“Where are you?” Tamara asked.
“Crystal’s.”
Not again.
“Why? What’s happened?”
“I’ve had to leave my place.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing that can’t be sorted.”
Tamara sat up, fully awake, and switched on the bedside light.
“Just tell me what’s been going on.”
“No big deal, sis.” His laugh was hollow, a dry bark. “Run up a few debts. Got a few arrears on my rent. If I don’t pay up, they evict me.”
“Jesus, Ross, not again. How can you have rent arrears? You’re on housing benefit.”
“Been a mix-up down the DHSS. And then the neighbours, some snotty Christian couple, have been making complaints. They want me out.”
“What happened to the money I sent you?”
“What money?”
Was he serious?
“The eighty pounds I sent you, registered mail, last week?”
“Oh. Right … Never turned up. The post has got really dodgy round here.”
Was he lying? Or had he blown it on a binge he couldn’t remember?
“I can claim it back from the post office. I’ve got the receipt.”
“You don’t want to be bothered with all that, sis.”
He was right.
“How much rent do you owe?”
“I’m not asking you to pay it.”
“Just tell me how much rent you owe.”
“Two hundred quid.”
“How the hell did you manage that?” She instantly regretted her anger. “No, never mind. Don’t tell me.”
“I don’t know. I’m not asking you to pay it,” he repeated huffily. “Anyway, Crystal says I can stay with her as long as I like.”
That was the last thing he needed.
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea—you and Crystal.”
“What do you mean? You’ve always been down on her …”
“Come on, Ross. You’ve not exactly been good for each other.”
“What do you know about it?” His voice cracked with indignation. “Since when have you been an expert on relationships?”
Tamara had learned early to defend herself from his insults—he was just lashing out because he was in pain himself.
“I’m only trying to say, Crystal’s got her own problems,” she answered quietly.
“Yeah. And that’s why I’m not going to turn my back on her. She’s a woman in grief.”
“Grief?”
“Yeah. Her sister, Dawn—”
“But her sister died five years ago.”
“You know, Tam, sometimes, if I didn’t know you were my baby sister, I’d mistake you for a heartless bastard.”
Tamara looked at the clock. Three a.m. It was too early—or too late—for this. She had to be in the office in a few hours. Her head was pounding. Could it be a second-wave hangover from the Press Awards?
“I’m only worrying about you. I want you to be okay,” she said.
“I’ll be okay. Once my disability allowance comes through in a fortnight.”
“But how will you survive until then? And what about your rent arrears?”
“I’ll manage.”
“Are you sure your money hasn’t gone on drugs?”
“You think I’m lying, don’t you? You’re just like Dad. Mum was the only one who ever believed me.”
He began to cry, a low keening that grew into an awful, wounded-dog howl.
“No, of course not, Ross. I believe you.”
Her eyes filled with tears. She could not bear to hear him hurt and hopeless.
“You think I’m lying. You do.” He was angry now. “I can tell. I’m sick of you people writing me off, judging me.”
“You people?” Tamara could not risk rising to the bait. Nor could she risk allowing him to fall into Crystal’s hands again. There was no way of knowing whether Ross was telling the truth. But if she pressed him, she risked him slamming down the phone, and then she would endure months of worrying silence.
She had £220 left in her building society account—she was saving for a new computer—and she would draw it out tomorrow. This had to be the last time. Appeasing her brother, protecting him, was becoming an expensive habit. But what else could she do? Her mother would have paid out. Ross was vulnerable. He could not help it. This must be mental illness; for who, in their right minds, would volunteer to live like that?
“Look, I’ll bring it over to you tomorrow night. To Crystal’s, if you want. Put the money in your hands. After work. Then you can move back to your own place. You going to be all right till then? Can you get any food? Go to your corner shop. Try to get some on credit. Tell him I’ll pay him over the phone with a card. He can call me at The Monitor.”
Seventeen
Dishevelled after a fitful sleep, Tamara arrived at the office to discover an impromptu meeting in progress. The Psst! team stood clustered around Simon, whispering. Their expressions were grave. Only Courtney remained at her desk, opening the post with a conspicuous smile. Simon was silent and pale.
