by Mari Reiza
‘If not, our teams of Squad-staffers will mix and match to bring Squads together as available.’ According to Melchior, if you had worked on the PI-IP you could usually be part of the mission team.
Hallelujah! I felt like saying.
‘The Confrère-led Squad needs to do a good job to satisfy the seniors who will in turn satisfy the patient.’
I nodded, having decided that I wanted to facilitate a speedy download of Melchior’s dump and get away.
‘The Confrère role is the step before Father, at least five years up from where you are now,’ he loved depressing me, ‘so Confrères definitely want to do a good job.’
There was a long pause. Should I ask him to draw a picture depicting my ranking on the flip chart? I knew it would make his day but only further spoil mine.
‘Have we finished?’ I asked instead, hopeful, but he pointed to three more pages of notes we still needed to get through.
‘Squads lack knowledge at the start of an instruction,’ the monotone started again. ‘It is part of our DBM strategy,’ (Developing Better Mankind, he kindly reminded me), ‘to allow junior, able but relatively unknowledgeable folk to get maximum exposure and to lead salvation.’
Sure. It was also cheaper and I knew that we called unknowledgeable junior folks, like me, the money mills.
‘The first thing they have to do is to get smart quick,’ he added, making it clear that Enterprise believed that clever people, the type of people it chose and nurtured, could get smart in a short time. ‘It will be expected of you,’ he added.
‘How can you coach football when you have never played in your life? Can you learn it in five minutes?’ I cursed myself after saying it. I hadn’t meant to slow the bore down.
‘Certainly it takes us a fraction of the lifetime to learn anything that it would take the industry leaders we work with,’ was Melchior’s wisdom and I realised that he was not just talking the talk but believed it. We apparently even had it in ourselves to sneak into half-forbidden places, according to him, to bring back unreliable information, making us proud of our bravery, so we could talk the patient talk in no time. We were daring and flagrant like James Bond, he seemed to believe.
Was he for real?
‘And then there are the practical details to get clear on.’
‘What’s that?’
‘To know whether the Squad will get a basement, a window room or no room at all at the patient site over the ten weeks an average mission takes, if and where the patients have the cantine, what is the nearest hotel that will get us loyalty points, and the fastest plane out of there,’ he was full of resourceful tips that made you want to hang yourself. I realised loyalty points seemed to be the pride of Enterprisers all over.
Melchior assured me it was also key to check whether the patients had worked with us before. ‘We hate patients who cannot understand the way we work. After all, we are working very hard for them and they do not have the right not to be sympathetic.’
Did Peter-Moses really respect this idiot? You sure had to in a way if only for his unstoppability.
‘It is important to set working parameters at the initiation meeting within the Squad, next we scope the patient’s problem and determine which redemption switches would be worth investigating in depth. This leads to a number of workflows to be fitted around short timelines, making the best use of the Squad’s time and outside resources. Timelines will be dictated by meetings with patients and Enterprise leaders, and by patient milestones…’
Melchior was more effective than Valium.
‘The Squads will always work to a mission statement.’ And making the odd eye contact, ‘Do you know what that is?’
‘Best statements are POOR: imPerceptible, non-actiOnable, misapprOpriate, indiscRete,’ I replied with a joke from our first training. ‘To make it easier to get away with it if the mission failed,’ I added a bit too quickly. I thought it was a good joke but Melchior was unimpressed. I could tell even if he kept his eyes down on his notes.
‘Statements have to be time-bound, concise and solvable via a hypothesis-driven approach like Fei-Tzu,’ he replied.
Who the fuck was Fei-Tzu? Nobody Melchior knew, surely.
‘The hypothesis is our best guess, an informed guess backed up by data and our leaders’ know-how, or we often ask PEN for background data to back it up.’
‘Who the hell are PEN?’
‘Professional Enlightenment Network rebranded from Professional Information Services or PIS, because names mean everything.’
Next Melchior looked at his watch abruptly, as if he had been prompted by a ghost. It marked three on the dot, the precise end time to our scheduled appointment.
‘Time to stop,’ he added almost like a robot.
I thanked him with a handshake, for being small in every way (past, present, future, size, context, stature and fibre), and for his commitment to float in irrelevance, indulged by anxious overachievers that needed someone to achieve over. Someone needed to look bad for you to look good, even at Enterprise, it seemed.
Vittal discovers PEN
So, who were PEN-PIS? A bunch of egomaniacal drama queens plus a cheery homosexual and a failed monk, at the verge of a nervous breakdown way worse than in Noël Coward’s Hay Fever.
