You Don't Have To Be Evil To Work Here, But It Helps Read online

  Odd about Boots, he thought. Maybe they’re feeling the pinch too. Colin wasn’t inclined to take the withering and perishing of H&F personally, since he hadn’t been working for the company very long (he’d wanted to go to university and learn to be a vet, but Dad wouldn’t hear of it), but he felt sorry for the rest of them - Dad, Uncle Chris, Uncle Phil, the cousins. If Boots was also finishing off its hearty breakfast while the hangman tested the drop mechanism in the prison yard below, at the very least it implied that the hard times were general, and accordingly it wasn’t really anybody’s fault.

  ‘Anyway,’ said the accountant, ‘that’s more or less the position. Unless you can increase turnover by at least twenty-five per cent over the next three months, or else cut costs by forty-two per cent—’

  How old can you be, Colin wondered, and still train to be a vet? All he actually knew about the profession was what he’d gleaned from repeats of All Creatures Great & Small, and the hero in that had been, what, about his age (but you can’t tell with actors, of course, they’ve got make-up and all sorts). The careers bloke at school had said he needed all sorts of A levels and stuff, and he’d left as soon as he was legally able to do so, and had come here to start at the bottom and work his way up in the customary fashion. As it was, he’d started at the bottom and more or less stayed there, partly through lack of the killer instinct needed to get on in modern commerce, partly because there wasn’t anywhere up for him to go until either Dad, Uncle Chris, Uncle Phil or one of the cousins decided to call it a day. A bit of a waste of time, he couldn’t help reflecting, these past few years. His fault? Well, most things proverbially were, but in this case, not everything. If Dad had been a little bit more broad-minded, his life could have been quite different at this point. He could have been standing up to his knees in mud with his arm up a cow’s backside, if only he’d been given a decent chance.

  ‘I think that’s more or less covered everything,’ Dad was saying (and Colin couldn’t help thinking of a man in a black suit drawing a cloth over the corpse’s face). ‘Thank you all for your time, and obviously we’ll be in touch as soon as we’ve reached our decision.’

  The vultures spread their wings; all except the nice-looking Cassandra female, who followed Dad into his office. No summons for Colin to follow, so he wandered slowly back to his own miniature lair, crept in behind the desk (he was slim going on scrawny, but he still had to breathe in), stacked his feet on top of the Albion Plastic Extrusions file, and allowed himself to slither into a reverie of petulant thought.

  It was all very well cramming his mental screen with images of Christopher Timothy saving the elderly farmer’s beloved sheep-dog, but assuming he wasn’t ever going to be a vet after all, what was he going to do with his life once Hollingshead and Farren went under? The accountant, he remembered, had been ferociously upbeat about certain aspects of the disaster. The freehold of the factory and warehouse, he’d pointed out, would pay off the debts and redundancies and leave a nice fat lump sum over to provide for Dad and the uncles in the autumn of their lives. That, however, was more or less it as far as comfort and joy were concerned. The machinery had a modest value as scrap iron, maybe enough to pay the accountant’s hourly rate for telling them it was otherwise worthless. The patents were about to expire anyway, the office equipment was a joke, and the best thing to do with the Daimler was to leave it parked temptingly in the street and hope a joyrider with an antiquarian bent might take it away and crash it into something solid. The men would be paid off, of course, and that would be that. Apart from one loose end, behind whose desk he was currently sitting. Nobody had ventured any suggestions as to what might be done with him. Like it mattered.

  Colin frowned. As a general rule, he didn’t do self-pity. Looked at from another perspective, he was tolerably young, more or less healthy and not a complete idiot, and after a childhood and early adulthood spent chained to the widget-smith’s bench he was free to do whatever the hell he liked. Not so much a disaster, therefore, as an opportunity in fuck-up’s clothing.

