‘Which Ray?’ I asked, lips numb.

‘Man Ray. I’ll be taking a lower salary than Eddie was. A lot lower, in fact. You wouldn’t beli— another Errol contract.’ She paused, a strange, intense, faraway look in her eyes. ‘And Mohit will move up to be my deputy, but not for a while, six months or more … the freeze …’ She tailed off again. ‘If we can keep him. He’s not happy. No one is. No one likes doing the back. Sorry, I’ve lost my thread. I don’t know what that leaves.’

‘Me,’ I said. Get to the point. She wasn’t handling this well. What did I care about what Mohit would be doing in six months? I’d be gone.

‘Of course.’ She opened the clip on the clipboard and pulled loose some papers. ‘Listen, your work recently …’

I lowered my head. I knew what was coming, I was prepared, but I wasn’t proud. ‘I know,’ I said, voice failing on me, almost a whisper.

‘Exceptional. Really. I can’t thank you enough. We gave you a tough week, I know, but you’ve excelled, you really have. It’s convinced me that I’ve made the right decision.’

‘Excuse me?’ I said.

She was holding a sheaf of A4, fresh from the printer and paperclipped together. ‘I read this when you sent it over yesterday. It’s phenomenal work, really superb. And you say this is just a start? You’ve got more?’

My lips felt dry, and I licked them. ‘I’m not … May I see that?’

Polly pushed the document across the table. The cover was a printout of an email.

Here’s the first part of the Oliver Pierce transcript.

– Jack

I had the distinct sense of having stumbled sideways into a different world. Could one of my blackouts have been … beneficial? A forgotten patch of preternatural organisation and productivity? There were dreams like that, nasty deadline dreams. You imagine it’s all done, all sorted, and you wake, and … Better than a sweat-soaked anxiety nightmare, maybe, but still horrible. The nightmare is the waking world, the dream the false respite. Maybe this was the subconscious trying to soothe a deeply troubled mind, but it always felt cruel, like a trick.

There were tricks, too, that unscrupulous writers could play, trying to cheat an extra hour or two out of a strict deadline. You could send an email saying, ‘Here it is!’, but with no attachment, having forgotten to include your copy; or you could attach a file with only a title or a couple of paragraphs on it, accidentally sending an unfinished version of the file rather than the (not-yet-existent) complete one. An honest mistake! Sincerest apologies. If you were really lucky, you might not get a reply pointing out your ‘error’ until hours later, or even the next day – or the subsequent Monday. By which time you might have actually achieved a draft. And I was forced to assume that this might be a case like that – Polly might be showing me a blank document or one filled with dummy copy, or a Q&A pulled off the internet and stripped of formatting to resemble a transcript – remembering my recent indiscretions, that seemed possible, or at least less impossible than having actually done the work.