Drowned Lives

3

Once Samuel Longden was out of my company, I began to wonder whether he’d just been spinning me a yarn. He was old, and perhaps not entirely in touch with reality any more. A little bit unstable. Besides, what did I really know about him, other than what he’d told me himself?

There was no evidence to back up his claim to be so closely involved with my family. On the contrary, my parents had conspicuously failed to mention him. I hadn’t asked to see any proof, of course — it would have seemed incredibly rude. My emotions at being confronted by this man, a complete stranger who seemed so familiar, had completely swamped my journalistic instincts. I’d always been taught to check my sources, to get confirmation.

Back in 1987, I began my working life as a trainee reporter on one of the local papers. It was something I drifted into, just because an advert for the job appeared in the Echo in the same week that I returned home after graduating from the University of Birmingham. I’d studied Economics at Birmingham, but I never intended to be an economist. I wasn’t alone in that. Most of the students I knew had no idea what they wanted to do when they went out into the real world — they were only concerned about whether their grants would last out and where the next party was happening.

It’s different these days, I know. I think we were probably the last generation who saw no need to worry about the future. I’d certainly never concerned myself with the past. Part of my course was called Economic History, which dealt with the Industrial Revolution and all that stuff. Those were the lectures I skipped to spend lunchtimes in the pub.

I don’t talk about my Economics degree now. It seems to tempt sarcastic comments about how bad I am at managing my own money. Now all that’s left to me from those three years in Birmingham is some vague recollection in the back of my mind about the laws of supply and demand and the price mechanism, and a man called John Maynard Keynes.

But the world of newspapers couldn’t keep me interested either. At least, not the Lichfield Echo, with its constant diet of council meetings and summer fairs. I felt cut out for better things than reviewing the amateur dramatic society’s latest Alan Ayckbourn comedy or sitting in the magistrates’ court in Wade Street all day long listening to the dreary details of shoplifting and speeding offences.

So after a few years I went into Public Relations, deciding there was no future in local newspapers. Who wanted to read the Echo when there was television and local radio and the internet? I took a job as a PR officer for the county council at their offices sixteen miles away in Stafford. The journey by car was a bit too much sometimes, and that was my justification to move away from home. It was ridiculous that I should feel I needed an excuse, but I did.

It was impossible simply to tell my parents that I wanted to leave home, even though I was nearly thirty by then. It took a calculated campaign, with numerous references to the appalling traffic on the A51, the notorious accident black spot near Rugeley, and the bad weather when the north wind blew across Cannock Chase and iced up the road. I told my mother how difficult it was for me after a hard day’s work, and in the end she was almost relieved when I announced that I had the chance of sharing a first-floor flat in Stafford with a county council Information Technology Officer called Dan Hyde.

Dan was a real computer buff, and his enthusiasm was infectious. He’d persuaded me that the internet was the future, and there was a real killing to be made by the people who got in early. Six months ago, he’d told me he wanted to start a dot-com company aimed at businesses in the West Midlands. It couldn’t fail, he said. And he wanted me to join him. All it needed was a bit of capital to get it started.

I knew very little about running a business on the internet, but Dan was persuasive. He showed me lots of articles about dot-com start-ups with mind-boggling figures for their estimated value within months of being launched.

I remember him smiling at me smugly as I boggled over another string of zeros behind a pound sign.

‘See,’ he said. ‘We can make a killing. It’s exactly the right time.’

‘But this isn’t real money, is it? It’s only a notional value. No one makes any profit from a dot-com unless the company is sold.’

‘That’s why timing is so important. Right now, people are buying into the hype.’

‘So we create hype? Is that what we’re going to do?’

‘Exactly. We build it up big, then after a few years we do an IPO, make our fortunes, and get out.’ He rubbed his finger and thumb together. ‘Easy money, Chris.’

‘It sounds too easy.’

‘Well, as I said, it needs a bit of investment to get it off the ground. We’ve got to rent some premises, hire a few programmers, invest in the right tech. After that, it’s all about advertising and marketing. Creating that buzz. You’ll be the perfect guy to write the website content.’

I looked again at the articles. Many of these dot-coms hardly seemed to be doing anything tangible.

‘And you think an online auction site is the right choice?’ I asked.

‘Absolutely. Just like uBid or eBay in the USA. I showed you the figures—’

‘Yes, I’ve seen them.’

‘Fantastic, isn’t it? uBid only launched a few months ago, and they’ll be going public this year. We can do what they’re doing, but here in the UK. There’s a gap in the market.’

‘They specialise in consumer electronics, don’t they?’

‘Yes, laptops, computer hardware, business equipment, cellphones. We can do all that too. At least at first, then we can see how it goes, decide whether we want to expand into other areas. It doesn’t matter, because it’s all third-party sellers. We don’t hold any stock ourselves, everything is done online. A win-win situation, Chris.’

Then Dan had become exasperated with my hesitation.

