pull when you’re on the dole? We’ve delivered an insult to all our wankers — a deserved insult, but an insult. We’re saying, we’re proving, that our readers’ richards, if any, are straight out of the Black Lagoon.’
Four days earlier the Morning Lark, with considerable pomp, had launched its new feature, Readers’ Richards. And the death threats had started coming in that morning.
‘“Your ankles will be nice and warm” ‘, Heaf incredulously quoted, ‘“as you feast your todger on another array of top-grade totty, submitted by our red-blooded …” ‘He sat back. ‘Sweet mother of Christ, will you look at that — that troll in the top left-hand corner.’
‘I’m getting e’s from blokes who’re stapling the pages together in case they see it by accident.’
‘You should have a look at what we’re not using. Every last one of them takes years off your life.’
‘You got to brace yourself, and even then …’
‘There’s not that many to choose from. And we’re already running out.’
‘Three point seven million wankers,’ said Heaf weightily. ‘And this is the best they can do. Well then. What’s our course of action?’
‘Simple,’ said Jeff Strite. ‘Scrap it. Without comment.’
‘No. See,’ said Clint, ‘that’s another insult. And it’s not what they’re after.’ He pointed at the four heaped stacks of printed protests. ‘They can’t believe it either. They’re not telling us to scrap it. They’re telling us to say it isn’t so.’
‘And there’s a road out of this, Clint?’
‘Yeah, Chief. We can turn it around. Over a period of a few days we weed out the Wives and start replacing them with models.’
‘What, our own girls? Bit obvious, isn’t it?’
‘Well, not the Donna Stranges of this world, obviously. Use more like the also-rans. And if a famous face does get in there now and then … See, it’s not overly rational, is it, their response? We’ve kicked them in the arse. We’ve insulted them. Now let’s flatter them.’
In the fight for the Lark‘s ideological soul, Clint Smoker was always alertingly radical. He alone, it sometimes seemed, had a true estimation of their typical reader. He now went on to add,
‘It’ll go down okay. You could fill that spread with filmstars and have a strap saying dream on, you stupid sods and it would still go down okay. The other thing we need to do is improve the decor. Not these bleeding … coalholes. Look at the one on the middle right.’
Heaf rotated his head ninety degrees to the left, and then realigned it very slowly before jerking back from the page.
Clint said, ‘That could illustrate a piece about white slavery or slum housing. The whole spread could. No. We want reasonable birds on three-piece suites. Or better. And if you had them in the driveways of stately homes, I assure you, our wankers would be none the wiser.’
There was a silence of about half a minute.
‘Thank you for those words, Clint,’ said Heaf. ‘Make it so. Additional points … Now. All the other papers are going on about the NEO, the asteroid or whatever it is, and I’m sure our instinct was sound when we decided we’d completely ignore it. But with all these earth-shaking events going on — aren’t we short-changing the wanker on current affairs? I think we should at least mention the main wars and plagues and famines and what have you. Now I know our emphasis is essentially domestic, but with the world situation as it is I can’t help thinking we’re slacking off a bit on our foreign news.’
‘I agree, Chief,’ said Strite. ‘I could do with another month in Bangkok.’