London and the South-East

3

IT IS A perfect Monday morning. Late November. Cold grey gloom outside. And raining. On waking, in the dark, to the alarm’s infuriating high-pitched stutter, the first thing Paul does is fumble on the light. For a few moments it stings his eyes. It is not a day on which he expects anything significant to happen. Heather drops him off at the station on her way to the small solicitors’ firm, Gumley Rhodes, where she does part-time secretarial work. For an hour, he sits squashed against a wet window, someone else’s newspaper in his face, and a morsel of hashish under his tongue. When he arrives at London Bridge, he has a slow subtle floaty feeling in his limbs, a peaceful fug about his whole person. He takes the Northern Line to Bank, and there transfers to the Central Line. From the mighty escalator at Holborn, he watches the adverts slide down through his field of vision, until delivered by it, via the low ticket hall, into daylight and rain, he crosses Kingsway, and enters King’s House through the taupe glass door — tentatively, fearing some sort of fallout from the Flossman incident. He knows, however, that this is paranoid — there is no sign of fallout nor will there be.

Paul is always one of the first onto the sales floor in the morning. Murray is usually the last to arrive.

‘Murray,’ Paul says, when he does, ‘is it just me, or was Eddy Jaw in the Penderel’s on Friday?’

Murray looks surprised. ‘Eddy Jaw?’ he says.

‘Yeah.’

‘Don’t think so.’

‘I’m sure I saw him.’

A few uninterested heads turn to see what Murray will say.

He shrugs. ‘Might have been, yeah,’ he says. With an unlit cigarette in his hand, he stands up. The double-breasted front of his suit, especially when unbuttoned, seems too big for him, there seems to be too much blue cloth — masses of it, a dismantled marquee.

‘I’m sure he was …’ Paul says.

And suddenly, on the point of leaving, Murray says, ‘Yeah, he was. I saw you talking to him.’

‘Me? I was? What were we talking about?’

Murray leaves without answering.

It is, Paul thinks, as if he’s offended — as if I’ve offended him somehow. And he sifts his scant memories of Friday night, looking for something that might account for this moodiness. Nothing that he can remember. Perhaps something happened to Murray over the weekend. What Murray does at the weekend is a mystery to Paul — the two of them operate an informal, unspoken don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy on the subject, and in fact hardly speak of their lives outside the office at all. (They are always hearing about Andy’s life, though. Every Monday he has a new story about some Annabel or Alexandra he’s lusting after, who’s always ‘gorgeous’ — all the girls in Andy’s stories are ‘gorgeous’, if they’re not ‘mooses’ — and whom he met at Jezza’s or Josh’s party on Saturday night.) About Murray’s life, however, only the occasional slight snippet filters out. Every summer he has a barbecue in his small suburban garden but only people from the office are there, and not many of them — typically the Pig and Neil and Simona and one or two others — a few of the transients who happen to be on the team at the time — as well as Paul. It is a long-standing tradition now, Murray’s office barbecue. So Paul knows where Murray lives, and what his house is like — two-up, two-down, not unlike his own minus the extension. He also knows that before he knew him, Murray was married, and divorced, and thinks he may have a brother somewhere — all in all surprisingly little, given that they have worked together, on and off, for over fifteen years. These days, particularly, Paul finds Murray’s life quite depressing to think about — in the intensity of its seeming loneliness, no woman, a desperate financial situation — so he seldom does. When he does, it is with pity, and mild horror.

The morning is unexceptional. Paul reads The Times, and does what he can of the quick crossword. Tony Peters holds a team meeting — which Paul watches, sneeringly, over the top of his paper. He dislikes everything about Tony Peters’ team — the tidy desks, the smart, well-behaved salespeople, the way they laugh at Tony’s jokes, the strict timekeeping, the team meetings … Later, the slow clock nearing eleven, he listens in to one of Andy’s wooden, underpowered pitches. ‘Yes, many of our readers are in the chemical industry,’ Andy is saying when Paul activates the earpiece and, shaking loose the tangled coils of the cord, puts it to his ear. ‘Would they be potential clients?’

‘We have clients in the chemical industry.’ It’s another German. ‘And also, of course, in other industries.’

‘Like what other industries?’

‘For example, the food industry.’ The German is civil, but sounds bored.

‘That’s very interesting,’ Andy says. ‘We have readers in the food industry as well. Such as Nestlé.’

‘Do you have something you could send me? A fax?’

‘Of course. But if I could just ask you whether you’d like new business from Europe’s leading multinational companies?’

Obligingly, the German says, ‘Yes, I would. Of course.’

‘That’s good, because as I’ve said, our readership includes the purchasing directors of Europe’s thousand leading multinational companies, such as Philips, Hoechst and BMW.’

‘But if you could send me something.’ The German is more insistent now. ‘Let me give you my fax number. It is forty-nine for Germany.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then …’ There is no hope for poor Andy, Paul thinks. He replaces the earpiece and returns to his desk. No hope at all. He leafs through some old leads — the dead catalogues of international industry fairs, obscure publications full of advertorial, directories. Listlessly, he taps in a number. A company called Sunny Industries, in Mumbai — though the lead is so old it is still down as Bombay. It is in an ancient directory of Indian companies, and he chooses it because it presents him with the MD’s name and direct-line number. He watches Murray while it rings. All morning, Murray has managed to pretend not to have noticed that Marlon is there — which is not easy because Marlon’s desk is directly opposite his own, and Marlon is there. Paul notices that Murray’s eyes take on a strange, empty, defocused quality whenever they pan across it, as they often must. Yes, he has been very quiet this morning, Murray. Uncharacteristically subdued …

Earlier, Paul had heard separately from several people what had happened on Friday. Murray, it seems, had waited in the Gents, sitting bored in the locked stall, until he thought that Marlon, who usually left the office early for the gym, would be gone. For some reason, however, Marlon was not gone. What’s more, there was a strange atmosphere of eerie stillness on the sales floor — something must have happened. Sitting at his desk, Marlon had his back to the entrance. Murray had hesitated, and then — after momentarily making eye contact with a smiling Andy — had turned to leave. And it was then that he heard Marlon’s voice. ‘Oi, Murray!’ Involuntarily quickening his stride, he had pretended not to hear. When Marlon shouted again, though, it had been impossible to keep up the pretence with any sort of plausibility. So he had stopped, and turned, and seen Marlon stalking towards him, saying, ‘I’ve got a bone to pick with you, Murray.’