‘Come on, Chris, you know you’ll love it,’ he said. ‘You were always the one who got excited about a new project. You can’t—’

He stopped suddenly.

‘What?’ I said.

But he hesitated. ‘Nothing.’

‘What were you going to say, Dan?’

‘Oh, just that you can’t pass up this opportunity.’ He shook his head as he sighed. ‘The old Chris Buckley wouldn’t have done.’

The old Chris Buckley? So who was I, this person standing here now? Apparently a different man from the one Dan Hyde had known, and perhaps everyone else I knew or worked with. In other people’s eyes, I was no longer the same Chris Buckley I’d been a few months ago, the old Chris who got excited about a new project and wouldn’t have passed up an opportunity. They didn’t know what to do about that change. And neither did I.

I looked again at the dazzling figures.

‘So what are we going to call it?’ I said.

Dan smiled. ‘I’ve already registered the domain. We’re calling it winningbid.uk.com. It has absolutely the right ring to it. Makes people think about winning straightaway. And that’s what we should do.’

His tactics had worked. Once I was on board, the project became the one thing that made my future seem brighter, a glowing vision of untold wealth in the not-too-distant future. It was like an oasis in the desert.

Gradually, I’d become convinced we were onto a real winner. Online retail was set to be a burgeoning market in the first years of the new millennium, and we were going to be right there at the cutting edge.

‘We’ve got to do the job properly,’ Dan had said. ‘A professional marketing campaign, corporate design. Remember who our target audience are — we want high-grade businesses to come on board. Image is everything, Chris.’

So I’d gone along with the idea of employing a graphic design agency and a marketing consultancy in Birmingham, who charged the earth. My eyes had nearly fallen out of their sockets when I saw their quotes, which involved figures so large they made me dizzy with anxiety.

Dan had soon packed in his county council job to launch the website. He said winningbid.uk.com was going to make our fortunes — but only once we’d recouped the money we put into it and paid back the frighteningly large bank loan we’d just committed ourselves to, with both of our names on the agreement.

Offices had been leased on an enterprise park near Trent Valley Station. I’d visited the unit and gazed in awe at the empty space we intended to fill. Dan wanted to get the sign up on the building as soon as possible, and that was the first remit for our designers. Equipment had been ordered, and the next step would be to start hiring staff. The costs were mounting up, but we had a lot of interest in advertising on the website, and within a year we’d be well established and heading for profit. Or so Dan told me.

It hadn’t been in the plan for me to part company with the county council quite so soon. Despite the bank loan and an investment from some anonymous backer Dan had found, there was no money in the kitty to pay me a salary — indeed, the flow of cash was entirely the other way for now.

Of course, there was no such thing as job security any more. I was on a fixed-term contract, and I’d known for some time that my term was coming to an end. The writing had been on the wall, and it didn’t take a genius to read it. After all, I’d been one of those whose task had been to put the best possible gloss on cuts and redundancies in other areas. My contract ended in three weeks’ time. And since I was owed fourteen days of my annual leave, I’d effectively already left the job. All that remained for me to do was turn up at the office for one last day, clear my desk and accept the ritual presentation from my colleagues.

So that was how I ended up back home in Lichfield. It was the last place on earth I wanted to be, but the flat in Stafford had become a luxury I could no longer pay for and would soon have no need for, once winningbid.uk.com went into profit.

There were no outright recriminations from my father that I’d failed to stick to a career, no ‘we told you so’, just a continuous cool, unspoken atmosphere of disapproval. My mother had died a few months before, the sudden onset of stomach cancer taking her away before my father even knew what was happening. I looked after him for a while, a duty I could never have imagined until it happened and there seemed to be no choice. But he faded rapidly. It was a heart attack that took him one night as he watched television in his armchair. I’d been at the pub with some friends, and I found him cold and stiff when I let myself back into the house at about half past eleven. ‘The Big Match’ was still blaring away on the TV screen.

At least, everyone said it was a heart attack. But they hadn’t seen him droop and fade once my mother had gone. They didn’t see the disappointment and resignation in his eyes when he looked at me every day. The fact is, my father hadn’t thought it worthwhile to carry on living. Not for my sake, anyway.

His death had helped me financially, of course. With no prospect of another full-time job after my contract ended and winningbid.uk.com draining every spare penny, my dead parents were now subsidising the cost of my board and lodging, as if I was a teenager who’d just left school, rather than a man in his thirties. The small amount of money that came to me in my father’s will would have to keep me going for the next twelve months.

Meanwhile, I was trying to cover my options by earning a bit of extra money as a freelance journalist, and that was hardly lucrative. Even my modest lifestyle was gradually eating into those few thousand pounds my father had left me. The car was getting old, the household bills were piling up, and I spent too much over the bar of my local, the Stowe Arms. By the time I said goodbye to my colleagues at Stafford, I would be practically penniless. Thank God there was no mortgage to pay on the house in Stowe Pool Lane.

But things would change. Life would get better soon. When our dot-com was the success that Dan and I planned, all of this would be forgotten.