The Desert Run

by Gregg Dunnett

  She screwed up her face.

  “Sounds exciting,” she said. It was fairly clear she was being sarcastic. “I thought you had a job at that petrol station?”

  “That’s just until something better comes along,” I said, trying not to sound hurt, and maybe she picked up that she’d been harsh, cos then she said:

  “So you’re going to be a corporate clone. Sign your life away before you’ve even lived it?” She had a faraway look in those pretty eyes. I found myself scrambling to explain.

  “Well, it’s kind of what I studied in my final year. It’s kind of interesting when you get into it.”

  She gave a little half laugh.

  “Well, the money’s good, anyway.”

  She raised an eyebrow at this.

  “Go on, then. What’s good?”

  I told her.

  “Not that good.”

  “Well, no. Not that good right at the start. But it’s an accelerated promotion scheme. In a few years, you’re on good money,” I began, but I stopped out of disappointment. She looked so bored.

  She crunched her way through more cornflakes, but otherwise, we sat in silence. In some versions of my fantasy about this moment, she’d offer to help me with the presentation, laughing in wonder at how brilliant my slides were—before we stripped off and had sex. In other versions we just went straight for the sex. But I didn’t dare suggest either route just now. It was harder in real life. Instead, I asked her what she wanted to do with jobs and stuff. That animated her a little bit.

  “I want to travel. Explore. Do something exciting. I want to do something. Don’t you ever feel like that?” She leant forward, and her eyes sparkled for the first time as she said that. Not that I was looking at her face. She wasn’t wearing a bra and her thin t-shirt wasn’t doing a very good job of containing her breasts. I forced myself to focus.

  “Like a gap year or something?”

  “Yeah. Or a gap five years. Just—” Suddenly, she swept a hand around the room. “There’s a whole world out there, Jake, and you can do anything. Spend a year travelling round Asia. Go skiing in the Rockies. Don’t you want to live before you settle?”

  Even though this was Julia, and by then, I would have agreed with anything she said just to get her to spend five minutes with me, this still annoyed me a bit. Of course I wanted to go travelling. Who didn’t? But that was only an option for the kids with rich parents. Kids like... well, like Ben and Julia.

  “Yeah, well, we can’t all do that,” I said, a little petulantly, but I didn’t elaborate, and we lapsed again into silence.

  “You got any of Ben’s dope?” she asked next, surprising me a little.

  I thought for a minute. Clearly, I hadn’t impressed her with my job interview, but maybe that was just a stupid fantasy anyway. I already knew she liked to have a few puffs on a joint. Maybe I could regain a little lost ground here by the two of us getting stoned together? Anna and Ben wouldn’t be in for hours, and I still had plenty of time to finish my presentation. But a couple of relaxing joints, now, who knew where that could lead?

  “Yeah, sure. Do you want me to roll you one up?”

  She didn’t seem to hear me; by then, she’d started looking at her phone, tapping out a message on the screen. The dope was sitting on the table along with the tobacco and the papers in Ben’s little tin.

  “I could join you, actually,” I said casually. “I’m nearly done here anyway. I’ll get rolling.”

  She was still working on her text, so I reached over for the cigarette papers and began to stick two together and sprinkle tobacco into the crease.

  A minute later when she finished her eyes flicked up from the phone and to what I was doing.

  “Oh no, it’s alright, Jake, I’m just gonna nick a bit for later on.”

  I was already half way through making it, I couldn’t really stop at that point, so I just carried on.

  “I wanted to have a smoke later on with Andy. It might loosen him up a bit.” She smiled at me, a smile that lit up her face. With that and the mention of Andy, my body and soul ached for her.

  “I might just have one anyway,” I said, hoping that would explain away what I was doing. “Are you sure you don’t want some?” I said, hearing the desperation in my voice.

  She didn’t say anything for a moment, and I really thought she was going to say yes.

