Commissioning Editor, London: 10

 

The cold glare of a water chiller moment is too much for me after Mike Trilling’s stag do and so I swiftly head back to my desk. I’d been invited because it was typical of the man to be so generous and inclusive, something that I could rarely say for myself. He knew about what had happened between Dorothy and me when they were on their ‘break’. He smiled and shook my hand when I arrived and I felt sick.

 

It was so close to the Christmas period we could touch it, taste it. The scent of nostalgia, mulled wine, mince pie crumbs down everyone’s unwashed red sweaters, and those songs, the same songs, on repeat, everywhere you go.

The stag do itself had started slowly but gone on to be a messy affair. I staggered out of a bar at one am in search of some food and a night bus, and saw Mike staring at the bar in a dead-eyed fashion, his trendy jacket with its brass buttons and epaulettes looking slick in the low, ambient light of the basement boozer. They were playing some mid-period Manic Street Preachers and I felt sad. Climbing up the stairs, I nodded at the chunky bouncer who barely noticed me in my grey wool jacket and black jeans. I had some battered Adidas on and I swore a look of distaste passed across his face as they fed into his field of view. I can’t be certain.

 

Beatrice had been dating Marcus for a while now. They were the toast of the office at Rodberry Publishing, wonderful in young life as Simple Minds would have it. We’d had a good year, apparently, and I’m sure Marcus had his part to play, swingeing young buck that he styled himself as. People genuinely did seem to fear him at publishing meetings, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel much at all. I was usually presenting something that he couldn’t give much of a care about either, so I guess the feeling was mutual. We half expected them to move in together; that seemed to be protocol. To trade their independence, Oyster cards and flat shares for a big fat commuter season ticket and a lonely suburban des-res in Metroland or even further out. I tried not to place too much emphasis on any of their actions because my main concern was Frank and his treatment.

 

Frank had been going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for a few weeks after Bettina had admitted their relationship to me in a pub and I admitted I hadn’t heard from him for a while, in fact, not since the eReader incident and she admitted that they’d parted on bad terms the last time they were out, in fact, not since their own eReader incident, and we both realised that they were playing callow mid-period Radiohead with its clanging, tiresome teenage idiosyncracy and so we left to find him. He wasn’t in a good way. He was functional, that much goes without saying – Frank has always been functional. He’d function in a nuclear winter, that much I could always depend on. The rest of it, I can’t be certain. He was living on his dwindling stock pile of soup and own brand vodka, having long exhausted the milk, the mixers and the fresh produce in his flat. He was remarkably together, telling us both that he was writing his memoirs but was having “difficulty remembering.” He was sat with his laptop in his easy chair, smoking his way through what must have been his fortieth cigarette of the day. The ashtray was heaving. He let me take a look at the laptop while Bettina spoke to him in private in the bedroom, and it read like an illiterate attempt at concrete poetry, gaps, broken syntax and misspelled words, and a narrative that had as much content as a Beckettian silence. I feared for his sanity.

 

This was the result of our endless escapades to the drinking dens of Soho, Covent Garden and Fitzrovia. The empty kitchen, just a few bowls drying the drainer, a bin one third full of empty soup cans and the fridge, bereft of produce, one small unopened carton of UHT milk. I considered the next step. Bettina and Frank were no doubt considering the next step, too, in the bedroom. Through the door I could hear the murmur of voices and Frank’s deep baritone, rendered hoarse by the cigarettes and the stale air in here. I read some of the document, devoid of chapters or a part structure. 

 

“My time at Rodberry Publishing has been one of epic bacchanal in time of dire need of intellect stimulus and I broke all known records in my single-minded pursuit of the honeypot Bettina, emotion physic the time I enjoyed her in the station cupboard was my entire favourite.”

 

The font was Garamond, set to 14. Certain words were italicized, with no real rhyme or reason. I saved the file, and closed down the word processing programme. After some furious chugging, the hard drive slowed down and I shut down the laptop itself. I snapped the screen shut, flush to the case and moved it to the sideboard. Frank’s half empty vodka glass lay on the table, on a coaster. We had to get him to somewhere where he could dry out. That much, I knew.

 

When I had started at the company, as an assistant editor, Frank had shown me all I had needed to know. The almost frantic energy of the man was something impressive, appalling, admirable, all at once. He took no prisoners, calling people out for what they were.

 

“You, dear colleague, are an utterly incompetent buffoon,” he had said, before throwing someone’s stapler out of the window and on to the roof of a passing bus. His appearances at Christmas parties, brief and blurry, were best glossed over. The room was so close I could hardly breathe and so I opened the window. The noises of Central London flooded in, distant Tube trains, the screech of bus brakes, the noise of people in massed humanity. I let the cool air bathe my face, and watched as the room visibly cleared of smoke. In the corner, I spotted a stack of books on an occasional table, part of a nest that were placed at various random points in the room. The books were mass market paperbacks; in between two of them was a notebook. Frank’s name was on the front, and opening it, I saw that it was a small A5 diary with lined cream paper, neatly penned, clearly dated. It was over ten years old. There was fresh cigarette ash on the table and the book had recently been cleaned; the cover had uneven dust covering and a smeary of something sticky that seemed like sambuca. 

 

“I feel as if my heart is fit to burst,” read the beginning of one entry. “We’re completing on the flat very soon. I am planning to ask Mariella to marry me as soon as the contracts are exchanged and we have somewhere to live together. The flat has a great location. Rodberry continues to bore and enthral me, but I doubt the old codger will stay on too much longer. His son show no inclination; I’m sure we’ll be sold to the highest corporate bidder.”

 

I felt a solitary tear fall down my cheek and I slammed the book shut, placing it in my jacket pocket. I looked up the number of Alcoholics Anonymous in the Yellow Pages that was propped up next to Frank’s bookcase and dialled it on my mobile phone, which was low on battery and had intermittent reception.