Pravda (27 page)

"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.

Somehow, though, he controlled himself, ignored the echoes of his mother's voice (you would say it, wouldn't you, Ma—you'd just come right out and say it), and tried to take advantage of Pablo's horrified attention.

He repeated himself slowly. "We are not going to fight for this, Pablo. And it's not just the cover."

Pablo straightened his back and set his jaw, as if to arrange himself against the moment of his life's greatest indignity.

"Also, I can see what you're trying to do with the center spread, but it's ... it is all image, Pablo. The copy just has to be bigger than this." Gabriel ran his finger along the bottom of the page, where Pablo had reduced the point size of Annabel's (wretched) interview with a celebrity famous for forgiving her parents to something that resembled a slapdash massacre of starving ants. "Nobody is going to be able to read it."

Gabriel began to turn through each of the layouts at speed. "And—I'm sorry, but we have to have headlines at the top. So pages five and seven, can you redesign? On nine, you've got the body copy running sideways—I think it's sideways. We can't do it. Sorry. Hamish hates all that space. So do I. So does everyone. Okay? Right. Readers' letters should be the same font size—at least the same font size for each individual letter. And Spirited Away has to go back around the right way ... Our readers won't guess that they have to turn the magazine upside down for those pages. They're desperate, Pablo. Let's not make it any worse."

Pablo's eyes were two slits.

But Gabriel had moved beyond care. "The neobrutalist stuff, or whatever it is, that you want to do on the back—well, okay, I'll allow that on the inside back cover. But. But Inner Space can't stay in this ... this galaxy effect. Yeah, I know what you're trying to do—I get it. It's just totally unreadable. And not really that clever. Spiral text—it's for kids' mags."

"I'm not doing it. I'm not changing anything." Pablo was actually crying.

Tears.
This
was a first.

"I'm sick of ... I'm sick ... I'm sick of you squashing my creativity."

Gabriel felt the surge of his furious blood. Beethoven was creative, Pablo—Mozart was creative, Dickens, Dante, Kant, Dürer, Newton, Raphael, Aeschylus, Balzac. Yes, there have been a good few genuinely creative human beings. But you're not one of them. You are not in the least bit creative. You are not even talented. You just have a computer. That's all. The same as every other mediocre fucker whose terrible shit we all have to suffer every second of the day. So let's leave that word "creative" alone for a few decades, shall we? Let's all stop pretending. There are
no
creative departments in London. Creativity is not copywriting or art directing, creativity is not interior, graphic, or fashion design, creativity is not mimicry or doodle, is not gesture or token, is not a clever text message, a new and even sillier pair of trousers, or an unmade bed, it's not your shitty computer music, or your shitty homemade films, or your shitty Web site with a flashing cock. Creativity is ... creativity is a massive and serious lifetime's endeavor to further humankind's fundamental understanding of itself. Creativity is 154 perfect sonnets and 38 immortal plays, creativity is 1,126 masterworks of music, every note perfect, creativity is E = MC
²
, the Rougon-Macquart cycle, the discovery of planets. What you do is total horseshit. Got that? Total and utter horseshit.

And suddenly it came at him like a whetted knife slicing out of the fog in which he was living: he wasn't thinking like his mother at all,
he was thinking like his father.
The journey that he had feared in Petersburg was already under way. Thinking like a nasty, bullying, cowardly, small-time little bastard.

"Pablo—I'm sorry. No further argument about the changes. Just—"

"I really..."He was fighting through the tears. "I really do not respect you, Gabriel. You are a fucking fascist. A fucking homophobic fascist."

"I'm neither of those things, Pablo. And you know that I am not." Gabriel handed his colleague some tissues. The distress of others had always distressed him more than his own distress. He reached out his hand and put it on the other man's shoulder as gently as he could manage. "I apologize, Pablo. You are a great designer. I mean it." He
spoke softly. "But please, can you make the changes? If not, if you still feel upset in half an hour, then let me know and I will do them."