They had originally been called the PIS girls, boys included, because Enterprisers said they were not real men. Later they were renamed the PEN girls because names meant everything in this new era of ethical business, at least at Enterprise, and PIS sounded demeaning.
PEN-PIS were based in London, on my same floor, and, as required for any junior Enterpriser who wanted to survive, I soon got to know them.
We saw them as office clerks, the only ones below our starting rank, whose career path was not up-or-out, unlike ours, but stationary. They were not going anywhere in a hurry. They mechanically answered to transactional requests for bits of knowledge that could occasionally help Enterprisers look knowledgeable, if our patient was being unfairly finicky or clinging to an old-fashioned view that, if you had agreed to produce something, you would actually turn up to do it.
PEN-ers were like those pizza girls that tucked in the corners of the pizza boxes and handed them over the counter to people with twenty dollar bills. They did not need to smile. And if they did, we would not fucking notice. We just wanted the pizza. We wanted them automated. Having to deal with human PEN-ers was the price we Enterprisers paid for ‘caring’ for those less fortunate than us and with smaller brains. The PEN-ers could surely not expect to have career prospects as well? They had brought it upon themselves. If you chose to live your life in the slow lane, then that was your choice, a choice that we did not understand. We would not even try to, for fear that it may put our own choice into question.
Take Felicity, she was the historian at Enterprise London and ran PEN’s muscular tentacles. She was a quiet, fifty-ish, English lady from a small town in Southern Hertfordshire, probably not far from Midsomer. She came to the office dressed like an English grandmother who was tending her roses. You could easily imagine her slowly poisoning you with self-grown garden herbs inside yummy apple pies. I soon concluded Felicity was too commonsensical to have stood her place for twenty years at Enterprise for no good reason. I was sure it had given her bad acne that specialists in America would have diagnosed as stress-induced, self-inflicted harm. Or perhaps she was redeeming herself, in penance for some devious sin in her youth. And her parents had undoubtedly cursed her. She was Felicity, but she never smiled. She hated overachievers and wanted her daughter to go to drama school to end up in toothpaste ads. She once described Alakrita to me as one of them. ‘A feminist?’ I said. ‘No, an overachiever.’ ‘Aren’t we all?’ I ventured. ‘Only in your world, Vittal.’ ‘Is that not good?’ I said. ‘No, it’s a pain in the bloody arse.’ I got it and was grateful that we usually limited our interactions with PEN-ers to rare snippets of dialogue.
Next to Felicity, German Caterina, a name fit for a queen, looked straig
ht out of that typing film Populaire. She seemed fully content to exchange the plodding life of a housewife for the drudgery-filled life of a secretary. In her early thirties, she was thrilled to be in the office every morning in her Boden outfits, perfectly failing to emulate that French style of the fifties. She was an expert in desk layouts and a devotee of ring binders containing up-to-date rituals. She spent a lot of time training in anything to better herself. She ensured PEN-ers’ chairs were ergonomically acceptable, and qualified as an office fire warden. Caterina was plump, her hair too wispy, and wore unflattering glasses. Her heels were too thin and too high (even though she shouldn’t have been allowed to wear heels!), and you felt sorry for them, towering under all that weight. The shoes themselves, in glossy primary colours, were asking for a part in Mary Poppins. Thankfully she would take them off as soon as she hit her chair, but for the smell! I often had to avoid her desk on the way to the water cooler. Caterina would not move much from her seat for the whole day, other than for cups of tea, and chocolate breaks from the automated machine on the fourth floor (she often went barefoot). And for lunch, rigorously at noon. She had an epiphany with peanut butter and would always complain by the end of the day that she had not hit the gym. She instead spent her energy making noises with food wrappers and other small objects, and slurping tea. They often called her Cate. She liked to glance at her glossy mag online over breakfast before the obligatory morning exchange with the PEN girls about her kids or the latest nail colour. On special days, she would treat herself to a printed copy of Heat magazine. The girl would have benefited from Lessing in her life, but she was afraid because she had actually understood it when she read it once and had found the author’s revelations condemning. (And who the hell am I to say what she needed? A conceited bastard. But should I not be allowed to have my own opinion in my own story? Even if I have promised not to be judgemental, at which I may be failing badly?) After her morning routine, Cate would take the phone. Oh boy, that girl was empowered by that phone, her voice as sweet as honey when she told you, in her helpful way, that she could not help you. These exchanges were her favourite and could fill in a substantial portion of her day. (They were also loud.) They gave her that feeling that she was getting on with her lot. But nothing could replace the excitement of the grid, a world in itself. The world of PEN-ers. In order to avoid talking to them, Enterprisers had built an electronic tracking system with a grid. The grid showed live requests from the most junior and senior people in Enterprise, for data which was key to our missions. Entries were theoretically dealt with by time of arrival but they were in reality handled by sender’s title, and Cate would get her knickers in a twist and sweat with elation when a Truth Leader request beeped in. ‘Mine, mine!’ She aimed to please.
