Choice, page 2
There are five other books presented at the meeting by other editors before it’s Ayush’s turn. One book, by a ‘mid-list’ American writer, is turned down because ‘there really is no place for yet another quiet, beautifully written literary novel’. An Israeli writer, whose first three books in translation they have published, has his fourth declined because the sales record is poor. Everyone has done his or her homework in the only domain that matters here: sales figures of past books. No mention of reviews, no mentions of prizes, which, admittedly, have negligible traction on sales apart from one or two brands, no mention of reputation, the meaning of the work (this would be embarrassing to bring up), or anything that cannot be monetized (Luke would have loved publishing). Two non-fiction debuts are given the green light with almost indecent eagerness – one, a book on new motherhood, another on why the author made the ‘life-choice’ of not becoming a mother. Both by white women, Ayush notes; reproduction is clearly hot. The book on volitional non-motherhood is based on a blog, the commissioning editor says, and its growing popularity among younger millennials, attested by the author’s Twitter following, should assure high sales. There are the usual formulae to talk about books: ‘Come for The Handmaid’s Tale, stay for Bridget Jones by way of Derry Girls’, ‘Kafka meets Fleabag meets anti–Female Genital Mutilation social activism’, etc. Some of these references pass over his head – Derry Girls? Fleabag? Such a fever of excitement, such hopes of having caught the zeitgeist by its throat. As he tries to dress the words inside him to demur in a way that would appear seemly at a meeting, someone else, someone much junior, has the foolhardiness to murmur something, which Anna cuts short with her tart, ‘High-minded books won’t butter any parsnips.’ He feels that she is speaking pointedly to him. Economics is life, life is economics. Several years ago, during the company’s Christmas lunch, Anna, after a couple of glasses of prosecco, had observed, ‘We just throw things at the wall and see what sticks. This isn’t a science.’ She thought she had been making a joke.
When Ayush’s turn comes, he leans forward and speaks of his book as the future of British publishing, the voice of a new demographic, diverse (the buzzy term used to be ‘multicultural’ when he had started out all those years ago), a voice as at ease with hip-hop and Brooklyn drill as with Dickens, a new voice, he repeats, ‘looking back to White Teeth in its vibrancy and to Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas in the way discrete, disparate narratives come together cleverly to make a unified whole that we call a novel’, ‘a big-L literary work that is also a big-P page-turner’ – in moments of extreme despair, he has always fantasized about selling the last free corners of his soul and joining an ad agency – and it would be a terrible missed opportunity to let this book, ‘so of its moment and so timeless at the same, erm, time’ go to another publisher. If self-loathing had material form, like vomit, he would be an abundant fountain now.
‘Is there other interest? Are there any offers already?’ This from Juliet Burrows, Head of Paperbacks. Of course. No industry is run more by herd behaviour than publishing: we want this book because others want this book, so there must be something in it, but we are not capable of discerning first, we’ll take cues from others. Would Luke have called this a signalling game? Two years ago, a novel Ayush had acquired for a substantial sum, a book everyone had been impressed with, had had its marketing budget reduced to nothing, effectively killing it, when the chief fiction buyer of the biggest bookshop chain had decided not to ‘get behind it’. Whereas before, it was a book everyone had ‘believed in’, or said they had, it became, overnight, something like a leper who had walked in from the gutters and stationed himself in the middle of the office: everyone felt embarrassed, full of pity and aversion, and walked in a wide radius around the leper, refusing to acknowledge his presence.
Ayush is prepared for Juliet’s question. He lies without the barest flicker: ‘I think Jessica said there was strong interest from’ – he reels off three names – ‘but no offers on the table yet. I’d like to try a modest pre-empt.’
There is talk of upper limits and caps. The sales director tweaks the P&L to make it work. Just; Ayush will have to buy it cheap.