This was the situation, more than any other, that he had wanted to avoid.

‘That was my repeat,’ Marlon said.

‘What? Was it?’ A half-hearted show of ignorance that only seemed to infuriate Marlon further. ‘You fucking know it was,’ he shouted, staring up at Murray, who quickly said, ‘If it was, I’m sorry.’

‘I don’t care if you’re sorry.’ Not knowing what to say, Murray had looked at the floor — had tucked his strong chin into his neck and looked at the worn grey carpet and the dark blue tassels of his loafers. ‘What are you going to do about it, Murray?’ He found it hard to believe that this was actually happening, that he was being dressed down by Marlon on the sales floor, in front of everybody. He could not look up from the carpet. He has had dreams like this — nightmares in which he is publicly humiliated by little men like Marlon, and in which his father, a short man, often figures. ‘What are you going to do about it?’ Murray seemed unable to speak. He had had to force the words out. ‘What do you want me to do about it?’

‘I want you to give me the commission next time you get a deal in. If you ever get another deal in.’ An obviously preposterous demand, and Murray had looked up, finally, just to make sure that Marlon was joking. He did not seem to be. ‘You lost me the commission on my repeat by fucking it up,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t have even been calling them, and you fucked it up.’

In mute protest, Murray shook his head.

‘You shouldn’t have even been calling them …’

‘That was never a deal.’

‘Yes of course it fucking was.’

The tension, to some extent, had fallen away — some people, bored by the routine spectacle of two salesmen arguing over leads and blowouts and commission, had gone back to what they were doing — and Murray had said, more emphatically, ‘That was never a deal.’ And for an infinitesimal moment, unnerved by something in Marlon’s eyes, he had feared the worst. Marlon, however, had not punched him. He had said, in a voice that everyone was able to hear, ‘You’re a wanker, Murray.’ Then he went back to his desk, and after standing in the doorway for a while, with what was technically a smile on his square-jawed face, Murray had slipped away …

‘Yes!’ shouts a voice in Paul’s ear.

‘Yes, hello,’ Paul says. ‘I’d like to speak to Abhijit Bannerjee, please.’ There is an offputting echo on the line.

‘Yes, that’s me. And who is this please?’

‘My name’s Charles Barclay, Mr Bannerjee. I’m calling from London …’

Half an hour later, Paul hangs up. He has been trying to get rid of Mr Bannerjee for most of that time, but Mr Bannerjee’s persistence, his intense will to sell, was unstoppable. He agreed — ‘Yes, yes, very good, of course’ — to take a full-page, full-colour ad within the first few minutes of the call, and then he started to sell. What he was selling, Paul was not sure, but he knew the tone. There were references to ‘tea gardens’ and ‘boutique hotels’, ‘software’ and ‘airport taxis’, ‘databases’ and ‘cheap labour one pound a day’. And he kept explaining how he had people, many people, who would be ‘the hands’ of some protean enterprise, which would make ‘a billion’ and involve ‘boutique hotels’. He said he had developed machines with true artificial intelligence, and that he had also developed property in London in the seventies. Whenever Paul tried to steer the conversation back to the full-page colour, Mr Bannerjee would say, ‘Of course, yes of course, we are going to do that,’ and then start talking, with torrential enthusiasm, about something else, some other business he was proposing to start — software or construction or tea or boutique hotels. The boutique hotels seemed to be the only fixed point in this maelstrom of entrepreneurial zest — they featured every few minutes, and always as a spin-off from something else, from the tea gardens, the airport taxis, the thousands of toilers entering data for a pound a day — though how this last would work was not entirely clear. After about ten minutes and several attempts to talk Mr Bannerjee through the agreement form, Paul began to give up on the full-page colour. Mr Bannerjee asked him when he was going to be in Mumbai. Paul said, ‘Probably not till next summer.’ Mr Bannerjee then said that he would be in London in a few weeks, and suggested they have a meeting. Paul was evasive, spoke of being extremely busy. Mr Bannerjee said he would be staying at the Hotel Henry VIII in Bayswater — did Paul know it? Paul fibbed, and said he did. Mr Bannerjee suggested the bar of the Henry VIII as a possible meeting place — ‘or maybe they have conference rooms, I don’t know’. The call ends with Paul saying that he really has to go, and that he will send the agreement form through, and Mr Bannerjee saying that ‘of course’ he will send it back straight away.

By this time, it is almost twelve. ‘Coming to the Penderel’s?’ Paul says to Murray, standing and pulling on his jacket. Surprisingly, Murray responds as if this suggestion were something unexpected. After a moment of strange puzzlement, he says, ‘Aye.’ But with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.

