Soft

Boom

‘These have been anxious days,’ Raleigh Connor said, ‘anxious days for all of us.’ He paced in front of the window, his shoulders rounded, his hands pushed deep into his trouser pockets. ‘However,’ and he turned back into the room and smiled, ‘I’m delighted to be able to inform you that our troubles are over …’

Positioned at the head of the table, he seemed to be waiting for some kind of response. A spontaneous burst of applause, perhaps, or murmurs of appreciation. At the very least he must have expected to see his smile mirrored in the faces of his employees. But all Jimmy sensed was a subtle slackening of tension in the room, a kind of exhalation. He glanced at Neil and Debbie. They had been meeting in secret ever since the first threat of a leak halfway through July. They had been working sixty-hour weeks for almost two months. Quite possibly they were too exhausted to react. Still, someone had to say something.

‘That’s great news,’ Jimmy said. ‘Great news.’

But Debbie was frowning. ‘Can you give us any details?’

‘I prefer not to, Debbie.’

Connor’s voice did not invite further questioning. But this was a nuance which Debbie, as usual, failed to register.

‘You don’t think we’ve got a right to know?’ she said.

Connor’s lips tightened. ‘A right?’ he said, easing down into his chair. ‘No. This is not a matter of rights. This is a matter of what’s appropriate.’ He leaned his forearms on the table; his fingers calmly formed a pyramid. ‘All you need to know is what I’ve told you. There will be no scandal, no exposé. I’ve seen to that personally. To put it somewhat bluntly,’ and he paused, ‘we got away with it.’ His head rolled on his shoulders. His eyelids lowered a fraction as his gaze fixed on Neil Bowes. ‘Or, as your famous playwright said, “All’s well that ends well”.’

A sickly smile from Neil. No Chinese proverb, though. Not this time.

‘Obviously we won’t be resurrecting Project Secretary,’ Connor went on, turning to Jimmy. ‘It would be tempting fate. In any case, it’s my firm belief that it has already served its purpose, that of helping to establish Kwench! as a real power in the marketplace.’

Jimmy nodded in agreement.

‘Tomorrow morning,’ Connor said, ‘I’ll be holding a press conference. There are one or two important announcements I’d like to make. Also, I think it’s time to put an end to the rumours, once and for all.’ He slipped a sheaf of papers into his attaché case and snapped the brass locks shut. ‘And now, if you’ll excuse me …’

‘A double espresso,’ Jimmy said, ‘that’s what I need.’

He was standing outside the lift with Neil and Debbie. After their meetings with Connor they would usually sit in the café round the corner and hold a brief post-mortem; the name of the café — Froth — provided the perfect ironic counterpoint to their tense discussions.

‘Me too,’ Neil said.

Debbie didn’t say anything, but when the doors opened she followed them into the lift. She stood as far away from Jimmy as she could, with her arms folded. Ever since she learned that Project Secretary had been Jimmy’s idea, she had treated him the way you might treat a suitcase that’s been abandoned at an airport. Sometimes she looked at him so warily that he had the feeling he might actually explode. He pressed G for Ground. The doors slid shut.

‘Well,’ he said with a sigh, ‘it’s a relief, I suppose.’

‘If it’s true,’ Neil said.

‘What about these announcements?’ Debbie said.

‘Don’t know about you two,’ Jimmy said, ‘but it’s a big promotion for me.’

Neil’s head swung round. ‘Really?’

Jimmy laughed.

‘Fuck you, Jimmy,’ Neil said gloomily.

‘What did you think of the Shakespeare?’ Jimmy said.

Debbie eyed him from the corner of the lift.

‘What about it?’ Neil said.

‘All’s well that ends well,’ Jimmy said. ‘Shakespeare didn’t say that. He wrote it. It’s the title of a play, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Not his special subject,’ Debbie said. And then, with a faint sneer, ‘Not his field of expertise.’

Neil watched the numbers declining as if they told of his own personal downfall. ‘So what is?’

‘I think we all know the answer to that one,’ Debbie said.

‘Do we?’ Neil said.