The fat taxi wallowed west on the Westway. All through the late afternoon he had been chasing so-called experts for quotes, opinion, insight ... To no avail. Even down in the thickened sedimentary murk at the bottom of the journalistic swamp, the same rusty old rule applied: anyone worth speaking to was impossible to get hold of, and anyone free to talk or write wasn't worth listening to or reading. He made a vow to go in even earlier tomorrow and track down at least one serious human being whom he might ask for information and guidance with his piece.

November nighttime London rolled by his window—white strip lights in the places of work, amber low lights in the bedrooms, the flickering blue of a thousand TVs.

His mind would permit him no rest.

Everyone said that it was unsustainable. Mother, sister, and the few friends who knew. But, Gabriel told himself, none of them could really understand it, or feel it, because none of them were inside the circumstances. None of them had the day-to-day experience. None of them lived it. No, Gabriel alone knew the truth: that it was
utterly
unsustainable. Because he alone had been sustaining it. For the past eighteen months.

Different parts of the heart—this was the way he explained it to himself. Indeed, this was the way he tried to explain it to everyone. You can love a sister and a mother, both entirely and at the same time, correct? But the love for them seems to come from different parts of the heart. One does not replace or override the other. Like the love parents evince for one child simultaneously with—yet separately from—the love for another, for son
and
for daughter. Or the love for closest friends. All of these loves—real, sincerely felt, ready to be tested—they all seem wholehearted in the individual case, and yet they all seem to come from a different space within the whole. I love my mother with all my heart
and
I love my sister with all my heart. These two statements are not mutually exclusive; one does not render the other nonsensical; rather, they are both meaningful, simultaneously. We all know this, intuitively.

But to take this a stage further, Ma, perhaps it
has
to be this way—necessarily, mathematically. Perhaps this is what it means to be truly human. Because, first, the human heart, where exercised, is found to have infinite capacity. (And if not exercised, then what is
the point?) And second, because there are infinite infinities in just one infinity. This is the great paradox in the laws of our universe, and this is also the great paradox of the human heart. And these paradoxes are as necessary as the consistencies they defy. And that's how it is for me with Lina and Connie, Ma: the love for one comes from a different place from the love for the other. And though I agree—of course, who wouldn't?—that it may not be possible in practice to live like this, still, in terms of the heart, in terms of the reality of my feelings (the only terms that really count, Ma), I tell you it
is
possible. So please, consider deeply. We must all respect feelings. Do not say that it is not possible—a paradox, yes, a very human paradox, but not an impossibility. Quite the reverse. An affirmation of my humanity. Yes, believe me, it
is
possible. Different parts of the heart. I know—I live it: I am the proof. Every day of my life; every day of my life, Ma, I live it.

"Here we are, mate. This is it."

Radio Rabbit was run from the basement of a converted Victorian school in a part of town that some people thought of as Lad-broke Grove and others Shepherd's Bush—nobody was quite sure, least of all Gabriel. No other city that he knew of had quite so many half-secret but long-established side roads, each one of them a great tragicomic story all its own. The car came to a halt. He signed the chit and stepped out. The night was uncommonly dark; the street-lamps did not make it this far up the cul-de-sac, and the rain fell so finely that he felt it only as a gentle film.

He pressed the buzzer at the side of the shiny door. The lock sprang. He felt his heart lighten, then quicken. A security man, a stuffed bear that someone had thought amusing to dress in a suit, nodded him through. Or might not have moved at all. Gabriel was a regular, and after eleven the bear did not seem to bother to sign people in or out. Not that it mattered; they could always burn together live on air. Be fitting, in a way. He passed down the familiar corridor hung with the fifteen or so faces of Radio Rabbit, including, right at the far end, the one with which he was in love.

Honey-highlighted hair that fell straight in careless strands about her pretty brow; blue-green eyes that appeared a little melancholy and yet forever just about to wink; high cheekbones, but rounded rather than sharp, so that when she smiled (and a smile was the natural set of her lips) she had the cheekiest face of any woman he had ever met—a face full of friendship, mischief, passion, and vitality, collusive, playful, understanding, a face forever caught between laughter and a kiss ... And yet there was also a distancing cool there—resolve and firmness in the rise of her chin, in the slight sideways angle of her head to the camera, most of all in the way those eyes came at you from somewhere deep and old as the pool of life itself.