One Hundred Names (Special Edition)

Dara, I want you to interview Tom; I talked to him at the funeral and he’s already agreed to it. Niamh, I want you to cover the other writers living and dead: who she found, how she found them, what they wrote, what they went on to write and so on.’
    Dara and Niamh nodded and made notes.
    Pete began dishing out pieces to the others around the table and Kitty couldn’t help but think that it all felt rather wrong. Constance would hate this edition, not just because it was all about her, but because it was rehashing old material. She looked around at the others for their reactions but they were all concentrating hard, busy scribbling down Pete’s orders in their notepads. And that’s what they felt like: orders, nothing gentle or inspiring, nothing to try to coax out further ideas from the people sitting around the table. No questions about personal stories or memories about a woman they all deeply respected, just information from his own head on what he thought was a good idea. Kitty appreciated that it was difficult for Pete having to do this at all and she hadn’t an original idea in her head to offer, so she kept her mouth shut.
    ‘Okay, so that’s that sorted out. Let’s talk about the rest of the magazine. Conal, how’s that piece on China in South Africa coming along?’
    They began talking about the rest of the magazine, Constance’s tribute piece already over. That made Kitty angry.
    ‘Uh, Pete?’
    He looked at her.
    ‘I don’t know, Pete. That all seems a bit … old?’ Not a popular thing to say when people were discussing their work. Some tutted and shifted in their chairs. ‘What I mean is, the Constance tribute. Constance hated republishing old articles.’
    ‘We’re not just doing that, Kitty. If you’d been listening properly you’d have heard that. And we have to look back, that’s what a tribute piece does.’
    ‘Yeah, I know,’ Kitty said, trying not to annoy anybody. ‘But Constance said it was like using used toilet paper, remember?’ She laughed. Nobody else did. ‘She wouldn’t want to just keep looking back. She’d want something new, something that looked forward, something celebratory.’
    ‘Like what?’ Pete asked, and Kitty froze.
    ‘I don’t know.’
    Someone sighed heavily.
    ‘Kitty, this twelve-page spread is to celebrate Constance. We have the rest of the magazine to create new stories,’ Pete said, trying to sound patient but instead sounding like a patronising father at the edge of his tether. ‘If you don’t have any ideas to offer then I’m going to move on.’
    She thought long and hard, while all eyes were bearing down on her. Instead of coming up with ideas, all she could think was that she couldn’t think of anything. She hadn’t been able to think of anything for six months, so she surely wouldn’t start now. Eventually people began to look away, feeling embarrassed for her, but Pete kept the spotlight on her, as if to prove a point. She wanted him to move on; why wasn’t he moving on? Her cheeks burned and she looked down to avoid meeting anyone’s eye, feeling that she couldn’t possibly sink any lower.
    ‘I don’t know,’ she eventually said, quietly.
    Pete moved on but Kitty couldn’t concentrate on a word he said thereafter. She felt as though she had let Constance down – she was sure she had let herself down, and though it still hurt, she was used to that now. She kept wondering what exactly Constance would want. If she was in this room, what story would she want to tell …? That’s when Kitty thought of it.
    ‘I’ve got it,’ she blurted out, interrupting Sarah’s feedback on how her story on contrasting nail varnish sales increases in a recession with lipstick sales during the Second World War was shaping up.
    ‘Kitty, Sarah is talking.’ Others looked at her annoyed.
    She shrunk lower in her chair and waited for Sarah to finish. When she had, Pete moved on to Trevor. She sat through two more ideas pitches, neither of which Pete would probably use, and then finally he looked back at her.
    ‘The last time I spoke to Constance she had an idea that she wanted to run by you. I don’t know if she did or not. It was just over a week ago.’ When she had been living and breathing.
    ‘No. I haven’t spoken to her for a month.’
    ‘Okay. Well, she wanted to tell you an idea she had and that was a piece about asking retired writers, if they had the opportunity to write the story they always wanted to write, what