Folk'd

by Laurence Donaghy

“Well maybe I should start hating it, you’re right,” she said, eyes twinkling, drifting downward.

  Beep. Beep. Beeeeeeeep.

  He made a fist at the heavens and shook it. “Curse you! Curse you, cruel God!”

  She kissed him and said goodbye and that she’d see him later and that yes, she was sure it was okay to get a taxi, and then she was gone, leaving a vapour trail of perfume in her wake that he followed, Pepe Le Peu style, to the bathroom. He did his ablutions there, rinsing and wiping and spitting and excavating, meandering to herself about the purpose of nostril hairs, and when he returned to the bedroom he discovered she’d left a work outfit hanging on the back of the bedroom door.

  The weather was glorious today; and even better, that rainstorm he’d heard battering the windows last night must have washed the humidity out of the air, for there was a fresh tang to the air and a spring in his step as he revolved the key in the lock and stepped out into Kensington Avenue. The newbies at no2 were just emerging, he noted, marvelling at his labelling of them as newbies - that had been he and Maggie only six months previous. Hard to believe.

  The clutch was sticking. Fuck. He rolled his eyes. Reliable Renault? Arses. That was the last time he let Flanagan advise him on car buying. As he drove he turned on the radio and listened to that awful fat DJ, not because he liked him, but because he actively despised him and listening to him could reliably be ensured to get his blood nice and boiling.

  The only thing Danny Morrigan liked more than liking something was despising it - if you liked a thing there tended to be not a lot more to say about it, but by hating something you could approach it from all angles of ire, really sink your teeth into a good solid loathe and better yet, discuss it at length at work with fellow-minded workmates, or better yet, argue with idiots holding the opposing viewpoint.

  He had a good four or five little nuggets of irritation lined up by the time he ascended from the underground car park and nodded curtly to the receptionist. He managed to slink inside the lift just as the doors shut, much to the obvious nervousness of the two people already inside who had, he noted mentally, made little to no effort to hold it for him.

  “Good morning…!” he said cheerily.

  “Morning Mr Morrigan,” they replied, one a half-second behind the other.

  “It’s Danny,” he said, waving away the formality as sincerely as he could, which wasn’t very to be honest. He liked the Mr Morrigan thing. Who was he fuckin’ kidding, he loved the Mr Morrigan thing.

  The lift insisted on stopping on every floor between ground and fourth and allowing more people to embark, which wasn’t ideal for Danny in terms of his possible tardiness for starting work, but did enable him to be inside the lift for sufficiently long to learn that the two mainstays from his floor sharing it with him really needed to get over themselves and just get it on with each other.

  Fourth floor. They walked together as far as reception in a heavy awkward sort of silence, and he reflected that, even though not their direct line manager, as a member of the upper echelons of the company he probably should say something to them, something motivational or something like that.

  “Only two days to go!” he reminded them. “Game faces on!”

  They thought it was an accusation.

  “We’re all working as hard as we can,” Cal shot back instantly.

  “Has someone been saying something? Has Thomas talked to you?” Alice demanded, all traces of niceties long gone.

  “No, no…” Danny waved his hands desperately. “You’re both doing great. Um, well I don’t know that for sure, because I don’t know you, you know, personally, but you seem like two good workers to me. So. Er…” he searched for something to help him explain, to say that he’d just been trying to impart some of his own enthusiasm; that had been very prominent in the management tutorial courses Mr Black had sent him on. He wasn’t implying anything.

  Looking at them, he knew saying anything else would just make it worse. He settled for nodding and smiling in what he hoped was a “we’re all in this together” type way, before he turned and walked away to the management side of the building.

  “Prick,” Cal muttered, as he and Alice walked into the telephony side, hit immediately by the dull chattering roar of customer service as they entered the workfloor. “Game faces on…what was that meant to mean? What’s he heard about me? That I’m sittin’ swingin’ the lead? Cheeky fucker.”

  “Graduate recruits. What have they got that we don’t?” Alice agreed. “I’ve a degree too y’know. I went for that scheme an all…”

  “Yeah?” Cal said, mildly surprised. “You never said.”

  “Well,” she paused, “…the test wasn’t fair.”

  “How so?”

  Alice‘s eyes were wide as saucers with injustice. “Well, it was really fuckin’ hard.”

  Jesus, Danny thought, as his email account roared into life and spat new emails at him. Steve still hadn’t gotten the hang of what differentiated things designated ‘Safe For Work’ and what constituted, just for example, ‘World’s Hairiest Minges: The Slideshow’. Sitting just outside the Chief Exec’s office on an open plan foor, somehow he doubted that would be a career-enhancing presentation.

