Corporate Bodies

by Simon Brett

  He wondered if the difference in the way the two men spoke of their superior was another reflection of the difference in their styles. ‘B.T.’ had a dated and distanced feel to it, while the ‘Brian’ implied not only a more informal approach, but also greater intimacy in the Product Manager’s relationship.

  ‘And you’ve always been the midwife to Brian’s babies, haven’t you, Ken?’

  As Robin Pritchard said this, Charles was aware of an undercurrent in the younger man’s voice. It was nothing as positive as insolence, but the intonation implied some kind of challenge. And a flicker in the Marketing Director’s expression showed that he was aware of that challenge.

  They were a contrasted pair; Ken Colebourne short and thick-set, grey-haired but with eyebrows and moustache still black. The suit was bluish with close white stripes: the tie, red, blue and white bands of different widths that didn’t quite amount to anything regimental. Ken’s voice had a Midland roughness. He gave the impression of a tough pragmatist who had worked up the hard way. Not a man with a great sense of humour. Certainly not a man to cross.

  The Product Manager for Biscuits and Cereals was at least twenty years younger, and had more obvious educational gloss. University certainly, possibly business school as well. The brown suit on his long frame was more fashionably floppy than Ken Colebourne’s, the tie looked like a detail from some twentieth-century abstract painting. Robin Pritchard wore round tortoiseshell glasses, and had either a weak mouth or a permanently sardonic expression. Or possibly both.

  Suddenly Charles identified the quality in the younger man’s voice. Robin Pritchard was, ever so slightly, sending up Ken Colebourne. His older colleague was fully aware of this, and didn’t like it. Ken was the one who was meant to be running the interview, but Robin very subtly implied that it was taking place by his licence.

  ‘The reason we wanted to see you, Mr Paris . . .’ the Marketing Director went on. ‘I mean, obviously we respect Will’s advice and his recommendation of you as an actor . . . but we had to check that you look right.’

  ‘Right,’ Charles echoed reasonably.

  ‘You see, this video will be seen all over the place. I mean, in-house, as induction to new employees . . . quite possibly for recruitment purposes . . . probably at trade fairs . . . It is going to cover the whole international scope of the Delmoleen operation – and that is big, as I may have said.’

  Yes, thought Charles, you have said it. A few times.

  ‘So, it’s important that we don’t have anyone in the video who looks wrong for the Delmoleen image.’

  ‘No, we do have a global profile to maintain, after all, don’t we, Ken?’ Now that Charles had identified the element of mockery in Robin Pritchard’s manner, it seemed more overt.

  As intended, the Marketing Director was a little flustered. ‘Yes, yes, of course. So, really, Mr Paris, we’ve called you in just to have a look at you, see how you fit in to the Delmoleen picture.’

  ‘Well, here I am,’ said Charles, spreading his arms wide in an ingenuous shrug.

  ‘Yes . . . yes . . .’ said Ken Colebourne, focusing on the actor as if for the first time, as though he hadn’t been able to form any visual impressions while he’d been talking. After a moment’s scrutiny, there was another thoughtful ‘Yes’; then another; then ‘I’m not really too sure.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Ken. You’re not at a cattle market.’ Robin Pritchard turned to Charles with confidential bonhomie. ‘I do apologise for my colleague’s bad manners, Mr Paris.’

  ‘No problem.’ And it wasn’t. Compared to the diplomatic skills demonstrated by some television directors, this was the height of good manners.

  Robin Pritchard’s words were a problem for Ken Colebourne, however. Again, the Marketing Director had winced, biting back some angry riposte. He knew that, in a verbal contest, the younger man would be the more nimble and only make him look clumsy.

  ‘To be quite frank, Robin, I’m a bit worried about the age factor . . .’

  Charles tried not to show that the barb had been hurtful. Like all actors, he always tried to look younger than his real age. This was not – or at least not wholly – for the reasons of vanity that drive some women to such deceptions; it was a matter of simple survival. There are few enough parts around, anyway; no actor wants to disqualify himself from any of them by being too old. Whenever Charles was asked at an audition – sorry, interview – the direct question, ‘How old are you?’, his automatic reply was, ‘Forty-eight, but play younger.’ Which wasn’t the exact truth, but near enough for an actor.

