Payback (2 page)

He
knew her well enough to know this was long past the stage of being a first negotiating gambit. It seriously was the deal on offer. ‘You’re putting a real bite on us with this, Lydia,’ he said, fighting to keep the weary air of resignation out of his voice. He had expected to go to fifteen per cent, at worst. ‘I’ll get back later today.’

Philip
had been standing beside her, listening nervously. When she hung up he said,

‘You’ve obviously
inherited some of your father’s negotiating skills.’ Sir James Barton was rarely out of the news.

‘I’ve warned you before. Keep your opinions of my father to yourself.’ It was a sore subject.

‘But, just wait and see, you’ll need that guy from Channel 6 one day. There’s such a thing as being too aggressive out there, you know.’ Philip was an old hand. At forty-nine he had seen everything but was now burnt out and afraid of losing his job in the teeth of the bewildering explosion of media around him. New terrestrial and satellite channels along with new digital stations and magazines seemed to be springing up every day. Narrowcasting, not broadcasting was the flavour of the day. And as for the ‘new media’, mobile and on-line marketing ...He just hoped he could make it to early retirement by cringing below the parapets.

‘
No there isn’t. That wasn’t me killing him out there, it was the market. He knows that. So should you, Philip.’

‘
What I do know is that for a vegan, you don’t mind blood baths in business,’ he went on mournfully, not accepting what she had said.

Lydia
knew that he should have got out, or been kicked out, years ago, for his own good as much as the agency’s. He always boasted over twenty years’ experience under his belt, but in reality it amounted to one year’s experience repeated twenty times over. It had taken Lydia just a month to learn even that as a trainee. But it was not just his age. The nature of the business had changed. Billions of dollars’ worth of advertising was now placed by media buyers like Lydia each year in Britain alone with many billions more across Europe, Asia and the USA—far the largest market of all. It was now a big, big business and much more aggressive than in the past. And people moved around so much more. Apart from a small handful of real mates, relationships mattered far less. In fact they could get in the way. But she had seen Philip’s hand shaking and the sweat sticking to his shirt so often that she had carried him recently. Each knew it, but for their different reasons neither openly acknowledged what was going on. It did not fit her tough-bitch image, and he in turn would not be able to cope with being helped by a ‘slip of a girl’.

She
was in no mood to start some shallow debate on her vegetarianism. ‘I need a coffee,’ she said, to change the subject. ‘Fair trade. I’ll fetch you one. Never say I’m an uncaring boss.’

Standing
by the machine, she kicked it gently in impatience as it served up what passed for espressos. Around her, the floor housed the forty-strong media department. There were a few small offices around the perimeter like her own, but mostly the media buyers, planners and researchers had work areas in an open-plan layout. Each was fairly standard, with a PC or laptop, phone, calculator and desk lamp, and like all media units, was inherently untidy—littered with newspapers, magazines, tapes and mountainous in-trays groaning under thick media reports and media owners’ sales blurb. Everyone had a pinboard and this gave them the chance for a little self-expression. Media remains a heavily male, laddish preserve, still somehow cocooned from feminism and the other now mainstream social mores. As a result there were enough advertising stills and calendars of pneumatic women to shame any garage workshop, along with sporting heroes, girlfriends, supercars and ancient media schedules. Philip’s was the exception, and summarised the man. Family photographs of his wife and three children, along with one of his sailing boat—pathetically for a man of his age, an old Mirror dinghy he had built in the garage. As for Lydia’s pinboard, she had a token picture of an oiled-up Arnold Schwarzenegger back from his Mr Universe days, to make a statement about all the silicon babes
she
had to endure around the place. But the rest were magazine tear-outs of animals—especially pigs—along with a couple of photographs of Oliver, her dog, as ever looking cross about something.

When
she got back with the coffees, Philip handed her a Post-it. ‘Can you call this number? The man wouldn’t give his name, or say what it was about. Sounded like a Midlander. A Brummie.’

