Ithaca (10 page)

He switches on the television. The morning news leads with the death of Michael Jackson and the grief and curiosity it was arousing in a billion people – death as public spectacle. He has never been a fan of the King of Pop, even though he acknowledges the genius of his compositional skills and showmanship, but the star’s passing somehow (for he couldn’t imagine two more dissimilar people) reawakens memories of his mother’s death, deepens the grey mood he is in.

He gets to the office late. He is tired and moody and wants to be left alone but a few minutes after he has walked in, Yanara rushes into his office and says she has a brilliant idea for a book: they should publish a quickie pictorial biography of Michael Jackson.

“We’re not Michael O’Mara Books, Yanara, this is not what we publish.”

“But I thought we were desperate for a big book or two that we could drop into this year.”

“We are, but for the sort of books we know how to publish well. And even if we were to go with your idea there will probably be half a dozen books published in the States before we even get started.”

She accepts his decision reluctantly but does not leave. They have a disaster on their hands, she says, the new biography of the Thames they had commissioned from Sir Reginald Zogoiby, the distinguished geographer and writer, is unpublishable. The book, which has been delivered two years late,
was to have been their high-priced gift offering for Christmas; Zach has nothing to fill the hole should it drop out.

Yanara is succinct. “What the fuck do we do?”

“Any chance of the old boy doing a quick rewrite?”

“He is eighty-eight and practically senile, everyone knows that. God knows why we ever commissioned the book.”

“Isn’t it yours?”

“I inherited it.”

“Well, his last book on the Tower of London made the bestseller lists.”

“So what do we do?”

“Let’s get someone in to tidy it up, and pad it out with a lot more pictures.”

“Christ, Zach, think of the permission fees!”

“We’ll just have to increase the cover price by a pound or two.”

“I bet the book will have the shortest shelf life of any book in Litmus’s history and will be in remainder bins from Paris to Istanbul before the end of the year.”

Paris. Istanbul
. What the fuck is Yanara talking about? His head hurts. He wishes she would go away. He asks her to do so, but no sooner has she departed than Lea, his assistant, says that Maggie would like a quick word with him. He beckons Maggie to come in. She almost pushes Lea out of the way, shuts the door to his office, and says dramatically, “We’ve got a problem.”

He looks at her wearily. “What is it?”

“It’s Ron.”

Ronald Carruthers has just scored a hit with a multigenerational novel set in the Cotswolds. It will be one of their
nominations for the Booker and a host of other awards this year. He is on tour at the moment.

“What’s he done?”

“His publicist, Pam, phoned to say he got pissed just before his event yesterday and couldn’t go on. Fortunately the organizers had two other authors reading that night so it wasn’t too bad, but apparently he doesn’t want to continue with the tour.”

“Damn!”

“And this is the first time Pam has escorted an author on tour so she is freaking out.”

“Do you think she can handle him?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Would it help if I talked to Ron, asked him to get his act together?”

“Perhaps.”

“Is the tour over?”

“No, he has two more days on the road.”

“OK, let me call him, tell him to calm down. I’ll stress how important it is for him to continue with the tour.”

“I don’t think it’s that simple, Zach. Apparently Pam screamed at him and they got into a big fight and now he is really cross with her.”

He is proud of Litmus’s publicists. Hard-working and conscientious for the most part, they valiantly put up with an enormous workload, a punishing schedule, a largely indifferent media, ungrateful authors, and demanding editors, with grace and good humour. Because they spend a lot of time with authors, they are often at the receiving end of atrocious behaviour.

“This is crazy. Who do we have who could replace her?”

“Mark should be good with Ron.”

“So why didn’t we use him in the first place?”

“Come on, Zach, you know that he and all the other publicists are run off their feet!”

“OK, OK, get Pam back to London immediately and send Mark up there to relieve her. I’ll talk to Ron meanwhile, pacify him.”

“That should do it.”

“OK, I’ll ask Lea to get Ron on the phone.”

No sooner has Maggie left than Yanara is back.

“It has to go!”

“What?”

“That creature pretending to be Janice is actually a vile zombie pretending to be a human being.”

“For heaven’s sake, Yanara, I have a busy day ahead.”

“You’re not the one being asphyxiated, so obviously you don’t care.”

“Yanara!”

“It’s my new temp, she has the most godawful BO and I can’t bear it, I simply can’t.”

“Why don’t you go to Naomi?”

“You’re my boss.”

“Well, OK, why don’t you just talk to her about it without being offensive?”

“And be fired for personal discrimination or something like that? I think we should have an official policy about it, I hear in some New York offices they have a perfume policy, your perfume can’t offend the person sitting next to you.”

“Yanara!”

“Oh, all right.”

Then Rachel is at the door just as his phone rings. He picks up the phone and holds up his other hand to tell Rachel to wait. Lea tells him that Albert Wallace wants to talk to him urgently. He groans – Albert is quite possibly the worst agent in London, but in accordance with the law that says idiots will every now and again snag first-rate authors he represents Boris Gaponenko, one of the hottest young writers in London, and the other writer on their list they intend to nominate for the Booker. He mouths “Albert Wallace” to Rachel and is about to take the call when his fiction editor waves her arms about, gesturing to him to put the phone down. He tells Lea he will speak to Albert later and turns to face Rachel.

“He’ll want to talk to you about the talking chicken.”

“What?”