Ayush runs out of the meeting to go the toilets, shuts himself in a cubicle and throws up. Afterwards, he spends twelve minutes scrupulously wiping, first, the top edge of the toilet bowl, the seat, the seat cover, then, worrying that some of that acidy toast-mulch must have sploshed outside, the floor, in circles of increasing radius around the squat stand of the toilet bowl. Then he thinks of the Edgar Allan Poe story, with the murderer wiping every surface at the scene of crime until the police break down the doors in the morning to find that everything has been polished to a gleaming high sheen, and stops.
3
All night, he lies awake. At 3 a.m., he gets out of bed and puts the tube-squeezers that arrived in the post yesterday on their three-quarters-finished tube of toothpaste and on the children’s strawberry-flavoured one. Then he has an idea and clamps one on to the tube of tomato purée in the fridge and feels a tiny squiggle of satisfaction run through him, over before it can be savoured. Then he has another idea. He takes the largest mixing bowl (4.8 litres), puts it under the shower, and turns on the timer on his phone and the shower simultaneously. While the bowl is filling, he runs down to the kitchen to fetch a pencil and a small pad. He notes down the time it takes to fill the bowl and turns off the shower. Now he has a problem – what to do with the 4.8 litres of water? Tipping it down the plug hole of the bath is unthinkable. The cistern is full (although less full than it would normally be because he has put bricks, wrapped in the plastic bag that Thames Water had sent, in each cistern in the house). Wait, he knows. He comes downstairs with the full mixing bowl, careful not to spill, and goes into the kitchen. Spencer has followed him; he looks up at Ayush curiously, wondering at this change in routine, wondering if there’s a nice surprise in store – an unexpected exploration of the night garden or something culminating in a chase and a treat. Ayush says, ‘Shhh, we’re not going out. You stay here, OK? Stay. Sit.’ Spencer obeys. Ayush sets down the bowl on the countertop, unlocks the garden door, turns back, lifts the bowl, takes it outside, empties it into one of the two water butts, and returns to the kitchen, very quietly shutting the door behind him but not locking it this time. Spencer is consumed by curiosity – the smells of the outside have flowed in – but also content to sit where he has been told. Something is afoot; he’ll find out in time.
Ayush repeats all his actions, from the collecting and timing of water to disposing of it in the garden. His pad fills up with figures in two columns: time and volume. He lets Spencer out for a wee, then worries that this one-off toilet break will confuse him. ‘Come in, now, come in’, he whispers, ‘back to bed, sweetheart. Bed. Come on.’
Then he goes to his study and begins the calculations and research.
By the time Jessica reports back, four months have passed, Ayush has formally acquired the book, and even the contract has been executed, not something that happens quickly. ‘I emailed to ask Opie for a phone number,’ she says. ‘He wrote back a very polite but firm note to say that he’d like all communication to be via email. I even asked about preferred pronouns, but that point was not addressed. I don’t know how to put this, but there was a wall somewhere in the email – it gives off a thus-far-no-farther vibe. I’ll forward it to you now.’ Ayush knows exactly why she is treading a fine line between feeling troubled and trying to appear to be breezy and unconcerned.
‘But what about publicity, when the time comes?’ Ayush almost wails. ‘I might get into trouble if I agree to this now. We aren’t getting ourselves into a JT LeRoy kind of thing, are we? Although if this is a Ferrante kind of situation, we may get lucky.’ He finds himself walking her fine balance too and hates himself for letting This could be a gift, a new kind of publicity flit through his head.
‘What’s his or her name?’ he asks instead, tamping down his polluted thoughts.
‘Oh. M.N. In fact, another thing he made very clear in his email was that he preferred to be called M.N.’
‘But what do M and N stand for?’
‘He didn’t clarify. He signed off “MN”.’
Ayush had already looked online, muttering, MNOpie, MNOpie, MNOpie. Nothing. A Catherine Opie in the US. Did you mean Julian Opie? The search results show . . . etc. Then he had laughed. Of course. He doesn’t mention any of this to Jessica now. Let it be his sort-of secret.
