A Cast of Vultures

T
HERE WAS EVERY
possibility that I was dead, and my brain hadn’t got the memo. Or maybe it was that I wished I were dead. On reflection, that was more likely.

I opened one eye and took stock. Head, pounding. Brain, fried. Eyes swollen shut, mouth like the bottom of a parrot’s cage. Stomach – I decided it was better not to go there. I’m a publisher, and I’m smart, I didn’t need to inventory further. I was hungover, and, even worse, for zero enjoyment the night before.

I’d been at the launch party for a new novel. It doesn’t matter which novel, because while the books are different, the parties are always the same. We scarcely need to go. Instead, we could just have a drawer full of cut-outs, like those cardboard dolls children used to play with, the ones with the paper dresses with the little tabs at the shoulders to latch them onto the figures. There would be editor dolls in two styles, hipster and librarian. (In both cases, wine
glasses would be firmly clutched in their tiny cardboard hands.) There would be a scattering of publicist dolls, all much better dressed. Then a couple of author dolls, one introverted and hating the whole thing, the other thrilled to be out of his or her own head, lapping up the sociability, because being a writer means being alone most of the time, with working lives that make Trappist monks seem chatty. When the sociable ones are let loose on real, live, breathing people, out spill great gushes of uncontrollable talk. The rest of the drawer would hold the rolling cast that moves from launch party to launch party: journalist dolls, book-reviewer dolls, blogger dolls, bookshop-manager dolls, literary-festival-organiser dolls.

These people are, after all, the reason publishing parties are held. We permit authors to think that launch parties are a celebration of their achievement, but that in itself is fiction. The parties are business, a way of persuading the necessary people that the new product is worth their attention. And, like everything else in the world, resources are not fairly distributed. Best-selling authors get glamorous (read, expensive) venues. New authors that publishers have high hopes for get lunch for a dozen in a medium-priced restaurant. Then there are what are known as the mid-list authors, a phrase that strikes fear into the hearts of the accounts department, or it would if the accountants had hearts. These are the authors of books you admire, but never manage to sell in any number, no matter how hard you try. (It is, tragically, still illegal to force people to buy books at gunpoint. I don’t know why this kind of restriction is allowed to remain on the statute books.) These authors get anything from a small dinner
party at their editor’s house, because the editor is too embarrassed to admit that there is no budget for anything else, to, at best, warm white wine and crisps in the private room of a down-at-heels club.

The requirements for a successful publishing party in London are few, and easy to remember. Lots of alcohol and then, really, well, lots more alcohol. That’s it. If there’s a bowl of peanuts beside the crisps, that’s good, but a party doesn’t stand or fall by peanuts. Sometimes I imagine a publicist’s checklist for these evenings:

The party the previous evening was textbook. It was in one of those Soho backstreets where strip-joints with names like Gentleman’s Relish were slowly being replaced by art galleries and noodle bars and ‘artisanal’ pizza places. (Artisanal means that the pizzas are lopsided, and the bottle of olive oil the server, hired for his skinny jeans and attitude, knocks over has a sprig of thyme in it.) The club itself was in a stately, beautifully proportioned eighteenth-century building that had fallen on hard times since its heyday, which was probably when the dinosaurs still roamed the earth. The annual membership fees of their few surviving members barely covered the building’s electricity bill. So they made ends meet by renting out space to companies like mine. All you had to do was ignore the peeling strips of paint dangling from the stuccoed ceilings, and the gaps in the intricate parquet floors where cubes of wood had popped out. And that it hadn’t been cleaned since before the French Revolution.

Everyone did ignore those details, and the dolls had come out to play. The editor doll was hipster, not frump – he was my colleague Ben, and not only was Ben not a frump, he would never have a frump author, because he would never believe that a frump could write well. And, who knew, frumpitude might be contagious, and he wouldn’t risk that. The author doll was therefore a thrilled-to-be-out, rather than a hating-every-minute, type, and she was happily flitting about. Or, she would have flitted, except that there were so many people packed into two rooms that flitting was out of the question. Nothing except determined barging was going to get anyone from point A to point B, so we mostly stayed in
the groups we’d arrived with, and drank steadily.

