Эдвард Докс - Pravda ['Self Help' in the UK]

“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, D&udie;rer, 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.