4
It’s a Wednesday, so Luke’s turn to cook supper. Ayush always returns home early on Wednesdays to do the task of what he thinks of as pre-emptive damage control. He has had calculated by an amateur science blogger the difference in energy consumption between boiling water for pasta in a big pot on the hob and boiling several kettles for the same amount of water: kettle is greener. Ayush has measured out the pasta in a bowl and the exact amount of water to be boiled, the first of four batches, in the kettle. Left to his own devices, Luke would have set their biggest pot of water to boil, drained it all after the children’s pasta was cooked, then repeated the same actions for his and Ayush’s meal later – a scenario that keeps Ayush awake at night. Luke gives them sausages, diced into bite-size portions, and plain pasta with a curl of butter on top, and some petits pois (boiled in the same water after the pasta has been lifted out with a large-slotted spoon, not drained, since that water will be reused for the adults’ pasta). In Sasha’s case, the peas, sausages, and pasta are all served on separate plates since he does not like different foods to touch each other.
Spencer is under the table, as always, hoping for scraps. The children have refused to heed their parents’ repeated pleas and threats not to feed him. It’s a war that Ayush and Luke have lost, not with many misgivings.
Sasha pushes his plate of sausage away, taking great care not to make his fork touch the meat. ‘I’m not hungry,’ he announces.
Masha chimes in, imitating her brother, as she does in all things. ‘I don’t want this, I’m not hungry,’ she declares.
‘What’s up?’ Luke says. ‘You love sausages. Do you want ketchup on it?’
They shake their heads in unison, toy with their pasta, then begin to exhibit the usual crankiness that comes with exhaustion. Later, Ayush will think that he was not paying any attention to what was really passing between them, so he is shocked, more by the speed at which the act is executed than by the act itself, when Sasha lifts the plate of diced sausages and tips it under the table. Spencer wolfs it down snufflingly before Luke and Ayush can react. When Ayush looks under the table, Spencer is looking up at the children’s feet, his tongue out, gratitude and greed melting his eyes.
Luke, who never gets angry with the children, is puzzled first, at the swiftness with which things have happened, then irritated with the way he’s been taken in. ‘Why did you do that? Tell me, why?’ He’s trying to work himself up into a fury.
‘He is canny-vor-es, he eats meat because he doesn’t have a choice,’ Masha says, looking unblinkingly at Ayush’s face.
Ayush turns away, pours himself a glass of the mouth-puckeringly sour wine that Luke calls ‘bone dry’ and seems to like so much, and returns to washing broccoli, chopping garlic and chillies.
Luke still doesn’t understand what’s going on – he is like an actor who has been thrust onto the stage without having been allowed to see the script. ‘How many times have I told you that you’re not to feed Spencer? How many times? Do you understand that it’s bad for him? Would you like him to get heart disease and die? Would you like him to get fat and ill and suffer and die? Would you? Answer me.’
The children look as if they’re paying careful attention to each of his questions, which he delivers in a tone of calm reason, not anger.
‘Fine, you’ll go to bed without supper in that case,’ Luke says, failing to enter into anger and inhabiting, by his characteristic default, especially with the twins, a reasoned gentleness instead. Ayush marvels silently.
‘Bath time now,’ Luke says, and chivvies them up to the bathroom.
By the time Luke comes downstairs into the kitchen, his bath-time and bedtime-reading duties behind him, he looks like a cartoon depiction of bafflement, his brows furrowed, his normally clear blue eyes clouded. ‘What did you do with them?’ he asks. ‘They refuse to continue with Charlotte’s Web.’
‘What do you mean?’ Ayush grates generous amounts of pecorino onto their bowls of steaming pasta with white-hot attentiveness so that not a single wisp of cheese falls onto the table. Let there be a hundred more years of a better, a healing world, if the tabletop remains untouched by a single particle of cheese. He will go blind with concentrating.