“Boris has a talking chicken in his novel and I’ve asked him to take it out.”

“Kafka did OK with a cockroach.”

“This is not
Metamorphosis
. Halfway through the novel a chicken on the protagonist’s farm abruptly starts talking in Latin – it’s supposed to be a narrative device to take the character back into the past, or a metaphor for the dumbness of the twenty-first century, I’m not sure what, but it’s ludicrous, completely implausible. The reviewers will rip the book to shreds, but Boris refuses to listen to reason.”

Rachel is a thoughtful, skilled editor who doesn’t tamper with manuscripts unnecessarily; if she wants to chicken out
it must be with good reason, but Boris is a star and if he wants the chicken in everyone has a problem.

“Let me take a look at the manuscript,” he says irritably.

By the time he gets to Orso, where he is meeting Julia for lunch, his spirits have sunk to his toes. He would have taken the rest of the day off except he feels that a meeting with Julia might be the only thing that can salvage his day. In the taxi over he remembers with gratitude how, when he returned to London from his mother’s funeral, she would arrive every evening after work to eat dinner with him, talk, just be around for him. She had done this for a month – essentially putting her life on hold until he could get going again. Why did he ever let her go?

The low-ceilinged restaurant is full of publishing types doing a last bit of business before they take off for the summer. He spots a top agent from Curtis Brown in a corner with a glamorous South Asian woman. An executive from Faber deep in discussion with an author who is expected to win the Nobel within the next five years. A table of Hachette editors. He greets a couple of people he knows as he makes his way to where Julia is waiting.

“Hey, have you seen the wall-to-wall coverage of MJ’s death?” she asks as he sits down.

“Yeah, apparently more people tuned in for news about it than for any other event since Princess Di’s funeral. The massive interest almost single-handedly crashed the Internet, isn’t that something?” he says grumpily.

“Is everything OK?”

He could talk about his need to get back with her, but this is not the time to do it; when he gets into one of his moods, he is too aggressive, too selfish about his own needs, it scares people off. With an effort he pushes the darkness aside, musters a smile, tries to interest himself in what she is saying. One of her closest friends, Laura, who works for one of the Big Seven companies is afraid she is going to be laid off in the autumn, there are rumours that all the big companies are planning another round of job cuts. He wants to tell her about Fiona, how awful he felt letting her go, but he doesn’t, because he knows she will see it differently from him. He can hear the exact words:
It’s not always about you, Zach! So you think it was tough for you, have you thought about what it might have been like for Fiona?

Their conversation veers to happier things. She brings him up to date with the latest gossip; she is incredibly well connected with the younger editors in London and nothing escapes them. For some years now a group of about fifty editors under forty (this is not a formal organization like the Society of Young Publishers) from across the publishing spectrum have voted annually on the worst-behaved author to be published that year, and this year the prize has gone to a much loved YA author who has a pristine image in public but is apparently a grade A bitch with her editors, assistants, and publicists. The award does not make the trade papers or the mainstream media – if it did heads would roll – but at Christmas the mystified and enraged author will receive an appropriate gift from an anonymous fan that all the editors
have contributed to (the current thinking is that Miss V—should receive a life-size marzipan capuchin monkey making a rude gesture – the publicist the suggestion came from is an enthusiastic and accomplished baker). She then tells him her UEA star has sold for a healthy sum to a Big Seven imprint and that she is preparing the ground for a big push at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Her enthusiasm for her author is palpable. Being an agent suits her, he thinks. She isn’t yet one of the superstar agents like David Godwin with his stable of prize-winning talent, jetting off to Delhi or Durban to snap up the next big international attraction, and she may never be, but her ability to spot talent, and more importantly nurture it, will ensure she makes her mark on the publishing scene.

“So why didn’t you sell us the book? I know Rachel was really keen.”

“You know why, you guys didn’t offer enough. Besides you wouldn’t budge on your ebook royalties, they were willing to offer more than twenty-five per cent of net receipts.”

“Come on, Julia, it’s the industry standard.”

“According to whom? Just because five or six of the big publishers get together and decide on something doesn’t make it fair or right. You have a tiny production cost attached, no distribution costs.”

“But we still have all the other costs, the cost of acquisition, selling, marketing, and editorial costs. And, of course, the cost of making printed books, which still accounts for the majority of an author’s revenue. So you can’t just treat ebooks in isolation.”

“So what will you do when ebooks constitute fifty per cent of sales within five years, as some people think?”

“We’ll think of something.”

“I don’t get it,” she says, “why must you people be dragged kicking and screaming towards a conclusion that everyone can see is inevitable – whether it’s this year or two years from now you are going to have to give authors a higher ebook royalty.”

“So that people like Laura can keep their jobs for a couple of years more,” he snaps, regretting the comment the minute it emerges from his mouth. Julia colours and turns her attention to the halibut on her plate.

Why does everything have to be so difficult? he thinks disconsolately. During his long walks through the pine-scented mountains of Paro, the way ahead seemed so clear, with Julia, with Litmus, with Mandy; now all the issues that he thought he could isolate and deal with neatly have begun to merge with one another and he appears to be rapidly going backwards to where he started. Let me at least salvage this lunch, he resolves, and forces himself to talk lightly and entertainingly about Bhutan, talking chickens, and a collie named Plasma. They part civilly enough, but he knows there is going to be a lot of work ahead if he is ever going to get together again with Julia.