  Stop sending me those things you twat, he typed, fingers flying. And then he reconsidered, and he deleted you twat, because after all it was Steve, and he didn’t want to seem ungrateful for Steve keeping in touch, because he knew Steve wouldn’t get too much time for that these days. It was a wonder he could even look at pictures like that without thinking of…

  Ew.

  “Danny…? Ready to go?”

  For a moment, a horrible stretched-out moment, he had visions of accidentally hitting the wrong button and a parade of hugely-hirsuited vulvas materialising on his monitor despite his desperate, feverish, sacked efforts to prevent it. But a furtive glance at his screen reassured him sufficiently to be able to swivel smoothly around and adopt a suitably sophisticated expression for the originator of the greeting.

  “Destiny awaits.”

  “Morning Mr Black,” he said brightly. “How was the golf?”

  “Grand, Danny, grand,” David Black, Chief Executive of Lircom said with that ever-present faint smile he wore. Danny had seen that smile vanish only twice, never at him. He had no desire to be present for a third, let alone risk being the recipient of the shit-storm that had followed on those two previous occasions. The man had a temper that made his surname seem woefully inadequate.

  “Where were you again?” Danny said, as much for something to say as out of genuine curiosity, even as he grabbed his sheaf of notes and printouts and swept around from behind his desk to stand beside Mr Black, who wasted no time in setting off toward the conference room.

  He could have simply gone there without Danny, Danny knew, but it was a measure of the trust he’d been given that the Chief Exec had waited on him to be by his side before making his entrance. There were whispers that he was being groomed. As long it wasn’t for bum sex, any and all grooming was fine with him.

  And even if it is for bum sex, Maggie had once said to him with that mischievous grin of hers tugging at her lips, at what David Black earns, you can fuckin’ well consider it boyo…

  “The Royal Tara. You must know it, Danny, surely?”

  Danny ran the name through his extensive database of golf clubs he knew. This did not occupy a great deal of time. “Sorry,” he said.

  “It’s not far from the Dá Chich na Morrigna,” Mr Black went on, as his hands rested on the conference room doors. Through the frosted glass Danny could see everyone else was already assembled inside. Seeing Danny’s politely blank expression, his perma-smile went up a little in its intensity. “The Breasts of the Morrigan,” he explained.

  “Is that where we left them?” Danny said, not really knowing what else to come back with.

  Mr Black laughed. He had a musical laugh.

  The presentation went pretty well, Danny thought; reassuring the nerves of
their financial backers and shareholders that the network was ready to go ahead, and presenting the media strategy, which was key to ensuring that uptake was sufficient to begin to recover the initial setup costs of manufacturing.

  The buzzwords ran through his mind and set off little sparks here and there as they were supposed to, and he made sure to take notes dutifully throughout because the Lircom Board would probably hold a less formal internal meeting later to pick the bones of this one, and his notes would form the fallback if anyone couldn’t remember the specific gist of a particular part.

  All the usual suspects were here around the table; he’d met them on the Lircom annual gala dinner the previous month, which had been pretty much the most nerve-wracking night of his life. Seventy five movers and shakers in the industry, and Danny Morrigan, three months out of university and feeling as if he didn’t know which to tuck in first, his shirt or his umbilical cord.

  He cast his eyes to one attendee, sitting at the far end of the table, not far from Mr Black’s position at the head of proceedings. He was the sole person he didn’t recognise. He made a mental note to try and get Mr Black to introduce them after the meeting concluded, although…judging by the glances he was getting from the newbie, maybe he had the same thing on his mind and wouldn’t need the intervention of the CE to assist.

  “Danny…”

  He glanced sidelong to his left, to where Andy, the head of Human Resources, had just whispered at him. Not willing to risk an answering whisper in return - Mr Black was in full flow halfway through the PowerPoint - he raised his eyebrows in a way that said yes?

  Andy didn’t say anything more, but simply slid his fingers along the desk until they came to a stop beside the pages Danny was writing on. He tapped them softly and then met Danny’s eyes again, and looking down himself Danny could understand why he had sought to bring something to his attention.

  The record of the meeting he’d thought he’d been keeping had not exactly turned out that way. Oh, sure, in some places he could spy paragraphs that made sense; but they were interspersed with paragraphs of complete gibberish, stream-of-consciousness nonsense.

  What if our uptake rate exceeds the lower limit of tolerance? What are our financial options for extending the credit on the loans given to Luke his name was Luke power your remember is remembering consider it granted that your power is Scully and the thing on the stairs coming down DOWN you let it IN it’s not an alleyway, it’s a cat purple her lips aren’t purple remember that your power is extension over the first two years at a consistent rate of interest, which should, with the government incentives we’ll qualify for, easily cope with the risk…

  He felt himself begin to sweat. Andy was looking questioningly at him in a way that said do you need to go? Andy had a look for everything; it was his uncanny knack for relating to people that made Danny incredulous he’d ever gotten a job with Human Resources.