‘They don’t want to hear a story about a pig who will be made into sausage. I couldn’t convince them that he is saved.’
Ayush makes some vague, non-committal tsks. He can tell that the children haven’t said anything of consequence to Luke, but he knows that it’s going to come in slow degrees. Now, Luke makes half a joke out of it: ‘If the kids turn vegetarian, you are dealing with their meals.’
Ayush says nothing. In the space of that silence, Luke works something out. ‘Wait,’ he says, ‘are you behind all this?’
‘What do you mean?’ Ayush repeats.
‘Are you indoctrinating the kids?’
Ayush takes a deep breath; if it has to be done, why not begin now. ‘I wouldn’t call it indoctrination. I think we should teach them about choices and their consequences. Certainly about things that don’t appear to be choices, things that are given to us as natural, things we fall into with such ease, such as what we eat, what we are trained to eat. I’d like them to question the so-called naturalness of that.’
Luke is silent for a while, assimilating. Then he says, ‘Sure. But it can’t become costly for us.’
In their twenty-odd years of being together, Ayush knows ‘costly’ is the econ-speak for not just the literal meaning of the word, but also for anything that is inconvenient. According to Luke, people simply won’t do things, or at least not in any sustained way that would make a difference, if you make it difficult or inconvenient, i.e., costly, for them.
‘There are more important things than convenience. If we all thought a little bit less about convenience, not a whole lot, god knows, I’m not asking for much, but if we gave up just a tiny bit of our convenience, then maybe we wouldn’t be in the state that we’re in now.’
‘Whoa, whoa,’ begins Luke.
Thank god he hadn’t said, What state are we in? Ayush thinks. ‘Most of us can agree on something,’ he says, ‘the badness of eating meat, or Facebook – but why are we unwilling to pay the private cost of giving those up? Why has the responsibility for action been shifted to the never-arriving public policy or, in your thinking, market solutions to make that large change? Where has the idea of individual agency gone?’
‘Because individual actions are low yield. Policing how much loo roll you use, going on marches, these things achieve nothing. The change needs to be on a different scale.’
‘You think American Civil Rights protests, for example, were low yield? Market solutions brought about the end of that discrimination, at least on paper?’
Luke hesitates. Ayush notices the gap and rushes to fill it in: ‘We are all so willing to follow the “no pain, no gain” dictum when it comes to improving our bodies, looking good, about all things feeding our general narcissism. What about “no pain, no gain” for the weightier matters?’
You must change your life.
‘The end of that line of thinking is good old socialism – everyone should have enough; if you have more, we’ll take it away and give it to others who have less.’
‘You’ve made several leaps, but I cannot see a moral argument against that principle.’
‘But a scientific argument there certainly is – there is no evidence to support your system.’
Again, Ayush has learned, over time, that this is a gussied-up way of saying that the arc of human nature bends towards capitalism and its foundational principle of ‘everybody wants to have more’. But ‘human nature’ is a term that’s unsalvageable, and in any case too fuzzy, too humanities-inflected for economists, so they hide behind the more sciencey-sounding ‘evidence’. Evidence from where? What experiments or data or observation? How many people? How many experiments over time? In every country in the world or just the USA, the one country that has become the standard, especially in Luke’s discipline, from which everything about human nature is extrapolated? What is evidence? Isn’t it always already selective? They have clashed on these matters numberless times, and every single time Luke has pointed to socialism’s bloody history to clinch his argument, or rather, the argument he thinks Ayush will understand. It’s straying there again, the conflict of economic systems, the insistence that capitalism is science, not an ideology with its own very special, and unfolding, history of blood. Ayush, too tired to retread those paths, just says, ‘But greed isn’t turning out to have such a great history, is it? Besides, resources are finite – how long are we going to sleepwalk through life like this? Where has all your tribe’s fetishization of growth got us? And anyway, who’s talking about socialism?’
