Plume

He really was an amazingly thoughtful guy. But he was talking with Polly, and it looked tense. Polly was holding her steel clipboard in Clipboard Pose #4: Body Armour, clutching it to her chest in crossed arms. As Eddie spoke, she gave a series of little nods to punctuate what he was saying, a human metronome on a slow beat. She was behind the De Chauncey stitch-up, I was certain of it. Two interviews – the injustice of it was planetary, galactic.

As if to confirm my private suspicions, she abruptly turned to leave Eddie’s office, and as she did so she looked straight at me. Our eyes connected, and something burned in hers, something that could be read as ruthlessness, or even cruelty.

Eddie looked up wearily as I entered his enclosure, announcing myself with a knock on the acoustic panel, a knock robbed of almost all its sound, reduced to a submarine bump. I had gone over as soon as Polly left, wanting to catch him before he picked up the phone or was detained by someone else.

‘Jack …’ he began, and his expression said, Never a quiet moment.

‘Eddie,’ I said. ‘These two interviews …’

He rolled his eyes. ‘No. Stop. We discussed this in the meeting. You’re doing both.’

‘It’s fine, that’s fine,’ I said, holding up my hands in surrender. There was a little armchair by Eddie’s desk for visitors to sit in but I chose to stand, as Polly had done. Business-like. On task. ‘I just want to make sure it’s OK to take the time I’ll need to do them properly. I’m seeing Pierce tomorrow, Wednesday for transcribing, then Thursday and Friday for writing. So if we arrange De Chauncey for Monday next week …’

‘No,’ Eddie said. He frowned, eyebrows coupling. ‘No. No. I’m not having you out of the office for two weeks, not when I’m out as well. You don’t need that much time. You’re meeting Pierce tomorrow morning, right?’

I nodded.

‘You can do De Chauncey in the afternoon, while you’re out. Transcribe both on Wednesday. On Thursday I can take a look at both transcripts, and we’ll know where we stand.’

I shifted from one foot to the other, uncomfortable. Standing suddenly felt like a lot of effort.

‘Come on,’ Eddie said. ‘Don’t give me this. I know you can do it, you used to do it all the time. Come Thursday, I want you back in the office, and we’ll make decisions about which feature to prioritise. I want clear progress before I go on leave, something I can have confidence in. Ready to show on Friday. Important day, Friday. Then you’ll have a clear run at writing, OK? Without me breathing down your neck.’

My ankles were doing a lot of extra work to keep me upright, I realised. I was being undermined – the pleasant sensation of the sand being sucked from under the soles of your feet by a receding wave on the beach, reborn as a nightmare. Undermined, yes, that was it – Polly digging away at my basis, unseen.

‘Sure,’ I said. I wished I had sat down when I came in – it might have looked less formal and professional, but there was nothing formal and professional about falling over.

‘Look, I don’t enjoy micromanaging you this way, but I also don’t enjoy it when you let us down, and when I have the others complaining that they have to pick up your slack.’

Polly – that had to mean Polly. Or Freya?

‘I don’t want a reprise of last month, or the month before,’ Eddie continued. ‘You were in the meeting this morning – it’s a tough time. The toughest. We can’t carry anyone. No passengers, get it? Need you up front, stoking coal.’

‘Sure,’ I said, squeezing out a smile. Had I been in the meeting? What had been said? It was a swirl already, nothing but half-gestures and loose words.

‘Great.’ Eddie smiled back, a comforting sight, which gave me hope I might make it out of his office and back to my chair without total collapse. ‘Pierce is a good catch. How did you get him?’

‘Uh, I’m a fan,’ I said. ‘Quin – F.A.Q. – put me in touch with him.’

‘The Tamesis guy? F.A.Q.?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I thought he wasn’t best pleased with us?’

I shrugged. ‘I smoothed him over.’

‘Anyway, Pierce could be great,’ Eddie said. Even in my depleted state, I noticed this was a bit more equivocal than ‘great catch’. ‘Get the goods from him, something new and exclusive, and you’ll have a great piece. Listen for a strong opening. Once you’ve got that the rest’ll write itself on the Tube home.’

‘Sure thing,’ I said, and my affirming smile took a little less effort.

‘Big week, then,’ Eddie said. He nudged his computer mouse, waking the screen, to indicate that the meeting was over. ‘Real chance to do something great. Make us all proud.’

