He frowned, eyebrows coupling. ‘No. No. I’m not having you out of the office for two weeks, not when I’m out as well. You don’t need that much time. You’re meeting Pierce tomorrow morning, right?’
I nodded.
‘You can do De Chauncey in the afternoon, while you’re out. Transcribe both on Wednesday. On Thursday I can take a look at both transcripts, and we’ll know where we stand.’
I shifted from one foot to the other, uncomfortable. Standing suddenly felt like a lot of effort.
‘Come on,’ Eddie said. ‘Don’t give me this. I know you can do it, you used to do it all the time. Come Thursday, I want you back in the office, and we’ll make decisions about which feature to prioritise. I want clear progress before I go on leave, something I can have confidence in. Ready to show on Friday. Important day, Friday. Then you’ll have a clear run at writing, OK? Without me breathing down your neck.’
My ankles were doing a lot of extra work to keep me upright, I realised. I was being undermined – the pleasant sensation of the sand being sucked from under the soles of your feet by a receding wave on the beach, reborn as a nightmare. Undermined, yes, that was it – Polly digging away at my basis, unseen.
‘Sure,’ I said. I wished I had sat down when I came in – it might have looked less formal and professional, but there was nothing formal and professional about falling over.
‘Look, I don’t enjoy micromanaging you this way, but I also don’t enjoy it when you let us down, and when I have the others complaining that they have to pick up your slack.’
Polly – that had to mean Polly. Or Freya?
‘I don’t want a reprise of last month, or the month before,’ Eddie continued. ‘You were in the meeting this morning – it’s a tough time. The toughest. We can’t carry anyone. No passengers, get it? Need you up front, stoking coal.’
‘Sure,’ I said, squeezing out a smile. Had I been in the meeting? What had been said? It was a swirl already, nothing but half-gestures and loose words.
‘Great.’ Eddie smiled back, a comforting sight, which gave me hope I might make it out of his office and back to my chair without total collapse. ‘Pierce is a good catch. How did you get him?’
‘Uh, I’m a fan,’ I said. ‘Quin – F.A.Q. – put me in touch with him.’
‘The Tamesis guy? F.A.Q.?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I thought he wasn’t best pleased with us?’
I shrugged. ‘I smoothed him over.’
‘Anyway, Pierce could be great,’ Eddie said. Even in my depleted state, I noticed this was a bit more equivocal than ‘great catch’. ‘Get the goods from him, something new and exclusive, and you’ll have a great piece. Listen for a strong opening. Once you’ve got that the rest’ll write itself on the Tube home.’
‘Sure thing,’ I said, and my affirming smile took a little less effort.
‘Big week, then,’ Eddie said. He nudged his computer mouse, waking the screen, to indicate that the meeting was over. ‘Real chance to do something great. Make us all proud.’
‘Sure. Great. Thanks, Eddie.’
It was 12.04. That would do. I slipped out of the office. Having had my dreams for the rest of the week dashed, I had no desire to be interrupted over lunch, so I ‘accidentally’ left my phone on my desk. The bubbles, the vibration, had completely left me.
It was about ten to two when I returned. We were allowed an hour for lunch and I liked to do some generous rounding in my interpretation of that rule. Eddie was pretty relaxed and didn’t count the minutes. I figured that if it was twelve-something when I left and one-something when I returned, that’s an hour. The people who left at one wouldn’t be back yet, the people who left at twelve thirty would have only just returned. It was normally quite easy to slide back into the office without anyone paying attention to how long I had been gone.
Normally. Today, however, there was a small crowd of my colleagues gathered between my desk and the window: woman Ray, Polly, Mohit, Kay, Kim from promotions, and even a couple of golf wankers and craft weirdos from downstairs, whose names, of course, I did not know. My desk, with its dank heaps of notebooks and magazines, was not their focus, thank heavens. They were looking out of the window.
‘Walthamstow?’
‘Don’t be silly, Walthamstow’s over there. It’s the estuary somewhere.’
‘Royal Docks?’
‘City Airport? Oh God …’ A murmur of horror passed through the group; a couple of people covered their mouths.
We were on the sixth storey of an eight-storey building, and the windows on my side faced east, ‘offering’, as Wolfe / De Chauncey would put it, ‘panoramic views of east London and Docklands’. In the foreground were the roofs and tower cranes of Shoreditch; much further away, to the right, were the towers of Canary Wharf, and behind those the yellow masts of the O2 Arena; to the left, at about the same remove, you could make out a little of the Olympic Park. On a clear day you could see a distant, dark line of hills on the far right and in places the mercury glimmer of the river. But in winter a grimy white dome, twin to the Teflon tent in Greenwich, was clamped down on the city.
Today, however, a new landmark had appeared. A column of black smoke rose from the ill-defined low-rise muddle of the horizon city. Further out than the skyscrapers on the Isle of Dogs, it nevertheless bested them in height and weight. While their glass and steel edges blurred in the cold grey air, the smoke tower was crisp and shocking, appearing as the most solid structure in sight, an impression only strengthened by its slow distensions and convolutions. It was blackening the dome, pumping darkness into the pallid sky.
‘Not City,’ a voice said behind us. The other Ray, man Ray, was hunched at his Mac. ‘It’s on the BBC, just a couple of lines: fuel depot in Barking. Explosion and fire. Oh, that’s awful. It says here people are being evacuated.’
‘Better than being in danger,’ Polly said.
Ray shook his head. ‘But people aren’t evacuated. Places, buildings, neighbourhoods are evacuated. Evacuating people would mean scooping out their insides.’
‘And that’s the BBC?’ the other Ray asked. ‘Really, you expect better.’
Man Ray shook his head in sad agreement.
‘Are we in danger?’ Kim from promotions asked. ‘From – I don’t know – gases.’
‘I doubt it,’ Polly said. ‘It’s a good long way away. If they were evacuating here, they’d be evacuating half of London. It’s just a fire, a big fire.’
‘It’s drifting this way,’ Kim from promotions said.
‘It’s just smoke,’ Mohit said.
‘When did it happen?’ I asked. I had reached my desk, which put me to the rear of the group, and I don’t think that any of them noticed my approach. Their eyes were on the plume.
‘When did what happen?’
‘Ray said it was an explosion …’
‘It doesn’t say,’ Ray said. ‘This morning.’
‘I think I …’ How to explain about the bubbles? If I said I saw the explosion I would sound ridiculous. ‘I think I felt it … The vibration …’
‘The earth moved for you?’ Kay asked, and a couple of people chuckled, Mohit and a golf wanker.
‘Now you mention it,’ Ray – woman Ray – said, ‘I think I felt it too.’
This prompted a more general and impossible-to-transcribe group conversation about who thought they had heard or felt what, whether it was possible to feel anything at this