Lydia
took it and sat down heavily. ‘Thanks.’

‘
You OK?’ Philip asked, concerned about her. She had suddenly gone pale.

‘
I’m fine.’

‘
Is that call bad news? Do you know who it is?’

Turning
away, she made to go back to her office. ‘Oh yes,’ she said grimly. ‘I know exactly who it is.’

She
also knew the bombings were about to begin again.

*

‘So. You will come? Port Moresby is exciting. A big village. You will like it.’ Chancey tried to look relaxed, but like many natives and those of native origin he found it impossible to lie directly without displaying some obvious tell-tale sign. For him that was scratching his head. He did not know he was doing it, but Banto certainly noticed.

‘
Will go.
Kepala
and elders agree to it,’ Banto said, speaking slowly, his limited English very rusty. He did not like Chancey, a man about the same age as him, early twenties and obviously from some other distant tribe. The stranger was wise in the ways of the outside world, however, and his arrival two months earlier, a day’s hike from the main Chenga tribal village, had caused a sensation. Isolated in the foothills of the Madang highlands of Papua New Guinea, PNG, Banto was from a sister community to the neighbouring Chenga. A still Stone-Age society. A short, almost pygmy race, like the Simbai tribe, they had not discovered the wheel, had no beast of burden and no knowledge of metallurgy. Chancey’s bag of magic, therefore, had excited and overawed most of Banto’s fellow villagers: mirrors, mouth organs, cassette players, a Polaroid camera, shiny steel axes, fishing hooks, a pistol...

This
was Chancey’s third, and he hoped, final visit. The 25,000 square miles of unexplored valleys and mountains, home to around a million tribespeople, were discovered as recently as 1933 by four young Australian gold prospectors. But while white men remained fascinated by the mystery or profit potential of the wilderness, most modern Papua New Guineans of the cities, like Chancey, wanted nothing to do with it. To them it was simply an embarrassing reminder of their own recent primitive ancestry. Their aspirations were now to be found in the movies and magazines from Australia, the USA, Britain and Japan. ‘Good. We leave tomorrow. Early. Good!’ He offered Banto a cigarette, but was refused.

‘
No more take?’ Banto asked with fear in his eyes, protectively holding his badly bruised arm.

‘
No more take.’ Again Chancey scratched his head.

Banto
nodded, not convinced, and left him. He was in some ways pleased to be going on the journey, as he still felt like an outsider amongst his own people. When just thirteen, he had been singled out by a white Christian missionary and his wife, evangelist Americans, who had one day trekked into the village and stayed over a month. As their first contact ever with the outside, the polite village elders had tolerated their eccentricities, and many—still out of politeness—had allowed themselves to be baptised, including the intelligent and inquisitive young Banto. During this time the Americans had taught him some English to act as their main interpreter, but when suddenly they left to ‘convert’ other tribes, the
kepala
—the chief—had refused their request to take him with them on their mission. Despite this, his association with the outsiders had left Banto a misfit amongst his peers. It had also, of course, made him the obvious go-between when Chancey turned up.

That
night, Banto slept in the creaking atap wood
longhaus
, in animal closeness with the other men. Females were strictly forbidden from entering: the men only spend time with their women to mate—and then never at night. The elders, their beds by tradition closest to the door, spoke at length of the importance they attached to him making the brief visit to the outside. They knew from other tribes with greater exposure to the outsiders that their own world was soon to change. There had been frightening stories of great creations cutting down the forests, and others carving wounds into the mountainside. And they themselves had often seen the noisy, shiny birds—the
balas
—above them, an unwelcome sight and sound of tomorrow. Banto had been told to accept this crude man’s invitation to visit his big village, Port Moresby, and become the tribe’s spy. To learn about things, and then return and warn them of what to expect, and how to prepare for the battles ahead. It was to be an important mission for his people.

