You Don't Have To Be Evil To Work Here, But It Helps (3 page)

Then to bed. He’d got the latest John Grisham from the library a day or so back, but for once the poet’s magic was failing to enthral him. He read the same paragraph three times, stuck a Switch receipt in it for a bookmark and laid it by. He wasn’t sleepy but he turned out the light anyway and closed his eyes. Lying in the dark, he fancied he could hear voices - not a Joan of Arc moment necessarily, because Dad’s study-was in the loft conversion directly overhead, and one of the voices could well be the old man’s rumbling growl. The other one sounded feminine, but he couldn’t make out any more than that. The nice-looking female, he thought, and then his stream of consciousness flowed out into the delta of drowsiness. He fell asleep, and so presumably what followed was a dream.

There was this girl, for a start. Annoyingly, Colin couldn’t see her face - either it was turned away from him or masked from view by the stupid great big hat she was wearing for some reason - but apparently he knew who she was; in fact, as far as he could make out, he was in love with her and (yes, definitely a dream, although somehow it felt more like a memory) she was in love with him. They were strolling beside a river, up and down which young men in straw hats were propelling ditzy-looking boats by means of long, wet sticks. He wished that his dream-viewpoint allowed him to get a good look at the clothes he was wearing, because he had a feeling they were strange and old-fashioned, like the clobber the girl had on. Curious; he had to flounder about in the very back of his subconscious mind before he realised that it was straight out of Mary Poppins, a film he’d slept through once many years ago. If the mental pictures he was creating for himself had been refluxed through the hiatus hernia of memory, it was an intriguing comment on his jackdaw mind.

Minutiae of female costume had never interested him in the least; but he was prepared to bet good money that the outfit the girl was wearing was historically accurate down to the last frill and button (although when the historical period thus faithfully recreated was, he had no idea). Not, of course, that it really mattered. The unusual and arresting feature of this dream, surely, was the girl who actually liked him back, in spite of having known him for more than ten minutes.

It got better. He couldn’t see her face, of course, so maybe she looked like a springer spaniel under all that hat, but she had a lovely voice and a wonderful sense of humour - she hadn’t said anything funny yet, but apparently that was part of the backstory -and it was obvious that just being in her company was the most wonderful thing ever. Here was a girl you could talk to all day and never realise how the time was passing, a girl who saw the world in a wonderfully refreshing different way, a girl he was enchanted by and absolutely at home with at the same time— Fine, it was just a dream, and even at its best real life isn’t ever like that (and if it was, ten minutes of it’d be enough to make you want to throw up). Nevertheless, it wasn’t at all like his usual kind of dream. For one thing, he wasn’t trying to play the cello with no clothes on in front of an audience of his relations, enemies and former headmasters. For another, he never had dreams about girls.

One of the ditzy-looking boats pulled in to the bank, and its passengers climbed out. Ah, he thought, that’s more like it. Goblins. Normal service has been resumed, we apologise for any inconvenience.

But the goblins simply strolled past, chatting pleasantly among themselves, pausing very briefly to tip their hats politely to him in a charmingly old-fashioned, courteous kind of way. He reciprocated; the goblins went on their way, chatting about the century that Fry had just made at the Oval.

Century. That was cricket, wasn’t it? Colin despised cricket, much as a cat relates badly to water. Arguably that made sense, within the dream’s own frame of reference. He didn’t like goblins much, either (not that he’d ever encountered one, because of course there’s no such thing) so it kind of followed that they’d like a game that gave him a pain in the bum. Dream logic. So that was all right.

Let’s sit down on the bench, the girl was saying, and feed the ducks. There was a bench. There were ducks. In his hand he discovered a brown paper bag full of little bits of stale bread.

Bloody odd dream, since he didn’t like ducks much either.

Colin opened the bag and offered it to her, she took a handful of stale bits and hurled them daintily onto the surface of the water. The ducks closed in, like cruisers cornering the Bismarck. So far, apparently, so idyllic.

But then she turned her face toward him (didn’t he know her from somewhere? No, but her face was completely familiar all the same) and looked him in the eye. That made her uncomfortable; she looked away, folded her hands in her lap. I’ve been thinking a lot lately, she said, about us.

