Folk'd

by Laurence Donaghy

  They exited the room and Thomas trundled off to the workfloor, to begin collecting his things. Theoretically he should have had to work the rest of the week and next week, but Danny had told him he could go and he’d be fully paid up to his proper leave date. He’d square it with Mr Black. He’d told Thomas this and hadn’t been sure if he’d get thanks, and sure enough no thanks had been forthcoming. But he couldn’t exactly blame him.

  He sat down on his chair and stared balefully at his screen. He’d just fucked a man’s day, a man’s week, probably his month, possibly his entire year. Delivering the news hadn’t even been the hardest part. Just as it had been within his power to grant Thomas those extra days pay, if he’d really pushed for it, he knew he could have argued for the man to be given another chance. He could have arranged for further leadership courses for him to be sent on, called him in for a few chats about his managerial style.

  But he’d done none of these things. Because he knew Thomas was a hopeless case. The man couldn’t motivate Goths to look depressed. He was universally despised by his staff, about as effective as a Magic Tree in a sewage works.

  His work ‘phone burbled for attention. Internal number. “Lircom, Danny Morrigan speaking.”

  “Danny, it’s Sarah. Mr Black is wanting a chat with you, He’s on the line.”

  Danny sat straighter in his chair and flicked his mouse so that the screensaver died and something that looked like work popped up on the screen. “Yes, go ahead. Put him through.”

  “Okay. Hold for a sec.”

  The line clicked for a moment and then a smooth baritone voice cut in. It sounded like the guy who said ‘Cashier number four please‘ at the post office. God what a repetitive job that had to be…

  “-In a final battle with the Formorians,” cashier guy said in his usual pleasant little Oirish lilting voice, “Nuada grew arrogant when he saw his forces marching toward victory, and refused to use his silver sword, preferring instead to attack Formorians with his bare hands. His pride caused him to lose his arm to a well-placed Formorian blow, and despite claiming victory on the battlefield that day, the Tuatha Dé rejected Nuada as king thereafter, since his disfigurement meant that their ruler, and thus their representative, would not be deemed perfect. Nuada was exiled to the countryside and his silver sword taken from him…”

  Danny started drumming his fingers on the desk. He moved his chair back a foot or so and stretched his neck to look inside Mr Black’s office to see what he was doing and why it was taking so long, but the blinds were drawn. The voice droned on.

  “The Morrigan,” cashier guy said, and Danny blinked in surprise to hear his own surname thrown out, and started to pay marginally more attention, “fiercely loyal to Nuada, was furious at this decision, and went into exile herself, not before taking the Spear of Destiny and shattering it into ten thousand pieces. The Tuatha eventually installed a new king, Bres, of half-Tuatha and half-Formorian descent. Bres was struck with fury when the Stone of Destiny refused to cry out beneath him, but he was able to use the sword of Nuada to re-shape the memories of everyone present so that they heard the stone cry out clearly.”

  Re-shaping memories. Wow. Some sword.

  “Only the Morrigan, watching from a distance, escaped the sword's influence and saw clearly what she had suspected - Bres was no king. ”

  Click.

  “Danny?”

  “…Mr Black,” Danny said, momentarily off-guard. “Sorry, I was…”

  Laughter came down the phone line. “I see my little trick worked,” he was told. “No need to apologise. Come into my office, I want to show you something.”

  Danny did so, nodding to Sarah as he did so. She smiled at him. Danny wondered, not for the first time, if the girl actually had legs; she was here every morning when he arrived and still here every evening when he got home, even when he pulled some late-nighters, and in all the time he’d worked here he had never once seen her away from the desk. Whatever Mr Black was paying her, clearly it wasn’t nearly enough.

  “Come in,” Mr Black said, waving him in as Danny opened his office door. It was a Chief Executive’s office through and through and though he’d been inside many times before it struck him now as if it were the first time he’d seen it; floor-to-ceiling windows covering one side opening out to a very grand view of Belfast’s harbour side estate; another wall incorporating one of those massive deluxe fish tanks in which a myriad of aquatic creatures large and small ducked and dived over and under each other in a ceaseless ballet.

  There was a large and immaculate conference table with chic little minimalist office chairs stationed around it, a modest but fully-stocked little bar in the far corner, and of course Mr Black’s desk itself, which was three-pronged and had nary a ninety-degree angle in sight. If a woman had possessed the curves of that desk she’d have provoked erections at a hundred yards. Someday he’d sit between the legs of a desk like that, Danny promised himself. Someday…

  Mr Black was sitting in his chair, which was (in Danny’s opinion) not nearly throne-like enough; he’d decided if he ever climbed to the dizzy heights of CE he’d get a chair with bloody great flowing spike arrangements coming out its arse, like an evil Emperor, and he’d have a button on the armrest that would play a suitably dum dum dum DUM de DUMMMM theme tune every time he wanted someone to come in and be suitably terrified in his presence.

