Burial

11

That spring, he bought a rucksack and a six-week European travel pass. But he took Elise with him.

He was too old to be sharing late-night trains with gap-year students. After six weeks, he found himself alone at 3 a.m., dangling bare, tanned legs over the dock on Icaria. He'd sat all night outside a restaurant, alone with a book he was pretending to read, half-hoping somebody might strike up a conversation. But nobody did.

Since leaving England, he'd barely spoken, except to order a drink, or dinner. His orbit was marked by something dark. People didn't come too close.

He pretended to himself that he wished he'd gone to America instead, that he'd chosen this cheap travel pass because he was trying to conserve money. But that wasn't true.

When Nathan was eighteen, he'd come to the Greek Islands with Chloe, his girlfriend. It was their first and only time away - and for its three weeks they were happy-sad, because they knew this trip was an extended goodbye. They were about to start at different universities, and they knew that what was to come would change them. There was no way to maintain their relationship - Chloe had seen her two brothers make that mistake, and it had brought them nothing but unhappiness.

Now -- alone on the dock at Icaria -- he saw that over the last few weeks he'd followed almost exactly the route he and Chloe had taken, when he was a child who thought himself nearly a man.

He spat into the dark and watched it loop and spin into the lapping, oily Mediterranean. Then he got up, brushing the grit from his arse and slinging the rucksack over his shoulder. He found an all night bar and sat in the corner drinking Amstel until the sun came up. Then he slapped a pile of euros on the bar, didn't wait for his change, and walked out to greet the early morning ferry. His flip flops slapped to the rhythm of his feet.

He watched the ferry dock. It was rusted and ponderous, weathered as a coastal rock.

At length, it discharged blinking, fuzzy-headed young backpackers, American and German and Dutch, British and Canadian and Australian, on to the dock. Some of their faces were still marked with the weave of the ferry's dirty carpet.

Nathan was one of three or four people to embark. He sat in a patch of ringing sunlight, cooled by the sea breeze, and stared past the corner of a lifeboat, into the ferry's frothing wake.

In Goa, he saw a Hindu funeral. The corpse, draped in white, garlanded with roses and jasmine and marigold, was carried on a stretcher to a riverside pyre. On the pyre, it was arranged with its bound white feet facing south - the direction of the dead.

The chief mourner walked round the pyre three times, sprinkling water. Then he put the pyre to flame.

Nathan watched the body burn. The perfumed smoke, billowing, diffusing against the sunset. The yellow flames. The brown river.

He grabbed his bag and walked away.

He flew from Delhi and walked wearily through UK customs.

He stood in the English airport, ridiculous in his gap-year student clothes -- this man with no idea who he had become.

Before leaving Heathrow, Nathan called Sara at work. She answered on the fourth ring.

'Nathan?'

He swelled with a violent nostalgia. It took him a moment to speak. And then, all he could say was: 'Hi.'

'Where have you been ?'

It seemed to her that losing his job, his girlfriend and his flat within a couple of weeks had worked something loose in Nathan's head. She'd told her friends (in a grave, not unhappy tone): Nathan had a breakdown.

He said, 'I'm okay.' It sounded true when he said it. Then he told her, 'I've been to Greece,' and it sounded like a lie. Before she could ask any more questions, he said, 'Look, I've no right to ask this. But I need a reference.'

'What kind of reference?'

'A landlord's reference. I need a place to live.'

'So what you're phoning to ask is: pretend we never went out, and write a letter saying what a fabulous tenant you were.'

Pretty much. I know it's a shitty thing to ask.'

It was a shitty thing to ask. But she said 'Fine' because she pitied him.

He caught the train home and booked himself into a cheap hotel, then showered and shaved and went to buy a local newspaper.

The next afternoon, armed with Sara's reference, he paid the deposit and two months' rent in advance on a small, clean, one-bedroom flat.

It was on the top floor - into the eaves - of a big, Victorian building.

On the ground floor was a day nursery; his little bedroom overlooked the playground.

Since it was summer and the nights were short, Nathan could afford to wait until the first comforting signs of dawn before trying to sleep - which meant that, often, he woke to the pleasant screams of young children at playtime. He lay in bed listening to them, just as he might lie in a sun-warmed tent, listening to a chattering brook.

The sound of the children made him happy. Their existence seemed so tremendously unlikely, he took comfort from it. He never watched them playing, because he thought that from their perspective his face -- peering down from the small, high bedroom window -- would look ghostly and lost, and he wanted to spare them that.

But even their tears and tantrums, from this high place, sounded good to him.

He lay there, listening to them, and wondered what he was going to do about getting a job.

It was easy.

He visited an employment agency, where his agent displayed contempt for his paltry CV, enquiring in a frigid tone why he'd left his 'previous employment'.

He took in a slow breath, held it for a moment and then told her: 'I was kind of made redundant.'

'Kind of. Was there a restructure?'

'Not really. Kind of

'Kind of

'The show I was working on - it was called The Mark Derbyshire Solution!

After a moment, she said 'I see' in a manner that Nathan had learned to recognize; it was the way people chose to hide their sudden, incandescent interest in celebrity, even minor celebrity. She looked Nathan in the eye and said, 'It must have been terrible for you.'

'It wasn't good, no.'

'And if it's all right to ask - how is he?'

'How's who? Mark? I haven't spoken to him.'

'I see,' she said. 'Yes. That poor girl.'

So Nathan went on the books of the employment agency, and a week later, the agent called to let him know she'd lined up an exciting interview with a prestigious company he had never heard of.

Nathan no longer owned an interview suit or good shoes; they'd gone into the washing machine and then to a charity shop, scrunched up in a carrier bag. So that afternoon, he went shopping.

