The Worst Fish and Chips in London

Harry worked over the notes from Good Health magazine most of the morning. It was Thursday. He had gotten lucky yesterday. Phillip at DK had been friends with the managing editor at Good Health and had introduced Harry to the man, named Desmond. Harry and Desmond, one a former M.E. the other a current one, had hit it off famously. Desmond had a dry as dust sense of humor that matched Harry’s and they spent an hour trying to top each other. Then they got down to business and Harry got a boots-on-the-ground lesson in how to run a magazine in England. Harry had bought Desmond dinner and a bottle of wine to go with it and they had talked for about two hours afterwards. Then Harry had walked back to the hotel. He had reams of notes to go through, organize, write synopses of and cross-reference. But he had also eaten a full breakfast, lunch and dinner and right now felt that he could easily stand in for a whale exhibit down at the Aquarium. He felt bloated and lazy and wanted to run some of that feeling off. So he dropped his things in his room changed into his shorts and shoes and headed out for Regent’s Park about eight blocks away. Some of the pathways were closed for construction and a dirt trail had been worn away on the grass in their place. Harry took it. It was uneven but he bounced along, working through all the information he had mentally and working up a good sweat for a low sixties overcast London evening. He didn’t pay much attention at all to how uneven the paths were and how many mid-course changes he had to make just to keep his balance. The trail eventually led back to the even pathways. Harry followed one to the inner ring path of the park, sprinted two laps around it, then went home. He stopped at the front desk, not really caring that he looked and smelt like he had just run hard.

“Harry Moss, 307. Any messages?” he asked.

”No sir.” Harry went upstairs. It was late and there was work to do.

***

It was just after eleven a.m. The synopsis was pretty much ready for Lou and Craig to read. He picked up the rest of his notes from where they had been scattered on scraps of paper around the bed, the tiny writing desk, the window sill and whatever other level surface he could find. Everything was put in order and put into his briefcase. He saved the file out to disk and powered down his laptop. The front desk would probably be able to point him to the English equivalent of a Kinko’s. They might have messages for him too. You never know.

The phone rang. He picked it up but didn’t get to say hello.

“How’d you like to have lunch at the worst fish and chips place in London?”

“Chris.” There was a pause.

“Well?” she asked.

"Is this payback for taking you through the Imperial War Museum Sunday?"

"No, this is me bored and not wanting to eat alone. Payback for Sunday is gonna hurt a whole lot more." She could have asked if he wanted to go swimming near the water intake pipes to the Battersea Power station. The answer would have been the same.

“Where are you?”

”I’m at the Hulton Archive. It’s a photo archive on Westfield Road. Take the tube to Westbourne Park Street, cross the street to the bus garage, take a left and go about four blocks. Its on the right, about one building in. It’s got a black marble front with ‘Hulton Archive/Getty Images’ spelled out on the front. Look for it. Its not hard to miss.”

"So you think I have time to drop everything and come charging out there just for lunch?"

"No, actually, I'm only hoping."

“See you in about a half an hour. Maybe sooner.”

Harry grabbed his jacket and Red Sox cap, stuffed the disk in a pocket and left the room. Going downstairs, he became aware of a soreness, ever so slight in his right knee, just to one side of the kneecap. The doorman let him out of the lobby and when he hit the sidewalk the soreness became a twinge. Painful, a bit, but manageable. It was raining again. Not heavily but an annoying drizzle. He put on the Sox cap. The last time he was in London he had been a tourist. A few summers ago. He was starting to lose his hair then and either un-, or fully consciously, began to wear a baseball cap everywhere. Including England which ensured that he was one step away from putting a t-shirt on that said “Hey, look at me, I’m American.” Claire had taken a picture of him riding the London Eye. They showed the pictures to Harry’s old boss and good English friend; Alison. She noted that ‘there was the American with the ubiquitous baseball cap.’

“Keeps us dry in your ubiquitous shitty weather.” Harry had responded.