  Come to think of it, though, Mr Black didn’t need a theme tune for things like that. He just needed a faint half-smile and the threat of its removal…strange really, because he was neither a very tall nor a very broad man; he was in his early forties, average height and average build, with a darker-than-normal complexion which Danny rather enviously put down to many expensive holidays abroad. He did possess striking green eyes Danny had personally witnessed spellbinding a fair few power-suited members of the fairer sex across the conference table.

  “Sit,” he said, and Danny sat. He was holding a remote control and pointing it in the direction of a wall-set LCD TV inlaid into the nearest side of the office, facing the Belfast harbour view.

  “First things first,” he said, “did you get a chance to speak to Thomas?”

  Danny nodded, very very extremely glad indeed now that he hadn’t succumbed to temptation and put it off until this afternoon. “Yes, I did.”

  Mr Black inclined his head approvingly. “Good. We can’t afford to hang on to those who hold us back, Danny, unfortunate business though it may be to break bad news.”

  “I know,” Danny said, and steeled himself, “I, uh…I told him he could-”

  “-go home now and still get paid until his final day?”

  “Yes,” Danny winced.

  Mr Black smiled. “I thought you might. Why did you do it, can I ask?”

  “Because I…I thought it was a nice thing to do.”

  “For Thomas?” Mr Black said mildly.

  Danny frowned. “Yes,” he said. “I don’t see who else-”

  Mr Black met his gaze with the same mild detachment. “Thomas lived and breathed this job, undoubtedly bad at it though he was. If you’d let him work until his final day, I’d bet you ten to one by this afternoon he would have concocted a story for his staff that he’d been offered a better job somewhere else. He’d have squeezed every last drop of enjoyment out of his position before he left. By letting him go now, by telling him to go now, you took that away from him and made it seem - to his thinking - as if we couldn‘t wait to get shot of him. So tell me, Danny…was it really for Thomas, or was it because you felt bad about telling a man he’d lost his job, and wanted to do something to make yourself feel better?”

  Danny felt his mouth opening and closing. He wanted to deny it first off, but no matter which way he turned it over in his mind, Mr Black was right. “Myself,” he admitted, and waited for the tirade to continue.

  “And it’s that human factor that gives you such potential,” Mr Black said, to his surprise, without a trace of rebuke in his voice. “I’m not int
erested in people who take pleasure from delivering bad news to my staff. But those who’ll do it when it’s necessary and try to empathise and soften the blow - even if they don’t empathise quite right - they’re the kind of leaders I’m interested in. Kudos, Danny. Kudos.”

  Danny stared for a second, as if he was still waiting for the secret button to be pressed and the trapdoor to open beneath his feet. “Thank you, sir,” he said eventually. “You, um…you wanted to see me about something-?”

  “Yes!” Mr Black boomed, waving the remote. “You’ve already heard some of it - a little joke on my part, I hope you didn’t mind holding the line.”

  Danny pieced it together. “You’re…replacing the hold music?” he said doubtfully.

  “Absolutely! God how I loathe that Pan Pipes shit! Doesn’t everyone, I ask you? How many times have you been on hold with the bank or the telephone company and thought - if I hear a fucking Pan Pipes version of Orinoco Flow one more time in my life I shall take a sawn-off shotgun to the nearest public place and begin firing indiscriminately into the crowds?”

  “Too many to count,” Danny said without a second’s hesitation.

  “So I thought - we’ve got some of the richest mythology in the world right here in Ireland - why not relate some of it to our callers when we‘re unfortunately too busy to get to their valuable calls right away, rather than subject them to mental torture?”

  Danny nodded. It actually wasn’t a bad idea – it appealed to him, but then he was a literary buff. “Like Cú Chulainn and all that-?” he began.

  “Danny!” Mr Black scowled at him, to his surprise. “Don’t tell me you’re like everyone else. The moment anyone starts talking about Irish myth, everyone automatically trots out the name of that awful man and his boring tales. Imagine if the only Bond anyone ever talked about was George Lazenby…”

  “That’s true,“ he said, frantically dredging up every scrap of knowledge about Irish mythology he’d ever half-assedly absorbed through his studies, which wasn’t saying much. “Thought I heard my namesake get a mention…”

  “You were just getting to the good part - I baited the hook well!” Mr Black said delightedly. He hit the PLAY button on the remote control and immediately the cashier guy voice played over the embedded 6.1 surround sound system, seeming to come from all six speakers at once. Just hearing it, Danny felt naked without a parcel in his hand.