The pub is deserted when they arrive. Paul’s phone had started to ring as he was leaving the sales floor, and though he had hesitated, and half turned, he had not answered it. He is still wondering who it might have been. He wonders if it might have been Mr Bannerjee, whose long, supercharged spiel has left him exhausted and muddled, and oddly inspired. He is even starting to wonder whether perhaps he should have agreed to meet him at the Hotel Henry VIII, whether perhaps something might have come of such a meeting. ‘Like what?’ he asks himself, derisively, as he stands at the bar. And in answer summons the examples of Angus MacMilne, who so impressed one of his prospects that they offered him a job in the City, and of Pax ‘the Fax’ Murdoch, another former fellow salesman, who went out to Bangkok to set up a telesales business there — which turned out, extraordinarily, to be an international scam run by the North Korean intelligence service, though Pax did not realise who he was working for, or why, until it was too late.

‘Morning, Paul,’ Michaela says.

‘Morning? I think you mean afternoon. Never in the morning, Michaela.’ It is two past twelve. She laughs, and without waiting, starts to pour three pints. She likes Paul. He is ‘nice’. ‘Nice’ in a way that Murray — who makes her uneasy — is not. Setting his cigarette in the glass ashtray on the bar, Paul reaches into his pocket and fishes out the exact amount of money for the pints — he knows it well. He finds he is irritatingly shy with Michaela today, after what happened on Friday — the more so when, standing there, he suddenly remembers telling her that he and Heather were on the point of separation, which just isn’t true. ‘Good weekend?’ he says, smiling softly. Michaela shrugs her small shoulders. Andy is at the fruit machine, and they hear the metal of his winnings yocker into the trough. Scooping out the coins, he looks at Michaela, a cigarette stuck sexily — so he thinks — to his lower lip. And from the table, Murray stares, his face set in a virile scowl that he hopes she will see. All three of them find the unspoken hopes of the other two — of which they are all more aware than any of them think — contemptibly ridiculous, evidence of a comical degree of self-delusion. Paul puts the pints on the table, and he and Murray watch suspiciously as Andy wanders to the bar and says something to Michaela which makes her laugh. Murray mutters a few poisonous-sounding words, and Paul wonders if his unusually taciturn and preoccupied mood has something to do with his car, his Mercedes S-Class. It seems impossible that it will not be repossessed at some point this winter. The next payment, Paul knows, is due on Wednesday, and for the second consecutive month Murray will be unable to meet it.

Murray has always thought of himself as a Mercedes driver, the S-Class in particular — a serious, manly car for serious, manly men. (Sir Alex Ferguson, for example, drives such a car, and Murray sees many similarities between himself and Sir Alex — both working-class Glaswegians who have made their way in the world; both hard men, generous and just, with a gritty inborn nobility.) But as fifty approached and he was still driving the second-hand Sierra, Murray had started to worry. He had started to lose sleep over the thought that he might never drive an S-Class — might never be an S-Class driver. Why it happened exactly when it did, he is not sure, but one ordinary day in July, on his way home, he stopped at Tony Purslow Ltd, the Mercedes-Benz dealer in Epsom. He was determined not to think about what he was doing — not until it was done — and everything was therefore slightly dreamlike. The salesman’s smart suit and friendly, serious welcome. The shiny Mercs. The heated seats and leather-covered steering wheels and illuminated vanity mirrors. Forms were filled out, credit checks run, hands shaken. If the salesman was surprised at the impatient urgency of his client, he was too experienced a professional to let it show. And less than an hour after entering the showroom, Murray was motoring home in a long, wide S-Class — smiling down the A24 towards Leatherhead in its fragrant, insulated hush. The following week was one of the happiest of his life. At work, he was dreamy and absent-minded. He spent a lot of time staring out the window, or sitting on his own in the smoking room. At night, unable to sleep, he would get out of bed, and twitch the drapes, and look down at the car’s silver bodywork in the steady greenish illumination of the street light. He would spend evenings sitting alone in the stationary car, occasionally going for a short drive. One night, he slept in the car, waking on the anthracite leather in the bright silence of the very early morning, surprisingly cold, a terrible pain in his immobilised neck, the windows frosted with condensation. He opened the heavy door — startling some crows who were strutting on the tarmac — and stiffly swung his legs out. The steering wheel seemed to have bruised his knees during the night …

‘You all right, Murray?’ Paul says. Murray nods. Paul starts to tell him about Mr Bannerjee. He does not seem interested — though he murmurs occasionally, he obviously isn’t listening.

Leaving the pub at ten past two, they make their way back through Lincoln’s Inn Fields, its massive trees, and the noise of Kingsway. The afternoon passes slowly (though less slowly than it would were he sober) until, when it is starting to get dark outside, just when he is standing up to go to the smoking room, feeling in his jacket pocket for fags and lighter, his phone rings.

It is Eddy Jaw.

‘Hello — Rainey?’ his blunt voice says.

‘Yeah.’

‘Where the fuck were you?’

The Old Cheshire Cheese is on Fleet Street, halfway from the High Court to Ludgate Hill. It is possible that Shakespeare frequented the old pub (it was rebuilt in 1667, following the setback of the previous year), a possibility somewhat oversold on the sign outside. It was, however, Dr Johnson’s local, and Dickens knew its dark, creaking, wooden interior and cramped stairs. More recently, from the end of the nineteenth century and for most of the twentieth — until they decamped to less dear offices where the docks used to be — it was usually full of journalists. Now the only newsmen are from Reuters, over the road; the others have been replaced by investment bankers from Goldman Sachs, and lawyers from the Middle Temple, and tourists — lots of tourists — and salesmen.

Entering the narrow brick passageway where the pub’s entrance is — under a huge old lantern with ‘Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese’ in Gothic letters on its milky glass — Paul remembers, with some nostalgia, how he and Eddy Jaw used to work together in offices nearby, the offices of Northwood Publishing, and themselves spend long afternoons in the Chesh. That was some years ago, and it came to a sudden end when the contract they were working on was withdrawn. Which was a shame, because things had been very prosperous — ‘fucking dial-a-deal’ in the argot of the salesmen — and pushing open the pub’s broad door, Paul smells again, in the distinctive woody scent of the interior — similar to that of a Wren church — the spectacular success that the withdrawal of the contract had interrupted.

