Death of an obit writer (2)

Nancy was happy with the piece. She made a few tweaks in front of me, but no screaming at my incompetence or throwing my  laptop out of the window, she was nothing like her reputation. "We'll take it to Sid, the web guy, he can get it up ready to go."

"So you're the guy doing Nev's obit," said Sid. "Are you going to be taking over from him?"

"I've no idea," I said, "I'm a journalist, the original zero hours contract, one article at a time."

"Well I'll take you to the back end of the website, it's where the obits of the undead wait for death to make them live. The login is 'Theobitwriter' and this is the password," he scribbled the password down for me on a post-it-note.

"Won't Neville see it?"

"No, he doesn't have the access to this bit, it's the new system. He's a obit writer, not the obit writer."

"'An'" I said, correcting him, a force of habit I wish I could undo.

"My name's Sid," said Sid, "Not An."

"Sorry Sid."

He showed me how to layout the text on the web system, ready to edit, "Ready to go live as soon as they go dead."

Lunch with Gary was, effectively, lunch on Gary, as he disappeared not long after we got there. "Sorry, have to go, a Minister's just make a career-ending fuck-up. You stay though, it's all on account and it would be rude to cancel a table just because one of us has to go."

"What's he done?" I said. It's usually a 'he' in these instances, there are female cabinet members but they tend not to be as prone to fuck up.

"I haven't decided yet, but I've got a few things tucked away. But go ahead, order what you want, it's on account."

Sid had warned me about this. "You're his alibi," he'd said.

"His alibi?"

"He does it every lunchtime, buys someone lunch, leaves after a minute but insists on paying for the meal on expenses, while he goes off to do no good."

"It's hardly an alibi, is it?" I said. "Not if he's not there with me."

"Ah, there's the thing, he's bought your lunch, on expenses, for a work-related meeting. If the shit hits the fan his legal thugs will gently inform you that you've claimed an expensive lunch on expenses for a meeting that didn't take place, which is fraud, and wouldn't it be easier all round if the meeting really had taken place."

"You've thought this through," I said, impressed by the level of detail in his conspiracy theory.
"He took me to lunch on my first day," he said. "The same day that our Columbia correspondent died in suspicious circumstances during the lunch hour."

After lunch I worked on a couple of outstanding articles. I say outstanding, a previous editor had disliked my using the term.'No-one could ever mistake your prose for outstanding, it's late. Late as in dead'.

The next day I woke to a text from Gary. 'You're in the news'.

For a moment I thought he meant the fake lunch expenses scandal Sid had warned me about, but when I clicked on The Times website I saw my obituary on the front page.

'That was sudden', I texted back.

I received no further reply. I hadn't mentioned Neville's terminal illness in my obituary as I didn't know the details. I read it expecting to find out more, but it just read that he died suddenly overnight.  Probably cancer, I thought, some people don't like talking about it.

A few days later Gary phoned again.

"We've decided not to replace Neville," he said. "More specifically, we've decided not to replace Neville with you."

"Oh well, that's okay," I said, trying to hide my disappointment, "I wasn't expecting it, it was just a one off."

"No, you've missed my point, the official line is that Neville is irreplaceable, but you'll be covering obit duties now that he's gone."

Gary was so mired in the art of spin that he made being offered a job sound like getting the sack.
"Thank you," I said. "When do I start?"

"You've already started. For tax purposes you've been with us a month, it's a new tax year you see, payments to existing staffers are  taxed at a different rate from new employees. So if anyone asks you've not got a new job, you're still doing the old one."

A few minutes later I got an email from Nancy. 'We need an obit for Shadow," she said.

'Shadow?' I emailed back, with a question mark. Did she want me to do obits for the whole shadow cabinet?

'The new Blue Peter kitten', she emailed back. 'Meadow's daughter.'

'No problem', I said. I set to work immediately. The next Monday night I submitted my obit, and the next day I checked and it was up on the backdoor site.

I woke up in a nervous state the next day, aware of urban myth tales of obit writers whose obituaries all mysteriously die as soon as the obit has been written, but Shadow was safe, Neville proved to be a one off.

I watched Blue Peter live the next day and there was Shadow, the blue-black kitten, busy leaping around all over while the presenters tried gamely to get on with presenting.

'Tian Tian the panda', said Nancy's next email.  I googled Tian Tian the panda, I didn't want Nancy to think I was an idiot. It was the panda from Glasgow zoo.

"No problem' I emailed back. 'Tuesday okay?'  Obit writin was proving steady work, one obit a week, allowing me to continue my other jobs.

I got my first human commission next, whose name I also had to google, Cindy Bendford. One of the presenting team of the new cross-stitch challenge show on one of the cable channels. With so many channels now there are programmes about every niche interest and somebody has to write obits for their presenters.  Still, I felt I was being given very lightweight jobs and yearned for something with a bit more import.

' Do you need me to update the obits for the new Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet?' I emailed Nancy. Surely an important and time-sensitive piece of work as a number of backbench nobodies had suddenly been promoted to the highest offices of state and their existing obits, if anyone had even bothered to write one for them, would be completely out of date. Surely having an obit ready should anything happen to the Chancellor of the Exchequer was more important than the Blue Peter kitten.

I didn't hear anything for a few days, other than a request for Hoover, the real name, so google informed me, of the star of the new Lassie movie.

'No need', the email finally came. 'Our political team are on it. It facilitates consistency of message, the public are fed up of reading how terrible politicians are every day then as soon as they die they read glowing obits. It's why dead politicians always score so well in opinion polls, put Churchill on the ballot paper and he'd beat anyone.

I logged on to the back end of the website, where obits of the living lie waiting for their subjects to die. Sure enough, there was a stream of updated entries, the former cabinet, the new cabinet, the new shadow cabinet, the former shadow cabinet, the Blue Peter cat, a cross-stitch presenter, a Glaswegian panda and Lassie.

Someone had been busy and it wasn't me. I couldn't complain though, I was being paid well for the obits I did write and was now the official obit writer for the Times. In the narrow gene-pool which is the world of journalism this counted for something and I was able to increase my charges for my other work by 10%. Of course, I didn't charge much more yet, as bar Neville, my articles weren't in print, but I was only a couple of dead pandas and kittens away from being able to up my fees substantially.