(Two ducks were racing for the nearest chunk of floating bread. One of them, mottled brown, beat the other, sort of blue-greeny grey, by a short head.)

Oh yes? he said. Stupid thing to say.

Yes, she said, and - hesitation. Her voice wobbled a bit as she said. And I don’t think it’s going to work. You and me, I mean. I just don’t think we’re right for each other.

(Not to worry. Only a dream. Cheese on toast before going to bed.)

You can’t mean that, he heard himself say.

I’m sorry, she replied (in a dream, the people speak but you hear the words inside your head). I suppose I’ve known it for some time now, but I pretended it wasn’t true. I thought I could make it work, but I can’t. I’m just not the person you think I am.

(And if all this was cribbed straight out of Mary Poppins along with the sets and costumes, it must’ve been one of the bits that he’d slept through, because it didn’t ring any bells at all.) That’s simply not true, he was saying - hurt, incredulous, angry - we get on so well together, I’ve never felt like this with anybody else and I know you feel the same really, you must just be—

No. (A passing goblin turns to stare, then looks away hurriedly in embarrassment.) No, we’ve got to stop lying to ourselves, it only makes it worse. We’ve got to face it, we can’t go on like this any more. It’s just wishful thinking. If I could make myself love you, I would; but I can’t, and that’s all there is to it.

On balance, Colin decided, he preferred the cello-playing dream, even the version with the goblins and the pack of red-eyed howling wolves. At any rate, this would be a good moment for him to wake up, bolt upright, bathed in sweat, tangle of bedclothes in a white-knuckle grip. Please?

I don’t know what to say, he replied, perfectly truthfully. This is such a bolt from the blue. I thought— Damn it, we’re supposed to be getting married in a fortnight’s time. (A dream with plot twists; sophisticated or what?) We’ve made all the arrangements. What am I going to tell my parents?

I said I’m sorry, she was saying. I know, it’s my fault, I should’ve said something before now. I should’ve known it’d upset you dreadfully. Maybe that’s why I kept putting it off, because I really don’t want to hurt you. But you can see, can’t you—?

No. Colin opened his eyes. He was sitting bolt upright, all sweaty, hands gripping the duvet cover; it took him several seconds to make sure that he wasn’t still sitting on a bench beside a river, feeding disgusting ducks. Once he was sure that he was safely back in reality, he switched on the light and hopped out of bed. No sound of voices coming through the ceiling. He checked the time; a quarter to midnight.

He padded up the stairs, past the upper section of tree trunk that filled the stairwell, and paused for a moment outside Dad’s study door, looking for the crack of light that meant the old man was still in there. Then he knocked and went in.

‘Dad,’ he said, ‘you know all about cricket and stuff. Was there a cricket player called Fry?’

Dad frowned. ‘C. B. Fry,’ he replied. ‘Very famous Edwardian batsman. What about him?’

‘Nothing,’ Colin replied. “Night.”

He got as far as the landing, turned round and knocked again.

‘Dad.’

‘Well?’

‘Is there any, you know, insanity in our family? People not right in the head and stuff.’

Dad raised his eyebrows. ‘Before you, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘No.’

‘Ah,’ Colin said, ‘that’s good. Well, see you in the morning.’

Back out onto the landing, one step down the stairs; hesitate, back up again. Knock.

‘Now what?’

‘Dad.’

‘Well?’

Pause. ‘Why’ve we got a bloody great big tree growing up through the middle of our house, and why can’t you see the top of it from outside?’

Dad scowled at him. ‘Go back to bed,’ he said. ‘You need to be up early in the morning.’

CHAPTER TWO

Assessments,’ Peter Melznic wailed. ‘Bloody assessments. We never had anything like that before.’

Connie Schwartz-Alberich shrugged. ‘Lucky, weren’t we? Makes you realise how soft we’ve had it up to now. Never felt like it at the time, of course.’

The palefaced girl sniffed. ‘When I was at UMG—’

‘For two pins,’ Peter continued, ‘I’d go straight up to Tanner’s office and tell him where he can stick his job. I’ve been in this business seven years, and I’ve never had to put up with this kind of shit before. And what about this other bloody stupid idea, “ongoing vocational training”? Like I need some snot-nosed academic telling me how to do what I do.’