He remembers where they used to sit, in the square, skylit room — himself, Eddy, the Pig, Murray and the others. This part of the pub, he is disappointed to see, has been divided into smaller spaces, now full of people, so he makes his way to where the wooden stairs go down, and steadying himself with a hand on the low ceiling, descends to the vaulted rooms below — the former cellars — and down yet more stairs, stone this time, into the loud, high-ceilinged basement bar. It is half past five and every part of the pub is packed. Eddy is not there, so Paul goes back upstairs to his favourite place, the snug on the other side of the panelled entrance hall from the Chop Room restaurant (which does not seem to have changed much since the late eighteenth century, except that the waiting staff are now mostly Antipodean), where there is a fireplace with orange coals in a black grate, and a muddy painting of a man wearing a wig, and a window of thick, imperfect glass — he used to while away whole afternoons under that window — and wealthy American bankers talking shop. He decides that he should settle somewhere, or he and Eddy will spend the whole evening wandering through the pub, saying ‘Sorry, excuse me, sorry’, without ever seeing each other, so he goes back downstairs to a sort of mezzanine between the two subterranean levels, where a few small tables are squeezed into the painted brick alcoves formed by the ceiling vaults. One of these tables is vacant, and there he sips his pint of Ayingerbrau, lights a cigarette, and looks over the laminated menu, as if it were something utterly mysterious.

‘You’re not going to eat, are you, Rainey? That would really fucking throw me.’

Eddy Jaw has not changed. Stooping more than necessary under the low vault, he is wearing, as he always used to, a three-piece Hugo Boss suit with very short, stubby lapels — he looks buttoned-up, encased in olive cloth. His big face is perhaps fleshier than it used to be, but it was always fleshy. His hair is blond and cropped. ‘All right, Eddy,’ Paul says.

‘How the fuck are you, Paul?’

‘I’m all right. How are you, Eddy?’

‘I’m fucking brilliant. Do you want anything from the bar, another one?’ Paul glances at his three-quarters-full pint glass. ‘Course you do. What are you drinking?’ Eddy smiles significantly. ‘Prinz, is it?’

‘No, it’s Ayingerbrau.’

‘For fuck’s sake! What’s the matter with you?’

‘I’ll have the same again.’

‘No you won’t. You’ll have a fucking Prinz.’

Paul smiles, for a moment sincerely happy. ‘All right then.’ And Eddy’s broad back disappears down the stairs into the clamour of the bar. It is strange to see him again. He looks full of himself, thriving — very different from how he looked when Paul saw him last. Excluding Friday, that is. It was a few months after Northwood had lost the contract with International Money Publications in the summer of ninety-seven — they had all scattered, at the height of that summer, and gone their separate ways. Eddy had come to Murray’s barbecue, but after that he had disappeared, and none of them knew what had happened to him. Then, one wet November morning, Paul had seen him in Tottenham Court Road tube station. On his way to work at Archway Publications, Paul had been on the up escalator, and Eddy, a desolate face in the crowd, on the down, so it had been impossible to speak to him, and he had not noticed Paul. Paul has always remembered that sudden apparition of Eddy’s face in the crowd, the undisguised wretchedness of its expression, as the escalators shunted them past each other. It had been a low point in Paul’s own life — perhaps the lowest — and on the basis of nothing more than that glimpse, he has always assumed that for Eddy too that dank winter had been some sort of nadir. Perhaps it had not, but for Paul there is nevertheless a sense of shared experience — a sense sharpened to poignancy by their presence here in the Chesh; ensconced underground, unaware of the dark November evening above and able instead to imagine Fleet Street on a fierce July day. The taste of Prinz super-strength lager — unpleasantly spirituous and metallic — intensifies this effect. It was what they always drank then — except Eddy, of course. A Bacardi Breezer in his big fist he sits down opposite Paul, and clinks the neck of the bottle peremptorily on his pint glass. ‘Good to see you, Paul,’ he says.

‘Yeah, good to see you, Eddy.’

From his long-cheeked face, Eddy’s small eyes peer out, pale blue and smiling warily. Eddy is bluff and coarse, even brutal, but there is something else in his eyes — a slyness, for sure. Even an unexpected intelligence. He sits hunched forward, surrounding the Bacardi Breezer with his hands. ‘Sorry about lunchtime, by the way,’ Paul says. ‘I completely forgot about that.’ Eddy smiles. ‘I thought you might, state you were in Friday.’

‘Yeah, fucking hell …’ Embarrassed, Paul sips Prinz. ‘I don’t think I’ve been here since we left Northwood,’ he says.

‘No, me neither.’ Eddy looks around. ‘Those were the days, eh?’

‘They were.’

His smile widening, Eddy says, ‘Fucking dial-a-deal.’

‘Yeah, right.’ And for a few minutes they unshutter a friendship with familiar stories about people they both know — Murray, Simon, who was their boss, the Pig — and about Northwood, the small company where they worked for a few summer months, and where everything seemed easy and exhilarating. Paul finds it strange that they worked there for only a few months. It seems like longer.

‘You know why Simon lost the IM contract?’ Eddy says.

Paul shakes his head. ‘No.’

‘He was trying to launch his own yearbooks. In competition with IM.’

‘Was he?’

‘Yeah. Trying to set up his own titles. They found out, and he lost the contract.’ Simon. His empurpled face and loudly pinstriped bulk whelm into Paul’s mind. His wavy white-and-grey hair, port-and-stilton accent, and habit of tapping the desk with his signet ring when under stress. It was all affectation, apparently. He was from the East End, though in the Northwood days he lived in Surrey. Or said he did. ‘And what happened to him?’