The next PEN girl, Mandy, was a round suffragette born too late, who wore her hair in a short bob, making her look like a lesbian. She was in her mid-twenties and married to a dentist living in Bristol. (Asking why he had not yet moved to London was unadvisable.) You could tell that Mandy came from a big bickering family. Her pet subject was teeth, perhaps because of her husband, the dentist (or had she married a dentist because of her teeth obsession?). She insisted that she could not understand anybody who did not brush their teeth twice a day. I did not want to break it to her that there were over two and a half billion people on the planet who did not own a toothbrush, and more people would soon own a cell phone than a toothbrush. (This had actually been used as one of the Find-the-Truth case studies in my interview for Enterprise. But it would have broken her heart to know.) Mandy was incredibly proud of being Canadian, and she was the only one allowed to criticise Canadian celebrities. She spent a lot of time bringing them to our attention, whether they had become governors of the Bank of England or discovered how different sexual positions could accommodate for back problems at the University of Waterloo. Had the subjects been forced to have sex on the lab benches? I wondered. And like many of the highly ambitious girls in the PEN pen, Mandy had multi-faceted missions in life and once told me one of them was infiltrating Jewish posh society in London. But she also really wanted simply to make the world better. She participated in every single Enterprise challenge open to her, not to better herself like Cate, but to make the planet a nicer place. She could not resist joining Enterprise's women’s movement, but withdrew when she learnt that it was run by a woman proud to own over three hundred pairs of shoes! Mandy was also a strong supporter of feedback, and was the only person at Enterprise to dare to write, constantly, to our CEO, enraging his assistants who were forced to engineer polite replies. If Cate aimed to please, did Mandy aim to provoke?
And then there were the PEN boys. Rich Hathaway was a cerebral Cambridge graduate in Theology, who had started down a certain path then abandoned it to come to London and recover by composing his own music. He was in his mid-twenties but already a walking Wikipedia, only more accurate, a living Goethe. He was thin, tall and ginger, poor thing, although this may have been easy in the UK with Prince Harry and Ginger Spice as sex idols, and the launch of Gingers’ Day. He once confessed to me that he was trying to make it in the London music scene and Enterprise was just a paycheck, a means to an end. We even played the acoustic guitar together occasionally, and once I felt close enough to ask him whether he hadn’t yet decided if he wanted to be Mozart or Jesus? ‘I see it as an existential doubt myself,’ I said. It was just that he was free to choose and I was not, or at least that was how I saw things.
Rich had a complicated relationship with Rahim, the other male PEN-er who sat at the desk next to him. Rich and Rahim had both joined Enterprise at the same time and played football together (yes PEN boys could play football because they were not Enterprisers), but Rich’s relationship with sexuality seemed to be a sticking point between them. He was on a lifelong celibacy quest whereas Rahim wasn’t exactly gay but claimed he was bisexual, because he desired women with the intensity with which one wants things he lacks, whilst he was infatuated with men because he saw himself in them.
Personally, I strongly believed that Rahim could only ever love himself.
He came across as the perfect metro man, a jolly young British Pakistani with a Health Economics Degree from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He was newly slim and dented like a Ken doll (though he had been Raccoon Godzilla at school), a vain creature in love with his own reflection. You knew that he liked to blow dry his hair whilst looking at himself in the mirror, spent massive amounts of time shopping for clothes, the newest technology gadgets, the best face lotions and grooming accessories, and that his ideal holiday was sunning himself (though there was no need with his complexion) at the Mondrian pool in LA whilst contemplating his reflection in the water, with a pair of tight, white D&G speedos on. Thank God he could not afford it! I could see Rahim relaxing, reclined on a velvet cushion in his Moroccan trousers, in his small bedsit somewhere in Soho (maybe Shoreditch), recently re-converted from an old pencil factory. I imagined it had the most fashionable fake furniture and a large kitsch bed encrusted with fake pink diamonds. His fridge was empty because he spent most of his time at Enterprise or partying out at bars and clubs. I bet he had a small dog, a poodle with pompoms, and a meaningful relationship with his dog carer. He was probably a cheater and a terrible but sickly sweet boyfriend, who would say things like, ‘You seal my wound,’ and never ever mention his family (I need to stop being judgemental!).