On Monday, he was interviewed for the position of sales executive at Hermes Cards, Ltd. The interview was conducted by two men and two women, who sat behind a long desk like the top table at a wedding.

Nathan

told them he had no sales experience, and that he had no particular interest in greetings cards. Nor had he ever stopped to consider the profound part greetings cards had to play in observing British rites of passage - birth, marriage, illness and death.

But I've certainly been thinking about it over the weekend,' he said, and the interviewers laughed. From one of the women there was even a little flirtatious pen-playing.

When the chuckles had died down, he said, 'The truth is, when times were good, working with Mark taught me about working under pressure. And when times were bad, it taught me a lot about loyalty.'

When he'd done talking about Mark Derbyshire, a certain gloom settled on the room.

They thanked Nathan for coming along. He shook their hands one by one - and thanked them, and left, and went directly to the pub. He sat in the garden. The sun shone so bright he could barely read his newspaper.

Hermes Cards called back the next day: they wanted to see him again next Tuesday.

He bought a new tie, a raincoat and a folding umbrella, in case it was raining on the day. He wondered how the person who wore these clothes related to that lost man in Greece, in his Gap cargo shorts and Nike sandals; and how that man related to the wired madman in the Paul Smith suit, scrabbling with bleeding nails at the cold, wet earth. He could draw no line of connection between them.

He was a series of disconnected dots, a Morse code.

The second interview took place in a different room. This time, they sat round a shiny oval table, and Nathan knew before anyone spoke that he'd got the job.

He was to start on the 1st of July, which gave him ten days of nervousness.

He had no idea how to go about doing a proper job.

He went to the Business section of his local bookshop and spent seventy pounds on titles that promised to make him a more effective communicator -- but none of these books seemed to tell him anything that was not already perfectly obvious.

During the sleepless nights he lay in his bed, clamped between the past and the future. In the morning he lay listening to the children play.

And then the day came, and he went to work.

At reception, he introduced himself, saying: 'I'm the new boy.'

The receptionist said, 'If you'd like to take a seat, Roy will be down in a moment.'

Nathan had no idea who Roy might be. He sat with his briefcase on his lap, and waited.

Behind the reception desk was a wall-to-wall, ceiling-high, hardwood bookcase. Ranked on it were hundreds of greetings cards.

There were bawdy cartoons; floral tributes to the sick and the bereaved; congratulations for new parents and new graduates. Blank inside, they were rich with the passage of lives yet to be lived.

The receptionist saw him, scanning their ranks.

Nathan said, 'Is there a Congratulations on your new job ?'

She swivelled in her chair. 'There must be one up there, somewhere.'

He

smiled, then turned to the ping of an elevator door. A man he took to be Roy came striding towards him. Roy was trim and sprightly, not far from retirement; his handshake nearly pulverized Nathan's finger bones.

'You must be Nathan.'

Roy put an arm round Nathan's shoulder. Nathan had not been touched by another human being in many months; he tried to relax into Roy's paternal grip, as Roy said, 'I've heard a lot about you.'

'Okay,' said Nathan. 'Good.'

Roy led him to the lift. Nathan stared at his reflection as they whispered up two floors. Then Roy led him past what he described as the glass boardroom then through a set of double doors into the office building's working interior.

The floor was open-plan, lined with small, glass-fronted offices in which imprisoned executives and managers spoke into telephones or listened to telephones or hunched over laptop computers.

'This is sales and marketing,' said Roy. 'Welcome home. You'll soon get to know it.'

He wasn't wrong. When he wasn't on the road to Swindon or Edinburgh or Birmingham or Cardiff, the modern sales executive spent a great deal of time on the telephone and the computer.

The modern sales executive also spent most of his time engaged in pursuits which didn't involve selling anything to anybody: Nathan found himself attending weekly marketing meetings, and weekly pre-marketing meetings, and weekly post-marketing meetings which, with grim and affected professionalism, were called 'postmortems'.

In

addition, there were quarterly, half-yearly and annual sales performance review meetings. There were monthly sales projections meetings. There were bi-monthly regional and national sales meetings.

There were two sales conferences. There were buyers to entertain. There were lunches and dinners and drinks without number. There was karaoke in Sheffield and go-karting in Swindon.

The sales department was structured in a way that Nathan didn't completely understand. There seemed to be four UK sales directors, three of whom were beaten and bitter men who reported to one, younger boss, whose job title was simply Director (UK

Sales).

In addition, sales shared an arcane crossover of responsibility with marketing, which meant each department was in a position to blame the other when budgets were overspent or financial targets hadn't been met, which was always. Thus, the relationship between sales and marketing was alternately cordial and hypothermic.

At first, Nathan enjoyed the inanity of it. He was paid an initially modest but increasingly handsome salary, plus theoretical bonuses, to sit round a table for hours, pretending to care about the late delivery of 5,000 New Line Easter cards to a godforsaken warehouse in East Anglia.

As the weeks bled into months, then years, Nathan would sometimes be struck by wonderment as he was cleaning his teeth in the morning - but by the time he was knotting his tie, the sense of affable farce would have deserted him and he'd be worrying that Norfolk (as the warehouse was simply and ominously known) would be unable to clear the late delivery of 55,000 New Line Eclipse cards that had arrived late from the printers.

Getting into his car, an Omega, he would be anxious that the proposed New Lines for Christmas-after-next would not correlate with what marketing had identified as the post-Millennial Mood; or that a leading chain of high-street stationers would not after all decide to retail the new, cartoon-Jesus Easter cards which had been enthusiastically endorsed, first by the board, then by every other department - and which would just as systematically be disowned if they failed.

He knew thinking about all this was a waste of time; but it was much, much better than thinking about anything else.

And then, during the Winter Sales Conference, 2001, he saw Elise's family on television. They were making an appeal for information that might lead to her return.