‘Topped himself,’ Eddy says.

‘He killed himself?’

‘That’s what I heard.’

‘Why? When?’

Eddy shrugs. ‘When he lost the contract, I suppose. He had kids in private schools,’ he says, as though it explained everything. ‘I heard he got really tanked up and drove the Jag over a quarry. Kaboom.’

‘Fucking hell,’ Paul says thoughtfully. They observe a moment’s silence, then Eddy says, ‘Saw Glengarry Glen Ross last night.’ He says it with a strange, shy half-smile.

‘Oh yeah?’

‘It was on telly.’

‘Was it?’ Paul lights a cigarette. ‘Haven’t you got it on video or something?’

‘On DVD. I always watch it when it’s on telly though.’

‘Fair enough.’ Paul has never understood why some of the others, and Eddy especially, are so obsessed with that film. He remembers the first time that he saw it; not the film (he has seen it since) so much as the occasion — the end of a long night, one of those nights that has particularly stuck in his mind, though nights like it were normal in the Northwood days. The stalwarts were Eddy, Murray and the Pig, and with them there was always, in the end, a gravitational pull to the east — the Pig lived near Brick Lane, and Eddy in Islington — and at about one o’clock, having stomped around Soho for a while looking for somewhere else to go, they shouted down a cab on the Charing Cross Road and piled in, telling the faceless driver to take them to Shoreditch High Street, where there was a lap-dancing place which Eddy and the others liked to go to. The cab rattled through the hot night. On the door, the bouncers had Eastern European accents. Inside, the young — and not so young — women performed on their little stages with the swift, precise movements of product demonstrators on the shopping channel. After each act someone went through the crowd of standing men with a pint glass, collecting pound coins. Later, Eddy and the Pig had the Yellow Pages out, and were leafing through it, looking for escort agencies. Paul was slouched, smoking, in the La-Z-Boy chair. Murray hovered by the door. They were in the Pig’s flat, in a newish, hutch-like, secure development between Brick Lane and Bethnal Green. The idea of getting some escorts had been Eddy’s, but it soon became clear that they had nowhere near enough cash for one girl each — not even enough for one girl between them — and when someone (Murray probably) asked the Pig where the nearest cashpoint was, and the Pig said it was at Tesco’s on Bethnal Green Road, the idea was quietly dropped. Extraordinarily, there was still some cocaine left, and for some reason the Pig had about ten litres of unchilled sweet cider, and then Eddy, who was looking through his video collection, found Glengarry Glen Ross.

Its depiction of their work is not, in Paul’s view, inspiring, though some of the others seem to think it is. For him, the film’s final line — ‘God I hate this job’, spoken by a salesman dialling a prospect’s number — is not one which sends him out happy into the night, or in this case the deserted streets of Spitalfields at five o’clock on a cloudless summer morning. He and Eddy left the Pig’s place together, and walked towards Islington. ‘God I hate this job.’ It is especially uninspiring in view of one of the film’s other important lines — ‘A man is his job.’ On the other hand, it has to be admitted that Al Pacino and Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey, Ed Harris and Alec Baldwin were not assembled to make a film about, say, supermarket shelf-stackers; even depicted as sweatily desperate, duplicitous and soul-destroying, salesmanship is somehow made mythic by the film — stands in as a metaphor for a whole world’s modus operandi — and some of its lines have come to define what many of Paul’s fellow salesmen, and often Paul himself, like to see as the savage ethos of their profession. Their unmediated acquaintance with the stubborn realities of economic life is epitomised in the film by the terms of the monthly sales contest — ‘First prize, a Cadillac Eldorado. Second prize, a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.’ Of course, most of them prefer to identify with Alec Baldwin’s character — ‘I made nine hundred eighty thousand dollars last year, how much you make?’ — who delivers the terms of the contest, rather than the poor bastards listening to him. And — Paul has sometimes thought — it may be significant that he himself never has identified with Alec Baldwin, but always with the poor bastards, the losers, Jack Lemmon, Ed Harris, that other one — anonymous, not even played by a Hollywood star, the most loserish of them all in his unremarkable mediocrity. Murray, Eddy, he feels sure, do not identify with these men (and it is a film which smells intensely of men — there is only one woman in it, standing in the shadows behind a bar with no lines to say) even if the facts of their lives suggest that they should.

All these thoughts Paul had as he walked, still in his stale suit, back to the unfashionable part of west London where his flat was. A very long walk. He left Eddy at Old Street roundabout — silent at that hour — and made his way slowly down Old Street itself, and into Farringdon. Clerkenwell. Bloomsbury. When he passed Russell Square station it was open, just, and for a moment he paused. He decided that he would keep walking. He was in no hurry. Oxford Street was eerily empty — only a few delivery trucks and street sweepers, preparing for the day’s massed, shopping hordes — and preceded by his sharp shadow, starting to sweat in his suit, he walked its whole length. There was something strange and sad about entering his sunny flat, everything exactly as it was when he set off for work twenty-four hours earlier. It seemed totally indifferent to him. He pulled the curtains (it was still light enough to set the alarm for noon) and undressed, and went into the kitchen for a glass of tepid tap water. He remembers lying down, his mind still fizzing exhaustedly, his heart knocking. Yes that morning, which he remembers so vividly — with its sunlight and sense of impalpable menace — he thinks of as the first intimation of what happened next.