“What’s happened?” Tamara asked Alistair. They had not spoken since the Press Awards. It had been sheepish distaste on her part—after the awards the hero’s lustre had dissolved, and he looked and sounded like the little loser he had always been. Guilt was the cause of his awkwardness—his wife had given birth to their first baby the week before their night at the Belvedere. An office crisis was a good moment to restore diplomatic relations.
“We’ve been downgraded,” said Alistair.
“Downgraded? Who? How?”
“Psst!. We’ve been sidelined.”
Downgraded and sidelined. This was serious.
“Simon’s been shafted,” he explained. “We’re all working for the Web site now.”
“No! The Web site?”
How could they possibly work for the Web site? Print was their medium. They knew nothing about computers and cared about them even less.
“I know,” said Alistair. “It’s insane.”
“But who’s taking over from Simon?”
“Tania Singh.”
It could not be true. Had Tamara really lost her champion? Was the smug stuck-up Tania really to be her next boss? Impossible. Tamara looked at the faces of her colleagues and at Simon’s shocked pallor. The office had been one area of her life where she’d felt secure and in control. Now she’d been cut adrift, Simon had been vanquished and the enemy, a humourless office automaton, was victorious.
“I don’t believe it,” Tamara said.
Alistair showed her the proof: a memo from Wedderburn. While it did not actually use the terms “downgrading” or “sidelining,” it offered no comfort. “Integration” was the word. And Simon had not been sacked but “redeployed.” He was now content editor, in an arrangement the memo described as a promotion. But the implications were clear. Tania was to be editor in chief of Psst! and from next month, the magazine was, “as part of a bold experiment,” to be primarily a Web site, and its paper original, that friendly, tactile, shiny artifact, as familiar and comforting as a box of cheap chocolates, would shrink, becoming a diminutive two-page appetiser, a mere leaflet advertising the colossal online banquet.
The unofficial meeting reconvened in the Beaded Bubbles for an early lunch. No one, except Courtney, had any appetite for food.
“We’re goners. Dinosaurs and dodos, trampled beneath the jackboot of progress,” Simon said.
Jim was unusually supportive.
“It won’t last, believe me,” he said. “This Internet business is just a fad, bound for obsolescence. It’s the hot-air gramophone all over again. They’ll never make any money with it long term.”
But it was the short term that was preoccupying the Psst! team.
“This isn’t what I won my award for,” Alistair said. “I didn’t come into this business to spend my days staring at a screen playing the photographic equivalent of Pacman—�
��
“Hold on a minute, Al,” Courtney interrupted. “It’s no good coming on like Sebastião Salgado. We know what you do. It’s not pictures of oppressed Bolivian tin miners we’re talking about here. It’s snatched photos of pissed TV stars. The Web site seems a perfect outlet for your stuff.”
“Traitor,” Alistair muttered.
“What exactly does ‘content editor’ mean, anyway?” Tamara asked.
“Well, it’s got nothing to do with contentment,” Simon said. “They don’t want to be sued for constructive dismissal so they invent this nonsense role, supposed to span digital and print, bung me a few more quid and say I’ve been promoted. But no one’s fooled. Tania’s the boss now.”
“That’s it, then,” Tamara said. “The golden age is over.”
“The gravy train has been derailed, you mean,” said Courtney, ordering a bottle of champagne. “No fatalities. Just a few cuts and bruises in the first-class compartment. All change, please!”
Back at the office, dejected and mildly drunk, the Psst! staff were summoned by Tania for a “team briefing” in the canteen.
Simon took his jacket from the back of his chair.
“I’m off. You can tell the Warrior Queen I’m out foraging for content,” he said.
Tania sat on one of the canteen tables—still damp from a recent wipe-down, Tamara was pleased to note, though this mild charge of pleasure was short-circuited by the sight of a silver mobile phone glinting in Tania’s hand. A company phone, too.
