Commissioning Editor, London: 9

 

Frank had been gone for days. I saw his smashed eReader sitting forlornly on his desk, on a pile of gently crushed A4 pages that resembled a carpet of fake snowballs. I had been forlorn for days myself, damaged in some soft way since Dorothy had handed in her notice. She was marrying her fiancé Mike Trilling. They’d gotten back together and were pressing ahead with their marriage. His stag do was taking place soon in some patently awful Shoreditch bar but then I wasn’t going anywhere near that. For the obvious reasons. For the reasons I’ve given. For the things I’ve done. It’s what they say. For the ‘obvious reasons’. What obvious reasons? What’s so obvious about it all?

 

I mean, I’m not so proud of the way I’d begged her to stay with me. The way I’d cried in that crappy bistro after she walked out, my tears falling onto a greasy plate of egg and chips. The HP sauce with the lid left off and that brown coagulant making me dry heave into a nearby builder’s hard hat. I mean needs to have his pride, doesn’t he. I don’t put a question mark in where I know I should and feel a small twinge of rebellion. A Madonna song flits through my head, William Orbit putting flange effects over everything in sight and blasting the post-mix like a nuclear missile of conformity. I’m not so sure Frank still had his pride. The smashed eReader was a remnant of our last bender together. It had some garlic mayonnaise behind the screen. I guess it’s a familiar reaction to the extremes of corporate boredom. A post it note. The cold glare of a water chiller moment. I don’t think she had to do what she did. I think a lot of the times we do things we don’t have to do but we call it necessity and give weak, vaccillating reasons for it all. We’re fundamentally weak and self-indulgent behind soft touch keyboards clutching a glass of cheap red wine that reminds you of Christmas and the eternal loneliness of that awful two week stretch of forced jollity and compulsory annual leave that quite obviously culminates in severe depression. For the obvious reasons. Say it. It’s obvious.

 

I make my way to the publishing meeting and Bettina is in there presenting a proposal. She’s coming right there to it, right to the point, coming to the end of a brilliant set of arguments and her book is signed off with relatively few comments. There is a murmur of praise, followed by a murmur of commentary on my richly coloured black eye, courtesy of Frank. He’d hit me with the eReader before he’d dropped it into his kebab tray and fallen himself to the floor, heavily. He showed his age in his tumble, which I half-caught before I clutched my eye. When I next looked out onto the street, he was gone. He’d left one of his shoes, comically and I still laugh when I think of that shoe, inwardly, sometimes vocally, in bursts.   That lonely shoe framed by the milling pedestrians, sipping Venti lattes drowned in skim milk, from those plastic Travelcups, making me want to puke into their fat petulant faces as they rip open another stupid Demerara sugar sachet.

 

We’d come to blows as he blathered on about Dorothy. I think I loved her. I’m not entirely sure, but I think I loved her. I don’t really know what love is? I say that as a question because I don’t really think of it as a statement. I had it written down as a statement in a poem on the back of a deposit slip that I posted into the drop-in box at a branch of Natwest along with a wasabi sauce from a Tesco sushi-on-the-go. Beatrice flits by my desk briefly, smelling of Marcus’s cologne. Her breasts look amazing in a tight white blouse that’s probably one size too small on purpose. I look down at a pile of P&Ls and hold a cool pack into my eye. I check into my Twitter account and I’ve lost another follower since lunch.

 

I like my desk. Frank might not come back to the office this time. He has been unreachable by phone. I tried emailing him: frank@hotmail.com (he got there first, or so he says but I am convinced I’m emailing the wrong Frank all together). He tried a Blackberry for a while but he kept breaking the rollerclit or whatever its called. I got called in by the Publishing Director for a tense meeting. He asked me if I knew where Frank was. I said no. I spoke a little about my childhood before receiving word that I should leave the office. I don’t think tears are unbecoming in the right situation. A man is composed of many constituent parts. 

 

Frank left a message on my phone from a new number. I had a big drink, I am in some place I don’t know what iit is cld but can you tell Bettina that I miss her FRANNK

 

Bettina and Frank – it couldn’t be, surely? Well, at least, I was fairly sure his drink-addled mind was now beginning to free wheel fabricate. That is, just plain tell lies. I went over to her desk with my phone and the text flashed up and she visibly blanched. I went back to my desk, sat down and did nothing else for the rest of the day because I really had nothing else to add to the equation. For the obvious reasons. Go on, let it roll round your stupid obvious mouth. Obvious, right? It’s all so obvious. It doesn’t even need writing, just endless commentary and commentators mastering HTML so they can indent quoted text on the Guardian’s CIF. More books on why the internet is rewiring communication and why we’re so delayed all the time. I start researching authors for a textbook I want to commission and delete everyone’s number from my phone. Dorothy calls me entirely unexpectedly and invites me cocktails and tells me Frank is there and I take to it like a duck to crack water making sure that before I leave I make the paper in the photocopier misfeed horrendously.