The job in hand.
He conjured the current cover onto his computer screen. There was the masthead with its familiar exclamation mark: Self-Help! (It was company policy that every title that belly-crawled out of the building did so under the distracting fire of that exclamation mark.) Beneath his own subtitle, “The Toxic Parents Issue,” a youngish Prince of Wales and a near-teenage Diana stared back at him, unhappiness drawn in clear lines across their faces. Both photographs had been tipped slightly sideways and were overlaid by the transparencies of two test tubes, as if about to pour and mingle their contents.
What the living fuck was Pablo trying to do? Gabriel sighed. He was going to have to go it alone. Again.
The cheerless reality was that twelve times a year, working night and day as each deadline approached, Gabriel commissioned, designed, wrote, copy-edited, illustrated, captioned, laid out, and proof-checked the entire magazine. In truth, Self-Help! was a one-man operation. Yes, the others—Pablo, Craig, and Annabel, at least—did their stuff eventually, however unprofessionally. But he had never once felt able to leave their work unchecked. And almost without fail, he found himself rewriting, revising, redesigning, reworking, later and later into the night as the deadline approached.
The problem was one of conscience. For even though he could not stand the Randy K. Norris Organization, even though he thought Randy K. Norris himself one of the greatest charlatans alive, Gabriel nonetheless felt a crushing sense of responsibility toward the people who read Self-Help! The people who might—Jesus Christ—actually turn to the magazine for succor and guidance in their genuine distress. Despite himself, he was trying to make a go of it.
He looked up. His colleagues were returning. Maureen—heels high, chin low—walked straight into her office opposite (far larger than his own), shut the door, sat down, and lit the cigarette that she had readied in the lift. Given the flurries of rain, she would soon be joined by various pinch-faced delegations of fellow smokers from other magazines in the building, whom she welcomed with sardonic zest throughout the day, and who had grown used to using her room as the only alternative to the stairwell or the street. Pablo, meanwhile, sat down at his desk opposite Craig, who did the same for the count of three before standing up again, wedging his armpit with newspapers, and heading in the direction of the men’s room. Ominously, there was still no sign of Wendy. For a foolish moment, Gabriel considered calling an editorial conference. But really, there was no point; it was way too late for that. No, his only chance was to try to pick them off one by one. (He must remember to phone Annabel at home, too; check if she was okay; maybe she was genuinely ill. The hours that he had spent counseling that girl… and oh man, what do you say, what can you say?) He drew breath and got to his feet.
“Hey, Pablo.”
“Hello. You seen the layouts?”
“Yes, I looked through them over lunch. And the new cover. I really like the two test tubes things—clever.”
Pablo sucked in his cheeks. “Yes, it’s very oh-my-God. Mum and Dad, like two poison test tubes, pouring down into one bottle”—he mimed the chemist’s concentrated decantation—“which is you.”
“I see that.” Gabriel had the sense that he was being personally compared to a newly mixed tube of poison. Perhaps it was paranoia.
Pablo clicked his mouse and made as if to return his attention to the screen. “Okay. So, great—send me through the copy when you have it. You got anything ready now?”
Gabriel was unsure whether to perch on the desk or ask Pablo to come over to the big table so that he could talk directly over each of the alterations he required. He glanced up. Craig and Wendy’s absence argued in favor of staying put. He perched.
“I’ve got some changes.” He put the mocked-up cover on the design desk adjacent to Pablo’s terminal. “First, I don’t think we can use the Prince of Wales and… and Princess Diana on the cover of the ‘Toxic Parents’ issue.”
Instantly Pablo contorted his face, as if Gabriel’s stupidity were beyond the merely unbelievable and on into something that might be medically interesting. “That’s everything. Just, like, the whole cover idea”
“No—not everything. As I say, I love the concept. We just need different people in the test tubes. What about some celebrities from… from one of the soaps. A famously toxic couple. There must be one.”
“And, like, you would know.”
This seemed unnecessarily aggressive. Though, perversely, Gabriel was flattered. Which only served to remind him how far apart they were as human beings. He feigned a measured hurt. But Pablo was now staring dead ahead at his screen, busily clicking on pages as if to suggest that some people around here had work to do.
“Come on, Pablo—change the cover. If you don’t, you know I will.”
“Diana sells.”
“She is also dead.”
“But her painful legacy lives on. That’s the whole point. Duh. Every single person who picks this up”—Pablo indicated the printout with his finger but without taking his eyes off the screen—“will know exactly what this issue is about. Instantly. In one visual hit. They’ll think parents. They’ll think toxic. They’ll think William and Harry’s struggle. What more can you ask from a cover?”
“Charles has remarried,” Gabriel returned. “This is cheap. Worse than that—it’s nasty, it’s lame, it’s offensive, it’s lazy, it participates in everything about our national life that we should dislike. Come on, Pablo—it’s also more than twenty years old, and hardly a scoop or a particularly new image.” He held the proof up, his tone still just about jocular. “It’s tired. It’s worse than tired—it’s unimaginative, it’s ill-judged, it’s childish, it’s without taste, it’s a slight on the dead and an insult to the living, it’s—”
“Iconic.”
Jesus. Argument was futile. Power was the only recourse. “And it’s never going to be approved by the client, or Hamish”—the group editor in chief still signed off on everything individually—“or anyone else who has to approve every single thing we do here.”
Pablo now turned in his chair so that he was facing his editor with folded arms. “Well, let’s fight for it.”
“Pablo, our readers do not think of Diana as toxic. They love her. They love her to death.”
“Fight for it.”
“For Christ’s sake, Pablo, I—we—we are not going to fight for this shit… We’re just going to get on with it and stop wasting fucking time.”
He had never cursed in anger at the office before. And for a moment Gabriel could not think of anything acceptable further to say. For the first time in his working life, he found himself wanting to lash out at one of his colleagues. He found himself wanting to say something truthful for once: Look, you utter penis of a man, we’re in contract publishing—there’s nothing to fight for. We’ve lost every claim to dignity already. Let alone art. We’re totally and utterly beaten. Christ, they’re all beaten, even the bastards on the nationals. Journalism is over. Art is over. Design is over. Publishing is over. Fact is fiction. And fiction is fucked. Money won. We’re here because we’re slaves. And the only claim we are permitted to make is to tug on the chains of our wages once a month. That’s the deal. I get to buy my girlfriends overpriced tapas every so often. You get your tight designer T-shirts and a night out at Cream or Lube or wherever you go on the weekend by way of forgetting. So shut the fuck up and get on with it. Or get out there and start your revolution.