  No. He shook his head and refocused himself on the conversational flow ebbing around him, grasping his pen tightly as if daring it to venture off the beaten track. He’d have a few tablets when this meeting finished, maybe lay off the rowing machine tonight when he got home and take it easy. Workplace stress, Mr Black was fond of telling his management team, was the single biggest problem in the modern office environment.

  The remainder of the meeting passed off without incident; Danny kept his gaze firmly locked down at his writing hand and it behaved itself, which perhaps made him a little more withdrawn than he would normally have been, but the meeting was incredibly high-level and he probably wouldn’t have been able to contribute all that much anyway.

  As everyone filed out, Mr Black took the time to shake hands with them and ask them after their partners/children/cats/fish. He had an uncanny knack for remembering little details like that, Danny had noticed. He made it look effortless, and he must have sensed Danny’s attention was on him because he glanced his way and gave him a conspiratorial wink, before beckoning Danny over. Danny gathered his papers under his arm and moved to join him.

  “Danny, I’d like you to meet Michael Quinn,” Mr Black said, stepping to one side to reveal the attendee whose face Danny hadn’t known. “Michael works for FormorTech, but we mustn’t hold that against him now, must we?”

  He laughed, as did Danny and Michael, even if Michael’s laugh seemed a little clipped and artificial. Michael seemed not to know what to make of Danny, and Danny found himself shifting his weight from one foot to the other uneasily under the wattage of the older man’s glare. Mr Black had since turned his attention back to the crowd at large and was doing the handshake routine again, leaving he and Quinn alone.

  “How are…uh,” Danny ventured, feeling the conversational conch had fallen to him, “how are the negotiations going?”

  Michael shot a sidelong glance at Mr Black. “Cordially,” was all he said. His eyes swung back to Danny. “It’s…good to…meet you,” he said, sounding as if every word had been crowbarred out of him. Danny felt the ridiculous urge to crane his neck to see if there was a hand going up his back operating him like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

  “Yes,” was all he could think of to reply.

  “Your name seems familiar,” Michael said.

  Danny frowned. “Oh…really?” he said, nonplussed. “I can’t think where fr-”

  “My daughter went to Queens. Ellie.”

  “Ellie?” Danny said, incredulous. If you’d lined up a hundred guys and asked him to rank them from 1 to 100 on likelihood of contributing one-half of Ellie Quinn’s genetic code, the stiff in front of him would have been sitting pretty on triple figures. “I know Ellie dead well - her partner w…is my best mate.”

  “Yes,” Michael Quinn bit out, making the sort of face a cat makes when yakking up a particularly viscous hairball. “Steve.”

  Oh my God. This is HIM.

  Danny tried to keep his face as neutral as possible as about a thousand emails and texts and MSN conversations and phone calls from Steve flashed through his brain, all on the subject of “her fuckin’ ones and the pole up their holes” and how much they made it perfectly obvious that they despised him. Jesus.

  And worse, he’d absorbed it all with a sort of fuzzy patronising scepticism, thinking that anyone who fathered someone like Ellie couldn’t have been that bad. Guilt festered within him. Between the almost-a-dismissal of him via email this morning and the vindication of his strife-ridden position with the in-laws, he was beginning to think he owed Steve a pint.

  Mr Black was hovering nearby again. They were the only three people left in the conference room. He smiled faintly at Quinn, who took a half-step back; Danny could only assume he’d been startled by the man’s soundless approach - Christ knew he’d taken some getting used to it himself at first. He walked like a panther.

  “Small world isn’t it?” he beamed. “Couldn’t help but overhear. Danny’s one of our best and brightest here at Lircom. Big things ahead of him. We’re very proud to have him in the family.”

  “Steady on with that family stuff,” Danny replied, deadpan, his eyes wide with apparent alarm. “Don’t want you jinxing me. My life‘s stressful enough at the minute, thanks.”

  Mr Black found this hilarious.

  Michael Quinn didn’t even smile.

  ***

  At home that evening, Danny dialled the number he’d jotted down from an email. He’d never bothered to put it in his most recent mobile. That fact alone had caused him yet more guilt.

  “Hello?” a familiar voice sounded at the other end.

  “What about ye mucker?” Danny said cheerily. Too cheerily? He’d been a little worried over how casual to seem on the phone. It had been about six months since he’d actually seen Steve in person, after all. He pushed the frets out of his head. He could worry about that later when he was half-cut, on the basis that he wouldn’t worry about things like that, for the very reason that he was, in fact, half-cut.