The next day at work, Leonard was trying to rescue a chapter about the Romans in Britain. The first batch of tracked changes had come back from the overseeing author as an assault of red and strikeout. When he accepted all her changes just to see what they looked like, his word count shrank so much that he could have fitted the whole thing inside a fortune cookie.
In one comment box she had written ‘could we say something original here?’ and in another she posed the question ‘would someone really say this?’ This kind of vaguely disappointed feedback was the norm from overseeing authors who were subject matter experts but who knew little about how kids’ minds or writers’ feelings worked. A game of tracked changes ping-pong required the ability to put up with a lot more than you should. Leonard often felt he was being paid for his patience. It was hard to do his best work when he knew that all his good ideas would be either rejected without being understood, or appropriated and credited to someone else. He tried to keep in mind the advice his mother had once given him, that he should take his work seriously but not personally.
In general, children’s encyclopaedias about history weren’t as popular or good as other factual books. The best illustrators wanted to work on dinosaurs (if they liked hand drawing) or books about space (if they preferred computer graphics). History encyclopaedias seemed to attract illustrators with more mixed talents. One guy could only draw people facing out from the page, staring at the reader, which made for farcical battle scenes. Another couldn’t draw different nationalities and so depicted everyone looking slightly cross, reasoning, not without insight, that angry people were the same the world over.
The Romans themselves were a particular problem. Anything that goes from BC to AD is practically impossible to explain to kids. It sounds like you’re going backwards in time to zero and then forwards, which is confusing for children who mark time by counting from birthday to birthday. Also, the Romans’ long names made them hard to relate to, especially as Asterix and Monty Python had used up all the decent joke names, which was really the only way to get over that problem. Yes, there were the usual factoids about Latin, aqueducts, straight roads and slaves, but they had been overused and couldn’t possibly compete with a Tyrannosaurus attack or a supernova explosion.
Leonard’s real problem though was that the Romans were bullies. The Romans picked on everybody for four hundred years and were only eliminated when they got outbullied themselves by the Goths and Barbarians. To a kid, this is a worrying storyline. You like to think that a bully’s upper hand is short-lived and his fall precipitous and permanent. The true tale of history was worryingly short of comeuppance.
Running out of ideas, Leonard took off his noise-cancelling/society-repelling headphones and went to the kitchenette for a mid-morning cup, even though he always disliked the awkward wait for the water to boil and the prospect of kettle-related time-killing small talk.
He checked his mobile and saw that he had a missed call from a private number, which was surely Hungry Paul’s home phone. Hungry Paul didn’t have a mobile and often left epic voicemails, spread over several messages, which at times sounded like one-man radio plays:
Leonard, hello. It seems that in a world where people compete with numbers, it is the numbers that always win.
Hungry Paul began cryptically and epigrammatically, like a first-time novelist.
Ordinarily, I like to discuss delicate matters face-to-face, but I think it best that I leave you a voice message rather than wait until I see you next.
Leonard noted Hungry Paul’s typically impeccable manners.
My mother and Grace have talked things through about the wedding, at some length and in some detail, and the thing is, the numbers are tight. I mean if it’s a wedding of ‘about a hundred,’ which is how they have put it to me, though I have no idea— *beep*
Leonard was used to Hungry Paul’s lines over-running, with most messages being delivered in series format.
Apologies, I must get better at spitting it all out, so I hope this doesn’t sound too brusque.
He delivered the last word with a lingering pronunciation, and in doing so ended a lengthy era during which he had pronounced it as ‘brusk.’
A hundred is really just fifty each for the bride and groom, which is really just twenty-five for each of them plus the partners for each of those twenty-five. While it is perfectly acceptable for those on the outer orbits of the family to miss the cut, they, I mean, ‘we’—I was specifically told to say ‘we’—need to make the numbers work, as it were. *beep*
As the next voicemail loaded Leonard braced himself for a demotion to an afters invitation, which meant missing all the nice parts of the wedding and attending only the late, drunken bits he disliked. It was unlikely that there would be scope for a commensurate downgrading of the wedding gift, at least not without creating the impression of hard feelings.
So I, or we, were wondering whether you had any plans for a plus one, because I have already confirmed that I will be unaccompanied on the night concerned owing to a confluence of factors, and if you were in a similar position then perhaps we could be each other’s plus ones, thereby freeing up two spots which I am assured would be made available to guests without whom the whole wedding would be, I think the word Grace used was ‘tense.’ In the circumstances, and given that Grace has never asked me for anything, I’m inclined not to be difficult, so maybe you could think it over and call me back whenever you get the chance. I don’t want you to think— *beep*
There were no further messages.
It was an easy non-decision to make. It had been quite some time since Leonard had been a plus one. In fact, these days he was decidedly not himself, so ‘minus one’ was closer to the mark. It had been something of a formality that they had him down for plus one at all.
Leonard rang back and got Helen, who was slightly embarrassed about the whole thing, but who made no effort to talk him out of agreeing to be Hungry Paul’s plus one. ‘So long as I don’t have to wear a dress and dance with him—you never know, I could be your new daughter-in-law!’ he chipped in.
‘Thanks for understanding, Leonard. We weren’t sure how to ask, so I’m glad you’re okay about it.’
‘Not at all, not at all. Give my best to Gracie—hope she’s not too stressed. We’re all on her side.’
Leonard hung up and took off the mask of easy conviviality. Standing there in the kitchenette, there was something about the sincerity of Helen’s awkwardness that had brought it home to him. The ‘plus one’ on his invite, received several weeks ago, must have been intended for his poor mother. The thought stunned him gently for a moment as a man in chinos walked in and made disapproving noises at finding mugs left to soak. In a hurry to get back to his noise-cancelling headphones, Leonard put away the tea caddy and finished stirring his own palpable milky loneliness.