  “No, you’re alright. It doesn’t really go with breakfast.”

  I looked at her now empty bowl of cornflakes. But I finished off making the joint anyway. When I sensed she was about to get up and leave, since I had nothing else to say, I risked asking her directly about what had happened between us.

  “So, have you made any final decisions?” I asked, forcing chirpiness into my voice.

  She looked at me now, confused.

  “What decisions?”

  “You know, about the...” I indicated her chest with my hand, but she didn’t understand, or pretended not to.

  “The what?”

  “The, um... you know, your idea to...”

  “To what, Jake? What are you talking about?”

  “The boob job. Are you still thinking about it?”

  Now she looked annoyed, or perhaps just bored.

  “Oh, that.” And slowly, a small smile finally came back to her face. “Yeah, I’m still thinking about it. Why? Are you keen to check out the final results?”

  “Yeah, whatever,” I said. “I’m always here if you need any help.” I tried to hold her attention, to show her I was being witty and just a little bit suggestive. But all too soon, her eyes sank back down to her phone.

  “Here you go,” I was forced to say to get her attention even half focussed on me. I separated a generous amount of Ben’s dope into a second bag and handed it to her.

  “Thanks, Jake.” I got another brief flash of smile, but then I lost her attention again, and a few moments later, she trailed back to the kitchen, leaving her empty bowl on the table.

  I heard her going upstairs, and a while later, the front door shutting, presumably behind her. I finished rolling the joint I’d begun making for the two of us and lit it up. Even if that hadn’t gone exactly to plan, I still had a few hours to kill.

  11

  The next Thursday rolled around soon enough, and I got up, had a shower, and got dressed in my new suit. Somehow, it didn’t feel as smart as it had in the shop. It might have been nerves, or maybe it was something to do with the dope I’d smoked the night before.

  I felt a bit awkward coming downstairs. I could hear there were people in the kitchen, running around, getting breakfast, and I still hoped it might be Julia, and she’d at least wish me luck or something. But when I got in there, it was only Ben and Anna. And all I got from Ben were raised eyebrows. But Anna was nice. She said I looked very smart, and she made me a cup of tea. When I had to go, she gave my tie a little straighten, which was ironic because I’d imagined Julia doing the exact same thing.

  The office looked impressive from the outside: a big steel-and-glass building that stood out on the street. The entrance was through a revolving glass door. Inside, I found a shiny marble reception area, where a pretty girl took my name and pointed to a bank of seats along the wall. There were eight other people there, all staring at me. Most of them looked about as nervous as I was feeling, but the guy on the end seemed more relaxed. And the only free chair was next to him, so I went and sat down and nodded at him to say hello. There was a smell of cheap deodorant that I hoped wasn’t me.

  Ten minutes of silence later, a woman with a clipboard turned up. She spent a few minutes talking with the receptionist and glancing over at us, then walked over and told us all her name was Helen. I don’t know if I imagined it, but she seemed to give a personal smile to the guy next to me, and he said hello back, using her name as if he’d known it already. Then she asked us all to follow her and we tried to look like we were used to walking through a working office in our stupid suits and smart shoes. We arrived in a lar
ge room where the desks had been pushed together to form a kind of board table. There were two more people here, middle-aged guys in suits that didn’t disguise their bellies. Helen introduced them. The first one was the vice president of the company; the other was something to do with HR.

  Then we all sat down and Helen explained that we were going to introduce ourselves in a fun way. Everyone was going to say an interesting fact about ourselves. The two guys smiled at her when she said this, and she busied herself writing names on big white stickers that were destined for our suit lapels.