That evening Jimmy parked his car on Mornington Terrace and walked north, following the wall that separates the road from the railway cut. He had always been struck by the colour of the bricks, an unusual purple-grey, and the subtle sheen they had, the kind of iridescence that you find on coal. From behind the wall came the clink and rattle of trains picking their way over sets of points. He was thinking about the lunch he’d had with Richard Herring. When their coffee arrived, Richard had leaned over the table with that serious look he would sometimes, and rather self-consciously, adopt. ‘There have been some stories going round,’ he said. ‘About your company.’

Jimmy nodded. ‘Yes, I know.’

‘Pretty bizarre.’ Richard was watching him closely.

‘I know.’

‘Nothing in it, I suppose?’

‘Richard,’ Jimmy said. Then, when Richard’s face didn’t alter, he said, ‘Of course not. Totally without foundation. In fact, there’s a press conference tomorrow. Connor’s going to make a statement.’

‘You seem uneasy —’

‘I’m not uneasy, Richard. I’m just bored with the whole subject. I’ve been hearing nothing else for days.’

A silence fell.

Richard finished his coffee, setting the cup down on its saucer so carefully that it didn’t make a sound. Eyes still lowered, he said, ‘You won’t be needing any more of those invoices, I take it.’

It suddenly occurred to Jimmy that Richard might be taping the conversation and, though he instantly dismissed the thought as paranoid, he decided not to say anything else.

At last Richard sat back and, reaching for his napkin, dabbed his mouth. ‘It’s all right, Jimmy,’ he said, laughing. ‘I won’t tell.’

You’ve just lost the account, Jimmy thought. Not today. Not tomorrow either. But you’ve lost it.

He passed the house with the four motor bikes in its front garden. The window on the second floor was closed. Nobody home. At the end of the road he turned right, into Delancey Street. It had been a strange day, a day that had raised as many questions as it had answered. Halfway through the afternoon, for instance, Tony Ruddle had stopped him in the corridor and said, ‘You know what I decided while I was away?’

Jimmy had no idea, of course.

A wide smile from Ruddle, which revealed his chaotic library of teeth. ‘I decided,’ he said, ‘to let you dig your own grave.’

When Jimmy asked him what he meant by that, Ruddle wouldn’t answer. He just stood there, nodding and smiling, as if he was listening to a joke inside his head.

Walking more quickly now, Jimmy turned right again, making his way back towards his flat. He no longer paid too much attention to what Ruddle said. It was just hot air, bile, spleen; it had no consequence, no meaning. All the same, it could unsettle you.

Looking up, he saw a door open further down the street. Two people stepped out on to the pavement. They were in the middle of an argument. The man was balding, his skin-tight T-shirt highlighting a weightlifter’s chest. The woman was wearing sunglasses. With her low-cut scarlet dress, her muscular tanned legs and her frizzy hair, she had a Spanish look. The man strode on ahead, ignoring her. She kept shouting at him, though; you could almost see her words bouncing off the nape of his neck, his shoulderblades. Her breasts shook as she walked.

A strange day altogether. Provocative, somehow. Incomplete. And yet the threats, such as they were, seemed empty, and the most important news was good.

Later that night Jimmy lay on his sofa with the TV on and a vodka-and-tonic in his hand. He had just started watching the first American football game of the season, which he had videoed the week before, when the doorbell rang. For a moment he didn’t move. The bell rang again. He looked at his watch. Ten-forty-five. Marco, he thought. Or Zane. Sighing, he put his drink down and stood up.

When he opened the front door, Karen Paley was standing on the pavement, her back half-turned. She had been about to leave.

‘Karen,’ he said.

She stared at him, almost as if she didn’t know him. ‘Are you busy?’ she said.

‘No, I’m not busy.’

In his living-room she stood by the window, looking out into the garden. He asked if he could get her anything. She shook her head. The whites of her eyes looked too white, somehow, as though she had been crying. It occurred to him that maybe she had told her husband, and there had been a fight. Behind her, the San Francisco 49ers were moving upfield. Elegant, remorseless.

‘I’m sorry to turn up like this,’ she said.

‘That’s all right.’

‘It’s just — something happened …’

He sat on the arm of the sofa, looking up at her. The tempting top lip, the blonde hair tucked behind her ear. He waited.