  Ken Colebourne expanded his point. ‘I mean, remember, what B.T.’s keen to do is to project the overall image of Delmoleen. Is that going to be helped by having a forklift truck driver on the verge of retirement?’

  Ouch! Now that one really did hurt.

  Will Parton came to his friend’s rescue. ‘The point is, Ken, that we want to project the whole company . . . you know, like an extended family. So we’ve got to have a spread of ages. I mean, the kid who’s going to be in the office for this warehouse sequence, Dayna, is only about eighteen . . . but we need the other end of the spectrum too. In an extended family, you’ve got kids . . . and you’ve got grandfathers . . .’

  How dare you, Will? Even though he was a grandfather three times over, Charles Paris wasn’t enjoying the direction of the conversation one bit.

  ‘I’m still not sure . . .’

  Will came in with the clincher. ‘Brian was very keen on this when I talked to him. I mentioned the “extended family” idea and he liked it a lot.’

  ‘Oh. Oh well, that’s fine then. Consider yourself hired, Mr Paris.’ Ken Colebourne reached a stubby hand across his desk. Robin Pritchard seemed to find something infinitely amusing in a vortex at the end of his tie. Will Parton looked innocently up to the ceiling. Charles Paris tried to avoid his friend’s eye.

  And that’s how he got the job of being a forklift truck driver.

  Chapter Two

  ‘NO, NO, NO, NO!’ said Trevor. ‘You got to swing the wheel round with more power than that.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want to go crashing into –’ Charles began.

  ‘I thought that looked fine, actually,’ the Director, Griff Merricks, interposed in a conciliatory tone. Not difficult for him; conciliatory was the only tone he possessed.

  Now over sixty, Griff’s main claim to fame in the business was his ‘unflappability’. Charles suspected that this quality, which at times verged on torpor, arose from the fact that the director had no interest whatsoever in any of the work he did. He was a competent framer of shots, unimpeded by imagination, who had pottered along amiably enough in the BBC until he reached retirement age, and was therefore now ideally qualified to direct corporate videos.

  Will Parton, having worked with Griff on a few projects and knowing him to be ‘safe’ to the point of tedium, had offered him the Delmoleen job on behalf of Parton Parcel. Glad once again to be in work, Griff Merricks continued as he always had done, resolutely safeguarding apple-carts from the risk of upset.

  Trevor the forklift truck driver, however, seemed bent on a rampage of apple-cart upsetting. At the beginning of the morning he had been most amenable, keen to show off his forklifting skills and demonstrating a lively interest in the camera that was being used for the filming (‘Like, a bit of a hobby of mine, video, like . . .’

  In fact, he had been perfectly docile until he discovered what Charles’s role was to be in the proceedings. From that moment, he had made as much trouble as he could. And was clearly not about to change his behaviour.

  ‘It didn’t bloody look fine!’ he protested. ‘Listen, I’ve done the tricky bit on the truck, haven’t I? I actually brought the pallet down from the shelves, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yes,’ Griff Merricks conceded soothingly. ‘But when we filmed that, we did it in longshot. What we’re doing now is cuffing to Charles in close-up to say the lines. All we need to see from him on the truck is the f
inal turn of the steering wheel.’

  ‘But what I’m saying is that the people watching this video’s going to think that he and me’re the same person.’

  ‘Yes, that’s the idea.’

  ‘That’s why you’ve put us in these bleeding overalls, isn’t it?’

  Trevor pulled disparagingly at the pristine blue fabric. Charles looked down at his overalls, thinking of all the wasted effort he’d put into matching Trevor’s usual costume. He caught the eye of Will Parton, who was clearly thinking the same thing. The writer smugly preened in his neat suit and tie. Charles looked abruptly away. If he started giggling now, the aggrieved Trevor was quite likely to assume the laughter was at his expense and become even more belligerent.

  ‘Well, it’s partly that, Trevor,’ Griff Merricks was agreeing tactfully, ‘– so that you and Charles look alike – but it’s also because the overalls have got the Delmoleen logo on them, and throughout the film Ken’s very keen to build up the corporate identity, so that whenever we see one of the workers – I mean, a Delmoleen employee other than a management executive – we see them wearing these overalls.’

