by David Szalay
‘I’m just telling them,’ shouts Marlon, ‘that you just tried to proposition me in the toilet. See you later.’ And he moves off, shouldering his way towards his friends.
‘Rainey, you fucking bender,’ shouts Murray Dundee.
And furious, Paul smiles.
On Monday morning, Paul is in by eight. It is strange to see the sales floor so silent – the messy, misaligned desks unoccupied, semidarkness still outside. And the smell of cigarette smoke – that is strange too. Li has obviously been smoking at her desk – has in fact just put a cigarette out – there are still blue veils floating in the air around her, visible in the sharp light of her desk lamp. He sees a saucer, smeared with black ash and holding a number of butts, among her papers. She is surprised to see him, her mouth open, half smiling. Her narrow shoulders hunched. Instead of saying anything she nods – a miniature bow. ‘Morning,’ Paul says. ‘Have you been smoking here?’ It is simply undeniable, and she smiles, showing rotten yellow teeth. ‘You shouldn’t,’ he mutters – and then, taking out his own cigarettes, lights one, and says, ‘Don’t tell anybody.’
‘No, I won’t,’ she says, and laughs as if he were mad.
This is a strange situation, Paul thinks. ‘How’s it going?’ he asks, indicating the mess of papers on her desk.
‘Fine.’
‘Any deals?’
‘I think so.’
‘Who?’
Unnervingly, her initial answer is a laugh. Paul is not sure why, or what this means. He smiles uneasily. ‘Who?’ he says again, with more emphasis, raising his eyebrows.
‘Chinese company.’
An obviously inadequate answer, vague to the point of deliberate evasiveness, and simply to accept it would surely make him look like a fool. Seeing that he is in need of it, she hands him her ash-saucer, and for a minute he stands there, smoking in silence. He is surprised that she has not asked him why he is in so early. ‘I wanted to have a chat with you, Li,’ he says. She maintains her smile, but it becomes worried, even panic-stricken. Which disturbs him – why should she be so terrified? What does she think he has discovered? If he takes her to Delmar Morgan and she perpetrates some kind of scam there … ‘Are you okay?’ he asks. ‘Is something wrong?’ She laughs and shakes her head. ‘Nothing wrong.’
‘You sure?’
She nods.
‘Okay,’ Paul says, uncertain whether to proceed. ‘Yeah, I wanted to have a chat with you,’ he says slowly. ‘Don’t tell anyone, but, um, I’m leaving.’ She nods again, as if there were nothing surprising about this. ‘Going to another company,’ he adds, waving his cigarette. ‘Another sales company.’ Another earnest, respectful nod. ‘A better one. Better than this one. It’s called Delmar Morgan.’ This time the nod is eager, as if she recognises the name and is impressed. ‘You’ve heard of it?’
She shakes her head.
‘It’s a good company.’ An emphatic nod. ‘And,’ he goes on, ‘yeah – I’m asking some people if they want to join me there.’ He stubs out his cigarette on the filthy porcelain of the saucer, and sets it on the edge of her desk. ‘Would you be interested in doing that?’ She nods, but he wonders whether she has really understood. ‘You would?’
‘Would I be interested?’ she says.
‘Yes.’
She nods again.
‘Yes, you would be interested?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes, you would be interested?’
‘I would be interested.’
He is still not entirely sure that she knows what he is talking about. With a look at the dark entrance, and in a low voice, he says, ‘You would be interested in coming to work at Delmar Morgan? Leaving this company and going to the other company, Delmar Morgan.’
‘Yes,’ she says.
Paul smiles insincerely. ‘Okay. We’re planning the move in a few weeks, if that’s okay.’ Why am I asking her if it’s okay? he thinks. He feels uneasy – the uneasiness that often follows an apparently effortless sale, the sense that something has not been properly understood. In these situations, in his efforts to establish the situation as sound, the salesman often finds himself seemingly trying to talk the prospect out of it. Paul says, ‘We’ll start work at the other company, Delmar Morgan, after Christmas.’
She nods, smiles. ‘Okay.’
‘That’s okay?’
‘Yes.’
‘Okay. Fine. And don’t tell anyone, okay? No one.’
‘I won’t tell.’