  Opportunity; he considered the concept objectively. To date, opportunities had mostly been things offered to Colin via e-mail by benevolent Nigerian lawyers. Otherwise, he had always followed a path ordained for him by those who knew better - and a pretty narrow track it had been, running straight through a small and circumscribed world consisting mostly of rather boring work and running errands for senior family members. There had always been an undeniable logic to all of it, of course. Why should he want to move out to a place of his own when the family home was only a minute’s walk from the factory gate? What did he need a car for? What conceivable purpose would be served by him spending a year backpacking round the Andes, given that the entire Latin American widget market was sewn up by the big US manufacturers? Furthermore, whence had he got the curious idea that he had time to go running around after girls when there were inventories to be made and quality to be controlled? Over the years, widget-making had been held up to him us a combination of Holy Grail, family curse and closed monastic order. Without it, the world would be a big, strange, interesting place, even if his role in it was as yet poorly defined.

  Besides (he shifted his feet, nudging Albion Plastic Extrusions off the desk onto the floor) it was by no means certain that the old firm was even dead yet. This time last year, they’d been squinting down the twin barrels of an empty order book and a catastrophic tax demand; then, just as the doctor’s finger had been quivering over the life-support machine’s off switch, some lunatic in Newport Pagnell had bespoken a quarter of a million J/778c-30’s, payment fifty per cent in advance. In due course he’d paid for and taken delivery of his widgets, and nobody had seen or heard of him again. If there was one such loopy philanthropist in the world, why not another? Maybe even now he was stuffing a cheque into an envelope, a crazed look on his face and a lampshade balanced on top of his head in place of a hat.

  Enough about that, then; Colin let the unruly Highland terrier of his mind off the lead and let it chase pigeons through the bushes of more enticing improbabilities. The nice-looking female at the meeting, for instance. When the other suits had buggered off to shake their heads and pad their bills, she’d stayed behind to talk to the old man. What was she, then? Some business-school whizz-kid or efficiency guru, come to set them all to rights? Hadn’t looked the type, although Colin freely conceded that he hadn’t a clue what the type was supposed to look like. Not a customer, or we wouldn’t have been giving her a guided tour of the dirty laundry. For the same reasons, not a creditor. So: apart from clients, people we owe money to and charcoal-grey-clad leeches, who the hell else do we know? Nobody.

  Not that he’d have spared her one per cent of a passing thought if she hadn’t been nice-looking. A realist in matters of self-appraisal, Colin was well aware that he was both shallow (he preferred ‘uncomplicated’) and unregenerate when it came to nice-looking - not that he got much chance to be either in and around the widget trade, where people tended to be male, middle-aged, harassed-looking and generally sad. Even five years ago, things had been rather more lively. Now, however, his friends from school were mostly paired off and domesticated, and his social life had accordingly dwindled down to this: surreptitiously ogling nice-looking lady scavengers over the raised lid of his briefcase. He frowned. Maybe H&F going down the bog wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all, if it meant that he’d be turned loose in rather more varied society. O brave new world, he said to himself, that hath living, unmutilated females under forty-five in it.

  (Slowly but surely, he thought, I’m turning into a real mess. Note to self: do something about that, before it’s too late.)

  At some point Colin looked up at the clock on the opposite wall and saw that it was gone six. He sat up. Brooding morosely on his own time was something he tried to avoid. True, he had nowhere much to go apart from home. But even he, indentured servant of a family business, had some rudimentary grasp of the great Work/Fun dichotomy that informs the whole of modern
Western civilisation. If it was after hours, it was time he buggered off. He went home.

  An old-fashioned, rather shiny brown trilby hat on the hook in the hall; for once, Dad was home before him. Colin hung up his coat next to the hat and drifted into the front room.

  Mum was there, reading a magazine. She didn’t look up as he came into the room, but the cat lifted her head and gave him her trademark scowl of disappointed contempt. The TV was on as usual, with the sound turned down. You could tell it was autumn by the small drift of yellow leaves nestling round the foot of the massive tree that grew in the exact centre of the room.

  ‘When’s dinner?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Mum replied, eyes glued to print. ‘What d’you want?’

  ‘What is there?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘Fish fingers,’ she said. ‘Or chicken kievs. You could open a tin for Gretchen while you’re out there.’

  ‘Mphm.’ Colin nodded, and set course for the kitchen. For Gretchen the cat he opened a can of chicken fillets in gravy. He made himself cheese on toast. The ad hoc catering implied that Dad was having something on a tray in his study; figures to pore over, books to fiddle, whatever. Just as well; Colin didn’t feel like an evening of painfully synthesised conversation in front of the muted telly.

  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.