‘Sure. Great. Thanks, Eddie.’

It was 12.04. That would do. I slipped out of the office. Having had my dreams for the rest of the week dashed, I had no desire to be interrupted over lunch, so I ‘accidentally’ left my phone on my desk. The bubbles, the vibration, had completely left me.

It was about ten to two when I returned. We were allowed an hour for lunch and I liked to do some generous rounding in my interpretation of that rule. Eddie was pretty relaxed and didn’t count the minutes. I figured that if it was twelve-something when I left and one-something when I returned, that’s an hour. The people who left at one wouldn’t be back yet, the people who left at twelve thirty would have only just returned. It was normally quite easy to slide back into the office without anyone paying attention to how long I had been gone.

Normally. Today, however, there was a small crowd of my colleagues gathered between my desk and the window: woman Ray, Polly, Mohit, Kay, Kim from promotions, and even a couple of golf wankers and craft weirdos from downstairs, whose names, of course, I did not know. My desk, with its dank heaps of notebooks and magazines, was not their focus, thank heavens. They were looking out of the window.

‘Walthamstow?’

‘Don’t be silly, Walthamstow’s over there. It’s the estuary somewhere.’

‘Royal Docks?’

‘City Airport? Oh God …’ A murmur of horror passed through the group; a couple of people covered their mouths.

We were on the sixth storey of an eight-storey building, and the windows on my side faced east, ‘offering’, as Wolfe / De Chauncey would put it, ‘panoramic views of east London and Docklands’. In the foreground were the roofs and tower cranes of Shoreditch; much further away, to the right, were the towers of Canary Wharf, and behind those the yellow masts of the O2 Arena; to the left, at about the same remove, you could make out a little of the Olympic Park. On a clear day you could see a distant, dark line of hills on the far right and in places the mercury glimmer of the river. But in winter a grimy white dome, twin to the Teflon tent in Greenwich, was clamped down on the city.

Today, however, a new landmark had appeared. A column of black smoke rose from the ill-defined low-rise muddle of the horizon city. Further out than the skyscrapers on the Isle of Dogs, it nevertheless bested them in height and weight. While their glass and steel edges blurred in the cold grey air, the smoke tower was crisp and shocking, appearing as the most solid structure in sight, an impression only strengthened by its slow distensions and convolutions. It was blackening the dome, pumping darkness into the pallid sky.

‘Not City,’ a voice said behind us. The other Ray, man Ray, was hunched at his Mac. ‘It’s on the BBC, just a couple of lines: fuel depot in Barking. Explosion and fire. Oh, that’s awful. It says here people are being evacuated.’

‘Better than being in danger,’ Polly said.

Ray shook his head. ‘But people aren’t evacuated. Places, buildings, neighbourhoods are evacuated. Evacuating people would mean scooping out their insides.’

‘And that’s the BBC?’ the other Ray asked. ‘Really, you expect better.’

Man Ray shook his head in sad agreement.

‘Are we in danger?’ Kim from promotions asked. ‘From – I don’t know – gases.’

‘I doubt it,’ Polly said. ‘It’s a good long way away. If they were evacuating here, they’d be evacuating half of London. It’s just a fire, a big fire.’

‘It’s drifting this way,’ Kim from promotions said.

‘It’s just smoke,’ Mohit said.

‘When did it happen?’ I asked. I had reached my desk, which put me to the rear of the group, and I don’t think that any of them noticed my approach. Their eyes were on the plume.

‘When did what happen?’

‘Ray said it was an explosion …’

‘It doesn’t say,’ Ray said. ‘This morning.’

‘I think I …’ How to explain about the bubbles? If I said I saw the explosion I would sound ridiculous. ‘I think I felt it … The vibration …’

‘The earth moved for you?’ Kay asked, and a couple of people chuckled, Mohit and a golf wanker.

‘Now you mention it,’ Ray – woman Ray – said, ‘I think I felt it too.’

