Ayush has the less remunerative job, so he takes the children to school; as Luke says, “Economics is life, life is economics.” As always, Ayush tries surreptitiously to scrutinise the faces of passers-by to see if some kind of knowledge imprints their faces, their eyes, when they pass him and the twins, a quantum of a pause, a double take, a second look to pull together a middle-aged South Asian man and two white-ish children into meaning, but no, he is spared today. After drop-off, Ayush takes the Tube to his office near the Embankment. He works for Sennett and Brewer, part of a vast international publishing conglomerate. Sewer, as it’s commonly known, is a self-styled literary imprint, as opposed to an upfront commercial imprint, of which the parent company has several. Self-styled because that’s the window-dressing. Behind the deceitful window, what everyone would really like to publish are celebrity biographies and bestsellers. But the performance of literariness is important and does vital cultural work (i.e. economic work): it pushes the definition of literary towards whatever sells. Ayush knows that the convergence, unlike the Rapture, is going to occur any day now. Maybe it has already happened, but he’s still here, playing the old game because it still has residual value. Soon it won’t. He is an editorial director at Sewer, second in command to the publisher, Anna Mitchell, a woman reputed to have “a nose for a winner”; in other words, that nous about how the convergence can be more effectively achieved.
He has never been able to shake off the feeling that he is their diversity box, ticked – the rest of the company is almost entirely white; all extraordinarily well-intentioned, of course, but stably, unchangingly white. The very few people of colour there belong to the junior ranks of IT and HR, none in editorial, apart from Ayush, or in management. The way the system works if they make any diversity hires is to leave them imprisoned in junior positions for so long that they eventually leave. Diversity is a gift in the giving of white people; they pick and choose whom they should elect to that poisoned club. Ayush was marked for the same fate until chance intervened.
After four years as a commissioning editor – and, before that, three as the office envelope-stuffer (official title: editorial assistant) – he had got lucky with an author he had acquired for a fifth of Luke’s monthly take-home salary: Rekha Ganesan was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for her debut novel, In Other Colours. Not long after that, he had published, breaking the imprint’s ostensible mould, an upmarket crime-fiction novel set in the Punjabi communities of Birmingham. That had become a runaway bestseller and had scooped up a CWA Dagger and a Costa Novel Award. He heard the words “alchemy” and “golden touch” used of him; he knew that it was not because he was publishing good, maybe even important, work, but because these books were selling. Economics is life, life is economics.
A predictable state of affairs set in after these successes. Until that point, around 30 to 40 per cent of the manuscripts sent to him by agents, he would say, had been by writers of colour. That figure jumped to nearly 90 per cent. Anna complained that she only got books by white women on motherhood, the market for which, both on the supply and demand sides, seemed to be inexhaustible. It was true that she had not used the word “white”, but Ayush knew that the word he had silently supplied was accurate and could be easily substantiated by data: white women believed that motherhood was both original and endlessly interesting; a form of cultural narcissism. When he told Luke that his submissions from white writers had tapered off to almost nothing, Luke had said, “It depends on what was first coming through the pipeline. What was the proportion of POC and black writers you were getting before?”
“Um, I don’t know. Maybe three to four non-white to six or seven white? Probably fewer.”
“Maybe the success of POC writers leads to agents sending more to editors? Or more POC writers submit work and that doesn’t get ignored or buried. The market decides these things.” Then Luke had proceeded to give him a lesson on “herding” and “information cascades”.
“You mean stereotyping, when it’s at home?”
“It’s efficient, if you come to think of it.”
This had, of course, led to one of their usual rows.
Today, from 8.45 am until 10, he has spent the time at his desk sharpening all the seven pencils – always odd numbers – to murderous points, moving them from the right side of the desktop monitor to the left, then back again, nineteen times, to achieve symmetry with the pen-holder – again, seven fountain pens – but the perfect arrangement eludes him, as it does most days, so he sets about clearing the entire desk and hiding the contents in the metal cabinet below. This is easily done as there isn’t much on the desk in the first place. Then he feels the air around Rachel, who sits on his left, and Daisy, on his right, take on that peculiar charge when the young women make a special effort not to look in his direction. On his notepad, he sets down a bullet point and follows it with “Which more water, washing single portion of strawberries or cherries, or w/ing entire punnet in one go?” He makes the mistake of looking at both Animal Clock and Kill Counter on his computer before he heads to the meeting room. His breath races with the rhythm and speed of the numbers ratcheting up, as if his respiration is in competition with it. The list is headed by fish, which is already in the seven figures the very moment he opens that page and advancing five figures, in the tens of thousands, every fraction of one second. What goes up every full second is buffalo, which is number 15 of 17 on the list, arranged in descending order of numbers slaughtered: from wild-caught fish, through pigs and geese and sheep and cattle, to “camels and other camelids”. The clock begins the moment the page opens: it says, “animals killed for food since opening this page”. Luke would be pleased: he believes in the truth of numbers over the truth of representation. Ayush closes the tabs to stop himself from hyperventilating.
Ayush acquires around ten to twelve books a year; for the last three weeks, he has been pursuing a submission, a debut by an author called MN Opie. The agent through whom the work has arrived, Jessica Turner, knew so little about the writer that she seemed surprised not to have an answer to even the most basic question about whether Opie was a man or a woman.
“I don’t know,’ she had said when he called her. ‘The thought never crossed my mind … I had assumed that he is a he, if you see what I mean. But now I’m not so sure. Let me find out.”
Each story in Opie’s short-story collection is different in subject matter, setting, featured characters and the points in the social spectrum they are lifted from, and, notably and subtly, in style. There is one about Richard Johnson, an elderly Jamaican vegetable stall owner in Brixton, and the steady, casual, unthinking abandonment he faces from everyone, from the bureaucrats in Lambeth Council and the local Jobcentre Plus to his grown-up son and white daughter-in-law, to his customers who begin to move their business to a fancy organic store a few metres from his shop. Only his ageing, arthritic, halitosis-ridden coal-black dog, Niggah, is faithful to him. Then one day the dog goes missing. On the final two pages of the story, the man walks the length and breadth of Brixton, from Coldharbour Lane to Loughborough Junction, down Railton Road to Brockwell Park, shouting “Niggah! Niggah!” The passers-by take him to be yet another black person with mental health problems that Brixton is notorious for. The page had blurred for Ayush as he reached the end.
An excerpt from Choice, Neel Mukherjee, Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Random House.