The Psst! team slumped in chairs around her like moody teenagers on the first day of term. Arms folded, her suede-booted legs crossed, right foot swinging prettily, their new editor, as enchanted by herself as a girl in a shampoo advert, tossed back her glimmering hair and spoke of opportunities and excitements, Web readiness, interactivity and responsiveness, reader participation and page impressions, breaking news and instant updates.
“Hang on,” Alistair said. “ ‘Breaking news’? ‘Instant updates’? What exactly does this mean for our weekly deadline?”
Tania smiled beguilingly.
“That’s old thinking, Alistair. We’ve got a new model here. In the future—maybe two years, maybe five, down the line—The Monitor will no longer merely be a daily national newspaper with weekly supplements; it will be a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week multiplatform information and comment outlet with a global readership, straddling borders and time zones.”
“What about our four-day week?” Jim Frost asked, pointing the chewed end of his briar pipe towards Tania.
Tania gave him a pitying smile.
“And our days off in lieu?” Alistair added.
It was as if they had not spoken. Their new boss unfolded her arms, uncrossed her legs and gripped the edge of the table. As if about to share a thrilling secret, she leaned towards her audience.
“And the really exciting thing is that I, I mean we, or rather you, have been chosen as the vanguard—you will be trailblazers for this pioneering operation. Psst!’s adaptation to the new cyberdispensation will set the template for the rest of The Monitor. And, by extension, the future of the entire newspaper industry!”
“When do we start?” Courtney asked.
The meeting broke up in glum silence, and Tamara returned to her desk resolved to pursue her own course of Web readiness. She would be ready, all right. The prospect of no Simon, no flexible working, and the smiling Tania, a sleek enforcer presiding with merciless enthusiasm over galleys of cyberslaves, was too bleak to contemplate.
She had to get away from Tania’s twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a week, multiplatform universe, in which every newspaper and magazine would be sucked up by the technological twister, swirling skywards from newsagents and tube stations, from desks and coffee tables, cafés and kitchens, dustbins and gutters, recycling centres and landfill sites, darkening the sky before shrinking to a shower of pixels and falling to earth as magic dust, minute particles of information that would shimmer in plastic boxes in every house in the land.
S*nday—too august to be annexed by Tania’s digital dystopia—was no longer an optional escape route but a lifeline. Tamara must nail the Honor Tait story. But first she had another duty to attend to, and a month of fruitless stalking outside Holmbrook Mansions would be preferable to this evening’s desolate journey.
Purged, exhausted and faintly soiled, Honor Tait submitted herself to the latest indignity. Dwarfed by the machinery, she lay on a paper-covered pallet, cold and shrivelled, naked under the thin cotton gown, while a distant technician, shielded from the harmful rays by glass and lead, fed her by remote control, inch by inch, into the white tunnel.
“Breathe in,” said the radiologist’s disembodied voice, broadcast through a small grid at the entrance to the tunnel. “Hold it … keep very still … hold it …”
Compliantly, full of mute rage, she held her breath. A simple instruction but so hard to obey. She struggled, with her failing body, with her worn-out respiratory system, and with her natural obstreperousness, to do the voice’s bidding. To submit. It had never come easily.
“Now breathe normally.”
She looked around at the tunnel’s cold walls. She had never suffered from claustrophobia, but here, now, she could imagine how it might feel. No way out. A dwindling supply of oxygen, a narrowing of options, helplessness, then terror. The human condition. The ageing human condition.
“Breathe in … hold it … keep very still … hold it.”
She had to give it her full attention. That was, above all, what she resented. The machine made an oddly domestic noise as it captured its pictures: a soft swishing and clicking, like the sound of a big-buttoned shirt slowly rotating in a tumble dryer.
“Now breathe normally.”
All the experience, the interests of a lively, long-lived mind, the hard-won achievements, the passions and prejudices, reduced to this, wrapped in the hospital’s flower-sprigged shroud, moving powerlessly along the conveyor belt into the scanner, she amounted to nothing more than a series of grainy images—black-and-white splices, cross sections of tissue and bone rendered by technology into pulses of light and pools of darkness—as impersonal as a telescopic view of distant galaxies.