This prompted a more general and impossible-to-transcribe group conversation about who thought they had heard or felt what, whether it was possible to feel anything at this distance, and so on. I didn’t contribute much, and the group’s focus, such as it was, broke away from me. But Polly was still looking at me, and I frowned back, trying to figure out what I had said or done to earn this special attention. Her eyes darted down to my desk, which I was leaning against. My right hand was resting on one of the stacks of papers that are permanently encroaching on my keyboard and work space. It was this heap that Polly had glanced at, just a pile of torn-off notes, newspapers and magazines like the others, but I saw the top sheet, the one pinned under my hand, was not in fact mine at all. It was a yellow leaf from an American legal pad, and it was clipped, with many others like it, to a steel clipboard, which must have been left there by its owner while she was distracted by the drama at the window.

‘Excuse me,’ Polly said, and she grabbed her clipboard out from under my hand just as I lifted it to see what was written on it. Then she flipped the pages that had been folded over the back of the board to cover the sheet I had seen. But I had seen it. Columns of numbers – dates, times. The lowest line, the only one I saw in detail, read:

MONDAY: 10.11 12.05

Then two blank columns. I knew immediately, instinctively, what was recorded there, and what it meant. It was the time I had arrived that morning, and the time I had left for lunch, with spaces left for the times I returned from lunch and left the office at the end of the day. Polly was recording my movements – my latenesses, my absences, the myriad small (and not so small) ways I was robbing the magazine of time. The purpose of this record was obvious: she was building a case for my dismissal.

I did my best to hide the fact that I had seen the numbers and guessed their meaning. Grey oblivion enclosed my panicking mind on all sides, squeezing in. I pulled the chair from under my desk and sat down heavily. Polly was no longer looking at me. Instead she was staring fixedly out of the window, jaw tense, clipboard clutched to chest, being scrupulous about not looking at me. The grey closed in, appearing in my peripheral vision, cutting off my oxygen. I hit the space bar to rouse my computer and that small action felt like an immense drain on my resources. Fainting was a real possibility. No air. Horrible implications were spreading outwards from what I had seen, a thickening miasma of betrayal and threat. Firing an employee was cheaper than making them redundant – perhaps that was Polly’s game. Perhaps she was collecting a dossier against me to spare someone else, a friend, an ally: Freya? Kay? Mohit? But of those names, none was more clearly on the axe list than mine. If I was already doomed, and they could save themselves that redundancy payment into the bargain …

Unread emails. Hundreds of new tweets. Fifty new Tumblr posts. I looked at the latter, not able to face the clamour of Twitter, and it was a good choice – calming. Attractive concrete ruins. Unusual bus shelters in Romania. Book covers from the 1970s. Silent gifs of pretty popstars. New Yorker cartoons. Feel-good homilies and great strings of people agreeing with heartfelt, bland statements against racism and injustice.

But the smoke was there, too. A camera-phone photograph on the blog of another magazine, showing the same plume we could see but over a different roofline. A much better photograph from the feed of Bunk, F.A.Q.’s company, taken from a higher angle and showing the column’s base, orange destruction under buckling industrial roofs, in a necklace of emergency-service blue lights.

More of my colleagues were returning from lunch, some unaware of what was going on in the east, others brimming with urgency, disappointed to find that we all knew about the fire already. There was a volatile, excitable atmosphere in the office. Having an unusual event like this, a news event, so very visible in front of us all was turning people into restless little broadcasters, vectors for the virus of knowing, eager to find audiences as yet uninfected with awareness of it. This floor of this building was dead, saturated, so the group broke up and the spectators went to their phones and their keyboards to email, tweet, update Tamesis, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat – transmit, transmit, tell, tell. And all with this weird glee, the perverse euphoria that accompanies any dramatic news event taking place nearby, even a terrible event. Any other day, I would be among them – I felt that rush, that fascination, but at a distance, behind a firewall of private pain – but all I could do was gaze at my screen, barely seeing, hand dead on my mouse.

‘Crazy.’

Polly was at my side. I had no idea how long she had been standing there, but I knew I had done nothing in that time, not the slightest movement.

‘What?’

She nodded at my screen. It was still showing the Bunk picture of the fire.

‘Crazy,’ she repeated. ‘I wonder how they got that shot? The high angle … Helicopter? From the look of it, it’s amazing no one was hurt.’

Her tone was pleasant – just a regular chat between co-workers, as if nothing had happened, or was about to happen. A very casual assassin.

‘Long lunch?’ she asked.

