‘I became editor of the News when I was twenty-eight. You’d never believe it, but your dad was considered something of a success back then. In my “peak”.’ Gordon laughed grimly. ‘Carl called me to apply for a position as a subeditor. Amazing, that Carl would ask something from me. But we had a proper back bench: eight subs, night workers, rebel aristocracy. During the day they were artists, poets, musicians, cartoonists, designers, defiantly independent—though they were all doing drugs, so I guess they weren’t as free as they said. You’d have been amazed at the types. They had their secret language of style, brilliance, dexterity, a folded glassine mini envelope. They left me flapping. They disdained us daytime careerists. They arrived late in the day and remade the paper. They were like wizards; they wrote headlines, they rewrote all the stories, they tore strips off reporters for splitting infinitives or leaving modifiers dangling. The paper you read was the subs’ paper, not the reporters’ and certainly not mine.

‘So I gave him the job. What choice did I have? Three years Carl was back here. And then when the advertising collapsed and newspapers had to rationalise or die, or rationalise then die, the first to go were the subs. We marched them out with insulting redundancies. Carl was too proud to take the package.’

‘What happened then?’ Ben hardly dared to speak.

‘I hoped he would flourish—the still-employed are always the quickest to see a silver lining for the unemployed. I thought that now he’d been freed from a job, at last Carl could release his genius. Only later did I understand that those years on the subs’ desk, his early thirties, were Carl’s prime. Mine too.’

‘That’s not true, Dad.’

‘I thought everyone would see me as the villain for sacking the subeditors,’ Gordon said, without having heard Ben. ‘I braced myself to become public enemy number one. I’d sold my soul to the man, and then retrenched all the brilliant people. But it turned out everyone thought Carl and the subs were a pack of arty wankers. No more over-clever headlines and cartoons! The locals were glad to see the back of them. Hooray for Gordo!’

‘See, you were the good guy.’

‘I slogged away for another thirteen years subbing the News on my own. I was shithouse, excuse the language. No danger of any clever anything. And eventually, when I was on the receiving end of my own termination letter, people were good enough not to remind me that what goes around comes around.’

‘But what happened to Carl?’

‘We don’t really know. Jail, rehab, psych wards. Lot of fights. At least he didn’t die. For most of that legendary subs’ desk, when they fell out of their jobs, heroin was there to catch them.’

‘That’s horrible.’

‘He’s not well, you know? Better a beautiful corpse than what he’s turned into.’