Harry walked, or now kind of slightly limped to the tube station. The manageable pain had become quite sharp and persistent and was starting to slow Harry down. He worried a little that he had bent or sprained or stretched something in his knee. He worried a little more that, now in his forties, his knees had decided to blow out entirely on him. It was the same kind of anxiety he had had with his hair but now he couldn’t very well put a hat on his knee. By the time he got to the tube station he was full out hobbling. The pain was sharp and intense and unrelenting and he should have turned around for the hotel but Chris was just one short tube ride away, wasn’t she? He should be able to get a seat. It was the middle of the day.

The train got to Harry’s stop and he limped to the “Way Out” stairs. It took a minute getting up them Wasn’t this nice? The road he had to take to the archive went up a lovely, steep hill. Just what he needed to put the cherry on the disaster sundae. Harry had give Chris a first impression of being a pretty fit guy. She’d even remarked on how toned he was. She could feel it in the dark. But now in the cold, flat noonday light her first impression would likely be thrown out for the hobbling, middle-aged guy in a wet Red Sox cap. Harry hoped she wasn’t a Yankees fan as well. He thought about calling Chris on her cell and lying about having to run into a last minute meeting. Then he thought otherwise. They were here, there was a magic to their being together that Harry couldn’t understand or explain but he wanted to exploit every opportunity of it. Granted, you’re in a foreign city, you get a proposition out of the blue and spend a night together like two tigers on Vaseline and you want to beat your breast in a testosterone orgy. But there was something else. Something Harry couldn’t yet fully define. Sure he had checked messages like a man obsessed but he missed Chris. Not just the sex, but her, the sound of her voice, the conversations they had had over dinner. That was what he had focused on. Making love to her was great and he hoped for it again but it was the intimacy, not the stimulation that lit him up. That intimacy was the something he had missed with Claire. Those shared moments with Chris were the ones he would never have if he’d been connected to Claire in any way other than a marriage license. It was why the idea of leaving her had run across his brain once or twice. It was a consideration he was still afraid to face so he didn’t. Fully, anyway. Right now anyway, he was in London, there was Chris and he could figure the rest out later.

"Chris Adams please. Harrison Moss to see Chris Adams." Harry told the receptionist. She spoke into the phone, listened to some instructions from the other end of the line then put the receiver down.

"Miss Adams is in the glass plate storage area. If you'll go through those double doors and continue straight to the back of the building, I'm sure she'll be easy to find. Please don't touch anything on your way. We're not supposed to let in visitors unescorted but I'm sure you won't be there long." No I guess not he thought, nodding thanks. Didn't she just want to come up here? This was lunch, wasn't it? But Harry followed the directions and at the very back of the big box that was the building that housed Hulton's archives, he found Chris.

She was on one knee looking through a box of kraft paper wrapped glass plates. She had an oversized pair of white gloves on, a man's white dress shirt, blue jeans and New Balance sneakers. She looked up at Harry as he limped down the narrow aisle. She smiled and Harry thought her eyes were greener than blue today but what did it matter? They were still the deep pools that he had a crazy mental image of diving into.

"What's with you?"

"Knee."

"Poor baby." She said as a statement of fact. No sarcasm.

"It'll be ok."

"You should stay off of it."

"Not an option."

"Uh huh. You can take the cape off, it's me." She walked the last five feet to meet him. Harry stopped. Chris put her arm out straight and rested it on his shoulder. She looked at him and moved her mouth to his, stopped. Opening her eyes just before what Harry thought was a kiss, she looked at him, lips slightly parted. "I felt the strangest thing today." she said.

Harry cocked his head slightly.

"I missed you." She closed her eyes and pressed her mouth to Harry's. He fell back slightly and she caught him with her left hand hooking around the small of his back. Harry wrapped his arms around her and kissed her back as hard as she had kissed him. No one had missed him in a long time.

"Silly." Harry said, "You just saw me and I just saw you thirty three hours, forty six minutes and eight seconds ago. Not that I'm counting." They kissed again.

"So what’s wrong with your knee?"

"I don’t know. Something zigged when it should have zagged. Or maybe it’s the weather." Chris' hand had come off his shoulder and was being run up and down his chest. Then she moved it over his belt and down.

"Kiss it and make it better?"

"Knee. You're a little too high."

"I'll get there. You've just got to be patient."

"Um. I know we're in an isolated corner of this place, but aren't you a little concerned about being walked in on?" Chris was back down on one knee.

"Lunch. They're all at the worst fish and chips joint in London. But it’s convenient."

