Cloud Atlas

sales! It seemed almost unethical. Yet here I was with a bestseller of one-in-a-decade proportions on my lists. People ask me, “Tim, how do you account for its runaway success?”

Knuckle Sandwich was actually a well-written, gutsy fictional memoir. Culture vultures discussed its sociopolitical subtexts first on late-night shows, then on breakfast TV. Neo-Nazis bought it for its generous lashings of violence. Worcestershire housewives bought it because it was a damn fine read. Homosexuals bought it out of tribal loyalty. It shifted ninety thousand, yes, ninety thousand copies in four months, and yes, I am still talking hardcover. The feature film should be in production as I write. At the Frankfurt Book love-in I was feted by people who until then had never so much as paused to scrape me off their shoes. That odious label “Vanity Publisher” became “Creative Financier.” Translation rights fell like territories in the final round of Risk. The American publishers, glory glory Hallelujah, they loved the Limey-Aristo-Gets-Comeuppance-from-Downtrodden-Gaelic-Son hook, and a transatlantic auction skyrocketed the advance to giddy heights. I, yes, I, had exclusive rights to this platinum goose with a bad case of the trots! Money entered my cavernously empty accounts like the North Sea through a Dutch dike. My “personal banking consultant,” a spiv named Elliot McCluskie, sent me a Christmas card photo of his Midwich Cuckoo offspring. The primates on the Groucho Club door greeted me with a “Pleasant evening, Mr. Cavendish,” instead of an “Oy, you got to be signed in by a member!” When I announced that I would be handling the paperback release myself, the Sundays’ book pages ran pieces depicting Cavendish Publishing as a dynamic, white-hot player in a cloud of decrepit gas giants. I even made the FT.

Was it any wonder Mrs. Latham and I were overstretched—just a smidge—on the bookkeeping front?

Success intoxicates rookies in the blink of an eye. I got business cards printed up: Cavendish-Redux, Publishers of Cutting-Edge Fiction. Well, I thought, why not sell publications instead of publication? Why not become the serious publisher that the world lauded me as?

Alackaday! Those dinky little cards were the red flag waved at the Bull of Fate. At the first rumor that Tim Cavendish was flush, my saber-toothed meerkat creditors bounded into my office. As ever, I left the gnostic algebra of what to pay whom and when to my priceless Mrs. Latham. So it was, I was mentally and financially underprepared when my midnight callers visited, nearly a year after the Felix Finch Night. I confess that since Madame X left me (my cuckold was a dentist, I shall reveal the truth no matter how painful) Housekeeping Anarchy had reigned o’er my Putney domicile (oh, very well, the bastard was a German), so my porcelain throne has long been my de facto office seat. A decent Cognac sits under the ball- gowned lavatory-roll cover, and I leave the door open so I can hear the kitchen radio.

The night in question, I had put aside my perpetual lavatory read, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, because of all the manuscripts (inedible green tomatoes) submitted to Cavendish- Redux, my new stable of champions. I suppose it was about eleven o’clock when I heard my front door being interfered with. Skinhead munchkins mug-or-treating?

Cherry knockers? The wind?

Next thing I knew, the door flew in off its ruddy hinges! I was thinking al-Qaeda, I was thinking ball lightning, but no. Down the hallway tramped what seemed like an entire rugby team, though my intruders numbered only three. (You’ll notice, I am always attacked in threes.) “Timothy,” pronounced the gargoyliest, “Cavendish, I presume. Caught with your cacks down.”

“My business hours are eleven to two, gentlemen,” Bogart would have said, “with a three-hour break for lunch. Kindly leave.” All I could do was blurt, “Oy! My door! My ruddy door!”

Thug Two lit a cigarette. “We visited Dermot today. He’s a bit frustrated. Who wouldn’t be?”

The pieces fell into place. I fell into pieces. “Dermot’s brothers!” (I’d read all about them in Dermot’s book. Eddie, Mozza, Jarvis.)

Hot ash burnt my thigh, and I lost track of which face uttered what. It was a Francis Bacon triptych come to life. “Knuckle Sandwich is doing nicely, by the looks of things.”

“Piles of it in the airport bookshops.”

“You must at least of suspected we’d come calling.”

“A man of your business acumen.”

The London Irish unnerve me at the best of times. “Boys, boys. Dermot signed a copyright-transfer contract. Look, look, it’s industry standard, I have a copy in my briefcase here?.?.?.” I did indeed have the document to hand. “Clause eighteen, about copyright .?.?. means Knuckle Sandwich, legally, is .?.?. er?.?.?.” It wasn’t easy to tell them this with my briefs around my ankles. “Er, legally the property of Cavendish Publishing.”

Jarvis Hoggins scanned the contract for a moment but tore it up when it proved longer than his concentration span. “Dermot signed this f*****g pants when his book was just a f*****g hobby.”

“A present to our sick old mam, God rest her soul.”

“A souvenir of Dad’s heyday.”

“Dermot never signed no f*****g contract for the event of the f*****g season.”

“We paid your printer, Mr. Sprat, a little visit. He went through the economics for us.”

Contract confetti showered. Mozza was close enough for me to smell his dinner. “Quite a hill of Hoggins Bros.’ cash you’ve raked in, it seems.”

“I’m sure we can agree on a, um, um, funds flowchart, which will—”

Eddie cut in: “Let’s make it three.”

I feigned a wince. “Three thousand pounds? Boys, I don’t think—”

“Don’t be a silly billy.” Mozza pinched my cheek. “Three—o’— clock. Tomorrow afternoon. Your office.”

I had no choice. “Perhaps we might .?.?. er .?.?. moot a provisional sum to conclude this meeting, as a basis for .?.?. ongoing negotiation.”

“Okeydokey. What sum did we moot earlier, Mozza?”

“Fifty K sounded reasonable.”

My cry of pain was unfeigned. “Fifty thousand pounds?”

“For starters.”

My intestines bubbled, toiled and troubled. “Do you really think I keep that kind of money lying around in shoe boxes?” I pitched my voice for Dirty Harry, but it was more Lisping Baggins.

“I hope you keep it lying around somewhere, Grandpops.”

“Cash.”

“No bollocks. No checks.”

“No promises. No deferments.”

“Old-fashioned money. A shoe box will do fine.”

“Gentlemen, I’m happy to pay a negotiated consideration, but the law—”

Jarvis whistled through his teeth. “Will the law help a man of your years bounce back from multiple spinal fractures, Timothy?”

Eddie: “Men of your age don’t bounce. They splat.”

I fought with all my might, but my sphincter was no longer my own and a cannonade fired off. Amusement or condescension I could have borne, but my tormentors’ pity signified my abject defeat. The toilet chain was pulled.

“Three o’clock.” Cavendish-Redux went down the pan. Out trooped the thugs, over my prostrate door. Eddie turned for a last word. “Dermot did a nice little paragraph in his book. On loan defaulters.”

I refer the curious reader to this page of Knuckle Sandwich, available from your local bookshop. Not on a full stomach.

Outside my Haymarket office suite taxis inched and sprinted. Inside my inner sanctum, Mrs. Latham’s Nefertiti earrings (a gift from me to mark her tenth year with Cavendish Publishing, I found them in a British Museum Gift Shop bargain bin) jingled as she shook her head, no, no, no. “And I am telling you, Mr. Cavendish, that I cannot find you fifty thousand pounds by three o’clock this afternoon. I cannot find you five thousand pounds. Every Knuckle Sandwich penny has already been Hoovered up by long-standing debts.”

“Doesn’t anybody owe us money?”