Much
later, as the other men slept, and the smoky fireboxes hanging below the stilted floor died out, Banto lay awake, listening to the sounds of the forest: monkeys, birds and frogs. In the darkness of the fetid interior, staring at the blackened rafters, hung with jawbones of the countless pigs eaten there at feasts, he wished his father, mother and sisters were still alive to help him. But they had been massacred, along with six others, in a ritual ‘Payback’ clan skirmish two years earlier. He had been out hunting all day and found them on his return. Found what was left of them, that is. The aggressor clan took heads as trophies and, like Banto’s people, were cannibals. The inevitable Payback revenge attack, a month later, had butchered eight of the old enemy, with Banto himself despatching two. He had also, for the first time, eaten the flesh of one of the warriors he killed, as a symbol of total victory. The forest echoed with these and other memories and filled him with foreboding about the trip. Something was telling him he might never return. This could be his last night amongst his own people. His young warrior’s heart was heavy.

Chancey
meantime was in the visitors’ bark-walled bush house on the edge of the village. Beside him was the latest young girl he had attracted with his Western magic. As he taught his eager student different kinds of tricks—perversions he had picked up from Japanese porn videos—he thought wildly about all the money he was about to make. When he delivered Banto to the American, Bolitho, and once the tests were checked, he would at last be able to leave PNG. For Australia. Life as a street criminal—a ‘rascal’ as PNG slang over-innocently calls such gangsters and murderers—was no longer for him. He wanted out. A new life. The excitement of it all rushed through his body, and he pulled her head down fiercely by the hair until she gagged, panting for air.

*

The fire roared in the Adam fireplace, but Sir James Barton none the less rooted at it aggressively with the poker before throwing on yet another log. Outside the study window snow continued to fall on the parkland that stretched to the misty horizon. It was even beginning to settle now on the frozen lake beyond the ha-ha.

Cognac
before lunch had become the norm at Temple Manor, and Barton helped himself to his second XO Hine of the morning. Lady Barton, his American wife, Madeleine, came in and frowned at him.

‘
Yes, Maddie. I know. It’s not even noon.’ His big, heavy-set frame made its presence felt in even the grandest of rooms.

‘
Well. At least you’re not attacking the humidor yet. That’s something,’ she scolded half-heartedly.

He
looked at her sharply. At thirty-two, and his second wife, she was some twenty years his junior. Despite everything she had been one of his better ideas, he thought to himself. Her family, top-drawer Philadelphia, had put Maddie, an only child, through all the upper middle-class rites of passage: Swiss finishing school—to perfect her French and Italian—before reading literature at Harvard, followed by a short spell as a classy photographic model. It was whilst over in London on a
Harpers’
shoot that she had met Barton—then a Member of Parliament and junior Treasury Minister—at a dinner party thrown by her godfather. Having monopolised her attention, at the end of the evening he had hurriedly invited her to join a weekend house party in the country before she flew back home.

Whereas
her affection for him took time to grow, it had been love at first sight for his eighteenth-century ancestral home, Temple Manor. Immediately drawn to its patina of neglect, to her surprise she found herself longing to respond to its desperate plea for tender loving care and, of course, money. At the time, ten years earlier, Barton had faced monumental debts—from his divorce, the costs of upkeep, and a Lloyd’s debacle. But then he, like scores of British aristocrats before him, suddenly found salvation staring him in the face. In the shape of a beautiful young American, and her family’s old money.

The
elevation from headstrong American heiress to Lady Barton, mistress of the 1,200-acre Temple Estate had, after their St Margaret’s wedding and Palace of Westminster reception, appeared seamless to the outside world.
Le
style
anglais
was so right on her and, like the young Grace Kelly whom she so much resembled, she had always looked regal. The photogenic golden couple were seen at all the right places, did the Season, and were never out of the society and lifestyle magazines. Barton’s political career was racing ahead, his charm and good looks making him a regular TV face, and with Madeleine’s energy, design skills and capital, the Manor was inching nearer its former splendour. Life had become near perfect. Perfect, that was, until the twins arrived—both girls—and until the scandal...