Paul smiles, more warmly this time. ‘Not even what’s-his-name – you know, your beau.’ She is not familiar with the word ‘beau’, but she guesses – perhaps from the way Paul is smiling – who he is referring to, and laughs. ‘No, I won’t tell,’ she says.
The Kingsway Benjys is jammed with the bleary-eyed, the grimfaced, the harassed, the hurried. This is its peak time, eight thirty, and behind the long counter a line of pallid, green-T-shirted East Europeans hustle frantically with hot drinks and money. It takes Paul ten minutes to get his coffee, and when he re-emerges onto the loud grey pavement, he is surprised to see Li there, waiting, wearing her round-shouldered coat, which resembles a soft, mousy dressing gown. ‘All right?’ he says. She throws away her cigarette. ‘Paul, I just wanted to ask you – can Justin come too?’
‘Justin?’
‘My beau.’
‘Oh.’ He smiles at her use of the word. ‘Um … Yeah, maybe. I’ll think about it.’
‘Okay, thanks,’ she says, and together they walk round the corner to PLP’s tinted-glass door.
Adding more than an hour to its front end makes the day difficult. Paul’s head is not working properly, and coffee – he has had five – has no effect, except to stir up a faceless potent fear, and percolate nauseously through his innards. Cigarettes seem poisonous. The windows seem too light. And the January 2005 edition of European Procurement Management is terminal – there is no hope for it – only ten more selling days until Christmas, and it is not even halfway to its target. Lawrence, however, still stalks the sales floor like a fatally wounded animal with no understanding of death. And, struggling with lassitude and indifference, Paul must promise this animal, with spittle-foam in the corners of its mouth, with a messy, voluminous crown of hair, that everything is all right, that there is ‘a lot out there’, that the target will, in the end, be met, or only slightly undershot – the first time that even that has been admitted, though the target has never – not once – been met before. ‘Insane,’ Paul thinks, sloping off to the smoking room for the umpteenth time. ‘Insane.’
Justin Fellowes, Li’s beau, is on the Pig’s team, and on his way to the smoking room, Paul stops off, as he sometimes does, to say hello to Dave Mortished – the Pig. Filling his executive seat, he looks like a ginger Buddha with a fake tan, his mild eyes on the working salespeople of his team. They are not doing quite as badly as Paul’s people, but International Finance and Financial Policy Review will not make target either – though unlike EPM, selling extends into the new year. Perched on the edge of the Pig’s desk, Paul tunes his ear to Justin Fellowes’ pitching voice. (He has already found his name on the whiteboard, and seen with satisfaction that he is someone who actually sells – a salesman, not one of the transient desperadoes who make up at least half the workforce at any one time.) The voice is nasal and dully earnest, but he is able to project enough authority over the phone for this to be, if anything, an asset. He sounds trustworthy, simple – someone who, with unimaginative persistence, sticks to the pitch. A plodder, but apparently an effective one, and Paul is pleased. And wondering whether to jettison Dave Shelley in favour of Justin Fellowes, he experiences an enjoyable frisson of power – of deciding the fates of others’ lives as if hesitating between two products in a supermarket aisle.
The Pig is not a talker. He nods a lot, and occasionally mutters a few words, his eyes fixed elsewhere. Today, Paul finds him particularly unforthcoming. He wonders, has often wondered this past w
eek, whether Eddy has an arrangement with the Pig similar to the one that he has with him. And why wouldn’t he? He and Mortished know each other well from the Northwood days, and the Pig’s team – Paul has to admit it – is stronger than his own. When he asked Eddy if he was talking to anyone else from PLP, he was knowingly evasive – ‘You don’t need to worry about that, Paul,’ he had said, with a smile, as he swigged his Bacardi Breezer. Paul had, of course, taken this as a ‘yes’. And the Pig’s more than usually taciturn mode, and distracted lack of interest in verbally eviscerating Lawrence, suggest that he, too, has something momentous on his mind.
‘S’my birthday on Friday,’ he says. ‘We’re having drinks and a meal, if you want to come along.’
‘Sure,’ Paul says. ‘Sure. That’d be nice. How old are you going to be, Dave?’