Aha, I thought, here we go. I patted the book I had taken with me – Pierce’s Murder Boards, decorated with a jolly fringe of fluorescent sticky bookmarks. ‘Was doing some background. Working. Notes. Ready for tomorrow.’

‘Oh, good.’ Polly appeared genuinely pleased by this, which only intensified my suspicion that a trap lay ahead. ‘Have you looked at your emails? I’ve set things up with De Chauncey’s people – 3 p.m. tomorrow, at their Shoreditch branch. Easy-peasy.’

‘Right,’ I said. Grim tidings, but it didn’t feel like the gut-shot I had been expecting. Her chirpiness was concealing something, I knew. Sure enough, the trap revealed itself. She adopted Clipboard Pose #2: Moses, supporting it with the left forearm and laying her right palm on the attached papers, as if drawing from them some inviolable truth.

‘I wonder if you could do something else for me?’

I didn’t reply. Maybe I shuddered.

‘I’m trying to do some planning. To see if we can get past living hand-to-mouth, as we have been. When you have a spare moment, do you think you could jot down some future subjects for profiles? Your top ten people you would like to interview for the magazine.’

‘The thing is, what with De Chauncey …’

‘Eddie’s keen to see this as well.’

‘I just spoke with Eddie.’

‘I think he said to help me out with the front? This is what I want you to do. Just this.’

I coughed, throat dry, and the action churned the liquid lunch in my stomach, acid frothing, rising.

‘Just give me your target list,’ Polly continued, no less sanguine. ‘You must have people you’re pursuing? Ideas? Ambitions?’

Once I did, sure. ‘Sure.’

‘Just stick ’em on a page and give them to me. Say by Friday? Then we can get planning for the future.’

‘Sure.’

‘Great!’ And she hurried away cheerfully, clipboard swinging like a scythe.

The photograph of the plume on my computer screen disappeared, replaced by the writhing rainbow tentacles of my screensaver. But I didn’t need photographs to see it. I could just raise my eyes to the window and look at the real thing: a tight black column at the bottom of the frame, an ominous addition to the dusty publishing trophies lined up on the sill; filling the sky at the top of the frame, choking out the light.

The tasks I had been set were impossible. Not for the others, but impossible for me. I knew I would not be able to do them. I knew that I was going to be fired. I knew the how, and I knew the when. And I already knew the why.

TWO

Latenesses, absences, missed deadlines, empty pages. I knew how it looked. It looked idle. It looked like the work – the lack of work – of a man who no longer cared. No passengers, Eddie said. We can’t carry anyone. He wasn’t the sort of boss to crack the whip unless he had to. No, his methods were persuasion and consensus. But I could see the change in him. The moment was coming. The moment when I could no longer be excused, when the accumulating evidence toppled into a landslide that would sweep me away.

Facts, accumulating. Polly’s scrupulous notes, the implacable grid of the flatplan. Gather enough facts and you have the truth. But an interviewer, a profile journalist like myself, knows different. There are, for a start, too many facts. Far too many. Punch a name with even modest achievements into a search engine and back come hundreds, thousands, of relevant results. Search someone like Oliver Pierce or Francis Quin – someone who operated online, someone with a following, an active fan base – and there are tens of thousands if not more.

Add to that what you gather yourself. People have no idea how much they say in the course of a normal conversation. Talk to someone for an hour and the transcript can approach 5,000 words. Trim away all the worthless ‘yeahs’ and ‘umms’ and ‘I thinks’, cut all the bits where they’re ordering a drink or asking their PR how much time they have left, and unless they are the worst kind of drone celeb you will still have far more quotable material than can be squeezed into the 2–3,000 words you have been given to write.

So you select. You edit. And here the interview stops being photography and becomes impressionist painting. Ten quotes that make the subject look generous, warm and inspiring can be found in the transcript. The same transcript can yield ten quotes that make them sound weary, bitter and self-centred. The person remains the same, what they said remains the same, but they are seen through a series of funhouse mirrors, appearing first hypertrophied, then stunted, then undulating …

A correction. What they said does not remain the same, not quite. The interviewer does not merely prune, then select. They edit. People talk nonsense. They speak in fragments and non-sequiturs, they repeat themselves and omit. Sometimes they skip verbs, sometimes nouns. And by ‘they’ I mean we. We are all, always, skirting total aphasia, total nonsense. But we don’t mind, we don’t even hear it, because our inner editors smooth it all away in the hearing. The real evolutionary breakthrough was not the ability to speak – it was the ability to understand.