In the office, Rahim could not debase himself to take on certain requests. He preferred working with male Enterprisers, which was not a problem given the high male content of the office. He chose seniors belonging to Allure, if at all possible (Allure was the name of Enterprise’s gay society – where had political correctness taken us?). Rahim’s schedule allowed him to spend twenty minutes, three times a day, preparing protein shakes, which he religiously ingested at breakfast, lunch and tea time. He also suffered from the ineffable joy of pursuing the absurd and spent his office free time composing a book of gay names. His
interpretation of Enterprise policies gave him twenty per cent of free time every week, like at Google (he had coined it first). And he could afford loose interpretations, as he still knew that he would be the last man standing (who would dare sack him given his colour and well-advertised sexual preferences?). He had probably never visited a business lounge before joining Enterprise, nor sniffed a five-star hotel from up close, or remotely known what a Michelin star was. But soon after working with the right Enterprisers, business lounges carried mediocre champagne, he gave stick online to the best restaurant critics in the London foodie scene, and he would be booked only into a few select hotels, the Ws being at the top of his list, naturally. You could have sworn Rahim had a life of experience doing these things. I could not bitch about a self-improver, that’s what I was too, right? But Rahim’s shortcuts and quick successes annoyed all PEN-ers, and especially the three Marys.
The three Marys were SUBLIME, so sublime they should have never been in Enterprise, not even as PEN-ers. They floated like butterflies but stung like bees, they were too alive. How on earth had they landed here? They could have been scripted by Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, one of Dad’s favourites, the creator of Silvia Marsó, Victoria Abril and Kim the secretaries, in their huge glasses, short pants and hair stuck in the eighties. Dad had always had a strange fetish for Spanish TV shows, from that very first summer trip to the Alhambra to uncover Arab culture.
Zainab, she was barely a woman but had a crisp, knowing sexuality. She was juvenile and brothely provocative. Long black hair like an onyx cobweb with the translucent complexion of thin porcelain, striking Asian features made up of angles and a virago-like quality. Feminine but of the androgynous kind, narrow lipped. Tall and thin, almost bony. At school she had been called the toothpick, like Sophia Loren. Her beauty physically hurt, like a blow to the stomach, although her breasts needed to be enhanced if you listened to Cate’s viper tongue. You looked at Zainab and thought that she should live naked, running in and out of paintings with starlit forests and snowy mountains. She wore Zara but on her it looked like Chloé. Maybe she had the money for Chloé (I knew from my wife, Miriam, that it was prohibitive). Maybe Zainab had a sponsor or was an escort girl by night. The girl was surprisingly open. She had joined a year after I had and asked me for a mentoring coffee a few months later. I had taken her to Coffee Plantation where, after discussing the 9/11 denials and plot theories newly stuck to the wall behind the counter, she explained her dilemma over whether to drop her Bulgarian prince. My favourite heroin-chic barista had been wearing a vivid, violet T-shirt with a yellow diamond that read ‘Enthusiasm over Escapism’?, the usual tartan shirt open on top. I had seen Zainab arrive at the office a few days before, her nice little bottom coming out of a red mini with her skirt going peek-a-boo. I had thought how it was a waste to have it sitting all day on a chair at Enterprise. I was relieved that it was not the only thing it was doing, that it had another claim to fame at the hands of a prince. ‘These men,’ she told me, ‘who interrogate you with a thousand questions and don’t listen to the answers, and then ask you if you want their friendship?’ I myself thought that if Stephanie of Monaco had ever asked me out, I would not have posed that many questions or made her listen to any answers. ‘The Bulgarian princes are notoriously handsome,’ I ventured. And all the time Zainab kept looking at me with adoring stares, devouring my lusty pectorals, my delectable neckline and my loamy loins, and planting subliminal suggestions deep inside me that every last cell of my heart should burn with desire to lick her femininity to the last drop. Her physical attractiveness was undeniable and her spiritual integrity was nil. And I knew in an instant that it was such a dangerous combination for me, because men are so weak. I knew that if she ever asked me for anything, I would not be able to say no.