Connie, who’d been in the trade for five times seven years and seen a dozen Peter Melznics come and go like the flowers in spring, decided not to comment on that. ‘It’s modern management theory,’ she sighed, ‘the stuff they teach you at business school and so on. It’s just a fashion, some more bloody stupid hoops to jump through, that’s all. Did I ever tell you about when I was at the San Francisco office and some pinhead decided we needed a company song?’

‘What I’d like to know,’ Benny Shumway interrupted, ‘is who’s going to be doing these assessments.’

‘Good point,’ Connie said. ‘Anybody heard anything about it?’

Nobody had, apparently. But the thin-faced girl mentioned that she’d heard somewhere that Messrs Tanner and Suslowicz, and even Mr Wells himself, were going to have to submit to the same procedure. Connie looked sharply sideways at her, but nobody said anything.

‘Can you remember how it went?’ Bennie broke the silence.

‘How what went?’

‘The company song.’

‘Oh, that.’ Connie grinned. ‘Never came to anything. I believe the pinhead sent a memo to Humph Wells, who pointed out that ‘d had a company song since 1877, but you needed to be an operatic baritone to get through it without choking to death. It sort of fizzled out after that. But we had a whole month of doing physical jerks on the roof every morning, until the pinhead turned his ankle over. Which sort of proves my point,’ she went on. ‘They come up with these stupid ideas, you go along with them for a bit till they self-destruct, and then you can get back to doing things properly, like you’ve always done them. No harm done, everyone’s happy, and we remain defiantly unspoilt by progress.’

Benny finished his coffee. ‘Where’s young Cassie, by the way?’ he asked. ‘Not stuck again, is she?’

‘No.’ Connie smiled indulgently. ‘In a meeting with clients. Some potty little job south of the river, but I think she’s milking it for something to put on her time sheet.’

Peter scowled. ‘That’s another thing I’m really not happy with,’ he said, ‘these bloody time sheets. I don’t like being treated like I’m some wet-behind-the-ears trainee straight out of college. If the job gets done and the client’s happy and we get paid, what the hell does it matter how many six-minute units you took writing a letter?’

We all had to do time sheets at UMG,’ the palefaced girl said. ‘Of course, it was a complete shambles at the Munich office, given the sort of work that we were doing, but it kept the management happy.’

A brief who-let-her-in-here? moment, then Benny thanked Connie for the coffee and left, triggering a general evacuation. It was nearly time for Benny to go to the Bank, but (as usual) he wasn’t in any hurry to carry out that particular chore. Instead, he went quietly down to the basement and fed the goats.

He’d raised an interesting point over coffee, he thought as he weighed out the barley, oats and concentrates, though he said so himself. If they were going to have assessments, someone would have to do the assessing, and if the palefaced girl (what was she called? He was usually good with names, but hers slipped through his mind like car keys through a frayed pocket) was right about the partners having them too, presumably it’d be the new owners, or their trusted representatives, asking the questions. Unless they had in mind some set-up with one-way glass and microphones, it’d mean coming face to face with them at last; and if he was given that opportunity, he had a trick or two of his own up his sleeve, which might help him find answers to the questions that had been bugging him for the last three months.

Benny emptied the feed bucket into the trough, gave Esmeralda her apple, and paused, frowning. There was always the direct approach, he reflected. He could always go to Jack Wells or Dennis Tanner and ask him, straight out. After everything he’d done for JWW over the years, they owed him that. The thing was, did he really want to know the answer?

To the Bank; a wretched business, as ever, and when he got back to his office and closed the door behind him he dropped into his chair and sat still and quiet for a while, until he’d recovered his usual equanimity. Maybe I’m getting too old for this, he thought; maybe it’s time I thought about packing it in. Retirement: all the things he’d claimed to have been daydreaming about all these years. A nice little bungalow somewhere on the South Coast; a small open-cast mine of his own, just to keep his hand in; time for hobbies and gardening and stuff. He shuddered. Thoughts like that helped put going to the Bank in context.

His door opened, and one of the more appealing aspects of working at JWW these days appeared in the doorway. He found himself smiling. ‘Hiya, Cassie,’he said.

‘Are you busy?’

‘Not really. Just been and done the banking. I was just about to get a cup of coffee. Can I make you one while I’m there?’