My morning head would suggest it had been too steadily. Jake was already home when I got in the evening before. Being a police detective gave him superskills, and he only looked at me for a moment before he opened the fridge.

‘Pasta,’ he said. ‘It’ll soak up some of the alcohol.’

I stared at him severely. ‘Have you been drinking?’

‘No, sweetheart, I haven’t. You have.’

True. ‘But I don’t need to soak it up. I ate at the party.’

‘Crisps are not food.’

They weren’t? I’d have to revise my whole food pyramid. As would the rest of my profession.

Jake clearly felt the conversation was going nowhere. With the water set to boil, he moved to the fridge and began to pull salad-ey things out in silence.

‘Where did that come from?’ It was Friday, and I did a weekly shop on Saturday mornings. There was rarely much left by Friday night, and never any salad vegetables.

‘From Mr Rudiger. He left a postcard on the door to say he had a bag for us.’ I lived on the ground floor of a Victorian house that had been converted into flats long ago. Above me were Kay and Anthony, and their son Bim. They were actors, with erratic schedules. Not Bim. He’s neither an actor, nor does he have an erratic schedule, since kindergarten timetables tend to be fairly fixed. How Kay and Anthony managed their jobs, whether it was nighttime stage work, or daytime filming or advertisements or auditions (mostly the latter), and still saw that Bim’s life went on as normal, was a mystery to me. But they did.

Mr Rudiger lived above them, on the top floor, and his schedule was even more settled than Bim’s, because he never
went out. By ‘never’, I don’t mean rarely. I mean never. In the nearly twenty years we’d lived in the same house, he’d been past our street door only once that I knew of. He was an architect, a famous one, who had moved to London from Prague sometime after the war. I wasn’t sure when, but his career had been entirely in Britain until he retired in his forties, and then, apparently, spent the next three decades living in the flat upstairs. Sometimes he came down for supper, but not very often. Instead, I mostly went up to visit. Mr Rudiger didn’t hold with making phone calls to people who live in the same house. In the rare instances he ventured downstairs, he left a postcard on the door if I wasn’t in. I never texted him, either, because I doubted he had a mobile phone. He wasn’t mobile, so why would he?

But while he wasn’t mobile, he was active, and one of his activities was gardening on his roof terrace. He grew more fruit and veg than seemed possible in that tiny space, and we were often the happy recipients of his harvests.

‘He also said he had some cuttings for you to take to Viv tomorrow, so will you go up before you set off in the morning?’

That was often the case too. Viv lived five minutes’ walk from us. I’d met her when I’d been knocked off my cycle, and she had helped scrape me off the pavement. When I’d gone back to thank her, I’d found her flat was crammed with pots and growbags, filled with every kind of flower imaginable. I hadn’t managed to get Viv over to meet Mr Rudiger yet – Viv not only gardened, but nothing happened for a mile or more that she didn’t know about, so that took up most of her time. I was, therefore, their go-between, and on my way to and from doing my weekly
shop, I ferried cuttings and seeds back and forth as if they were black-market goods:
Oi, mate, I’ve got some tomato plants in the back o’ me van. Throw in a handful of dill seeds, and I’ll do them for you for a fiver
. Or perhaps it was more like a Soviet-era spy-drop:
The courgette flowers have blossomed, The fennel flies at midnight
.

I made a non-committal noise, which I hoped covered my response to Mr Rudiger keeping us supplied with food (good), my lack of desire for salad (bad), my wish that Mr Rudiger and Viv could meet so that I could stop being their courier (lazy Sam) and an acknowledgement that Jake was cooking and I was just sitting there watching him (
bad
Sam).

But before I could act on any of those thoughts, Jake had the sauce heated and the pasta boiled and dished up. He put a normal-sized helping at his place, and a much larger one in front of me. ‘Eat,’ he said.

Cranky Sam took over. ‘Why?’

‘Because you’re cranky when you’ve been drinking.’

This was true. I ate.