  ‘But nobody in the company actually does wear them.’

  ‘No, Trevor, but for the video they do.’

  ‘Huh. Right load of cobblers this video’s going to be then, isn’t it?’

  ‘We-ell . . .’

  Charles’s gaze wandered round the warehouse. It was a massive space, divided into sections by high walls of shelving loaded with pallets of Delmoleen products. Other yellow forklift trucks lay idle in the narrow aisles. The shutters of the loading bays along one wall were open, showing the maws of empty lorries. At one end of the space were offices, two prefabricated structures, stacked on top of each other like shoe boxes against the wall.

  It felt strange to be working there. Not that Charles hadn’t worked in stranger settings, but that had always been for drama, when all the resources of the location had been dedicated to the production. In this case, the priorities were different, and the film crew was clearly a positive hindrance to the main business of the warehouse.

  Still, Trevor seemed impervious to the resentment of his work-mates and was in no mood to expedite the morning’s shoot. ‘Point I’m making is, if you have him’ – a contemptuous finger was jerked towards Charles – ‘turning the wheel of the truck like a wanker, people who see it’re going to think I’m a wanker, aren’t they?’

  ‘It’s a point of view . . .’ Griff Merricks looked nonplussed. Maybe conciliation wasn’t going to be enough in this particular case; unfortunately it was the only weapon his armoury contained.

  Charles stepped into the breach. ‘Look, Trevor, perhaps you could show me again how to do it,’ he humbly suggested, vacating the driver’s seat. ‘You do it so well, and I know I’m making a real pig’s breakfast of it.’

  ‘You can bloody say that again,’ Trevor concurred. But the simple psychology had worked; it had brought a grin – albeit a patronising one – to the driver’s face. He sprang into the truck’s seat with insulting ease.

  ‘Look, can we make it quick, please . . .?’ This wingeing voice belonged to Alan Hibbert, the Warehouse Manager, who had been hovering around uneasily all morning, trying time and again to move the proceedings along.

  He had received assurances from Ken Colebourne that the filming would only take a couple of hours and would cause minimum disruption. Unversed in the ways of television and film – where everything always takes immeasurably longer than it’s meant to and where the words ‘minimum disruption’ always mean ‘maximum disruption’ – Alan Hibbert had actually believed the Marketing Director’s words. And was now, to his cost, finding out the truth.

  Ken Colebourne had kept saying that they were only using one aisle for the filming and that the work of the rest of the warehouse could continue uninterrupted, but every time Alan Hibbert tried to get one of the other forklifts going, it either became entangled in the spaghetti of cables spawned by the cameras and lights or was ordered to stop because it was making too much noise during a take.

  The marriage between show business and the industrial process was not getting off to a very good start.

  ‘Look, it’s dead simple. Bloody child of three could do it.’

  Charles grinned weakly, prepared to suffer Trevor’s scorn in the cause of speed.

  ‘First you switch on the ignition – right?’

  Charles, nodding like an idiot, watched the key turned, as if the operation were a complex feat of microsurgery. ‘Right.’

  ‘And then you simply push this lever on the left of the steering wheel forward and you’re in gear – right?’

  Charles watched this manoeuvre completed with the ardour of Galahad being given a sneak preview of the Holy Grail. ‘Right. You don’t use the clutch?’ he asked breathlessly.

  ‘Can do, but don’t have to,’ Trevor assured him. ‘And look – you’re moving.’

  ‘So you are,’ agreed Charles, amazed by the miracle of the forklift truck slowly edging forwards.

  ‘And then you give it a touch of the accelerator to go faster.’

  ‘Just like a car, really.’

  This thought did not seem to have struck Trevor before. ‘Well, yeah, I suppose, if you like. Bit like a car.’

  On reflection, he decided this comparison might diminish the mystery of his calling. ‘Different from a car, though.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘I mean, driving a forklift . . . well, it’s a specialised skill.’

  ‘I’ll say.’