Record the unedited spew that is natural human speech and write it down word for word, and the result is unprintable. The subject would be furious if you put these words – their exact words – in their mouth. Rightly so. They’d sound like a babbling fool. The work needed to correct this impression – to make people sound as they believe they sound – isn’t slight. It goes far beyond cutting out the ‘umms’ and ‘ahhs’. It can entail wholesale reorganisation and rephrasing of what was said. In other words – in other words! – the writer must extract the ore of what was meant from the slag of what was spoken. Done correctly, the subject won’t believe a word has been changed.

Even after explaining these difficulties, admitting the fundamental elasticity of the truth, the professional profile journalist will still insist that truth is the very soul of their work. Their profile, they will claim, is a fair portrayal, or an authentic depiction of an encounter. But I was beginning to believe that a true portrayal of another person might not be possible – not because the truth was impossible to portray, but because there might not be any truth to expose. It might be that every man and woman is a fractal Janus, infinitely involuted, showing at least two faces at every level of magnification. It might be that every human encounter is a cryptogram impervious to codebreakers.

The data Polly had collected gave the impression of idleness. If she was in a position to fill in the widening gaps in my day, that impression would only grow stronger. Perhaps she had already guessed the truth. I have considered telling the truth. I have wondered what that would sound like, what I would say, and where I would begin. But even a straightforward statement of facts is not the truth, not the whole truth.

I am not idle. I work hard. I start early, I work through lunch, I work in the evening, I work late into the night. I work until I drop. When I am kept away from work, by the Monday morning meeting or by the quiet drink I enjoyed with Mohit that same evening, work was always on my mind.

Idle, no. Polly would not see, but it is there to see, out on the streets. You are outside a pub, queueing for a cashpoint, waiting for a bus. They approach and ask for money. Maybe they have a story they tell. Look at them – the stance, the gait, the eyes. Abject, yes. But not idle. No languor, no sloth. They are busy. They are on a deadline. They are working. Addiction is work, all-consuming, urgent work. And unlike my post at the magazine, the job security is total. Addiction will never fire me. It will never let me go.

It was true that I was often late for work. But I overslept less than you might expect – I was rarely given the chance, rising promptly, at 7 a.m., when the drilling started. Next door was renovating their house. Renovate: to make new again. They were stripping that word back to its roots just as they were rebuilding their house down to its foundations. Deep into the London clay they dug, scraping out precious extra inches of floor area and headroom. They were in my head-room too. Their busy pneumatic drills were working perhaps only feet – perhaps only inches – from where my head rested on an under-washed pillowcase. They might as well have been drilling inside my skull.

I no longer got hangovers. I was never sober enough. So perhaps the universe supplied the drilling as a substitute. All the oxygen was gone from the room already. There was air, but it could not nourish or sustain. And it was thick with dust, created and stirred up by the building work. Dark grey was encroaching in the corners of the window panes, smooth surfaces crackled beneath my fingertips. My nose was blocked.

Shower first, then breakfast, I thought. But the Need disagreed. You’ll have time for that later, it lied. Me first. Still wearing no more than the T-shirt and boxers I had slept in, I went to the fridge, took out a can of Stella, cracked it, and took a swig.

The grit and stain was washed from the recesses of my mouth. Cold brilliance. Appeased for the moment, the Need receded. The choking fog around me parted and I saw the leftovers from the previous night. Grey tatters of lettuce on a sauce-smeared, greasy plate, plain newspapers balled up nearby, seven empties crowded on the little table beside the sofa – none spilled. The cushions were piled up on one side of the sofa, still indented with the impression made by my reclining form. It was dark in the living room, but it was always dark in the living room. The only natural light came through the glass roof of the kitchen extension, and that was the depleted stuff that had found its way through the winter sky and down into a canyon between the backs of Victorian terraced houses. It was further filtered by the grime that had built up on the glass roof, and the branches of the neighbours’ lime tree.

‘Good morning,’ I said to the black skeleton of the tree. It dripped filth in response.

I started to pick up empties. One turned out to be two-thirds full, and the surprise weight almost caused it to slip from my unready fingers. Another, tucked behind the lamp on the table, had about a third left in it. How long had they been there? Were they from last night, or earlier? Three days was a gamble.