Of the same generation as Murray Dundee, Mortished has been in sales-based publishing longer than any of them except Lawrence himself. He ignores Paul’s question. They go to the smoking room. One of the buttons of the Pig’s white polyester shirt has come undone and, as he sits, a shape of colourless, hairless flab pours heavily through the gap. The fake tan, Paul realises, must be restricted to his hands and head, with its soft wispy copper hair. The cigarette, as he brings it to his mouth, looks puny in his fat hand. After the failure of Northwood and the subsequent diaspora, he spent some time in Thailand and the Philippines, living cheap off his savings, sweating a lot. And when the money ran out, he returned to the UK, and sales. He and Paul joined PLP at about the same time, the Pig first by a month or two. And then Murray showed up …
Later, in the seemingly endless reaches of the afternoon (and it is only Monday), the sky over Kingsway darkening for a downpour, Paul gets Elvezia alone in the smoking room. As he is starting to outline his proposal, the door opens and Dave Shelley walks in, holding a single unlit cigarette. Finding the room occupied, he seems to hesitate for a moment, his long face unsmiling – he knows exactly when the smoking room is most likely to be empty, as he prefers it, and is displeased to find people there. Paul had decided not to include him in the move, now that Justin is involved, but he cannot be bothered to find another opportunity to speak to Elvezia – he has been following her down to the smoking room all day – so he says, ‘Dave, mate, sit down – I wanted a word with you as well actually.’ And quietly, he puts the plan to them. They both seem flattered, and sign up on the spot.
By close of business on Wednesday, and despite several openings, he has still not spoken to Claire. On Tuesday, Marlon had confirmed his interest in the move. And returning from the pub on Wednesday afternoon, Paul had found a letter from Li in his desk drawer (he had asked her to speak to Justin herself) which he read sitting in one of the luxurious stalls in the Gents, and which unexpectedly confirmed his suspicion that the Pig had his own arrangement with Eddy Jaw. The letter said: ‘Paul, I have spoken to Justin. He said he has already been invited to the other company, Delma Morgan. So that is fine. Kind regards, Li.’ It made Paul feel powerful to have unearthed this information, even inadvertently – made him feel in a position of strength, though there was no obvious practical use that he could make of it. Knowledge is power, he said to himself, stuffing the letter into his pocket and, for the sake of appearances, flushing the toilet. He knew things that others did not know he knew – Eddy, the Pig, Murray. Things that they thought he did not know. So only he, Paul, had all the facts. He stared at himself impassively in the bright mirror. You fucking shrewdie, he thought, and needlessly washed his hands. With two teams defecting – and, who knows, perhaps more – it really would be the end of Park Lane Publications. And this knowledge increased Paul’s sense of Olympian elevation as he walked back to his desk – all these salespeople, and like the sinful inhabitants of some antique city (he thought) about to be smitten by the immortals, overwhelmed by water, and still they toil on the phone and fret and bicker, unaware of what was about to befall them. Lawrence, in particular, presented an image of poor, deluded humanity. He will be swept away in the impending flood, and yet here he is, strutting around, lisping orders – an absurd, doomed king.
He feels so fortified by these thoughts, that when, at the very end of the afternoon, he once more finds himself alone with Claire, he invites her for an after-work drink without hesitation. Except that he visits the smoking room first. She is staying to make a call at five thirty, and as the others leave, he lingers, pretending to have things to do. Slowly the sales floor empties. At twenty past, except for the two of them – and near the exit, Tony Peters, in his coat but still detaining two members of his team with stories that they pretend to find amusing – it is deserted. Claire is reading a newspaper. His heart thumping – Why, he thinks, am I so fucking nervous? This is business – Paul slips off to the smoking room. It is obvious that he will never have a more perfect opportunity than this. If he does not speak to her now, he surely never will. He must ask her to join him for a drink now, today. And if she can’t – or won’t – he must simply put the plan to her on the sales floor. Though he seemed to light it only moments ago, his cigarette is already over. He considers smoking a second, then with a grunt of self-contempt, stands up – slightly unsteadily – and leaves. Slowly he mounts the silent stairs. Tony and his lickspittles have left. She is alone. As he approaches the desks, she looks up from her newspaper for a moment, and they smile shortly at each other. He sits down, and is about to speak, has actually opened his mouth to do so, when she picks up the phone and, consulting an index card, starts to enter the numbers. ‘Yes, hello,’ she says in her polite, husky voice. ‘Is Mr Gross there, please?’ There is a short pause, then she says, ‘Sarah Scotland. I’m calling in association with the International Federation of Procurement Management.’