  Trevor flashed a look at Charles, suspecting mockery. Unable to decide whether or not there had been any, he went on, ‘Anyway, what you got to do is swing the wheel like so.’ He matched the action to his words. ‘With a bit of bloody beef, though. If people are going to think it’s me, I don’t want to come across as a bleeding fairy, do I?’

  This prompted a laugh from somewhere over behind the stacks. Trevor turned sharply at the sound but could not identify its source.

  ‘No. Right,’ said Charles, long accustomed to the fact that 50 per cent of the population thought all actors were ‘bleeding fairies’. Presumably, it had been one of that 50 per cent who had just laughed.

  ‘Reckon you can do that then?’ Trevor asked, his voice again heavy with sarcasm.

  ‘Think so.’ Charles judiciously mixed humility into the confidence of his reply.

  Trevor didn’t look convinced. He nonchalantly swung the wheel of the forklift again and brought the truck to rest exactly where it had started.

  ‘That’s terrific,’ said Griff Merricks. ‘Thank you very much, Trevor. Right, Charles, could we run it?’

  But the real operator wasn’t going to relinquish his seat to any thespian surrogate quite so easily. ‘You don’t smoke, do you?’ he asked Charles accusingly.

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Oh.’ Trevor couldn’t keep the disappointment out of his voice. ‘Only you mustn’t smoke round one of these.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t, because I don’t.’

  ‘And the whole warehouse is a “No smoking” area, anyway, Trevor,’ Alan Hibbert pointed out testily.

  But the operator was not to be deflected from his narrative. ‘Point is,’ he continued, eyeing Charles beadily, ‘some of these trucks run on Calor gas, and there’s a risk of a leak and if you get a naked flame from a cigarette –’

  ‘Yes, well, since, as I say, I don’t smoke, and since this one I’m working on is actually powered by electricity, I don’t see –’

  ‘Bloke in a warehouse over Northampton,’ Trevor continued inexorably, ‘he had a crafty fag while he was driving one of the Calor ones . . . Whole thing went “woomph” . . . they was picking bits of him off the shelves for months.’

  ‘Well, that sounds –’

  ‘What you have to watch with the electrical ones,’ Trevor went on, ‘is that you don’t leave them with the engine running. Flattens the batteries. Have to be recharged every night, y
ou see. If there’s one way to get yourself unpopular in a warehouse, it’s to leave your engine running and flatten your battery.’

  ‘Well, I’ll certainly be careful not to –’

  ‘And this machine’s got a “Quick Release” button, and all . . .’

  ‘Has it?’

  ‘It’s got a guard over it, so’s you can’t push it by mistake . . .’ Trevor appraised Charles disdainfully, ‘well, unless you’re a complete wanker. It’s meant for lowering the forks quick when you’ve unloaded but, if you press it when you got a pallet up, whole sodding lot comes smashing down.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Charles, bewildered as to the cause of this sudden verbal diarrhoea. Maybe it was just intimidation, or perhaps the operator, affronted at the assumption that he wasn’t up to the task of speaking, wanted to assert his credentials in that department.

  Griff Merricks seemed to take the second view, or at least to reckon that it was Trevor’s exclusion from a more active role in the filming that was making him so uncooperative. ‘Um . . .’ he proposed, ‘I was wondering whether you would mind doing something else for me in the video . . .’

  ‘Oh?’ The speed of reaction showed that the director had judged his subject right. There was a glint of enthusiasm in Trevor’s grudging acquiescence. ‘I suppose I could, if you insist – since my day’s work’s bloody shot to pieces, anyway.’

  ‘Well, what I’d like you to do, Trevor, is to be seen chatting with the secretary who comes out of the warehouse office.’

  ‘What do I say to her then?’

  ‘It actually doesn’t matter what you say. We won’t hear it, just see you talking – OK?’

  Trevor nodded magnanimously. ‘Sure, I’ll help you out.’ He got down from the seat of the forklift. Granted another role in the proceedings, he no longer needed to continue asserting his dominance over Charles.

  ‘So what I’d like to do now . . .’ the Director illustrated his intentions with wide arm movements, ‘is pick up from the end of the manoeuvre you just did for us, Trevor. We’ve got you bringing the pallet down at the end of the aisle – that’s in the can. Then I want to sweep across the warehouse . . .’