FICTION:
February 24, 2023
The Inclusive Futures Sector Summit took the whole ground floor of a hotel outside Birmingham, and Priya Raval got there at seven to check the lanyards.
Speakers got purple ribbons. Delegates got grey. Sponsors got a gold clip that snapped onto the ribbon, and one of the sponsors had complained the previous year that the gold clip looked cheap, so this year the clips were brass and cost eleven pounds each. Priya had signed off on the brass. She was thirty-three, EDI Lead at a post-92 in the Midlands, nineteen months left on a two-year contract, and she had learned that the safest place to spend money was on things senior people touched.
By ten the news had come through and the room had a subject.
“Watershed,” said the man from the sector body, holding a pastry he had no intention of eating.
“Youngest ever,” said someone else. “At Cambridge. At thirty-seven.”
“Thirty-seven.”
“Didn’t speak until eleven.”
“Couldn’t read until eighteen.”
“At Cambridge.”
Priya counted. In forty minutes she heard the first name twenty-two times and the surname four. She had started counting at a conference in Manchester two years earlier, when she noticed that the ratio told you more than the content. First names went up as reputations went up. Then, later, they went the other way, and if you watched the ratio you knew before the room did.
Rufus Kenwright had a purple ribbon and a gold clip, which took some arranging. He ran a consultancy of four people and a website with a photograph of a boardroom he had never sat in.
“I’ve known Jason since Glasgow,” he said. “Before Glasgow, really.”
“You worked with him?”
“We were in the same conversations.”
Duncan Vane was director of communications at a Russell Group and did not wear his lanyard, which Priya considered the single most expensive status move available at the summit. He had spent the morning near the coffee and had said nothing anyone could quote.
“We’re looking at the whole strategy again,” Duncan said. “This changes the frame. It gives us something to build around.”
“Absolutely.”
“The question,” said a deputy vice-chancellor, “is how do we find our Jason.”
Nobody laughed. Priya wrote it in her notebook because she thought she might use it in a strategy document, and she did, in April, and it went down well.
Dame Helen Strachan came in at eleven for the plenary. She had run two universities, chaired a research council, and was seventy-four. She took a chair at the edge of the coffee area and a young man brought her a plate of fruit she had not asked for, which she accepted and did not touch.
“Enormous morning, Helen,” Duncan said.
“Mm.”
“Watershed, people are saying.”
“Cambridge has bought a biography,” Dame Helen said. “Biographies are cheap.”
There was a pause of about two seconds. Priya watched Duncan decide it was a joke, and then watched him laugh, and then watched two other people laugh a half beat after Duncan, because they had been waiting to see what it was.
“So true,” said Rufus. “Although I do think this one is real. I’ve known Jason for years.”
Priya wrote down what Dame Helen said. She did not repeat it to anyone.
At the plenary she sat in row four and clapped when the room clapped. Later, on the train, she tried to remember whether anyone at the summit had mentioned a single thing the man had written. She could not think of one. The applause had been for the story.
October 12, 2023
The meeting room at the publishing house was glass on three sides and named after a novelist who had died broke. Toby Fenwick-Hale sat with his back to the river and let Verity Mullan run the deck, because letting marketing run the deck was how you got marketing to fight for you in January.
“So the comp is Educated,” Verity said. “That’s our shelf. That’s our reader.”
“Big shelf.”
“Massive shelf. And we have something Westover doesn’t have, which is that he’s still in the institution. He’s in the chair.”
“Radio 4 love it,” said the publicity woman.
“Radio 4 will do a week.”
Toby was forty-six and had been an editorial director for five years. He had bought two memoirs that lost money and one that made a great deal, and the one that made a great deal had taught him that the story travels and the sentences do not. He had read the sample. The sentences sucked. They were also not the point.
“Any exposure?” he said.
The room looked at him with mild irritation, the way a room does when someone raises a thing that has an answer everyone already knows.
“There’s a retired academic with a website,” said the junior editor, who was the only person present who had done any reading. “He’s been going through the papers. There’s a correction coming on one of them, apparently. A journal thing.”
“A correction.”
“Added citations. That kind of correction.”
“Every subject has a man with a website,” Verity said.
“Every subject has a man with a website,” Toby agreed, and heard himself say it, and knew he had said it because it was the sentence that let the meeting continue. “We’ll do a full legal read at manuscript.”
“Obviously.”
“And we’ll want the mother in it,” Verity said. “The mother is the book.”
Toby said the number. The number was good. They had all been mildly enthusiastic and now they were committed, and by the time they were in the lift they had each acquired a private conviction that they had been the first to see it.
April 18, 2024
The conference dinner in Leeds was in a converted mill with bad acoustics, and Marcus Iyer had been seated at table nine.
He was thirty-eight. Teaching and scholarship contract, no research allocation, four modules, a book proposal in its third year of being nearly finished. He was the only Black man at table nine and one of six in the room, and he had done the count without meaning to, the way he had done it since he was nineteen.
The woman on his left was a professor at a Russell Group with a chair funded by a bank.
“Marcus,” she said, “you must have thoughts about the Cambridge business.”
The table turned.
He had about a second and a half. He knew the components. There was a correction notice on a paper. There were emails from an emeritus who had a website and had also written something against critical race theory, which meant the emeritus could be described as a critic rather than as a reader. There was a university statement of full support. There was nothing anyone at the table had read.
“I think the scrutiny is selective,” Marcus said. “Nobody goes through a white professor’s back catalog line by line.”
The table relaxed. He watched it happen. Shoulders went down around the whole nine of them, and the woman on his left said “quite,” and the man opposite said “that’s the thing, isn’t it, it’s the selectivity,” and someone refilled his glass, and the subject moved to the REF.