  We went around the room clockwise, which meant I was the fourth to speak. The girl who went first told us she had just graduated with a first-class degree from Newcastle, but that she actually lived in Surrey. Her interesting fact was she had a pony called Mr. Tumnus. She turned to the rest of us and explained that this was a character in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. This got her more indulgent smiles from the suits at the front and blank stares of hatred from the rest of us. The second guy tried a different tack. He told us he was an Arsenal supporter, and this was met with a sharp intake of breath from the HR guy and a comment that he was a Tottenham season ticket holder, and that drew laughs around the room. I didn’t hear the third guy say his piece because I was too busy panicking about what I was going to say. All I could think to say was totally inappropriate, like what Ben and I were planning, or what had happened with Julia. Then it was my turn. I opened my mouth to speak.

  “Hi, everyone. My name’s Jake. I just graduated from the University of Brighton with a degree in business and economics. And I...”

  I stopped. I still hadn’t thought of anything to say, so I had no choice but to go with whatever popped into my head next. And I knew it was crap before I said it, but it came out all the same.

  “And I like to go rollerblading on the seafront to keep fit.”

  I think I’d been aiming for amused smiles, but instead I just got just slightly raised eyebrows from the suits, and a wave of discomfort that rolled around the room, bounced off the walls, and rolled back again. It was like everyone was embarrassed that someone had said something so totally shit. It wasn’t even true. I’d never been rollerblading on the fucking seafront.

  I didn’t hear what the other people said. I was too busy trying to get my blushing face to calm down. By the time I had, Helen was into her explanation of what was going to happen next.

  She called it the group activity. We had to pretend we worked for a made-up company called Jupiter Bank which had lost its market share to bigger international competition. She told us to imagine the senior management had asked us to come up with a list of options for strategies to help this fictional bank, which we knew nothing about, to recover its market share. Then, without really explaining what she meant by this, or anything which might be relevant, she pointed to a flip chart and a pack of different-coloured marker pens, and smiled and wished us luck.

  It turned out she and the two other guys were going to sit and drink coffee and watch us. Slowly, we all stood up and walked over to the flip chart.

  Although this was the first real assessment I’d been involved in, I’d heard about this sort of thing before, and I’d even done a practice one at uni. I knew what you were supposed to do: You had to make sure you were heard and got your point across, not just sit in the background. But you also had to demonstrate that you weren’t too dominant and let other people have their say. Basically, you just had to show you weren’t too shy to open your mouth, or an asshole. I opened my mouth to speak, but unfortunately, it turned out we did have an asshole in the group.

  It was the guy who hadn’t seemed nervous back in the reception. His name was Pete—it was stuck to his chest now—and just as I started talking, he interrupted me and started telling us what we already knew, what the woman had said. Then he picked up the pens and wrote “Jupiter Bank” on the top of the flip chart. He switched colours and added “Options for Senior Management” underneath. Then he stopped and looked at the rest of us.

  While he was doing that, all the other interviewees had gathered around like he was the teacher and we were all students. I could sense that some of the others were anxious like I was. That we were giving him too big an opportunity to stand out.

  “OK, everyone.” Pete started afresh. “Welcome to the Jupiter Bank junior management ideas meeting!” He flashed a grin at the back of the room, where the observers were sipping their coffees and exchanging glances with each other.

  “As you all know, the bank is having some issues, and we’re here to come up with some killer strategies to fight back. So who has some ideas to kick things off?”

  It was obvious what he was doing, he was planning to ‘lead’ the session and take all the credit, even if he didn’t come up with any good ideas himself.

  The girl with the pony came up with the first idea, something about opening more local branches, and Pete wrote it down. Then another guy, with thick glasses, said something about advertising in schools, which didn’t make much sense, but Pete added it anyway. Then pony-girl said something else, and for a while, it was just the three of them, chatting about their ideas as if the rest of us weren’t there at all, or were just there to make them look good. I knew I had to do something so I opened my mouth again to try and turn it around.

  “Perhaps rather than all of us work in one group, we should divide up into two teams and brainstorm ideas separately?” I said, my voice cutting into their fun. “Then we can be sure that everyone will have an opportunity to speak.” I glanced at the back as I said this, and sure enough, Helen and the HR guy both made notes on their clipboards. I smiled at Pete and enjoyed the pissed-off look that flashed across his smug face. He had no choice but to agree.