The empty empties I crushed and put in the recycling; the part-empties I left by the sink. Then I sat on the sofa. The drilling had not stopped, or even subsided, but I had a little insulation in my head now, and it was at the other end of the flat. And only on the one side, for now. I felt pretty good, relatively. The meeting with Pierce was set for eleven, a civilised time, and I wasn’t expected in the office until Thursday. That was an aeon away. All that mattered was not screwing up the Pierce interview – and I was unusually well-prepared. I had actually read Pierce’s books and many of his articles; that was the reason I wanted to interview him in the first place. I just had to focus and stick to it for a couple of days, and the Polly-threat might recede, give me some time and space to get my head together, to make some changes, stabilise things.

‘Getting myself back on track, yes indeed,’ I said to the tree. ‘What do you have to say about that? Two interviews today, and they’re both going to go great.’

It had nothing to say about that.

The TV and DVD player were on standby, not completely off; they had done this themselves during the night. So discreet, so obliging. I turned the TV on and switched to the news. London Blaze, said the red caption beside the crawl.

‘… real concern isn’t the fuel but some of the additives used in some of these related processes, which we understand were on the site.’ Not a newsreader voice but the unpolished, hesitant voice of an expert, speaking over pre-dawn helicopter footage of the fire, hungry orange squirts of flame, the smoke column like a thick black neck attached to a head that was buried in the ground, swallowing, chewing, consuming. Around it, a necklace of twinkling blue lights.

‘So just how concerned should we be?’ The interviewer, a female voice, cut in. I liked this question. I wanted to precisely calibrate my concern.

‘Well, as I say,’ the interviewee, a male voice, said, ‘it’s not really a question of the fuel but the other chemicals that may have been present; now we don’t know what these were exactly, not as yet, but we understand there were substantial quantities of material on the site, and some of these can be, well, you wouldn’t want to put them on your cornflakes, ha ha, but still the question as always is one of quantifying risk.’

One of those morning interviews, then, when the interviewee’s time isn’t particularly important and there are unending minutes to fill. Slightly informative noise had to be created to cover the real interest, the pictures. Not the helicopter any more: footage from the ground, also shot before dawn, of fire crews directing inadequate-looking streams of water into a pulsing orange hell, the ground a reflecting pool in which coiled hoses wallowed.

My can was half empty already, its comforting weight gone, its top warm. I returned to the kitchen and topped it up from the one-third-full can I had found behind the lamp. Waste not, want not. The coldness and fizz of the remaining half of the fresh lager would take care of the flatness and warmth of the older stuff. But as a precaution, I poured it through a metal tea-strainer I kept beside the sink. In the past there had been instances when I had watched, horrified, as a glob of mould had slipped from a too-far-gone can into perfectly good beer. It was heartbreaking to have to pour it all down the sink. And there had been times when I had not washed it away, and they were even worse. But the strainer, found in a charity shop, had been a useful investment. This time nothing was intercepted, and the found beer frothed in a reassuring way. I had three cans in the fridge. That would probably do me for the morning.

‘Chances of a serious reaction are one in a million, one in 10 million really,’ the television voice was saying.

‘Ten million people in London,’ I said to the TV, ‘so one poor bastard …’

I tried to drink from the refilled can, but misaligned the aperture with my mouth, dribbling beer down the front of my T-shirt.

‘Shit.’

I ran the back of my wrist across my chin. The drilling, which had paused for breath, chose that moment to resume. I hated the pauses in the drilling more than anything, because they invited the thought that the noise might have stopped for good, which was seldom the case. The builders on the other side were now making their own contribution: a hammer-blow, perhaps metal against metal, which repeated eight or nine times, then stopped, then started again. Through the flat, from the direction of the street, came the throat-clearing sound of a diesel engine and a steady rattle of machinery.

I threw the tree an angry glance. It was planted in next door’s back garden, another of their multiple insults. Through the splattered glass of the kitchen ceiling, I saw a flash of white in its black limbs.

A cockatoo, sitting in the tree, looking down at me.

No, not possible.

I changed my position to get a better view through one of the cleaner patches of grimy glass. The white shape ducked from view. I stepped back. There it was again – not a cockatoo, but a white plastic bag caught in the branches.