‘I didn’t think anything of it at the time,’ she said. ‘But later — I don’t know …’

‘What happened?’ He reached for his vodka. On the TV he saw a wide receiver leap high into the floodlit air and fold a spinning ball into his chest.

‘There were dead people in the swimming-pool …’

Still staring out into the darkness, Karen told him that when she arrived for training that morning, there were TV cameras on the steps outside the baths. She thought it was funny. So did the other girls. It seemed as if the TV people were there for them, as if they’d become famous overnight. So they played to the cameras, waving and blowing kisses … Later, she heard that a woman had hidden in the changing-rooms until the pool closed and then, sometime during the night, she had drowned her two small children, then she had drowned herself. The bodies had been found that morning.

Karen turned to him with tears shining on her face. ‘I’ve been thinking about it all day,’ she said, ‘but this evening it got worse. Somehow, I didn’t want to be alone.’

‘Where’s your husband?’

‘In America somewhere. Houston, I think.’

‘He’s getting closer then.’

She smiled through her tears. ‘You think I’m stupid.’

‘No.’

‘Maybe I should go.’ She looked round for the backpack she had brought with her.

‘Karen,’ he said, ‘it’s all right. You can stay.’

She seemed restless, though, so he took her out and showed her the neighbourhood — the Hotel Splendide on the corner, the statue of Cobden on its scrubby patch of grass, the house where the bald man and the Spanish-looking woman lived. They stood on the railway bridge and listened to the trains. The red light on the Post Office Tower blinked in the distance. The sky was the colour of beer.

‘Our troubles are over,’ he said. He wanted to hear the words out loud, see how they sounded. He wanted to believe in them.

Karen was looking at him oddly.

‘It’s just something someone said today.’ He took her hand. He could feel the knob of bone on the outside of her wrist. His little finger touched against it as they walked.

Later, when they reached his flat, she had a bath. At one-thirty they went to bed, the flicker of a black-and-white movie on TV.

‘Do you mind just holding me?’ she said.

He smiled. ‘Of course not.’

‘Strange place you’ve got,’ she murmured.

‘Everyone says that.’

‘No, I like it.’

Soon her breathing deepened and she was asleep. He looked down at her, what he could see of her — some green-blonde hair, one half-closed hand — and found himself remembering something Bridget had said to him a few months back. Why can’t you be nice to me? Why can’t you just be nice?

*

Journalists from many of the country’s leading newspapers and two of its TV stations attended the press conference that was held the following morning, but Raleigh Connor showed no signs of nervousness as he stepped up to the microphone. He began by mentioning a colleague of his who had worked in Washington for many years. If you want a friend in Washington, his colleague had told him, buy a dog. Connor waited until the laughter died away. In London it’s even worse, he went on. You bring your dog, they put it in quarantine for six months. This time laughter burst towards the ceiling like a shout. Standing at the side of the room with Neil Bowes, Jimmy saw that Connor already had his audience exactly where he wanted them. It was only in private that Connor slipped up, became human — even, sometimes, a figure of fun; in public he was seamless, infallible. At that moment Neil Bowes nudged Jimmy in the ribs. Jimmy realised he had not been listening.

‘… so it’s with great reluctance and considerable regret,’ Connor was saying, ‘that we, as a company, have accepted Tony Ruddle’s resignation. For almost eleven years now Tony has been …’

So that was what Ruddle had been talking about the other day. Jimmy glanced at Neil, who raised an eyebrow.

‘Did you know?’ Jimmy whispered.

Neil shook his head.

‘… and we’d like to take this opportunity to wish him well in his new life …’

Before Jimmy could start speculating on the effect this might have on his career, Connor paused significantly. When he began again, his voice had dropped a register, acquired new gravity.

‘There have been certain rumours circulating in the industry during the past few weeks,’ he said, ‘certain allegations of impropriety and wrongdoing …’

A hush descended on the room.

‘Obviously I don’t intend to dignify these allegations with any kind of response,’ Connor said, his eyes moving slowly along the rows of journalists. ‘The whole idea, as I understand it, is repugnant and unethical. The whole idea’s absurd, in fact. All I can say is, if the competition are resorting to this kind of mud-slinging, then they must be pretty worried …’

One or two people chuckled.

‘All I can say is,’ and Connor smiled down, ‘we must be doing something right …’

Doing something right, Jimmy thought. Good line.