"Apparently."

***

Lunch was good too. Chris passed up the fish and chips for a slightly less convenient Indian restaurant that served Chicken Tandoori, eight kinds of bread and plates of yogurt to soak up the effects of the chicken. They washed it all down with some cheap French Pouilly Fuisse and were making an afternoon of it. Talk went to Chris’s work at the archive.

“The glass plates literally haven’t seen the light of day since the thirties. They’re all stringer shots from the old Illustrated London News that Neville published from the late twenties until the war started. Its amazing; backyards, busses, the King, soldiers parading, it’s like a time capsule. He paid these guys by the published shot, but also bought up their entire exposed sets. Went out of business during, what was it, the bombing?”

”The blitz probably.”

”That. Couldn’t afford the paper for an illustrated magazine. What was available was being bought up by the print newspapers and the government so he shut down. Everything stayed in boxes until the war was over and then Hulton found it, bought the entire collection, never unpacked it, just catalogued what he could and brought it to the warehouse that used to be here. They’ve since built something modern to house it all but it’s been pretty much here untouched. Fucking amazing.”

”So what are you doing?”

”A lot of the records are unclear. I’m going in, spot checking but I also want to see for myself what they’ve got.”

“Who for?”

”This time, me. “

”You?”

“I’ve got a few ideas. Some books I want to do. One in particular but I’m getting distracted right now. There’s so much good stuff here. So I’m playing for a few days, looking through it all. Then I’ll get serious and get back to the research and put the book together.”

“You’ve been playing here, then?”

“Uh huh.”

“Yesterday?”

”I’m sorry.” she paused. She looked down at her plate and idly played with a leftover piece of bread. She took a deep breath and then exhaled it. She looked at Harry. “That was kind of shitty wasn’t it? I’m sorry Harry. I should have called you. Even to let you know I was out. I just needed a little space. I’m sorry.”

”Forget about it.” Harry said, suddenly feeling a little small.

“I thought I had freaked you out.”

”You did.”

”Asking you to sleep with me like that?”

”No. Disappearing in the middle of the night right after you did.” Chris laughed. Her eyes lit up and the smallest of laugh line wrinkles formed on each side of her face.

“You mean you’ve never had a lover who walks out on you?”

”Not after I made her come that hard, no.” She laughed again, hoping, as did Harry, that the waitstaff wasn’t within earshot.

“Dinner tonight?”

”Love to.”

”Meet me in the lobby. Seven thirty o.k?” Seven thirty would be fine. Chris paid for the lunch against Harry’s objections. She was stubborn and the more Harry offered to split, the more stubborn she got and the more pointed Harry’s arguments about the bill became. A test of wills, but eventually Harry backed away. Seven thirty was a time he meant to keep. The Indian place had not been far from the archive, which was good. Chris kissed him hard in the rain, told him to stay off the knee. Harry hobbled back to the tube station and took a train to Oxford Circus. He had to fight the crowds but he found the copy shop he was looking for and soon had three sets of his research summaries. He tracked down Craig and Lou on their cell phones and proposed a meeting at the pub up the street for five.

Lou was already there, working on his second tonic and lime, no gin, when Harry showed up. Craig came in a few minutes later. They spread their papers out on the small pub table Lou had grabbed in the dark corner of the pub and began to share their notes.

“The circ numbers hold up.” Craig began. “Everything’s auditable. They are selling what they say they are selling and returns can be verified. They’ve run two single copy tests. A sample magazine each time. They sold in November and then again last month.”

”May. So?” Harry asked.

“Each copy test was tracked. They printed almost three hundred thousand magazines.”

“Recycled U.S. content, but the copyright was clear.” Lou added.

“Yeah. So after complimentary copies and giveaways, they put about two hundred ninety eight thousand magazines on newsstands in England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland. They took rack space where they could get it but cut a deal with Tesco, that’s one of the big supermarket chains over here, to get two time only prime space, right by the checkouts, one for each test.”

”So far, so good.” Harry said. “They got lucky. U.S. magazine space is a whole lot tighter and the tests are run on a smaller scale. Who paid for the print runs?”