“You’re doing very well,” the radiographer said. She could have been talking to an imbecile, or a child. “Not long now.”
Not long now. There it was, her life, a comet’s tail streaking unobserved across the night sky. A falling star. One among countless billions.
“Breathe in … hold it … keep very still … hold it.”
All her life she had enjoyed such exceptional good health that she had come to think of it as a moral quality, perhaps her only real virtue, a corollary of a purposeful life. Apart from certain difficulties in her thirties, after two terminations, she had got off lightly.
“Just one more now. Breathe in … hold it … keep very still … hold it.”
Finally, in doctors’ waiting rooms and hospital outpatient departments, she had been conscripted into the tattered army of the sick—old and young, bright and stupid, rich and poor, good and malign. The only thing they had in common was their imperfection; their bodies, the fleshy housing of their essential selves, had become their chief enemy.
“If you could just lie there and wait,” the radiologist said, as jauntily as a hairdresser, “in case we need to redo any of them, I’ll get someone to check through the films.”
Yes, thought Honor. I’ll wait. What else is there to do but wait?
Tamara made her way into the grim amphitheatre of the estate, past the carcasses of two abandoned cars, a discarded mattress with a sepia map of stains, trashed TV sets, white plastic garden chairs, arranged primly in a row as if for some interrupted postapocalypse tea party, a brace of the inevitable supermarket trolleys, upended frames like glistening webs in the sodium blaze of streetlights, and a sinister pushchair, lying on its side, its soiled fabric seat hideously slashed from top to bottom.
The place was deserted, apart f
rom a few kids kicking a football on a sparse patch of grass. Dogs seemed to bark from every flat. She knew these were no eager Labradors or pampered lapdogs but lumps of muscle with chainsaw teeth, programmed to rip through human flesh; creditors or debtors, police or dealers, hostile adults or sleeping babies, they did not discriminate. Even their owners weren’t safe.
The open walkway that linked the flats was a foul-scented corridor of graffiti, an extended Jackson Pollock of insult—someone’s mother liked it this way, someone did it with their dog, someone was a slag—and pathetic territorial pride: SyncKrew4ever, GBlokRule, KodyisKing. As Tamara penetrated deeper into the estate, human voices joined the barks—the rumbling bass call of complaint and soprano response of protest that presaged a marital spat; a baby’s defenceless wail—and above them the choral blare of countless TV sets. Some doors were barred and covered by metal grids; cages with locks on the inside. Outside others were ragged lines of children’s shoes, pushchairs, plastic go-karts—the cheerfully chaotic paraphernalia of family life. One fortress, its smashed front window sealed with a sheet of steel, was so tightly boarded and barricaded that it was impossible to imagine anyone lived there but, as she passed, Tamara heard a murmur of voices and a TV football match, with a hectic commentator shouting over the crowd’s swelling roars. The neighbouring flat, its door painted proud pillar-box red, had an optimistic welcome mat and a plastic trough of hyacinths. The tenant was probably an old person, a survivor of a prelapsarian age when the enemy was the Luftwaffe overhead, not the crackhead downstairs.
There was no welcome mat outside Crystal’s flat, but there was no metal cage either. Her net curtains were cobweb grey, but the windows were not broken, and at least there were curtains. Over the years, as hopes for Ross’s life had dwindled, Tamara and her mother had learned to take comfort from such small signs. Standards had plummeted, along with Ross.
After the shock of his first shoplifting conviction, news that he had only received probation had seemed like redemption. Here was the chance of a new beginning for the family. The three of them would be better, stronger people, back on track after this stumble, reinvigorated, clear-eyed. His second offence, or more precisely the second offence for which he was arrested, had earned a four-month prison sentence, rather than the threatened eighteen months, and, after the agony of foreboding before the trial, their mother had embarked on what seemed like a month-long festival of rejoicing, which had, coincidentally, eclipsed any celebration of Tamara’s A-level success. It really had seemed as if a stretch in an open prison in Northamptonshire was a shrewder career move than a degree course at Brighton Poly.
The Spoiler Page 24