Paul pretends not to be listening. He slides open one of his desk drawers and looks through the obsolete papers it contains. He does this to be helpful. It is harder to make calls on a silent, vacant sales floor than on a teeming one. The whole exercise can seem unreal, weird. ‘What, he’s left?’ Claire says sharply. ‘But he said I should call at six thirty.’ She is blushing – Paul notices – with irritation. ‘No,’ she says. ‘No, I’ll call back tomorrow morning. Thank you.’ She hangs up and says, primly, ‘For fuck’s sake.’
‘He’s gone?’ Paul asks, sympathetic, still staring into his desk drawer.
‘He specifically said I should call at six thirty, his time.’
‘Yeah, it’s fucking annoying when that happens,’ he says vaguely. ‘When you stay behind for one call, and then that happens.’
She has started to ready herself for leaving, is putting things hurriedly into her bag. She ties her scarf around her neck, pulling her hair from its woolly loop at the back. Now she is pushing her slender arms into the sleeves of her coat. In a few seconds, she will be gone. ‘Um,’ Paul says, sliding his desk drawer shut. ‘I wanted …’ He clears his throat. ‘I wanted to have a word with you, Claire.’ His voice, unintentionally, was heavily ominous, and she stops, a look of worry on her high-cheeked face. ‘Nothing to worry about,’ he adds, seeing this.
‘Okay,’ she says.
‘Do you want to get a drink or something? Maybe you’re in a hurry.’ He rushes these words out, and immediately feels he has made a mistake. She looks uneasy. He must clarify what this is about. ‘Just a quick one. It’d be nicer than talking here. I’ve got a proposal for you. A work proposal.’
‘What proposal?’ she says, still uneasy. Perhaps more so.
‘Um. Well.’ He wavers for a moment, and then, painfully abandoning the idea of a drink, says, in a low voice, ‘The fact is, I’ve been offered another job. At another company. And I’m asking some of the team if they want to join me there. It’s a better company.’
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Right.’
‘Um. So that’s it. That’s the proposal.’ He smiles. ‘Interested?’
‘Another sales company?’
‘Yeah. A better one.’
She looks uncertain.
She shakes her head and laughs sadly. ‘No, it’s not that. It’s just that I don’t think I’m very good at this.’
‘Good at …?’
‘This. Sales.’
‘I think you are,’ Paul says. And she smiles, pinks, in spite of everything enjoying the praise. ‘But I haven’t sold anything,’ she protests half-heartedly. ‘I’ve been here two months and I haven’t sold anything. It’s embarrassing …’
‘It’s normal.’
‘I just don’t think … it’s really me.’ She smiles apologetically. ‘I’ve been wanting to talk to you about it, actually.’
‘About?’
‘About leaving.’ Experiencing a quiet sense of inner disintegration, Paul waits for her to go on. For a week he has been imagining this conversation. Not once did he imagine it like this. She is now saying how helpful he has been, how it’s not his fault … ‘It’s just really not me,’ she says again, looking at him with sincere, uncertain blue eyes. He takes out his cigarettes, offers her one, and lights it for her. ‘Thanks.’ He lights one for himself.
‘It’s normal, you know,’ he says, after a few moments. ‘You shouldn’t give up on it so easily. I think you could be very good. I honestly do,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t just say that. And this new place we’re going to, it’s much better. Much better publications. Much better leads. It’ll seem easy after the stuff we’ve been working on here.’ She does not say anything. He can see that she does not want to be persuaded, is set against it, and when he goes on it is without vehemence – ‘This would be the worst time to stop.’
‘It’s not just that.’
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t really enjoy it.’
‘You’re not supposed to enjoy it!’ he says jokingly. ‘We’re not doing it for a laugh. Do you think I enjoy it?’
‘No, I know.’
They smoke in silence for a few moments. ‘Anyway,’ he says softly, ‘think about it.’
‘I have thought about it,’ she says. ‘I can’t do this. I’ve tried, but I can’t.’ She pauses. ‘I’m sorry.’