From among the boys the overseers were selecting a skeleton crew to man a single desk, the one furthest from the door. Others, pale, jittery, some making determined faces, some frankly afraid, were positioned in pairs at every entrance. It looked like a newsroom putsch, except that the boys were facing out.

As they took up their posts, the squat figure of the chief was striding from desk to desk around the newsroom’s periphery like a beacon fire passing from hilltop to hilltop. When he passed each desk, the hacks on Travel, on Personal Finance, on Property & Gardening jumped up and fled, leaving only the most senior ones behind to get the paper away.

Will tried to parse what was going on. He’d been right; something big was up. So many people leaving, the onliners at the doors, the reporters like a nest of disturbed wasps, Jeremy uncharacteristically keyed-up, Max driving them on faster than ever – something was happening and he didn’t know what it was.

He was like some low-ranking seaman on the night before D-Day, told just to keep swabbing the decks. Frustration choked itself up in him and he thought: Fine, I’ll just keep swabbing the damn decks then. He exercised himself in condemning what he was working on: a story about a ‘tragedy at epic ten-hour charity marathon’. It was so ignorant. The Iliad was an epic; the Odyssey was an epic; Paradise Lost was a modern epic. Epic was Hector and Lucifer and rosy-fingered dawn and the swift armada of the Greeks. It didn’t just mean ‘big’. And a tragedy was something else entirely: Antigone, Lear, Phèdre.

The Beast, despite being so much more powerful than him, was so much worse educated. And that didn’t seem to matter to anyone. Nor was it just ignorance; it was a cloth ear for any kind of meaning beyond the literal, excepting of course the pun. Only yesterday, Max had given a Health story about falling sales of moisturizer the headline ‘A Farewell to Balms’. Say what you liked about Hemingway – it wasn’t just meaningless, since there was no relation between the two things yoked together; it was simply tasteless to use a novel about war to sell an article about face cream. And the worst was that, far from hearing how it jarred, the other subs had congratulated Max on his cleverness.

There was always ‘something rotten in the state of’ somewhere or a ‘first casualty of the war on’ something. Anything bad in Greece became a Greek Tragedy and any dead painter became an Old Master – categories that occluded the whole complex world behind them.

Well, he could satirize from within, and he and Rosie could laugh together at Max’s expense. He clicked the white arrowhead into the headline box, pressed Ctrl+A to highlight the dummy copy and deleted it. He started to write, feeling vicious:

EPIC TRAGEDY MARATHON

UNFOLDS AT CHARITY EVENT