  It was Pete though who divided us up into the two teams—his way of showing he was still in charge, and he put himself with pony-girl and glasses-guy, and another girl who hadn’t said anything but was pretty—so he kind of had an A team and a B team. They got the flip chart and the pens; we got to huddle around a writing pad. But we came up with suggestions of our own. There was nothing spectacular, but that’s not the point of these exercises, is it? They just wanted to see if we could handle ourselves in a professional manner. By the end of it, I was feeling a lot better about how this was going. I even began to enjoy myself. This was how it was going to be. Jake, the impressive young executive. Cutting a dashing figure as he strode up and down the boardroom, senior management watching him with wry smiles. This boy had potential. This boy was going places.

  When the interviewers finished their coffee, or just got bored watching, they stopped it. And they’d obviously bought into my two-teams idea because Helen then asked us to present the two sets of ideas, and she said they would then say which team had won. We got to go first, and since the rest of my group looked at me expectantly, I stood up to present what we’d talked about. I looked at each of the interviewers in turn and cleared my throat.

  I’m not pretending our ideas were anything remarkable; they weren’t, but the point is it went well. I could see the interviewers were all listening, and making notes. They looked impressed. When I’d finished, I thanked them again and sat down.

  Then Pete got to his feet and said what his team had done. They’d somehow gotten obsessed with this advertising-in-schools idea, and he was talking for ages about a competition where schoolkids drew pictures of what Jupiter Bank meant for them. He was speaking in the same confident voice he’d had all morning, but it was bullshit. And it was obvious the interviewers didn’t really get the relevance, and then when Pete actually held up some examples of what the kids might draw— pretend kids’ drawings that his group had done, it was just embarrassing. And then the vice president guy, who up to that point hadn’t spoken all morning, said he was going to announce the winner.

  He stood up and stretched out his stomach, and I got myself ready to accept the win magnanimously.

  “Thank you all for your hard work so far this morni
ng,” the VP said. “On behalf of the panel, I can say it’s been absolutely fascinating.” He looked at the others to make sure they were nodding in agreement.

  “And I have to say I’ve seen a lot of this type of exercise, and it’s very rare that a really genuinely good idea comes up. But this time, we really think it has. An idea I think we may even consider taking forward.” He paused again, and gave a fat smile, building up the suspense. My mind ran through the few ideas we’d had, wondering which one had so caught his attention, none of them seemed that good to me.

  “But I’d like to first of all thank...” The vice president stopped and stared blankly at me.

  “The rollerblade guy—I’m sorry, I can’t read your name from here—for some good ideas,” he flashed a half-hearted smile at me but then looked away.

  “But the clear winner is Peter’s group and his frankly excellent suggestion of involving local schoolchildren. Because we both get the kids involved and interested in banking while they’re young—and we get the parents involved. It’s a really great idea. Thank you, Peter.” He started clapping, and then we all had to do the same. Giving Peter a jolly good round of applause.

  We broke for lunch. Sandwiches cut into triangles and half Scotch eggs. I didn’t put too many on my plate but watched as Pete took a massive pile and wandered over to the vice president, and began chatting like they were old friends. After a while, I realised I wasn’t the only one watching. Mo, one of the other candidates from my ‘B’ team was watching too.

  “Cocky wanker.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That guy. Peter. Cocky fucking wanker.” He spoke quietly so I was the only one who could hear him. “You do realise this whole thing is a set-up don’t you? They had to hold the interview, but he’s already been given the job.”

  I looked at Mo with suspicion. “Why do you say that?”

  “It’s fucking obvious, man. And I’m sorry to disappoint you, since you’re trying so hard.” Mo took a bite of a sandwich, and while he was chewing, I thought about what he was saying. It did seem to explain how confident Pete was.