When Simon took the call from Alan at International Money plc, one fresh and open-windowed morning a few weeks later, it was immediately obvious from his prolonged silence on the phone that something serious had happened. ‘We’ve lost the contract,’ he said, and smiled, and they all went to the pub. Not the Chesh — it seemed inappropriate — another one, which they did not normally go to, down by Blackfriars. When he was asked why they had lost the contract, all Simon would say was: ‘I don’t know. Because they’re cunts.’ They stayed in the pub until it was dark outside — Simon’s gold card was behind the bar — and then, too drunk to stand or see properly, they dispersed. On his own, Paul was sick in the street. The next afternoon, Simon called them all individually and said that he was sorry about what had happened, and that he had ‘something exciting in the pipeline’ which he hoped they would be interested in working on. They never heard from him again. Paul didn’t anyway. For a while, with money in the bank, he did nothing and during this short sabbatical, sitting in the hot sun on the balconette of his flat (which was just large enough for a straight-backed chair and an ashtray), smoking spliffs, he thought about doing something that he positively wanted to do. Nothing in particular occurred to him, however, and in early September — the school time, summer’s end — he started to look for work. And work, of course, meant sales.

That his first stop was Archway Publications, and not one of the other multi-storey telesales factories that stud London, was down to nothing more than alphabetical order, and once he had arranged an interview with someone called James Grey, he shut the phone book and went back to his balconette to soak up some more of the Monday-afternoon sun. The interview itself was a formality. James Grey — a slick, oleaginous man who sat with his soft, manicured hands loosely interwoven, and whose tiepin, Paul noticed, featured the Playboy bunny — asked a few unsearching questions, the final one being when Paul would be able to start. Archway had a voracious need of salespeople. More or less anybody could walk in off the street and sign up for the next intake — a week of training starting every Tuesday. There was no salary, of course. Waiting for James Grey, Paul had been able to see the open-plan training area, the week’s dozen trainees — it would be difficult to imagine a more varied set of twelve people, scooped from the sloshing population of London, and united only by their need of money — and the training manager saying, ‘We are not selling advertising space. We are selling sales. The prospect will only buy space if he thinks it will increase the sales of his company — that is the only thing he is interested in. So you do not sell the space — you sell the increased sales. So, what are we selling?’ Paul did not have to do the training week. He was put straight onto a team. It was, perhaps, only a month or two later, when he saw Eddy on the escalator at Tottenham Court Road, that he understood quite how unhappy he was.

Picking, with a heavy thumbnail, at the label of his Bacardi Breezer, Eddy says, offhand, ‘So what you up to these days, Paul?’

‘Oh …’ Paul exhales vaguely. ‘Did I say on Friday? I can’t remember.’

‘You said something …’ Eddy says, equally vaguely.

‘I’m working over Holborn way. Place called Park Lane Publications.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Murray’s there as well. D’you see him on Friday?’

Eddy smiles. Whenever Murray is mentioned, people smile. ‘Yeah, for a minute.’

Paul smiles too. ‘I’m his manager actually,’ he says.

Eddy laughs. ‘Bet he’s not fucking happy about that.’

‘I don’t think he is.’ Paul lights a cigarette. That Murray may be even less happy about it than he seems sometimes troubles him. ‘No, it’s all right.’

‘How did that happen, then?’

Paul shrugs. These things are, after all, always happening — people move from one job to another, and often find themselves being managed by someone they managed themselves a year or two earlier. Murray was Paul’s manager for a few years when he started out at Burdon Macauliffe. Then they worked at Northwood together — Simon was the only manager there (though the Pig was his lieutenant, and on an override). When Northwood ended, Paul fetched up at Archway and Murray somewhere else — some place in Covent Garden that he found through a newspaper ad. Years passed. They more or less lost touch. Then, one morning, Paul — now a manager at PLP — picked up his phone, and it was Murray, looking for a job. Which was, of course, humiliating for him. ‘I haven’t done a pitch for fuck knows how long,’ Eddy is saying. ‘I miss it. Honestly.’

‘I wish I never had to do another pitch ever again,’ Paul says. And then smiles, to smudge the unintended sincerity of what he said.

‘You’d miss it.’

‘I doubt it. Maybe.’

‘Is it not going well?’ Eddy asks.

‘It’s going all right. Anyway, what are you up to, Jaw?’

Eddy takes out his wallet, and flips it open in his big hands. From it he pulls a business card, which he holds out, mysteriously, to Paul. Paul presses his cigarette into the ashtray’s glass notch, and takes the card. The first thing he notices are the words ‘EDWARD FELTMAN, DIRECTOR OF SALES’. Then he notices the stylised elephant-head logo in the top left-hand corner, and the words ‘DELMAR MORGAN’ next to it. ‘Is this you?’ he asks.

‘Of course it’s fucking me,’ Eddy says.

‘Sales director?’

‘That’s right.’

Paul offers him the card back, but Eddy says, ‘Keep it.’

‘All right.’ He puts it in his pocket. ‘So how d’you get that then?’ There is something sour about the way he asks the question, and, hearing this, he is slightly ashamed of the shadow of pique that seems to have fallen on him. Eddy is still smiling, and there is undoubtedly something smug about his smile. But then, perhaps in an effort to smooth over what has become an unexpectedly prickly moment, he leans back, and says, with a laugh, ‘Oh, mate, I don’t fucking know.’ And if that was his intention, it works. Mollified, even smiling, Paul shakes his head and says, ‘Fucking hell — you.’

‘I know. It’s mad.’

Having put the card in his pocket, Paul takes it out again. ‘What’s Delmar Morgan?’ he asks.

‘Sales place,’ Eddy says, looking away with a sort of sudden shyness, and swigging the sweet, green dregs of his Bacardi Breezer.

‘What sort of sales place?’

‘The usual sort. Ad sales.’

‘How long’ve you been working there?’

‘A few years. Do you want another one?’