He had said a thing he believed. He had also said the thing they wanted.
In the corridor by the coats he found Sarah, who ran the doctoral program with him.
“Have you read the thesis?” he said.
“God, no.”
“Neither have I.”
They stood there.
“If it turns out to be what they say it is,” Marcus said, “then some of us are going to pay for it.”
Sarah looked at him.
“The campaign against him is disgraceful, obviously,” he added.
“Obviously,” she said, and they went back in.
September 30, 2025
Ellie Crowther ordered the lentils and no wine.
“So it’s dead,” she said.
“Killed or died?”
“Killed. Ours died. Theirs got killed.”
She was thirty-one and had two days a week at a sector publication and three days doing communications for a housing charity, which was how journalism worked now.
“The letter?”
“The letter.”
“Carter-Ruck?”
“Do you want me to say the name in a restaurant?”
Toby laughed.
“Here’s the thing,” she said. “The editor doesn’t think about wrong. The editor thinks about a six-figure defense on a title with a sixteen-person newsroom and no insurance appetite. You put the dossier in front of him and he says, and I want you to hear the word he uses, he says: is this the story we want to resource?”
“Resource.”
“Resource.”
The lentils came. Toby had a pub date in his head, eleven months out.
“Is it true?”
“No question. Somebody serious went through it.”
“Somebody serious.”
“A sleuth in Indiana who does this for nothing.”
Toby put his fork down.
“So who publishes it?”
“Whoever has nothing to lose.”
July 28, 2026
The garden in Islington belonged to a woman who ran a foundation, and the party was for a report nobody had read, and it was the day after.
Priya had been at the new job eight weeks. Same grade. Different contract, still fixed term, sixteen months. She had come because Duncan had told her the right people would be there, and the right people were there, and they were doing something she had never seen a room do at speed.
They were sorting.
By the drinks table, three positions had already formed and were competing for the middle. Priya went along the terrace and listened to each one for a minute and a half.
“Look, I’ve had questions about that work for years,” said a man with a lanyard-shaped tan line. “Years. Ask anyone. I said it in 2023.”
“You said it in 2023.”
“I said something.”
At the second cluster a woman was signing the solidarity petition on her phone and turning the screen around so people could see the confirmation, and the confirmation was the point, and everyone said good, good, and one man took his phone out and then put it back in his pocket without unlocking it.
“He’s been cleared,” the woman said. “The university says he’s been cleared. Of the thesis and the papers. It’s in their statement.”
“There’s a memoir out in weeks.”
“There’s a memoir out in weeks and a philosopher on Substack who thinks Black people are less intelligent, and I know which of those two I’m standing next to.”
At the third cluster, near the fig tree, Duncan Vane said: “Our position has been governance-first throughout. We’ve always said the process has to be seen to be robust. That’s been our line since 2023.”
Priya had written his 2023 line. His 2023 line had used the word watershed.
Marcus was by the wall with a beer he had not drunk. She had met him twice. She went over because he had the expression of a man being asked things.
“Two in ten minutes,” he said. “One wants me to say witch hunt. One wants me to say standards. Same tone of voice. Same lean in.”
“What did you say?”
“To the first one I said the Cofnas sourcing is ugly. To the second one I said fabricated quotes would be serious. Both of them went away satisfied and neither of them was listening.”
“Did you say the same thing twice?”
Marcus thought about it.
“I said what was expected.”
Rufus Kenwright came past with a glass of something and stopped, because he had recognized Priya, and Priya braced.
“Awful business,” Rufus said.
“You knew him, didn’t you.”
“I met him once at a thing,” Rufus said. “Conference. Years ago. Barely spoke.”
He moved on. Priya stood there and felt the specific pleasure of a prediction landing, and then, a second later, felt something she did not enjoy, which was the recognition that she had not said a single sentence all evening that she would want printed under her name.
August 2, 2026
The bar of the hotel by the station had four people in it and a television with the sound off.
Dame Helen was down for a governance review and had an hour before her train. She was seventy-seven now and had given up the boards that required her to be pleasant.
“You were at the thing in Birmingham,” she said. “Twenty-three. The brass clips.”
“You remember the clips.”
“I remember everything about that morning. Nobody had read a word he wrote. Twelve hundred people and a standing ovation for a story.”
“You said something about biographies,” Priya said. “That they were cheaper than reform.”
“I did.”
“I wrote it down.”
“And?”
“And I didn’t say anything.”
Dame Helen turned her glass on the mat.
“No,” she said. “Of course you didn’t. You were on a two-year contract and I was on a pension and a damehood. I could say it because it cost me nothing. It cost me nothing and so it did nothing. If I’d cared about the outcome I’d have written it down and put my name on it and made it awkward for someone, and I didn’t, because I was seventy-four and I wanted to get to my train.”
The television showed a weather map.
“He may be innocent of all of it,” Dame Helen said. “What’s your interest?”
“What should I say,” Priya said. “When someone asks me. I get asked four times a week now.”
“You want me to tell you to say the true thing.”
“Yes.”
“Say the true thing.”
“I’ve got sixteen months on my contract.”
“I know,” Dame Helen said. “I can afford to be honest and it’s worth nothing because I’ve left the field, and you can’t afford it. Telling the truth doesn’t pay you. Don’t say things that don’t pay.”
She left for her train.
Priya sat for another twenty minutes and drafted an email to her director about the autumn program, and in the third paragraph she wrote a sentence about how the sector had spent three years selling stories it had not checked.
She looked at it for a long time. Then she took it out and put in a sentence about lessons for our assurance processes going forward, and sent it, and the director replied within the hour to say it was a really thoughtful note.
