All these thoughts Paul had as he walked, still in his stale suit, back to the unfashionable part of west London where his flat was. A very long walk. He left Eddy at Old Street roundabout — silent at that hour — and made his way slowly down Old Street itself, and into Farringdon. Clerkenwell. Bloomsbury. When he passed Russell Square station it was open, just, and for a moment he paused. He decided that he would keep walking. He was in no hurry. Oxford Street was eerily empty — only a few delivery trucks and street sweepers, preparing for the day’s massed, shopping hordes — and preceded by his sharp shadow, starting to sweat in his suit, he walked its whole length. There was something strange and sad about entering his sunny flat, everything exactly as it was when he set off for work twenty-four hours earlier. It seemed totally indifferent to him. He pulled the curtains (it was still light enough to set the alarm for noon) and undressed, and went into the kitchen for a glass of tepid tap water. He remembers lying down, his mind still fizzing exhaustedly, his heart knocking. Yes that morning, which he remembers so vividly — with its sunlight and sense of impalpable menace — he thinks of as the first intimation of what happened next.
When Simon took the call from Alan at International Money plc, one fresh and open-windowed morning a few weeks later, it was immediately obvious from his prolonged silence on the phone that something serious had happened. ‘We’ve lost the contract,’ he said, and smiled, and they all went to the pub. Not the Chesh — it seemed inappropriate — another one, which they did not normally go to, down by Blackfriars. When he was asked why they had lost the contract, all Simon would say was: ‘I don’t know. Because they’re cunts.’ They stayed in the pub until it was dark outside — Simon’s gold card was behind the bar — and then, too drunk to stand or see properly, they dispersed. On his own, Paul was sick in the street. The next afternoon, Simon called them all individually and said that he was sorry about what had happened, and that he had ‘something exciting in the pipeline’ which he hoped they would be interested in working on. They never heard from him again. Paul didn’t anyway. For a while, with money in the bank, he did nothing and during this short sabbatical, sitting in the hot sun on the balconette of his flat (which was just large enough for a straight-backed chair and an ashtray), smoking spliffs, he thought about doing something that he positively wanted to do. Nothing in particular occurred to him, however, and in early September — the school time, summer’s end — he started to look for work. And work, of course, meant sales.
That his first stop was Archway Publications, and not one of the other multi-storey telesales factories that stud London, was down to nothing more than alphabetical order, and once he had arranged an interview with someone called James Grey, he shut the phone book and went back to his balconette to soak up some more of the Monday-afternoon sun. The interview itself was a formality. James Grey — a slick, oleaginous man who sat with his soft, manicured hands loosely interwoven, and whose tiepin, Paul noticed, featured the Playboy bunny — asked a few unsearching questions, the final one being when Paul would be able to start. Archway had a voracious need of salespeople. More or less anybody could walk in off the street and sign up for the next intake — a week of training starting every Tuesday. There was no salary, of course. Waiting for James Grey, Paul had been able to see the open-plan training area, the week’s dozen trainees — it would be difficult to imagine a more varied set of twelve people, scooped from the sloshing population of London, and united only by their need of money — and the training manager saying, ‘We are not selling advertising space. We are selling sales. The prospect will only buy space if he thinks it will increase the sales of his company — that is the only thing he is interested in. So you do not sell the space — you sell the increased sales. So, what are we selling?’ Paul did not have to do the training week. He was put straight onto a team. It was, perhaps, only a month or two later, when he saw Eddy on the escalator at Tottenham Court Road, that he understood quite how unhappy he was.
Picking, with a heavy thumbnail, at the label of his Bacardi Breezer, Eddy says, offhand, ‘So what you up to these days, Paul?’
‘Oh …’ Paul exhales vaguely. ‘Did I say on Friday? I can’t remember.’
‘You said something …’ Eddy says, equally vaguely.
‘I’m working over Holborn way. Place called Park Lane Publications.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Murray’s there as well. D’you see him on Friday?’
Eddy smiles. Whenever Murray is mentioned, people smile. ‘Yeah, for a minute.’
Paul smiles too. ‘I’m his manager actually,’ he says.
Eddy laughs. ‘Bet he’s not fucking happy about that.’
‘I don’t think he is.’ Paul lights a cigarette. That Murray may be even less happy about it than he seems sometimes troubles him. ‘No, it’s all right.’
‘How did that happen, then?’
Paul shrugs. These things are, after all, always happening — people move from one job to another, and often find themselves being managed by someone they managed themselves a year or two earlier. Murray was Paul’s manager for a few years when he started out at Burdon Macauliffe. Then they worked at Northwood together — Simon was the only manager there (though the Pig was his lieutenant, and on an override). When Northwood ended, Paul fetched up at Archway and Murray somewhere else — some place in Covent Garden that he found through a newspaper ad. Years passed. They more or less lost touch. Then, one morning, Paul — now a manager at PLP — picked up his phone, and it was Murray, looking for a job. Which was, of course, humiliating for him. ‘I haven’t done a pitch for fuck knows how long,’ Eddy is saying. ‘I miss it. Honestly.’
‘I wish I never had to do another pitch ever again,’ Paul says. And then smiles, to smudge the unintended sincerity of what he said.
‘You’d miss it.’
‘I doubt it. Maybe.’
‘Is it not going well?’ Eddy asks.
‘It’s going all right. Anyway, what are you up to, Jaw?’
Eddy takes out his wallet, and flips it open in his big hands. From it he pulls a business card, which he holds out, mysteriously, to Paul. Paul presses his cigarette into the ashtray’s glass notch, and takes the card. The first thing he notices are the words ‘EDWARD FELTMAN, DIRECTOR OF SALES’. Then he notices the stylised elephant-head logo in the top left-hand corner, and the words ‘DELMAR MORGAN’ next to it. ‘Is this you?’ he asks.
‘Of course it’s fucking me,’ Eddy says.
‘Sales director?’
‘That’s right.’
Paul offers him the card back, but Eddy says, ‘Keep it.’
‘All right.’ He puts it in his pocket. ‘So how d’you get that then?’ There is something sour about the way he asks the question, and, hearing this, he is slightly ashamed of the shadow of pique that seems to have fallen on him. Eddy is still smiling, and there is undoubtedly something smug about his smile. But then, perhaps in an effort to smooth over what has become an unexpectedly prickly moment, he leans back, and says, with a laugh, ‘Oh, mate, I don’t fucking know.’ And if that was his intention, it works. Mollified, even smiling, Paul shakes his head and says, ‘Fucking hell — you.’
‘I know. It’s mad.’
Having put the card in his pocket, Paul takes it out again. ‘What’s Delmar Morgan?’ he asks.
‘Sales place,’ Eddy says, looking away with a sort of sudden shyness, and swigging the sweet, green dregs of his Bacardi Breezer.