‘It’s my round, isn’t it?’ Paul says.

‘Okay.’

‘Same again?’

‘Cheers.’

Standing, waiting at the bar, a tenner in his hand, Paul feels an unpleasantly keen sense of shortfall. That Eddy Jaw is director of sales somewhere … It suddenly puts things into perspective, makes him suddenly dissatisfied with his own life — even slightly ashamed of it — a shame deepened when he thinks of the flustered, envious shock with which he took the news of Eddy’s unexpected success. And there, in the press of people at the bar, he experiences a savage twinge of panic, a dismaying sense that he has somehow overslept, that it is too late. It is his turn and he says, ‘Pint of Ayingerbrau and a Bacardi Breezer.’

‘What flavour?’

‘Um. Melon.’

Eddy is more forthcoming when Paul returns to the table. He has a less edgy way of speaking now — the first Bacardi Breezer seems to have smoothed him out. ‘Everyone thought I was mad when I went to Delmar,’ he says. ‘I thought I was mad. It was going nowhere. It was going down. That old Chink with the Scottish name was running it then — Malcolm Kirkbride. He was MD. Five-foot-tall Malaysian bloke with a Fu Manchu moustache who could hardly fucking speak English and was called Malcolm Kirkbride. He was in charge in those days, and it showed. Morale was on the floor. People were leaving every day — whole teams disappearing overnight. But we turned it round — me, Tony Littleton and John Pascoe. We were just three salesmen, but we got together one day and decided to sort things out. I was sick and tired of fucking around, Paul. We all were. Since the end of Northwood I’d just been fucking around.’ Paul nods in sympathy. Eddy smiles, and says, ‘First thing I did was try to make money off the fucking horses. Can you believe that? I lost all the money I made at Northwood on the fucking nags. Lost it all in about two or three months. Then I went through a few sales jobs, here and there, just getting by. You know how it is. And I was still trying to make money out of the horses. I spent all my fucking time on the Internet, looking at tipsters’ sites, looking at the fucking form and all that shit. Trying to put together the perfect staking plan …’ He laughs. ‘I never made any money from that. Everybody always thinks they can, they always think they’re different. They’re like fucking medieval alchemists, trying to turn base metals or whatever into gold, and the more they try, the more they believe it must be possible, because they’ve spent too much time and too much money to believe anything else, and it never is.’ Eddy stops speaking for a moment and smiles, remembering all the hours he spent in smoke-filled bookies — and there’s nowhere smokier — the little stubby plastic pens, blue in William Hill, red in Ladbrokes. He still goes in sometimes to have a bet — or just to taste the failure he no longer shares — enjoying the status he has in there, a big man in a suit, among the nervous unemployed, the dusty builders, the garrulous Chinese, the threadbare middle-aged men in overcoats who always sit in the same place, like it’s their desk at work, their personal Racing Post spread out, their paper coffee cup, their dreams, their fags. ‘And one day,’ Eddy says, ‘I thought, what the fuck are you doing? If it’s money you want, you’d be making a fucking fortune if you put the hours, the dedication, the single-mindedness you’re putting into the horses into selling ad space. You’d be making more than you’d be making off the horses even if your fucking system was working. That was the stupidest thing. You see, I’d always thought I was lazy, and that was just the way it was, but actually I wasn’t. I was working evenings and weekends, working on the fucking horses — working on the wrong thing. So one day, when I’d just lost a couple of grand, I took all the fucking crap I’d accumulated, all the papers and pages of numbers and fucking spreadsheets and tipsters, and chucked it all. I chucked it all out, and wiped it off my hard drive, and cancelled all the subscriptions, and it felt fucking great. Like a fucking great load off my back. And obviously at first there was a void in my life. And nothing to hope for — that was the worst thing. Nothing to hope for — if you’re trying to turn lead into gold, and you believe it can be done, and you think you’re getting close, there’s always something to hope for, something to dream about. Suddenly not having that is fucking hard. You’ve got to dream about something else, you’ve got to have something else to expend your energy on, to get you out of bed in the morning. And preferably something that will actually fucking get you somewhere.’

Pausing for emphasis, Eddy swigs green alcopop, and Paul lights a B&H. ‘We were selling on a book called International Pulp and Paper Yearbook,’ he goes on. ‘Not a great book. A rubbish book, in fact. A basket case. Everyone knew it was rubbish, and no one expected it to make much money. So no one really bothered. We’re all fucking good salesmen — John and Tony and me — we just weren’t trying. And then one day, we just said, Fuck this — there’s just no point doing this like this. And we really had a go. It’s a shame you weren’t there, Paul. I’d have liked you to have been there. Tony and John felt the same way I did — there’s no point muddling through any more, faffing about. We wanted money, everything we needed was there, to hand, we just had to stop making excuses, and fucking get on with it. You seen Taxi Driver?’ he asks, surprisingly.

Paul nods. ‘Yeah, of course.’

‘I love that film. There’s a great line in it. I can’t remember it exactly. It’s that older taxi driver — remember him? — and he’s talking to De Niro, and he says he sometimes wonders how he’s ended up, at his age, still driving a company cab. You know, not having his own cab. And he says in the end it must be because he didn’t really want his own cab. Because he didn’t really want his own cab. I think that’s brilliant.’

Paul nods slowly, meditatively.

‘Isn’t that brilliant? It’s the only explanation he can think of, because if he really wanted his own cab, there was nothing to stop him having it. Nothing.’ He watches Paul — who has gone quiet — to see what effect his words are having on him. Then, with a smile, he says, ‘Just going to point Percy at the porcelain. Back in a sec.’