”Far as I can tell, Wallace.” ”He’s got that kind of capital?” ”Somebody’s got it over here. Somebody with a vested interest in making Wallace work. Owens media sent over content but that’s the extent of their involvement. No big capital outlays to finance Wallace. They think there’s a market here and they think they can make a go of it.”

”Which is why they sent us over.” Lou said. “So is it all working according to plan?”

“Seems to be.” Answered Craig. “Sell through each test was in the forty to forty five percent range. Returned copies were tallied and the count variance was plus or minus three percent so it all adds up.”

”In other words,” said Harry, “Three hundred thousand magazines go out on the rack, a hundred thirty five K sell, and about a hundred sixty thousand copies, give or take, get counted before they are trashed. No problems, right?”

“Right.” Said Craig. “Doesn’t feel right. But right.”

“That’s kind of it, isn’t it?” asked Lou. “It doesn’t feel right but on paper it all adds up.”

”On paper it does.” Answered Craig.

“What’s missing?” asked Lou.

“He is getting a hell of a lot done without a lot of help.” Said Harry. “For starters, his regular staff is four. He’s putting out 160 pages of edit, granted, his copy is free, but he is anglicizing it and laying it out and picking up new art and photos and securing rights and going to print. All with four staffers. Friend of mine in the business wonders if he isn’t getting elves in at night. Even the U.S. operation runs with about four times as many staffers. And that’s lean and they need to write or buy all their stories.”

“So he’s a good manager.” Said Craig.

“But a lousy sales rep.” Lou jumped in. “Look at his page rates. They’re published and the projected rates are in the business plan he submitted to Owens. I did some quick comparative studies. He could be getting between nine and twelve percent more per page for this kind of ad space at these circulation numbers.”

“But that’s his problem.” Said Harry. “If he’s short-selling, the only person he’s hurting is himself. He pays Owens a flat licensing fee for the name and some, some free edit. Then he had to fill in the rest of the book, put it on the shelves and hope that he sells enough copies and enough ad pages to pay next month’s rent, licensing fee, payroll, lights and so on. He pockets what’s left over or, if he’s smart, plows most of that back into the business so he’s not a one trick pony hoping Towards Better Health is going to provide for his kid’s college fund.”

“I don’t get that.” Said Craig.

“Neither do I.” Said Harry. “He’s a pompous ass but he’s not a stupid pompous ass. He knows he has to make it on what he sells here. There are no subsidies from home. So why short change himself?”

”Can he be discounting ad space until the book really picks up, really takes off and then ad pages come at a premium? Reward everybody who advertised early, nail all the Johnny come lately’s with premium rates? That’s on way to build a core endemic advertiser stable.” Craig wondered.

“Could be.” Said Lou. “But he’s taking an awful big risk if he’s going to pick up premium ad rates from later advertisers. You want to grow your client accounts at the same time you’re growing your circulation. Everybody wins. You pick up some more copies, advertiser picks up some more eyeballs on their page, feels good and then six months later you present solid sales numbers and advertisers are only too happy to pay a higher page rate.”

”Well that’s not entirely true, is it?” Harry wanted to know the obvious.

“No, of course not. Advertisers always want something for nothing. But if you deliver the numbers, they piss and moan a little less about your raising the rates.”

“Why don’t we ask Mr. Wallace himself tomorrow.” Harry said. “We have an eleven o’clock meeting and the afternoon set aside for just this kind of question and answer period. Ought to be illuminating and we’ll start to find out if Wallace is the publishing value he says he is or if TBH is making a mistake.” Both Lou and Craig had finished their drinks. Now that the meeting was over Craig suggested that they order another round, this time something a little more potent.

”Bartender keeps giving our three pints of club soda a dirty look.”

“You are going to have to face down his wrath without me.” Said Harry happily, “Its almost seven and I have to be clean and presentable in a half an hour.”

“Dinner date?” Craig looked at him.

“A pal from the museum.” Lou stepped in. “We’ve done enough for now. Lets take a break. We’ll meet at breakfast tomorrow. Eight o’clock as usual boys?”

”Sure.”

Craig was up and heading to the bar for a proper pint of something. “See you later then, Harry.”

“Harry.”

”Lou. I’m back. I won’t fuck up like I did.”

”I know. But be careful Har. Just be careful.”