  “Rejected by the Stone of Destiny,“ he intoned breathlessly, “Bres in secret decided to embrace instead his Formorian ancestry. He undermined the Tuatha and built up the strength of the Formorians, culminating in a huge battle between the two races for mastery of Ireland.”

  “It’s good stuff. Very dramat-” Danny said, but was silenced by a single raised finger from Mr Black.

  “The Tuatha won the battle decisively. So it was that Bres, beaten and humiliated, sent a message to Athens, where the sorceress Carman lived with her three monstrous sons; Dub, Dother, and Dian. Long had she brooded over the treasures of the Tuatha, particularly the Cauldron of the Dagda, and she quickly saw Bres as the weak-minded fool who would prove to be her way into Ireland to get it.”

  Mr Black stopped the narration with another button press. He looked questioningly at Danny who judged it was now safe to speak. “It’s really good,” Danny said, and to surprise found that he wasn’t entirely blowing smoke, “I can imagine people being quite disappointed to have to speak to one of our staff. They’ll probably want to go back on hold to hear the end of the story.”

  “Do you really think so?” Mr Black said, leaning across the desk. The eagerness in his voice surprised Danny a little; he hadn’t expected the Chief Executive to get so animated in seeking approval from Danny for this idea.

  “Um, yeah,” Danny nodded. “Absolutely,” and because he was a little freaked out by the way his boss was looking at him, he searched for a sideways move in the conversation and found one, “how did you come up with the idea?”

  Mr Black rose from his seat and strode over to the Belfast cityscape, spreading his arms out to encompass the magnificent view of the city afforded to him. “This did, Danny,” he said. “Look at it. Do you have any idea how amazing this is? Do you have any idea for how long humanity lived in mud huts, eking a living from the land, lurching from crisis to crisis? Time was when a bad winter or a crop failure would have destroyed an entire community. But now look at humanity. Living in gleaming cities of stone and metal, impregnable to all but the most extreme of disasters to such a degree that new ones have to be invented so that fear does not become a meaningless concept.”

  “So you’re not one of these people who thinks everything was better in the old days, I’m guessing?” Danny said, rising from his own chair to stand six feet or so to the left of Mr Black, not to toady to the man’s physical gestures but simply because he loved this view, loved seeing so much of his home town stretched out before him. “I thought, with the myths and legends stuff, you were going down a nostalgic route…y’know, more innocent age and all that…”

  Mr Black stared at him searchingly. “More innocent age?” he said, sounding amused. “That’s not quite how I think of it. If anything, this is the innocent age, Danny. Comfort has made mankind complacent and soft. The closest thing we have to a male rite of passage now is the ability to successfully construct a flat-pack sideboard from Ikea. Correct?”

  “Mmm,” Danny said, looking at the floor, remembering a certain effort of his own that had ended up being an eclectic, if temporary, addition to the inside of the wheelie bin.

  “I simply think it might be interesting for us to reconnect with our history. Revisit an age where magic existed and where you couldn’t explain everything fantastical with the three letters - C, G, I. Have you heard of a Black Swan event?”

  Danny struggled to keep up. “Black…Swan?”

  “Europeans once believed through the evidence they had available to them that all swans where white. And so the phrase “black swan” came into use as the embodiment of the impossible. Until someone went to Australia and discovered,” he said, putting an ironic stress on the word, “ta da! - black swans swimming happily, unaware of the fact they were meant to be impossibilities. The term black swan event has come to mean something thought to be impossible which later rears up to bite you in the arse. Or break your fucking arm.”

  He’d rarely heard Mr Black speak so passionately. “I see,” he said.

  Mr Black stared out over the city. “Beware the Black Swan event, Danny,” he said softly. “Beware it, but don’t avoid it, for you’ll find they’re as laden with opportunities as they are fraught with dangers.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind.”

  Mr Black seemed to snap out of it. The half-smile returned and he turned to Danny, all business once more. “Now,” he said. “back to the grind. Enjoy your dinner tonight, by the way. And when tomorrow hits, Danny…”

  Danny felt compelled to finish the thought. “…it’s going to be a big challenge,” he said.

  “The biggest,” Mr Black said gravely, looking him straight in the eye. “It’s going to change Ireland forever, Danny.”

  That was a bit much. Despite all the hype and the PR, when you got right down to it the Hypernet was going to give Irish people the chance to download porn quicker than anyone else. Of course, Danny would rather have gargled nails than have expressed anything close to that sentiment out loud.

  “Absolutely,” was all he said aloud.

  As Danny exited the office, he frowned. He must have mentioned his dinner plans at Steve and Ellie’s to someone in the office in passing this morning before his meeting with Thomas. News travelled fast in this place - even news as relatively mundane as his dinner plans apparently reached as high as the Chief Exec. He supposed he should feel honoured at that.