When Eddy gets back, he continues his story. ‘Once we started trying, once we started working, once we started only being satisfied with the max — it went through the fucking roof. Nobody else could believe it. And they weren’t too happy about it either because it showed them up. Kirkbride was fucking happy, though.’ Eddy does a crude, comedy Chinese accent — ‘“You boys de best! You de best! Me so horny!” Of course he was fucking horny — he got ten per cent of everything. When we finished Pulp and Paper, he put us on International Project Finance, which is a much better book, and we made much more money. More than at Northwood, Paul.’

‘Yeah?’ Paul says sceptically.

‘Much more. And the books were rubbish, rubbish compared to what we were working on at Northwood. When I think about what we could have made if we’d actually worked those books properly …’ He shakes his head. ‘Anyway. We were making a fuck of a lot of money, and everything was hunky-dory. Then we said we wanted better terms, more commission — because if you’re working that hard, you don’t like to see eighty-five per cent of it go into other people’s pockets — but Kirkbride wasn’t so keen on that. “I see wha’ I can do, boys. Ma-com see wha’ he can do.” And he did fuck all — so we asked again, said we weren’t happy, said we were going to leave. That got his fucking attention. He got us into his office, very serious, very fucking sincere, and said he understood our concerns, and had an idea. He said he’d make us all managers, with a team each, and we’d get a special override, plus what we’d get anyway, if we improved the whole company’s sales like we’d improved our own — which basically meant doubling them. The override was five per cent. Five fucking per cent!’ Eddy drinks indignantly. ‘So we got rid of Kirkbride. His sales director was a ponce called Pascal Olivier — we got rid of him too. We went to the chairman, behind Kirkbride’s back — a bloke called Sir Trevor Cawthorne. A Geordie. I get on well with him. He knew us even then, because the three of us were making half the company’s sales. We said to him, why don’t you let us run the company? Get rid of Kirkbride, and we’ll make you a lot more money than you’re making now. It took him about two hours to think it over, before he called me and said, “All right.” And I was in Kirkbride’s office at the time, talking to him about some shit, and my mobile rang, and it was Trevor and he’s saying, “I’m going to sack Kirkbride — you lot can take over.” And I’m pretending it’s someone else, and looking at Kirkbride, and thinking, “You don’t know what’s about to happen to you, mate. You don’t realise that your life is in my hands.” And I say, “Yeah, that’s fine.” And then a few minutes later, Kirkbride’s phone rings and he answers it, and puts on his best arse-licking voice — “Ah hewow, Sah Trawah! How ah you, Sah Trawah?” And he waves at me to get out of his office, and whispers, “Is Sah Trawah.” And I’m thinking, “Yeah, I fucking know it is.” So he went for a meeting with Trevor that afternoon, and Trevor sacked him, and then we had a meeting with Trevor — John and Tony and me — and he basically gave us the keys to the company, and said we had six months to show him what we could do. And we showed him. We turned things round. We changed the image of the company. I came up with the elephant logo,’ Eddy says proudly. ‘It’s a new image. Honesty, integrity, long-term relationships.’

‘Memory,’ murmurs Paul.

‘Yeah, of course. Our MD’s an accountant. We nicked him from KPMG. He knows what he’s good at and doesn’t get involved on the sales side. Not at all. I deal with all that. And John and Tony run two super-teams. We wanted to cut out as many managers as possible — pare it down. We each get ten per cent of gross sales. The sales force gets ten to fifteen per cent. The rest goes to the company. I made over a million quid last year, Paul. I’m not joking. That’s more than anybody makes off the geegees. Even fucking Henry Rix.’

‘Who’s Henry Rix?’

‘Doesn’t matter. Now we’re starting to think about an MBO.’

‘What’s that again?’

‘Management buyout. The company’s owned by a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a shell company that’s part of some fucking offshore investment vehicle. Fuck knows what else they’re involved with. I don’t really know much about it — Trevor’s my only point of contact with all that. But whoever does own it isn’t really interested in it, or they wouldn’t have let Kirkbride fuck it up for so long, and they wouldn’t leave an old codger like Trevor in charge. The point is, they’ll probably sell if the price is right.’

‘Sell to who? To you?’

‘Yeah,’ Eddy says, with a hint of impatience. ‘A management buyout. We’d buy the company — me, Littleton and Pascoe.’

‘With what money?’

‘We’re looking into that. A mixture of debt finance and venture capital probably. Mezzanine, maybe. We’re looking to end up with about half the equity. Anyway … But that’s not really relevant.’

‘Relevant to what?’

‘To what I want to talk to you about.’

‘What do you want to talk to me about?’

‘Should we get something to eat?’ Eddy says. ‘I’m starving. What about going to the Wine Press? For old times’ sake.’

After two Ayingerbraus and a Prinz, Paul has no appetite. He feels settled in the warm low-vaulted space. ‘All right,’ he says unenthusiastically. ‘If you want.’

‘Excellent.’

Outside, fine light rain is falling in the alley. The Wine Press, a venerable pizzeria where they sometimes went in the Northwood days, is a little way along Fleet Street, near Fetter Lane. Paul is about to ask Eddy what he wants to talk to him about, but Eddy speaks first. ‘How’s your sex life, Paul?’ he asks as they walk. Paul is evasive. ‘It’s all right.’ He is aware of having described many aspects of his life as ‘all right’. ‘How’s yours?’

‘Very good actually. I think it was Henry Kissinger said power is the greatest aphrodisiac.’

‘Did he?’

‘He did.’

‘You still with Kim?’ Paul asks.

Eddy laughs. ‘No.’ He holds open the plate-glass door. ‘After you.’

‘Cheers,’ Paul mumbles, and steps into the torrent of warmth under the heater inside.

‘This place hasn’t changed,’ Eddy says.

Paul nods and lights a cigarette.