After his statement Connor took questions. The journalists were unusually benign; they seemed cowed by his performance, almost sycophantic. As Jimmy moved towards the back of the room, though, he noticed a young man rise up out of the audience. He was roughly Jimmy’s age. With his smoke-grey RAF greatcoat and his hair tied back in a pony-tail, he looked more like a student than a member of the press.

‘At the back there,’ Connor said.

‘Where’s Glade Spencer?’ the student said.

The room stirred like someone half-woken out of a deep sleep.

‘I’m afraid I don’t understand the question,’ Connor said. ‘Perhaps I didn’t hear it correctly …’

‘You heard,’ the student muttered. But then he repeated the question, his voice louder now, a space between each word. ‘Where’s Glade Spencer?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Connor said. ‘I don’t know anyone by that name.’ He glanced towards the exit. Two security guards began to make their way along the edges of the room. One of them, Jimmy saw, was Bob.

The student was brandishing a folded newspaper. ‘Glade Spencer is one of the innocent people your company exploited,’ he shouted. ‘You exploited her, and now she’s dead —’

Taking an arm each, the two guards steered him towards the door. He was still shouting over his shoulder: a girl was dead, and ECSC UK were responsible. During the struggle he dropped his paper. Jimmy walked over and picked it up. In the background Connor was pointing out the dangers of rumour and gossip, how it brought ‘all kinds of people out of the woodwork’.

Once outside the room, Jimmy studied the paper. It had been folded in half, then folded again, which meant the top-right quarter of page nine faced upwards. A small article under the heading News in brief had a square drawn round it in black felt-tip.

Plunge couple mystery

The bodies of a man and a young woman were found on the Lincolnshire coast yesterday. Barker Dodds, 38, and Glade Spencer, 23, were last seen in the vicinity of the Humber Bridge on Monday evening. Police are appealing to anyone who might have information on the couple to come forward.

Jimmy had the curious feeling that this was something he already knew about — and yet the people’s names and the location meant nothing to him. Then he remembered Karen’s story of the night before — the bodies in the swimming-pool, the drownings …

After scanning the article again, he shook the newspaper out and looked for a date. It was five days old.

‘What’ve you got there?’ Neil said.

Jimmy showed Neil the paper. ‘That guy who was shouting, it belonged to him.’ He waited until Neil had read the article. ‘You think she was one of ours?’

‘One of ours?’ Neil gave him an acidic glance. ‘What was your name for them? Ambassadors?’ When Jimmy didn’t answer, Neil shrugged. ‘I’ll tell you what I think. I think this whole thing’s going to blow up in our faces.’ He paused. ‘Boom,’ he said, then walked away.

Jimmy drove home slowly, thoughtfully, his jacket on the seat beside him, his shirtsleeves rolled. As he waited at a set of traffic-lights in Maida Vale he caught sight of a woman in a first-floor window, above a shop. She was leaning on the window-sill in a beige slip, the warm, gold light of early autumn colouring her hair, her shoulders. She looked like someone nothing bad could happen to. She looked immune. To his surprise, he found he envied her. For the last few hours he had had the sense that things were turning against him. He felt strangely unanchored. Adrift. His bones seemed to be floating inside his skin.

That morning, after the press conference, he had walked up to Connor and congratulated him on his performance. Connor smiled stiffly, but said nothing; the ease and calmness that had always come so naturally to him suddenly appeared to require an effort. At one point Jimmy took a quick breath, thinking he might ask something, then he decided that the timing was inappropriate. But Connor had already noticed, of course.

‘You have a question, James?’

Jimmy hesitated. ‘Glade Spencer …’

‘Yes?’ Connor was looking directly into Jimmy’s eyes.

‘Who was she?’

‘Who was she?’ Connor said. ‘I honestly don’t know.’

His gaze had no depth to it, only surface, and the surface was hard and shiny, like lacquer or enamel. In the end Jimmy had to look away, as if he was the guilty party. As if the responsibility was his.

A horn sounded behind him.

‘All right, all right,’ he muttered.

He let the clutch out fast and pulled away from the lights, leaving the woman leaning on her window-sill, not thinking anything, just breathing, dreaming.