"It was a joke!" I protest.
"It reads like incitement! What are you trying to —?"
"You'd let Muriel Gray away with it."
"Not the way you've put it, I wouldn't."
"Well, get it legalled, then; the lawyers —»
"I'm not going to get it legalled, Cameron, because I'm not going to run it." Eddie shakes his head. "Cameron," he sighs, quitting the window to resume his throne again, "you simply have to cultivate a sense of proportion."
"What happens now?" I say, ignoring this and nodding at the print-out.
Eddie sighs. "Rewrite, Cameron. Try to dilute the vitriol instead of harping on about this asbestos filtering."
I sit and stare at the print-out. "This means we'll lose the slot, doesn't it?"
"Yes," Eddie says. "I'm moving the National Trust series forward a week. The whisky piece will just have to wait."
I purse my lips, then shrug. "Okay, give me till — " I look at my watch "- six. I can have it redone by then if I work right through. We can still make the —»
"No, Cameron," Eddie says exasperatedly. "I don't want a quick rehash with a few of the expletives deleted; I want you to rethink the whole thing. Approach it from a different angle. I mean, get your criticism on the moral corrosion of late capitalism in implicitly if you must, but make it implicit; keep it subtle. I know you… we both know you can do it, and that you're more effective when you're wielding the stiletto rather than the chainsaw. Take advantage of that, for goodness" sake."
I'm not mollified but I make a half-smile and give a grudgingly confirmatory grunt.
"Agreed?" Eddie asks.
"Okay," I say, nodding. "Agreed."
"Good," Eddie says, sitting back. "Anyway. How's everything else going? Liked that piece on the submarine, incidentally; nicely balanced; just hovering on the brink of editorialising, but never quite going over. Good stuff, good stuff… By the by, I hear rumours you might have something interesting coming up involving a government mole, that true?"
I fix Eddie with my best steely look. It seems to bounce off. "What's Frank been saying?" I ask.
"I didn't say I heard it through Frank," Eddie says, looking all innocent and open. Too innocent and open. "A few people have mentioned you seem to have something on the go, something you're not telling anybody about. I'm not prying; I don't want to know anything about it yet. I just wondered if these rumours are true."
"Well, they are," I say, hating having to admit it.
"I — " Eddie begins, then his phone rings. He looks annoyed as he answers it.
"Morag, I thought — " he says, then his expression changes to one of sour resignation. "Yes, all right. Just a second."
He presses the mute button and looks apologetically at me. "Cameron, sorry; this bloody Fettesgate thing. High-altitude leaning going on. Got to field all this stuff. Nice talking to you. See you later."
I leave the office feeling like I've just been to see the headmaster. Retreat to toilets for nose-to-nose with Auntie Crystal. Thank fuck for drugs.
Andy and Clare and I walked through the Strathspeld estate, from the house across the lawn and the terrace and through the shrub garden and the forest, down into the glen and out again, up to the wooded hill beyond and the densely overgrown dip where the old air-shaft chimney was.
The chimney was one of two on the hill; the old railway line ran directly underneath. The line had been closed for thirty years and the tunnel entrances had been first boarded up and then filled in with rubble. The viaduct over the Speld a half-mile away had been demolished, so that only the piers were still visible in the rushing waters. The tracks themselves had been torn up, leaving a long, flat-floored canyon curving under the trees of the estate.
The two air-shaft chimneys — squat dark cylinders of undressed stone a couple of metres across and a little over half that high, each capped with an iron grating — had vented the steam and smoke from the trains in the tunnel. You could climb up onto them and sit on the rusting iron grid — afraid it would give way but afraid to admit you were afraid — and look down into that utter blackness, and sometimes catch the cold, dead scent of the abandoned tunnel, rising up around you like some remorseless chilly breath. From there, too, you could let stones fall into the darkness, to land with a distant, hardly heard thud on the floor of the tunnel thirty or forty metres below. Once Andy and I had come here with old newspapers and a box of matches and dropped the lit, twisted papers into the hole and watched them slowly fall flaming, spiralling silently downwards into the blackness until they hit the tunnel floor.
Andy was eleven, Clare ten, and I was nine. We were there for a ceremony. Andy was slightly plump at the time, Clare agreeably normal. I was — everybody agreed — wiry, but I'd probably fill out, like my dad had.
"Blimey!" Clare said. "Dark in here, isn't it?"
It was dark. In high summer the outrageously tangled bushes around the chimney grew fast and green and blocking, starving the hollow of light. We'd had to fight our way in here to the little oasis of calm clarity around the forgotten chimney itself. Now that we were here, in its little green cave, the light seemed dim and clotted.
Clare shivered and clung to Andy, face puckering in pretended terror. "Argh, help!"
Andy grinned, putting an arm round her. "Never fear, sis."
"Do the dreadful deed!" she cried, making a face at me.
"You first," Andy said, handing the packet to me.
I took the box, extracted a cigarette from it and put it in my mouth. Andy fumbled with the match, lit it, then quickly put it to the cigarette. I sucked hard, eyes narrowed.
I inhaled a smell of sulphur, coughed immediately, turned appropriately green and nearly threw up.
Andy and his sister laughed themselves hoarse while I kept on coughing.
They each tried smoking, too, and pronounced it utterly foul, quite disgusting, what did people see in it? Adults were mad.
Andy said, But it looked good; had we ever seen Casablanca with Humphrey Bogart? There was a film. And who could imagine Rick without a cigarette in his hand if not hanging from his mouth? (Clare and I could, as we mugged to each other. Hell, I'd seen that film a couple of Christmases ago, hadn't I? It was a Marx Brothers movie and there was nobody called Humphrey Bogart in it I could remember.)
We tried another cigarette, and by then I'd — maybe instinctively — sussed how to handle it.
I was getting a hit from the stuff! I really toked on that second fag. Andy and Clare just sipped at it, took it into their mouths but not their lungs, not their beings, didn't accept it into their own personal ecospheres; just giggled childishly, peripheral.
Not me. I sucked that smoke in and made it part of me, joined mystically with the universe right at that point, said Yes to drugs forever just by the unique hit I got from that one packet of fags Andy liberated from his dad. It was a revelation, an epiphany; a sudden realisation that it was possible for matter — something there in front of you, in your hand, in your lungs, in your pocket — to take your brain apart and reassemble it in ways you hadn't thought of previously.