Jake wasn’t scheduled to work that weekend, but even so, I wasn’t surprised to find he was gone by the time I woke up. I ran, in a half-hearted fashion, a few times a week before work, but Jake liked to hit things, so he went to the gym on Saturday mornings when I was at the farmer’s market, and we met up afterwards. He’d come with me to the market a few times, but he drove me crazy, buying all sorts of weird food: blood sausage, or cheese that smelt like it had been dug out of the drains. Then it sat in my fridge for a week, because he was working a particularly difficult
case and wasn’t home to eat it. Once I’d made him take his purchases back to his own flat, but that was even worse, because when I’d opened his fridge a month later, they were still there, and their mould had got married and had babies. So we had silently agreed a Saturday division of labour: he hit things; I went hunter-gathering.

There was no help for it. I staggered up, and through my morning routine, caffeinating myself liberally as I went. By the time I went upstairs for Mr Rudiger’s ferry-load I was as alive as I was going to get. He had a few pots of cuttings and a bag of figs from the tree on his terrace for Viv, and extra figs for me, my fee as courier. I have trouble with deferred gratification, so I ate a fig as I headed downstairs, wiping my sticky hand surreptitiously on the back of my jeans. I doubted that there would be any left by the time Jake got back, but then, I was the courier, not him.

Viv lived halfway between me and the market, so the duty wasn’t exactly onerous. We’d got the transfer down to a routine, and I just rested my cycle against the railing when I got to her flat, knocking and calling out, ‘It’s me!’ when I heard her footsteps. Viv was barely five feet tall, and so for her the peephole in her front door was a decorative rather than a functional device. We good-morning-ed each other, lovely-day-ed a bit, and I’d handed over Mr Rudiger’s consignment before I noticed that she had nothing to give me in exchange. That was unusual, especially as we were in the middle of peak growing season. So was the fact that she was hesitating. Viv went everywhere, knew everything, and you’d have to be a fool to cross her. If I had to guess, I’d say she was seventy, but if someone told me she was a spry and active eighty-eight, I’d believe that too. Or ninety-eight,
come to that. What she never was, was hesitant.

So now I waited while she paused for a moment. Finally she said, ‘Do you have time for a cup of tea?’

I dislike tea, but she wasn’t asking me because she thought I was thirsty. I chained up my cycle and went in. Viv’s flat was in one of the many council blocks in my neighbourhood that had been built after the war. She’d told me that her parent had been in the first intake of tenants, and she had never left. Nor did it look like she had ever redecorated, apart from a bit of fresh paint now and again. The rooms were a time capsule of 1950s style: black-and-white checked lino, Formica cabinets and all. The rest was plants, plants everywhere, on every surface, on the floor, on top of the small, squat, bulging refrigerator, on the windowsills, hanging from hooks in the ceiling.

There wasn’t a moment to look closely, however. Viv moved briskly, thought briskly, and had little patience with people who didn’t keep up, physically or mentally. I skipped along to catch up with her as she marched down the hall to the kitchen. That was the only room I’d ever seen for more than a moment, and it was probably the only room she used for anything other than sleeping or a location for more plants.

By the time I reached the doorway, just two steps behind her, she was already carrying the teapot over to the table. Cups and saucers had been laid out, and the biscuit tin was open. Whatever her hesitation earlier, she had planned to ask me in.

I sat and waited while she poured, but I didn’t bother to make conversation. She’d get to what she wanted when
she was ready. It took longer than I expected. She fussed with the cups, passing me the milk and sugar even after I’d refused both, then the biscuits. Those I didn’t refuse: she was a terrific baker. Fresh figs and newly baked biscuits might be the death of me on the morning after a launch party, but it was a hell of a way to go.

Finally she gave a sniff, sat up straight and looked me in the eye for the first time since I’d arrived. This was the Viv I knew and secretly feared. ‘I don’t know what to do. I need some help,’ she said. No wonder she’d been fidgeting. I doubted those two sentences had ever passed her lips before. Viv always knew what to do, and she gave help, she didn’t ask for it, much less ‘need’ it.